I’ve known too many kids who were attracted to studies in English lit only to discover that the college courses were heavy with postmodern theory fads and led by profs who seemed to bring every discussion around to issues of sexism, racism, Etc.
If you aren’t going to teach, nobody wants to hire an English major. First hand experience. Want fries with that?
My D is a Literature major with a language intensive. Whatever that means. What I believe it means that she can take two languages and have them count toward the major. Anyway, she is in reading heaven. Don’t know many people who love have multiple novels to read at once. She wants to either go to law school or carry through to a PhD and teach at the college level.
It is just not true that the only job available to an English major is teaching. In fact, writing skills are much in demand. it may take a little longer to find a niche versus a vocational degree, but overall, traditionally, humanities majors have a better chance of being generalists, meaning, in part, upper management versus business majors etc.
D just had an interview for an Ivy with an alumna who majored in English. The alumna appears to be very successful, we looked her up on LinkedIn. Right out of this college she went into marketing, specifically as a retail buyer and appears to have worked her way up through a few different companies to where she is now - marketing executive at a large retail chain. Presumably she has intelligence and an ability to communicate well in speech and in writing.
My D is more interested in science but I am not one of those who thinks college should be just a high level vocational school.
My son was an English major at an Ivy and got a good corporate job with a top TV industry company in the middle of the recession (2010) and got hired away 18 months later by the leading company in the industry. Don’t underestimate the demand for strong writers and critical thinkers. It helped that he had good internship experience during college and an economics minor, too.
I work at the headquarters of a Fortune 500 corporation. We have lots of English, History, Journalism, and other “useless” majors on staff producing marketing literature and editing professional articles.
My oldest was an English and Business double major. It’s not held him back in anyway. There are so few kids these days who are really competent at writing. On top of that, in many cases, writers are fairly articulate people so do well in interviews, talking on the fly and those skills that win jobs. My oldest still loves to read and write and these are things he can do on the job as well as for enjoyment. My oldest got a lost minute request to address the board on a particular topic. He had less than an hour to rip off a summary and gave the talk on the fly. Several board members mentioned afterward how impressed they were that he did that with no notice and no time to prepare. My engineering student couldn’t do that in a million years…let alone less than an hour.
My two sister in laws both majored in English. I’d characterize both as somewhat underemployed partly by choice, partly by location. Both have BAs only from Harvard. One did a bunch of non-profit adminstration related to music. The other has done just about everything under the sun from driving a school bus (short lived), writing for a regional paper, being a cooking columnist in said paper, being a children’s librarian, being a real estate developer and currently a State Legislator.
English is not unique among majors where those looking for jobs outside of those which are major-specific need to be aggressive about looking for jobs, including in job categories that they might not have previously thought of. Indeed, someone in any major who does not like that major’s major-specific jobs, or finds them too few to successfully get hired into, needs to do this type of thing for job searches.
Someone looking at a writing type career may want to include electives in other areas to gain basic knowledge of various subject areas that s/he may write about. It seems that your son has done this with the second major in business (although business is certainly not the only subject area that someone looking at a writing type career may want to write about).
pops popcorn
Who else wants some?
ucb, we really encouraged him to seek out a second area so he would have some narrower interest or market to target when he graduated and he hunted and hunted - tried all kinds of intro classes from sociology to geology to anthropology to history, but he really liked the economics related business classes when he stumbled into those. I would highly suggest a double major or at minimum a major and minor for any kid who is thinking of majoring in English at a smallish school (not in J school). The world is so huge that it somewhat "helps’ to have a target. He’s just now starting to think about whether getting an advanced degree in something even more specialized makes sense so I think he’s doing just fine I really didn’t mind nurturing his love of English writers, his love of Latin, his creative writing along the way and I still send him a box of books now and then since he likes to hold books rather than read on a Kindle and after all these years i know what books he would enjoy. It doesn’t hold you back but it also really helps to have a targeted area of specific interest when you grab that diploma, otherwise the world is a huge, huge place for an English major. He never saw himself as a poet or as a novelist or even as a college prof…he toyed with the thought of being a high school English teacher. and he had a couple profs that kept whispering “law school” into his ear…but he found something he enjoyed with his business classes that complemented his English major and he ran with it. YMMV.
Personally, I’m not of the opinion that all liberal arts majors are the same, just as I believe (and can see) that not all STEM majors are the same (nor are all pre-professional majors the same).
English major here. Twenty years after working my way up through publishing to executive level with a BA in English, I moved to the seacoast to work for myself as a consultant. I am so busy I routinely have to turn down work that is less interesting to me. I’ve never served a French fry in my life. If you’re an excellent writer and you can’t get work, you’re doing it wrong.
Smart, driven individuals will succeed, the degree is secondary.
@Mathmom Hmmm…
If she lives in Florida, and based on our current crop of legislators, she should really think about going back to driving a school bus. :-bd
From Florida originally, but not any more. 
She’s not too impressed with her state legislature either however.
My daughter was an English major with a creative writing concentration. She’s been continuously employed, both before and after graduation, as a journalist. Most of her work is in editing now. It’s a competitive field but there are jobs out there for those who love and excel at reading and writing.
My English major D works for a major publisher. Loves her job.