<p>Naw men will exist, people can just spin their sperm around in those centrifuges;)</p>
<p>For the most part, liberal arts majors are quite unnecessary and overrated. They pressure you from middle school that college is an ultimatum and without it you're doomed to a life of failure. My high school pressured all of us to go to a four year school and obtain at least a bachelors degree. It's not about practicality but reputation. It leaves a better impression on someone to say that you've gone through four years of college and graduated with a degree than it does if you've attended one year of trade school. That's the sad reality of society. They knock trades as insignificant means of success. Schools insinuate this mentality far to often.</p>
<p>Trades are not all manual. My mother went to trade school and she's doing administrative management at an office. She's in her 60's, so please don't tell me that trades fade with old age and that bachelors degrees are more practical for life long careers.</p>
<p>As far as money goes, you're absolutely right. Trades are more sought after because there is a need for certain skills in the world. The world will always need truck drivers, auto mechanics, managers, plumbers, accountants, and hair stylists. The world won't always need art historians, global studies, language arts majors, music theorists, and philosophy majors. Good luck trying to find a job with those degrees. If you go to college it should be practical. You should go with the intention of receiving a degree that has a stable career focus, job reliability, interest (given it's usable), and pay. Many jobs that require a degree pay merely 30-40k a year. That's nothing. You're wasting your money since people without any education, trade or not, can make that.</p>
<p>It's not true that college educated individuals earn more on average than those with trades or without degrees. I make the salary of a lawyer yet I hold no degree. I make more than all of my friends that have liberal arts degrees. I realize that not everyone has this option but if they are smart enough, they'll figure out a way to utilize their time that has a great pay off. Whether it be liberal arts or trade school.</p>
<p>Even though I'm completely financially well-off, I still have the ambition to pursue education. I'm set on going to medical school so my schooling will have a pay off in the end. I see the practicality of going through school to obtain an ambition of mine. I know that I'm not wasting time only to make minimum wage after I graduate, and best yet, no college debt!</p>
<p>I have news for a lot of people: a lot of employers don't care what your major is, they just want to know you focused on studies, went through 4 years of transition and change and growing up, that you saw it to completion, and you bring a positive attitude and work ethic. Of course, degrees in accounting, finance, engineering etc usually bring lucrative and multiple offers but millions of liberal arts students can and do find rewarding work. Yes, some of them are in retail management. Some work for the local, state or federal government. Some of them even take jobs in a trade, even truck driving. Many go into sales and do very, very well, particularly in pharmaceutical sales or consumer non durable sales. But nobody can ever take away that college degree, the pride in achieving it or the boost it gives to your self esteem. Will it always pay more than a job which doesnt need a degree? No. But the statistics prove it sure helps.</p>
<p>An educated society makes for a better society. </p>
<p>What I oppose is the notion that unless you go to a top tier school or Ivy League, you aren't anybody. That is elitist bs that is "marketed" by the very people who went to those schools.</p>
<p>There is at times a disconnect between the time spent & subjects studied, and what one eventually does after graduation. College is not a perfect preparation, and at times I think it's an expensive holding system designed to occupy young people while they put off adult responsibilities.</p>
<p>BUT what you must take seriously is the way our society regards the value of a degree. You might think an English degree is meaningless waste of time, but many employers will see that degree as a minimum requirement. For the reasons nonelitist states, for example. </p>
<p>Although the starting pay for a trade job may be appealing, the quality of work life, fringe benefits, and opportunity for advancement available to "degreed" jobholders are substantial. Some trade jobs are great, and would be a good fit, and more young people should give them serious consideration. I'd agree with that. But your dismissal of college and what it offers in terms of short-term and long-term gains in not borne out by experience or data.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>The majority of people don't go to college anyway. And you're assuming that the 'majority' of people spend upwards of $50,000 going to school. My state has the HOPE scholarship, which provides a public university education free of charge to those who can be bothered to keep a 3.0 GPA. Local public universities' tuition, in-state, is generally nowhere near $50,000 even after 4 years.</p></li>
<li><p>I already told you who cares about options if they have a lucrative trade: a lot of people. I gave you some anecdotal evidence already about some family members of mine, but the truth is I grew up un a working-class community. Most of the adults in my life do not have college degrees, but a large percentage of them returned to college as adults in order to expand their options because they wanted to make more money, or they were dissatsified with with they were currently doing, or they wanted to move up in their trade.</p></li>
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<p>Target and Best Buy have corporate positions as well, and it is false to imply that most people graduating even with liberal arts degrees all end up as sales associates in supermarkets and retail stores. Some people cannot find a job, indeed. But job placement rates, even in this economy and even at my small second-tier liberal arts college, were pretty good -- and that's not as sales associates.</p>
<ol>
<li>Yes, I do think the auto mechanics getting paid $50/hour care about moving up. You want to know why? Because I know those auto mechanics and other skilled workers. My father, grandfather, uncles, cousins, male relatives and adult friends are those skilled workers (and some of my female relatives, too). My father-in-law was an auto mechanic for many years and even had his own shop. He quit. First of all, you certainly don't start out making $50/hour, and you don't get up there in all areas of the country. My mother, with a 2-year LPN program, started maing $11/hour as a nurse at a hospital. My brother as an electrical line worker started making $15/hour. If he even makes it up to $50/hour, it's going to take a long time. I don't think my father makes $50/hour and he has 30 years of work experience.</li>
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<p>Pensions and retirement are becoming more shaky in the skilled labor trades, and you're forgetting about turnover and layoffs. In jobs that involve manual labor, the mechanics who don't move up get older and sometimes get replaced by younger, sprightlier mechanics. On average, people who earn bachelor's degrees make more over their lifetime AND have higher annual salaries than those who don't. There are always exceptions to that rule, but that is the general truth.</p>
<p>And your math doesn't add up -- especially since you don't take into account the business management's salary. if the business major nets a salary of $70,000 they could pay off their $75K loan in 10 years, assuming a 6.8% interest rate. If they graduate at 22, they'll be 32 when they finish paying off their loans. Only if they hit some serious financial difficulty will it take them 30 years to repay their loans. And it would be ridiculous to stretch their payments over 30 years, since they'd be paying more in interest than they actually took out.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>IT and computer networking are indeed trades -- trades that are increasingly requiring bachelor's degrees to even get into the field, much less advance or get paid anything useful. As I said, I am familiar with a lot of skilled laborers and the majority of them have physical work, even though I know that trades aren't always physical. The ones that aren't pay even less, except for IT and computers, which as I pointed out are getting increasingly harder to become employed in without a degree.</p></li>
<li><p>I didn't say anything about become a well-rounded person. I think that's a stupid reason to go to college, if it's your only reason.</p></li>
<li><p>Art history majors don't always become starving artists, you know. Your younger sister's friend could plan to become a museum curator or an art historian, in which an art history degree may be useful. She may just like art history and be planning to go into certain business fields that don't care what your major is, like management consulting. You seem to have a huge chip on your shoulder about liberal arts degrees, but the fact is that undergraduate degrees do not feed into neatly packaged little jobs.</p></li>
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<p>Essentially, I agree with you -- college should be viewed as primarily a booster for future career prospects, and future college students should put more thought into what they think they would like to do after college and what the use of their degree is going to be rather than just how much they looooove philosophy or they want to go to school with a large sports team. Some people are just whiling away their time in undergrad (and grad school -- I know plenty of people at my graduate school who simply didn't know what they wanted to do next, and they're wasting over $100,000 while they hide out from real life) with no direction or no purpose.</p>
<p>And there are certainly some fields nowadays that are requiring bachelor's degrees and beyond when just a few years or a decade ago, people were doing the same work with no or less credentials. The work hasn't changed, it's just that a bachelor's degree has become the new standard. Nursing and physical therapy are two examples of that -- what the hell does my mom need to know how to divide polynomials or when the civil war started for? She's a nurse. And she's a damned good one, but she needs a bachelor's degree in order to employ her skills to administer other nurses.</p>
<p>Kid 112 -- in the middle-class world, college is the "intermediate step." Not for everyone. Most people I know who moved out didn't have an intermediate step -- they just moved out and they got a job.</p>
<p>right on... if we as a country learned more productive things than learning to understand poems and write essays we would be much better off</p>
<p>"right on... if we as a country learned more productive things than learning to understand poems and write essays we would be much better off"</p>
<p>Yes, we would. As a democratic society, education and critical thinking skills are an important part of the democratic process in my opinion.</p>
<p>I also think that it is hilarious that people on this board seem to think that an Art History degree or even a History degree in general is a ticket to a life of debt and poverty. I wonder how many multi-millionaires there are with history degrees compared with multi-millionaires with mechanic training?</p>
<p>interesting article on this subject (if it hasn't been posted already)
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/opinion/28murray.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/opinion/28murray.html</a></p>
<p>Many people I know who went to college don't even do anything related to their majors. For instance, I know a guy who went to University of Southern Florida and became a History major with a Music minor, and he currently does IT services for the county. What happened there?</p>
<p>A liberal arts degree makes you a well rounded person, suited for jobs that require critical thinking and problem solving, plus give you a route to graduate school. For those who are stuck between a trade or possibly a degree, it doesn't seem like a terrible investment to go to college, especially if you aren't interested in a trade. It works both ways, in that, while some are not interested in college, many are just not interested in trades. </p>
<p>A liberal arts education may not make you skilled in a particular trade, but I feel it would at least make you adaptable to situations so that you may understand them better.</p>
<p>If you polled a lot of top executives at many companies, you might be very surprised to learn what their undergraduate degree is in. Many people feel they can learn marketing and finance at any time, particularly if their employer is a bank and will train them anyway. But a classic liberal arts degree is sort of a once in a lifetime opportunity to tackle subjects and thought processes you may never have the time to pursue at that level again. </p>
<p>Look at the boards of directors of major non profits in the Arts. They are almost all CEO's and CFO's and retired CEO's or CFO's and other executives. Why? Because somewhere in their souls they learned to appreciate the fine arts and many of them will tell you that they got that first pinge of interest in college.</p>
<p>From my perspective it would be very sad to spend four years in college hunkered down in Accounting or Finance. But that is my opinion.</p>
<p>Steve Schwarzman and Tony James are two great examples of that at Blackstone.</p>
<p>Would we have doctors and surgeons without college? </p>
<p>Plus, what if you really aren't interested in any trade jobs? What if you want to go on to get a PhD or a Masters? I think that for people who only care about making money and surviving, trade school is their perfect place. But for people who have a strong interest in life and in the world around them, college is their place.</p>
<p>^^^ medicine is little more than a trade despite the overpaid graduates of the medical programs; largely due to lobbiest and the AMA union. I'll give you that surgeons require more time and practice than what we normally think of coming from a trade school but I still see it that way.</p>
<p>LOLZLOLZLOLZ </p>
<p>this is hilarious.... you honestly need a BA for anything now, so the point is more people are going to college and more qualified than people who did not go to college.</p>