Linguistics, Liberal Studies or Child Development Majors Advice

Uh…that’s not true at all. Teaching at the K-12 level requires majoring in specific subjects at places that lead to licensure for teaching. Usually, if you want to teach at the K-5 level, you major in early childhood education and get certified for elementary education. If you want to teach at the 6-12 level, you major in a subject that is offered at that level + the school’s education program (so math education, English education, science education, social studies education, history + education, etc.) and get certified to teach middle grades (usually something like 4-8) or high school/secondary school (7-12).

So if you want to teach K-12, you need to decide what you want to teach, and major in that.

If you want to teach on the college level, that requires a PhD, but you also have to select what you want to teach. If you want to teach developmental psychology/child development then that would be a good major; if you want to teach linguistics, that would be a good major. But you should know that the job market for professors is quite bad, and most people who begin PhDs don’t make it to a professor job.

The liberal studies major…well, that really depends on the college. But generally speaking, the point of a college major is to help you build both breadth and depth in some specific field. At many colleges, a liberal studies major is really for people who don’t know what they want to major in, and therefore just take a bunch of humanities and social sciences classes that count towards a major. I am generally not opposed to any majors, but this one I don’t think is a good idea unless you have a clear plan for specialization.