I agree with you that it would be good to ask recent grads and ask them why they regret their major. But I also think it would be helpful to ask the question again 10 years, 20 years, and 30 years out. Did the person find their career fulfilling? Or did they find out that the initial start of their career wasn’t that great but that it led to more fulfilling options later on? Or did they find that the skills they developed in college were no longer needed (or needed at the same pay level) and they had difficulty changing gears?
For those who didn’t follow the CNBC link, these are some of the relevant graphs.
Obviously, I think we need to pay teachers more. As a group, we’re overeducated and underpaid. I could see low pay impacting job satisfaction for sure. Those who teach in non-humanities fields certainly have more options. Our school has lost countless math teachers to computer programming and quant type jobs at start ups. The humanities teachers aren’t jumping ship for more money generally because those jobs don’t exist for us.
Some of our son’s friends who are humanities majors but want to go into finance took Google classes or other online classes on finance topics not offered at Bowdoin. They put those certificates on their LinkedIn pages and resumes.
Our D21, who is a psych and poli sci major, has already taken statistics and got a certificate to show she’s proficient in Excel. She’s also looking into Google certifications for certain marketing disciplines. These sort of “add on” options can help kids gain skills that maybe a business undergrad would have without having to major in business. Neither of our kids were interested in majoring in business because they didn’t like the limits on class selection and weren’t ready to choose some specific business discipline.
Also, leveraging contacts and alumni are key when it comes to humanities majors. They need to pull out all of the stops because they aren’t going to get put in some funnel of business undergrads headed to large firms. Our D has talked to so many alumni lately and they all say they love hiring liberal arts majors. (I guess take that with a grain of salt because they all went to Colgate lol.) That being said, at the risk of sounding out of touch, a psych major from a highly ranked LAC is likely going to have more opportunities than a psych major from a directional state college.
No, they are not overrepresented. Based on my last go round with Beta testing, health care workers were overrepresented-- PT, OT, Speech, RN, LPN, phlebotomy. And Zip needed a strategy to come up with more robust health care job postings to satisfy the needs of that population…
It may not be too surprising that, for major-agnostic or major-flexible jobs, college prestige may matter more than for major-specific jobs where the supply of employees is not overflowing.
I thought you were trying to argue that ziprecruiter has more humanities majors represented, and they are unhappy because they are there either because they are unhappy with the current job, or just lost a job. If health professions are more represented on ziprecruiter, then by your logic, they should be the most unhappy right?
I’m not arguing anything. I’m pointing out that the entire Zip survey was conducted from the Zip population (which is not a random sampling since by definition, the folks on Zip are unemployed or unhappy). So whatever conclusions you draw from a biased sample of unhappy folks is- surprise surprise- biased.
Health professionals are frequently coming up as either “the most burnt out” or most unhappy population on reputable surveys that are not conducted by a profit seeking entity. And that represents some serious cognitive dissonance. You want your kid to become a nurse because RN’s are in hot demand… but RN’s are burning out at a rapid rate, what to do, what to do?
There are no silver bullets or guarantees in life. Except that someone who WANTS to be a nurse is likely to be a better nurse than the one who is doing it because mom and dad said they’d be shamed forever if the kid majored in English.
To make humanities more relevant, not only can you ask recent graduates why they are not (if they are not) happy with the area. You can also ask employers that used to hire them in the past, why they are not hiring them in the same numbers.
But employers could be hiring humanities majors in the same numbers as previously. That wouldn’t necessarily help because population is constantly increasing.
I have read several similar articles. If they are correct, what has changed? Many here on CC value their humanities degrees ( is that the right word?). Has the job market changed? Have the career goals of graduates changed? Have many students assumed that “any” college degree will ge them the money they want?
So fewer people are getting the degrees that many on here don’t think are as valuable, seems like the market at work. Why is anyone worrying that businesses aren’t hiring humanities degree students? I’d be more worried about those in communications areas, or finance where it seems like a lot of those ‘lost’ humanities students are ending up.
With the humanities as defined in the AAAS article, only 4% of people are pursuing history, language and literature. Those pursuing languages (strategic and otherwise) are going to be a very hot commodity…as @blossom and @Lindagaf both pointed out.
I am not sure how low teacher salaries are (if they are low at all) given the skillset, and the fact that it is life time employment with pension. Many other industries with pension have gone the way of the dodo. The auto industry needed some pretty heavy bailouts just because they had large pensions.
No, the lost humanities students arent ending up in finance ( see IB chart in prior post). They also arent ending up, largely, in elite business school: Harvard Business School’s first year class is only 5% humanities majors, compared to 43% business/econ and 28% engineering. Wherever they end up, I hope they find happiness, but I see little reason to want to increase their numbers.
They could definitely be ending up in sub par finance programs…that don’t feed into IB. Those are available as well as those CS programs leading to IT specialist, etc. etc.
You aren’t troubled by the 43% of students who have ALREADY prepped for a business career in either econ or business and then need to get still MORE business and econ? Seems horribly inefficient to me.
