I’m a senior and about to graduate and people are telling me that liberal arts degrees are worthless, I don’t know if I believe them. My professors tell me that it doesn’t matter what you study or where, just as long as you have a degree.
Neither of those is really true.
First of all, the “liberal arts” includes all non-pre-professional degrees - so majors like English and philosophy (which are in the humanities) and psychology and political science (which are social sciences) as well as majors like math and computer science (which are mathematical/computational sciences) and chemistry and biology (which are natural/physical sciences). But usually when people say this, they mean social sciences and humanities majors.
It’s not true that humanities and social science (HSS) degrees are worthless. Most HSS majors are are gainfully employed in jobs that require a bachelor’s degree, making middle-class salaries. An HSS degree can be parlayed into a variety of different kinds of careers and jobs - with or without a graduate degree.
What you study, though, can make a difference in the types of jobs you can get. It’s hard for an English major to get a job as a software developer, for example, unless she somehow otherwise develops the skillset that software developers have. It’s difficult for a philosophy major to become a statistician or bioinformaticist. Conversely, it may be difficult for a biology major to become a technical writer or a physics major to become a school psychologist. Not only does this affect the work you do; it affects the salaries you make. Technological job roles and job roles in the mathematical, computational, and physical sciences tend to pay more money than careers in the HSS fields, and your ability to get those jobs is affected by your major. (But major isn’t perfectly predictive - I majored in psychology and work in tech.)
Where you go also does matter a little in some career fields. An English major from Harvard is more likely to obtain a high-paying job in something like consulting at Bain or McKinsey than an English major from Cal State Northridge, for example. They have better networks and better recruiting. But that doesn’t mean that an English major from CSUN can’t find meaningful and good-paying work based on the recruiting there. And in other career fields, where you went to college doesn’t matter a whole lot.