<p>In Syracuse, you get a free library card for all the libraries in the county. You just need to live in the county and I think your parents or someone in your household has to pay taxes.</p>
<p>I can see how people would think majoring in humanities/liberal arts is a waste of time. My girlfriend worked at starbucks a few years ago and all her coworkers were college grad with degrees in humanities. Also my cousin graduated from her states flagship university and decided to go to grad school simply because she couldnt get a job involving her major, now she is about to finish up at a top 20 grad school and is talking about getting her pH.D simply because she still cant find a job dealing directly with her major.</p>
<p>Majoring in Greek Mythology or art history seems cool, but it would seem to be a major let done to find myself working in some job that has nothing to do with my major.</p>
<p>Now with that said I am majoring in wildlife biology, one of the most competitive and lower paying fields in science, where you need to go to grad school to get one of the cooler jobs that everyone in that major dreams about. So it is definitely a two way street.</p>
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<p>Yeah, pretty much you can study mathematics/engineering straight from the textbooks.</p>
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<p>But it’s better than majoring in something you don’t like and finding a job that has nothing to do with your interests. </p>
<p>I’d rather study something I’m passionate about for 4 years and end up in a job I don’t care for than read boring-ass textbooks for 4 years and end up with that same crappy job.</p>
<p>The point is that you’re there for the diploma. The little piece of paper that says “I stuck with it for 4 years”.</p>
<p>No, it’s not. You’re there to learn. The diploma means you completed a course of study. </p>
<p>I wouldn’t ever hire anyone who went to college and “stuck with it for four years.” Makes it sound like you went to college because you had nothing better to do.</p>
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<p>For many social science/humanities people, or in any discipline, a Ph.D and professorship at a college or university is the only way to work directly with your interests. It’s one of the few ways to research exactly what you want. And professorships are not easy to earn.</p>
<p>I would say yes, majoring in humanities, in most cases (not all), is a waste of time.</p>
<p>i agree with the statement about a $5 library card being a better choice than $40,000 a year just to learn something that won’t even be useful for keeping your refrigerator filled in the future.</p>
<p>there’s this attitude in america that “you should do what you love” or “do it if it’s your calling” but get real, people. Science, technology, engineering, and math is the way to go if you want to maximize your probabilities of living a stable life</p>
<p>for those who think engineering/math is “boring, dull, and uncreative” and it isn’t something you love, why not make yourself love it? then it will become something you love. anything can be fulfilling if one lets go of his/her ego and puts their mind to it</p>
<p>Humanities are excellent training for medicine, law and education. If you want to work after four years of college, other majors may be more appropriate.</p>
<p>^ yeah, but for medicine, a science major might be more appropriate.
also, patent law (which requires technical background) seems to be by far the most lucrative of all law fields…</p>
<p>i dont mean to say that humanities isn’t fulfilling. im just pointing out the fact that anything can seem “fulfilling” if someone makes a choice to see things that way.</p>
<p>thus, it would make sense to go into a field that is more stable, let alone more lucrative.</p>
<p>If you force yourself to love something be it a job, girl, etc. youll find yourself looking in the mirror 15 years from now regretting where youre at. Besides if were all engineers and chemists who us going to do the rest of the stuff for us?</p>
<p>Only in America do people feel entitled to happiness. For goodness sake the statement at the forefront of the American dream is “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”. However, it’s just a false sense of entitlement. </p>
<p>“If you force yourself to love something be it a job, girl, etc. youll find yourself looking in the mirror 15 years from now regretting where youre at. Besides if were all engineers and chemists who us going to do the rest of the stuff for us?”</p>
<p>See there it is. That idea that if you don’t do exactly what your interested in you can’t be happy. It’s one thing to have that opinion but so many people state it as a fact. Generally what provides happiness is a comfortable lifestyle with people you love. Most workers who have gone to college and landed a good, secure job and follow that with smart spending and do not allow themselves to drown in work are very happy people. </p>
<p>It is funny that you will never find a business/engineering/professional major making the statement about how if you don’t do what you love you’ll be miserable. It is the people who are majoring in humanities, the ones with the very little job prospects, that say this. As someone who started out in humanities but came to reality and realized I would be much happier becoming an expert in a field that could provide me with stability in an increasingly unstable world, I felt like I made the “pursuit of happiness” statement only to calm my mind. It made me feel like I would be okay burying myself in $40000 a year in costs only to come out of college with very few immediate possibilities. Truth is, it wouldn’t, stability would. </p>
<p>It is my firm belief (and it’s not one my parents pounded into my head, my father was kind of upset when I told him I no longer wanted to attend film school) that job security and family is what can make you happy.</p>
<p>As for the statement “who would do the rest of the stuff?” You can say that professors earn very respectable incomes, or you can point to the alternative med school majors, but in reality most humanities majors will wind up simply graduating BA and having no plans for further education, that is a waste. This is another cliche statement made by humanities majors. It once again justifies investing so much in a college education for something that isn’t a good return on investment. If you come into college with the intention of pursuing a career in academia and possess the work ethic to do so, by all means do it. However, if you come in saying that your doing it because you are interested, indeed a library card is a better idea. </p>
<p>(To msc: I am not trying to direct my statement at you, but you just made both the comments that I have heard over and over again from humanities majors =P)</p>
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i completely agree with you on the second quote. not everyone can go for the same jobs.</p>
<p>as for looking yourself in the mirror, what’s to say that you won’t be doing that as well if you don’t have a stable career, or your once-loved passion no longer becomes a passion?</p>
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quoted for truth.</p>
<p>passions may change, but a comfortable lifestyle is a comfortable lifestyle</p>
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Any job a humanities major can land an engineering major can also get. Any job an engineering major can land a humanities major cannot get. </p>
<p>If an engineering major can be competitive for any type of graduate school (med, law, humanities PhD, etc.). A humanities major would need a lot of math and physics (among other things) to be competitive for PhDs in math, engineering, physics, computational biology, computer science, economics, etc.</p>
<p>There are specific trainings and benefits from humanities classes. Whether or not one needs to take 15 history courses to gain the full benefit from it, who knows.</p>
<p>I disagree a lot with these recent posts, but everyone’s entitled to their own opinions. I say this as a former engineering major who switched out to the humanities. At my uni’s engineering open house that I went to as a h.s. senior, I met a lot of alumni who had changed careers due to the boredom and dissatisfaction of their industry jobs (e.g. lawyers, a pet store owner). While talking to me they could probably tell that I wasn’t wholeheartedly interested in engineering opportunities either, so they assured me that I could do anything with an engineering degree. While that’s true, the situation is no different for any other major. They would have been better off pursuing a degree in a field that really interested them and expanding themselves, instead of suffering through their vocational classes.</p>
<p>“But wait kevercho! They had better opportunities outside of college, and they made more money/had a more comfortable lifestyle than those stoopid liberal arts majors!”</p>
<p>Meh. The suburban house and BMW in the driveway are alright, but boring for me. I don’t think happiness is gained from living a ‘comfortable’ life, but rather by setting goals for yourself, and having the free time to actualize them. This is what Tal Ben-Shahar preaches, as well as others in the online self-help community like popular bloggers Steve Pavlina and Tim Ferriss. I don’t agree with most of their beliefs, since they tend to promote a narrow lifestyle and some random new-age crap from time to time. But the idea that happiness isn’t a function of toys or disposable income rings true for me.</p>
<p>I think the main hindrance for graduating liberal arts majors is their student debt, and it’s something we can all agree on. They won’t make as much money in their first jobs compared to accountants/engineers/the like. This simply means that wise students shouldn’t borrow as much money for their education, or they’ll have to adjust their living expenditures. It’s something I’m completely aware of, and I especially feel bad for students who go to private, pricy art and film schools, expecting to make it big soon after graduation.</p>
<p>An FYI for the guy who said that engineers can apply for a humanities phD - I don’t think you have a clue of how difficult upper level classes in my field are. The analyses and references required of literary texts are much more rigorous than freshman comp / English 100. Even the core classes are as time consuming as say, Calc 2 or Linear Algebra, which I’ve taken.</p>
<p>"I don’t think happiness is gained from living a ‘comfortable’ life, but rather by setting goals for yourself, and having the free time to actualize them. "</p>
<p>This is great and all for a couple years out of college, but then what? What about the ability to comfortably raise a family? While I am not saying all Humanities major struggle supporting a family, it seems that most only have the idea of what they can do for THEMSELVES. All you really said was exactly what I wrote about: Humanities majors think the only way to be happy is by pursuing passions. The rest of us realize that passions are better off as hobbies. And by all means don’t think I discourage spending time after college doing things like traveling. What happens though when your 35, and still pursuing these goals with all that free time (because you lack job stability), with a wife/husband and kids? </p>
<p>I don’t think i’ve read a post by anyone supporting humanities that does not say the same thing: I want my degree to make ME happy. </p>
<p>“The suburban house and BMW in the driveway are alright, but boring for me.”</p>
<p>This is just another absurd, cliche statement. Who in here has said that a comfortable life is measured in THINGS? A comfortable life is not having to worry about how you will pay your mortgage or for your child’s education. Who has given you the impression that we non-goal-seeking majors are shallow people looking for things? </p>
<p>You also speak about having “free time”. Are you actually saying that you are not only going into Humanities to follow a passion instead of security, but that you also want “free time”? I think that’s about the worst reason to major in something. </p>
<p>Why Kevercho do you believe that as a humanity major you have more opportunities to “expand yourself” and “set goals and have free time to meet them”? We are very much past the age of art and into the age of Science. With that comes a much faster paced world than our parents, whose generation graduated a much higher % of humanities majors, did as young adults. Free time is pretty much non-existent in this world. Free time should be spent with some relaxation, but more as time to get ahead. I know that I, most likely, will be able to retire much earlier than any humanities major who does not go on the higher education. As a matter of fact, many humanities majors may not even be able to retire down the road with Social Security becoming null and void.</p>
<p>“They would have been better off pursuing a degree in a field that really interested them and expanding themselves, instead of suffering through their vocational classes.”</p>
<p>That seems to be very empty judgment. Just because they did not like their career does not mean they were “suffering” through their classes.</p>
<p>“I don’t think you have a clue of how difficult upper level classes in my field are.”</p>
<p>Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t. It’s kind of hard to tell when you don’t specify your field. </p>
<p>“Even the core classes are as time consuming as say, Calc 2 or Linear Algebra, which I’ve taken.”</p>
<p>I’d REALLY like to know your field after this comment.</p>
<p>I just really don’t get it. If your argument is only “happiness comes with doing EXACTLY what your passion is” than your argument is pretty shallow. Why is it that everyone defending humanities has to do so by belittling others to nothing more than depressed, suburban-living people? Let me make a rash judgement. Your ideas that you can only be happy in humanities is nothing more than you having to put your mind at ease because you will have no job stability, a lot of debt with a low income, and you will very much likely be living paycheck to paycheck. See, it just makes me sound like a pompous ass.</p>
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I never said a humanities PhD was easy. I never said that upper level humanities courses were easy. But why can’t an engineer do this stuff too or apply to a humanities PhD program. I doubt most would want to, but if an engineering major wakes up senior year and decides that he wants to go into history or polysci, he could tack on some upper level humanities courses senior year and work to making himself more competitive for a PhD program. The reverse jump is a lot harder. If a senior history major decides they want a PhD in engineering (or even economics) the amount of catch up in math and phyiscs they would need would require more than one academic year. You see lots of people leave engineering for other majors. You never see it go the other way around.</p>
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Let’s ignore the fact that some people might actually enjoy studying engineering but don’t want to become engineers. Look at it from an economic stand point. If you major in something qantitiative (engineering, math, physics) you are rarer than someone who majored in humanities and social sciences. With the large numbers of people who switch out of engineering to humanities it’s implied that humanities majors can’t do engineering work, but an engineer can do humanities work (not saying this is 100% true). An engineering curriculum is “tougher” with more weedout, more math, and more hours of class every week, imlying that the average engineer worked harder to get their degree than the average humanities major. An engineering degree is a much better signaling tool to future employers than a humanities major.</p>
<p>Ive been struggling between the whole humanities vs. vocational majors issues and I’m a little conflicted. </p>
<p>On one hand, I dread the idea of paying thousands of dollars to study humanities. I have a library 2 blocks from my house and I barely utiilize it. Maybe I should start going to the library instead of getting a whole college degree in one of the humanities. i also hate the idea of coming out of college only a little bit ahead of where I was in high school as far as job prospects.</p>
<p>On the other hand I have entertained the idea of majoring in many “practical majors” ranging from accounting, civil engineering, math, and computer science. I never actually stuck with any of these though because they ended up actually making me depressed. Anytime I’d get worried about studying one of the humanities and how that will affect my future, I became depressed and starting researching something more practical. In a way, I was being purely driven by fear to attempt studying one of these subjects. I was basically trading an uncertain career for certain depression in everything I do.</p>
<p>I also have to agree with the guy who said that wanting a comfortable life has nothing to do with a big house or a bmw. I grew up very poor and both parents worked full time. We still didnt have enough money to fix our plumbing when it broke, buy me new shoes for school, etc. Lots of money is unnecessary, but you cant just write off money as if it doesnt matter. Everything in life becomes miserable when you cant even support yourself or your family. It doesnt matter how happy your job is if your house is falling apart and your kids dont have clothes. </p>
<p>At the end of the day, we should all do what we want. But I hate it when I hear people talking about how they are miserable in their engineering job or how their history degree is ruining their life and holding them back. We all make decisions and have to take responsibility for what happens afterwards.</p>