Well, yeah. I’ve been reluctant to go there, but that’s the 800lb. gorilla in the room. There’s a very good reason most American presidents have held college degrees since the end of the Civil War and that very few of them have been MBAs, even in the modern era.
There are many measures of what makes a good life, and making money is a part of the big picture. However, we all know lots of miserable human beings for which that in itself didn’t do the trick at all. We want our children to be decent, fulfilled, and of good character. We want them to be happy. Aristotle thought this was a matter of actualizing the powers within a human being. There are many kinds of powers, but the most important, he felt, was acquiring knowledge for its own sake. “All men by nature desire to know.” That’s the “liberal” part of “liberal arts” - something done freely because it is worth doing, not because it is instrumental to something else. We live in a practical world and have to make a living in it, but there’s more to life than that.
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Don’t worry about it. I changed my mind as soon as @marlowe1 agreed with me. 
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This brings to mind another big change between 1980s first jobs and today’s first jobs. Used to be that you’d enter a “training program” – some of these programs were a year long, with classes and tests. There was the famous Macy’s buyer’s training program. All the banks had training programs. Some PR companies had training programs. They knew they were hiring anthropology majors, art history majors, psychology majors. So they had to provide specific job training. Nowadays, firms want entry-level hires to be job-ready on day one. The burden of job-training has moved from the actual place of employment to college campuses. IMO, not for the better.
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This reminds me of something a college advisor recently told one kid I know. And that is that unlike majors in engineering, nursing, accounting etc, a liberal arts major has to acquire sufficient skills for a first job outside the classroom. And that takes more effort and creativity than those fields where the major alone will be sufficient.
Which in turn brings up the age old conundrum of “how do I get my first job if I need to have relevant experience to get it?” Even when I was looking for my first job (late 80s) with my newly-minted CC-approved STEM degree, the first question at any job interview was always “what work experience do you have?”
I also worry that as more and more business majors enter the corporate workforce and move into management where they are responsible for hiring, that, regardless of an applicant’s skills, they will only want to hire other business majors, because that’s what they know.
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Professional English
But that can be camp counselor, McDonald’s, receptionist in the History dept while in college.
Sometimes they just want to know they you know how to be an employee. I know plenty of 25 year olds who have never worked and don’t know how to work. They expect others to clean up the office kitchen after they use it, they don’t know how to fill out forms, they don’t understand that sometimes the day doesn’t end at exactly 5 pm.
Oh sure, totally agree. Though in my case they were specifically looking (hoping?) for work experience related to my field. I didn’t have any, and while I did find a job where they appreciated my non-career related jobs, I got several rejections because I didn’t have any (I know because they told me so).
That kind of thing was well known enough even years / decades ago to be the topic of a US Army recruiting ad. Basically, the Army did not require prior work experience to enlist, and veterans obviously did end up with work experience in whatever jobs they had in the Army.
It seems like the trend toward requiring new employees to be fully educated and trained (at their own expense or the expense of a previous employer) with no need for the new employer to do on-the-job training has increased. Of course, the cost of education and training for those aspiring to enter the workforce has gone up (including by raising the minimum education for many jobs, such as occupational and physical therapy now requiring graduate degrees instead of bachelor’s degrees). Even where the job is more “general” without needing much specific education and training, credential creep seems to be the norm (e.g. requiring a bachelor’s degree for a job that a high school graduate can do).
I got lucky because the company that ultimately hired me was implementing a new technology and thus knew they’d have to train everyone, so my lack of relevant experience wasn’t a hindrance there. I don’t think the other companies were expecting new graduates to have done anything substantial, but did want to see a co-op or internship indicating they had worked in some capacity in a similar job/industry. I’m sure there’s even more pressure on that now.
I was older when I got my degree, and had several years of full and part time work experience. The jobs ranged from menial to fairly complicated and responsible, in industries as varied as insurance, public utilities, international shipping, and more. The jobs I could get with a high school diploma then either don’t exist now (file clerk anyone?), or most likely require a college degree. My favorite (probably would have been able to build a career out of it) was something akin to what we now call supply chain management.
There is a difference in employer expectations for entry level vs non entry level jobs. Experience for most non-entry level jobs is generally critical based on the higher salary paid and responsibility to be given.
If we are talking about the entry level jobs that most recent college graduates are seeking, there will be some that require technical expertise – GM is not going to hire a history major into one of its engineering departments. On the other hand, the vast majority of traditional entry level jobs for college graduates, administrative or operational support, sales, marketing, banking/financial services (Main Street as well as Wall Street) don’t necessarily require a pre-professional degree or relevant work experience.
My experience as an employer is the same as @Catcherinthetoast. I don’t think we ever hired a paralegal that had any paralegal vocational training. We looked for students who did well in any subject at any college or university that demonstrated good writing and other communication skills, who could take independent initiative but also be a team player and who we were confident could be easily trained. So we had plenty of History, English/Lit, Econ, Poli Sci, Philosophy majors. Same thing when I was at my IB when we hired analysts, although here some quantitative aptitude was required. While we recruited and hired from Wharton undergrad, we also recruited and hired Econ, History, Philosophy, Engineering, Math and Physics majors. Personally, I preferred the latter because I thought their problem solving skills would be more rounded. I run a private medium sized company these days, and while the need for entry level college grads is much less, we still look for “the best available athlete” when it comes to areas such as sales/marketing and even HR.
I find myself agreeing with many of the comments above, even those taking seemingly opposite views. The way I reconcile a lot of this is IMO there are generally 3 buckets of college grads. There are some people who will likely succeed, no matter what college they attend or major they choose. Then there is a group that has no business attending college and they will have wasted 4 years of their lives and maybe big bucks pursuing a “certification” that no longer has the value that it may have had 20-30 years ago. The largest group, where having a college degree will matter, are comprised of some people who will benefit the most from early technical training and others who will gain the most long term from learning how to think vs gaining any specific knowledge/skills. The hard part is honestly assessing yourself/your kid. The higher the cost of education and the lower the family safety net, the more dire the consequence of making the wrong choices.
Just to clarify, yes, I was referring to entry level, first full-time position new graduate jobs. I was in a field that did require my specific degree, but what I found was that many employers also wanted relevant work experience, such as a co-op or internship, in addition to the degree.
This is where I made mistakes. Even when I thought I was researching careers and assessing myself, the bottom line is you don’t know what you don’t know.
(I had a particular problem with those assessment tests that would suggest suitable careers…I guess I was able to game the tests because they always recommended whatever career I thought I wanted at the time 
)
Fortunately I learned a lot from my mistakes, and was able to pass on my increased knowledge.
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Totally agree. That’s the rise of the internship culture. How many of us 1980s college grads had internships during the in-between summers? Not I. And not anyone I know. This was early '80s.Maybe late '80s it started to change.
Now, the advice I give English majors and Art History majors is to take an online course in Excel and to leverage open-access campus resources to gain experience that can lead to internships. For example: campus newspaper, campus investment clubs, student government, research labs, etc.
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Gee - why couldn’t we have started with that summarization 50 messages ago 
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Love that Volvo picture. 
Not sure if you intentionally said “Lemons” instead of Le Mans racing.
Sometimes, the choices need to be made before one can make a well informed assessment of what choices may be better or worse for the student. Sometimes, a student may not even know that some career paths that could be good fits for the student even exist, if they did not hear of them from parents or school counselors or peers.
Perhaps that need to make important educational and career path choices before being able to be well informed about them may be part of the apparently increased stress that high school students are seeing.
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It is actually Lemons or LEMONS, or maybe LeMons.
When we hired at a bank (the public side – not IB) we looked for econ background, math, stat, some coding, and written and spoken communication skills coming in.
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