Could I get former english majors to give their current jobs and what college they got their masters from (if you only have a bachelors then list the school you got that from.) I really want to study English, but I am afraid about my job prospects.
P.S. I don’t want any fluffy answers about following my heart regardless of the job outlook.
I’m not going to give you a fluffy answer about following your heart; but the disadvantages of an English major are greatly overblown.
Humanities and social science majors go onto all kinds of careers and positions. Some are related to their undergrad major, and some are not. This gets even larger for people who get master’s degrees in a variety of fields. I even know of English majors who have changed careers - to nursing, to computer programming - and who have gone to medical school.
Jobs are less dependent upon majors than they are upon skills. An English major who’s had 2 internships in college, or who knows how to design webpages, or who knows how to program in two languages, or who can write a killer white paper, is a valuable asset and is more likely to get hired even than a math major who did nothing for 4 years.
I think more valuable to you is to think about the kinds of careers you might want and start doing some exploring of what’s out there.
@juillet Thanks for the reply. But in the examples you gave, the knowledge in English didn’t give them a job it was other abilities that they had. I’m sure that their English background probably helped them in places, but to me it seems like they just wasted thousands of dollars on a degree that they don’t need or use.
Go to the StudentsReview dot com website. Select “Careers & Majors”, then “Salary by Major”. Then click on “English”. The bottom of the page shows actual jobs some (US) English majors got. Click on the job title to see where they got their degrees (and other details).
I am an English major who then when on to get a JD (law degree). Oddly enough, I manage a team of project managers. We PM various telecom engineering teams, from acquiring property to burying fiber to installing equipment. Where the English comes in: using the writing skills to clearly explain expectations; understanding your audience when creating reports; breaking down projects into steps; listening and asking good questions. Basically, the analysis skills developed in the degree apply in the field.
But…that’s generally how college + jobs work. College isn’t vocational training that guarantees to lead to a certain set of careers; most liberal arts majors (which includes math and the natural and physical sciences as well as humanities, social sciences, and fine arts) are about developing breadth and a foundational set of knowledge that is designed to make it easier for you to learn and do a variety of positions.
First of all, most of the jobs out there don’t really require any specific major. On the flip side, it’d be impossible to have colleges offer a career-related major for every major - a technical writing major for technical writing; a project management major for project management, etc. Even jobs that would prefer certain majors don’t necessarily require or care about them as long as you can do the work. Computer science is an obvious major for software development, but there are software developers out there with all kinds of backgrounds. The important part is that they know how to write code and think creatively.
Secondly, majors have more expansive applications than you might think. As @2stemgirls pointed out above, English has a variety of skills: writing skills (which are important in every job on the planet), analysis skills, problem solving. You learn things in majors aside from the obvious content-related stuff. If you only think jobs that use the top-level superficial stuff - Shakesperean poetry, abstract geometry, technical theater, lab studies with rats - are not a “waste of thousands of dollars”, then I would say most of the jobs that any person with a major in a non-professional field has are a “waste of thousands of dollars.”
That’s not even getting into the fact of career changes. What if you decided to major in engineering, did engineering for 3 years, decided you didn’t like it, and changed careers to project management? Is that a waste? What about graduate degrees? Would you say a philosophy major with an MD who practices medicine wasted thousands of dollars? Or a math major with a JD?
Thirdly, college isn’t graduate school. You don’t go to college to study engineering or math or English. You go to college to get a broader degree - the “bachelor of arts” or “bachelor of science”, as in liberal arts and sciences. Colleges have required majors to ensure that students develop both breadth and a little depth into something with the goal of ensuring that you know how to being developing breadth in a certain field. But most of your classes actually won’t be in your major - around 2/3 of them will be in other fields through general education, divisional requirements and electives. You won’t be a scholar of English (or a mathematician or a chemist or whatever).