<p>If this is your only point, you’re correct. Where your argument gets a little fuzzy is:</p>
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<p>Choice of major is only one element of “building a marketable skill set.” It’s not even the most important element. Besides computer science and engineering, which are themselves imperfect examples, there really aren’t any majors that are careers-in-training. Who do you know that graduates with a BS in math and becomes a mathematician? How about a chemist? </p>
<p>Most majors, humanities and STEM alike, require additional skills or advanced degrees to become “marketable.” As you say, this means internships, networking, and/or coupling with other skills like CS or foreign languages. I don’t know what’s so shocking about this.</p>
<p>What about TV writers? The writers’ rooms in Hollywood are filled with young Harvard liberal arts majors. The Simpsons pretty much wouldn’t exist without the Harvard pipeline. And the entertainment industry as a whole seems to favor Ivy League grads (but particularly Harvard grads). This is one place where the connections you form as an undergraduate seem to help. (Of course, grads from the top film schools also have an edge but I’m talking about liberal arts majors).</p>
<p>1) Biology major in and out of itself is not a marketable major; in fact, it is not marketable at all to most employers. Keep in mind that getting into a medical school is very competitive, so many biology majors who don’t cut it with medical school admissions end up getting screwed job-wise, very hard. </p>
<p>2) Getting into a medical school is a function of your undergrad GPA + grades earned in premed courses + MCAT score + research/volunteer experience + interviewing skills for med schools. As a result, if your goal is to become a doctor, you should be gunning for top grades, especially in science courses and keep yourself busy to be on top of the curve in all other important aspects. However, what this means is that there are many unknown variables that will impact your chances at a medical school, as you can’t know in advance what your GPA nor MCAT score will be in future.</p>
<p>3) You don’t need to be a biology or chemistry major to be a successful medical school applicant. You can pursue any major you want; you just need to complete a set of required ‘premed’ courses to apply to med school. Hence, it may be wise to pursue a marketable major in college other than biology, so that you have a fall back option, in case you change your mind in future and want to pursue an immediate employment after college, or you don’t get into a medical school in future. As the majority of premed students don’t end up getting into any medical school they apply to, it is a serious risk you should consider. My view is that you should try to avoid putting all eggs in one basket.</p>
<p>4) That being said, if you end up getting into a med school, you are set. Unlike law school, medical school has very low risk and most, if not all, of MD’s are virtually guaranteed a job. However, to get into a competitive specialty (such as neurosurgery) you will need to be near top of your class at your medical school.</p>
<p>The bottom line is that the BA (or AB) will not be the terminal degree for the vast majority of students graduating from Harvard or any similar college.</p>
<p>With the possible exception of newcomer Computer Science, no liberal arts major qualifies anyone for any particular professional-level job. To have the kind of careers they want, students will have to get additional, focused training, either (or both) at graduate programs or on the job. Or, if they are especially entrepreneurial, they will teach themselves in the School of Hard Knocks. The only careers people have with BAs are those with long apprenticeships and tight, tight bottlenecks. (Like earning a living as a screenwriter. Or being an advertising executive or talent agent.)</p>
<p>Non-liberal arts degrees like engineering, nursing, teaching do provide basic entry-level career qualification. But the careers for which they qualify graduates are more limited than many of the most ambitious students want. (Engineering is somewhat broader. But for most people engineering is a field where getting an initial job is easy, but without additional training and skills the compensation and career advancement cap out relatively early for all but a handful.)</p>
<p>So you have to anticipate that and plan for it. It’s hardly an indictment of Harvard that the world doesn’t have a lot of demand for high-paid non-MD, non-PhD biology workers.</p>
<p>Personally, I’d rather drive a truck than work in most of the fields listed in #20. Perhaps that’s why there are still plenty of humanities majors.</p>
<p>“Thousands of recruiters, chosen from top companies in 20 countries, were asked to rank universities based upon the employability of their graduates.”</p>
<ol>
<li>Harvard</li>
<li>Yale</li>
<li>Univ of Cambridge</li>
<li>Univ of oxford</li>
<li>Stanford</li>
<li>MIT</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
</ol>
<p>I think the choice of your major is more important than the college you attend, job-wise, for pretty much any entry-level job outside of Inv. banking and Mgmt. consulting. As long as humans are building stuff and maintaining them, the world needs engineers. As long as humans and corporations pay taxes, the society needs accountants. If you are a history or biology major at Yale or Harvard, it is very easy to graduate without a job.</p>
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<p>Wrong. Accounting, finance, nursing, and architecture are all career-oriented programs available at undergrad level. Also, why exclude cs and engineering? In fact, I think those two are the best majors to pursue.</p>
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<p>Ah, that’s not the point. The point is that a math student has a lot more options open compared to a psychology major. With strong math or stats skills and decent GPA, you will get nauseating amounts of interviews from prop trading firms, hedge funds, investment management firms, research firms, and many others. That can’t be said for someone with a degree in humanities.</p>
<p>Another advantage = with a degree in math & stats, you can gun to become an actuary, which happens to be one of the most lucrative entry level jobs out there for any college grad.</p>
<p>Or, in case you miss out on lucrative employment as a math & stats major, you can leverage your degree to get into a masters/ PhD programs in quant-heavy fields (eg. masters of fin. engineering, Econ PhD, masters in stats, masters in engineering, etc) which will be of tremendous help in landing top corporate jobs.</p>
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<p>The reason pursuing a degree in humanities is risky is that it teaches no marketable skills for most professional jobs in real world other than to teach someone “how to think critically”. For someone like the woman from the video, probably only options would be go to law school or pursue a PhD in humanities. The bad thing is, law schools nowadays are absolutely flooded with humanities grads who couldn’t get a job after college, so getting a job out of law school is a formidable challenge. (over supply of lawyers) Also, getting a PhD in humanities is basically asking for trouble, since majority of those who complete PhD in humanities end up un(der)employed. (hint: getting a tenure job in academia within humanities is arguably one of the toughest job hunt tasks out there due to very limited slots of jobs and way too many applicants)</p>
<p>Having an elite degree doesn’t hurt for employment, no doubt. But I suspect what the job market wants more then an elite degree is the marketable major and skill sets.</p>
<p>24% of Princeton grads graduated without a job lined up.
22% of Princeton grads heading straight to grad school.
10% of Princeton grads employed as ‘interns’, after graduation.</p>
<p>The biggest problem that I have with NYULawyer’s arguments is the reality that what may be a hot job today may not be a hot job 4+ years after an undergraduate determines their major. I started my career as a chemical engineer when the oil industry was booming. I graduated with twelve job offers to choose amongst and all of my classmates had jobs secured. The boom turned to bust in less than two years and only a third of the ChEs graduating from my alma mater that year secured jobs and many of my classmates had been laid off. CS is also hot now and it too has gone through boom and bust cycles over the course of my career. In fact, most large companies have much smaller IT departments than before as they outsourced jobs to service providers such as IBM. These cycles have happened in every engineering discipline. You also misread the cause of the relatively poorer prospects of law students today. It is not because “law schools nowadays are absolutely flooded with humanities grads who couldn’t get a job after college” as this has always been the case. Rather it is because the economy has changed and law firms have downsized significantly.</p>
<p>In my view you are still best served finding a major that truly interests you. Careers are long and have many twists and turns. Those whose only motivation is the dollar can follow the signals that the market provides in starting salaries, but should be forewarned that the market is fickle.</p>
<p>Since when is going to graduate school a bad thing? I understand that some graduates are going into grad programs to delay entry into the job market, but hasn’t that always been the case? I knew plenty of students 25 years ago who went to law school to avoid the real world. The top 4 grad schools attended by '11 Princeton grads were Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Columbia with attendance at those 4 exceeding the numbers at all other grad programs combined.</p>
<p>I couldn’t access your Princeton link so I did a search of my own. According to this report from the Princeton Office of Career Services, 6 months after graduation 10 percent of the class of '11 was still looking for a job. 85.4 percent had “achieved their post-graduation plans.” While a 15 percent unemployed/underemployed rate isn’t great it is still substantially below the average for college graduates. .1 percent (1 student) were in accommodations food services and .7 percent were employed in retail. Of course we can’t know whether this was as a brand manager for Coach or folding sweaters at the Gap, but it’s clear there are not a lot of Princeton graduates asking “You want fries with that?” as a part of their job.</p>
<p>And as for the Princeton grad in the CNN story, “Brittney Winters graduated from Princeton in 2009, expecting to use her double major in French and Spanish to get a teaching job.” She didn’t bother to get a teaching credential but expected to be snapped up by a school system simply because she had a degree from Princeton? Silly girl. One additional year of training as a teacher would have made her very marketable.</p>
<p>I get what you’re saying. You view majors as a source of marketable skills and to choose a major that doesn’t impart marketable skills is a squandered opportunity. I would agree with you that it is a bad idea to major in humanities and expect that to be your sole source of marketable skills. However, it is a perfectly feasible approach to major in humanities and seek marketable skills elsewhere. As I said, this can be through internships, secondary skills acquired through minors or other coursework, or even extracurriculars at schools like Harvard that have often very legit extracurriculars, such as managing a magazine with readership in over 100 countries.</p>
<p>The evidence for this is your “Other Careers,” the common denominator of them is that they don’t require a specific major but rather marketable skills acquired elsewhere, or merely good test-taking and grades in the case of law school. You just picked the commonly sought-after ones but I reckon you could add dozens more, if people are willing to accept less than 100k starting salaries or stray a bit from the beaten path.</p>
<p>The question remains, is it “risky” to pick a humanities major knowing that you’ll have to get your marketable skills elsewhere without a guarantee that you actually will? Of course. I’m a Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations major and I would like nothing more than to have the 4 classes I’m required to take a semester directly contribute to my employability. But they don’t, and I had to look elsewhere during my summers.</p>
<p>You’re presenting humanities majors as an inherently inferior choice. That’s overly simplistic. They’re riskier, maybe, but for some the risk is worth the subjective benefits like intellectual exploration, something that gets harder and harder to find time for as life goes on, and, as Hunt said:</p>
<p>Law school blows? I’ll admit, the first year can be scary and overwhelming, but you have to be near brain-dead not to find something interesting to do in law school.</p>
<p>One of the great moments of my undergraduate years was when the head of the local Arthur Andersen (Arthur Andersen! Remember them?) came to my Introduction to Financial Accounting class to offer us all jobs. “We don’t need people who know the rules of accounting. We can teach you those. If you were good enough to get into this college and graduate from it you will be good enough to pass the CPA exam. What we need is people who can write and speak clearly and persuasively. What we really need is someone who, at 25, will be able to walk into a board room full of men twice his age and with far more than twice his experience, and knock their socks off. That’s why we recruit here. Experience tells us there are many people like that in this classroom.”</p>
<p>My college didn’t offer an accounting major. It offered a total of three accounting courses, and only one of them – that one, the Intro – ever had more than 15 students take it. It was a famous gut, too, deliberately designed so that athletes could pass it without doing any work outside of class. Everyone in the room, practically, was some kind of humanities major.</p>
<p>Now, maybe this dynamic has completely broken down, but I doubt it. If you want a great career in accounting, you are better off going to Harvard or Princeton, majoring in whatever you want, and taking a few accounting courses, than you are going someplace where you can major in accounting.</p>
<p>So, it seems that NYU Lawyer has a grudge against liberal arts colleges and the, apparently, worthless critical thinking skills acquired there. What I want to know is who are the English, Poli Sci, Psych, Bio and Econ majors that think they’re going to get a great job in business immediately after graduation just because they went to HYPS or some other elite school? Is that common thinking? The college name counts for a lot with high schoolers and people at cocktail parties, but otherwise don’t most of them know that you still have to set yourself apart and make yourself special to succeed at every new level of life? They realized they had to do that to get into the elites and I think they realize they have to do that to get a good job when they get out. Same holds true for law and med school. I’m sure there are some Harvard lawyers at the prosecuting attorney’s office right next to the person from Ferris State. I won’t disagree with NYULawyers whole premise, but it just seems kind of obvious.</p>
<p>So, you are basically saying that a religions studies major at Harvard can just walk into PwC in corporate tax practice division and demand that they just hand him/her a job? I think a quick 5 minute browsing of profiles on some accounting firms will answer this question. (hint: most accountants who get hired by big4 accounting firms majored in accountancy in college and were eligible to sit for CPA exam shortly after being employed by their firms)</p>
<p>Well, a nice fraction of Harvard Class of '11 are sitting in great banking, finance and business development jobs in New York. The economics and applied math majors are in number crunching positions with very high pay. But the many gov, history and other liberal arts concentrators are bringing in great pay for B.A. grads. Stop by the Harvard Club of New York for evidence.</p>
<p>I see your side of argument. However, the problem is that many of liberal arts grads can’t even land a job that requires a college degree (like the woman from the video), and that is rather unfortunate. </p>
<p>The economic climate is very rough, and I suspect it will be for a long time to come. The fact that 17 million college grads in the U.S. work in jobs that don’t require a college degree - and this figure is excluding those who are unemployed to begin with - should signal to people that finding a white collar, career-track job after college is no joke. </p>
<p>Now, are there people who attain career success after getting degrees in humanities? Of course. There are many, in fact. Some of the most powerful figures on Wall Street were humanities majors in college, including the Goldman CEO. However, if getting a white collar, career-track job after college is proving to be this much of a challenge for many liberal arts grads, why take the risk in the first place? (unless if you are completely content with the lack of job prospects after college, then that is a different story)</p>