SImple answer. An exceptionally motivated student will do well no matter what the major. 98% of kids with liberal arts degrees will either work for minimum wage or will require help from parents for many years. That may be OK with all concerned if the family values a generic ‘education’.
WHATEVER YOU DO, do NOT take out student loans for a Liberal Arts degree (unless you REALLY want to be a teacher). You will spend the rest of your life in debt and in a hole. Doesn’t matter if you go to StateU or Harvard, there are few to zero jobs for most liberal arts majors.
The real problem is the boomer parents who remember that a college degree in the 70s guaranteed a decent job somewhere. Those days are LONG gone.
A good liberal arts education will benefit anyone. BUT, if you want a job to support yourself and maybe a family some day, forget it. The world needs welders, programmers, auto technicians, nurses, med lab techs. It does not need Greek Feminist Literature PhDs.
Y’all who have already posted doubting the utility of a liberal arts degree do realize that the M and S parts of STEM fall squarely within the liberal arts, yes? Just checking before I post any more on this thread.
Engineering and physical sciences have actually grown slower than the overall growth since 1970. Math and statistics have actually declined. But biological sciences and engineering technology have grown faster (although engineering technology still remains small). CS has grown enormously, but it was tiny in 1970.
For non-STEM majors, business, psychology, and visual/performing arts have grown faster than overall. Social science and history have grown slower. English has declined.
First of all, pet peeve: “Liberal arts” is short for “liberal arts and sciences,” which includes all of the disciplinary sciences: mathematics, physics, chemistry, computer science, and biology. STEM vs. liberal arts is a completely false dichotomy, in part because of that. Most STEM fields ARE liberal arts fields.
What y’all mean is social sciences and humanities.
Demonstrably false. The data on this shows that most students with social sciences and humanities majors are gainfully employed, and most of them are employed in jobs that require a college degree. There are many jobs for social sciences and humanities majors.
The difference is that while jobs for STEM majors actually explicitly ask for a major (e.g., an ad for a software developer may advertise that they want a computer science or other technical major, or an ad for a pharmaceutical sales position might prefer a biology or chemistry major) many jobs for social science and humanities majors don’t have a preference for a specific major (e.g., an ad for a marketing manager or general analyst role might not specify any majors, or might ask for a marketing major but would gladly take a philosophy or sociology major with the appropriate skills or experiences).
The other issue is that the “hard” skills that social science and humanities majors teach are 1) more difficult for students to artfully articulate in a cover letter or resume and 2) sadly, undervalued by employers who don’t realize how difficult it is to find someone who has that skill and does it well. For one example, I did a market research internship and one of the responsibilities I took over was writing a special feature for our clients on some results we had that month. The unit I was in was very impressed by my writing and my boss even said they had never really thought that much about how improving the writing style of the feature would improve the uptake of the feature itself.
So social science and humanities majors just need to be a little more creative and a little more deliberate about collecting the skills and experiences that employers are looking for.
I’m going to say, this kind of attitude REALLY irritates me, especially from adults. One, because it’s false (still looking for that hole - I have a six-figure income to go along with my social sciences PhD), and two, because it reflects a kind of narrow perspective on the world in general.
Yes, the world needs technologists and medical professionals. That’s demonstrable and true.
BUT. The only way that the world has developed these wonderful technologies is through the work of humanists and social scientists. Historically, without the study of philosophy we wouldn’t have math, biology, chemistry, or computer science, or medicine (and any of the technical fields that come from it like engineering). And looking forward, developing technologies require MORE humanistic and social perspectives, not less. Like how much data is it ethical for companies to collect and share from people? How does media consumption affect the growing brains, cognitive function, and social skills of children? Are there historical lessons from similar developments that we can learn to avoid making the same mistakes our forefathers did? How can we design our new technologies to be aesthetically pleasing and usable by people? How the heck are we going to write the manuals and instruction guides to get people to understand how to use all the stuff they’re buying? How are these new technologies and fields affecting the way our global and national economies work? What’s the influence of social media and new technology on political structures, and how can we use them to our advantage to promote infrastructure in resource-poor or developing settings?
I mean, a really simple example is the expanding - rapidly expanding - technology markets in China and India, which collectively have 2.6 billion people - 37% of the world’s population. Yes, sure, we need software developers and physicists and engineers to make the stuff, but we need social scientists and humanists to understand how to actually deploy it in those markets (understanding how different those markets are from our own, infrastructure, political negotiations, understanding the economy, translation - which isn’t just technical, but cultural, etc.)
Taking debt is a risk.
Taking debt with no consideration of how to pay it back is just nuts.
I feel strongly that the amount of debt one is willing to take should be proportional to the expected pay on graduation less 25k. So a school who’s engineering majors average 65k to start might be ok with 40k of debt. But if you don’t have a pretty solid idea of where the payback is coming from, its worse than foolish- it’s irresponsible to take more than a token amount. True about cars, houses, and education.