<p>Valley Accountant: “A BA in English is not worth 50k in debt.”</p>
<p>My mostly-retired business partner has an English degree from a mid-level NESCAC school, and his career would comfortably have covered $50K in debt. It went like this: major company sales training program for a year, manufacturing management for a year, 5 years in human resources, consulting firm business manager morphing into a consultant then consulting project leader. With enough at age 48 in his pension to retire, he moved into doing consulting and retained search on his own until he stepped into a mostly-retired role at 60.</p>
<p>My friend from high school in a not-so-prosperous city of 60,000 also has an English degree from a different mid-level NESCAC school. His career started as a podunk newspaper reporter and he eventually became a Washington Post editor. He is now a senior executive with one of the major broadcast TV networks.</p>
<p>She was an 09 at Dartmouth. Had a pretty easy time finding a job at another internet marketing job upon graduation. A few months ago she started at Google. When she graduated from Dartmouth she realized getting something directly in her field was not going to be easy. Many employers ARE looking for bright kids who can write well and think critically.</p>
<p>“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>This is what it’s all about for the Ivy liberal arts folks who don’t go to graduate school. My closest friend from college graduated from Penn with a psychology BA (same major I had). She spent most of her time at Penn focused on the Daily Pennsylvanian newspaper. Her first job out of college was a research job at a big-3 network news department. She got it because a DP alum at the network reached out to DP seniors to apply. 13+ years later, she’s still working in broadcast journalism, rising to become a senior producer on the network’s flagship news program and then moving into public radio. There are hundreds of different versions of this story.</p>
<p>I’m gonna add a few additional stories to this list. </p>
<p>I know 2 humanities/social science majors–both classmates in my year–who worked at consulting firms/banks, but disliked the environment and work. They quit and one enrolled in a coding course in NY. The other picked up some books on Ruby and C and started to teach himself programming. One now works for an up-and-coming start-up and the other is running his own with both revenue and VC money. I know quite a few people doing post-bachs in prep for med school. Their college backgrounds could not be more different. There are a number of humanities and social science majors among them…but guess what? There are also a bunch of engineers who decided a career in EECS was not for them. </p>
<p>I also know someone (not a STEM major either) who basically subsisted as a freelance private tutor for a few years while doing stuff she wanted on the side; she’s now with Google or something. </p>
<p>Life is not a straight line. Having a ‘practical’ degree doesn’t make the path or direction simpler.</p>
<p>Way upthread I listed some elite college grads who had a great deal of success with only their unmarketable BAs, but I forgot one of the best: Charlie Hamlen. </p>
<p>Charlie graduated from Harvard with one of those super-marketable French Lit concentrations, and after a year at the Sorbonne started teaching high school French in Western New York. He had been a strong amateur pianist all his life, and he became active in the classical music scene of his city. He was especially good at accompanying soloists (voice and other instruments), and was often called on to support touring musicians who couldn’t afford to bring their own accompanyists when they performed in his area. A few of them, who were getting to the point where they COULD have their own accompanyist, prevailed on him to move to New York as a full-time musician. Not long afterwards, one of them asked him to be her manager as well, and then a few more, and in short order he was an artist manager, not a musician.</p>
<p>He founded a management company with a like-minded woman, and they became a hot management company in the classical world. A major sports management company was moving into other fields, and bought them out, but hired Charlie to stay and run the company. He built it over a decade into the dominant artist manager in classical music, and expanded into other business lines. He left to work full time on fundraising for AIDS research, and was knighted by the French government for his work. Sixteen years after leaving the company he founded, he was re-hired as chairman and CEO after a scandal forced the resignation of his successor. </p>
<p>He is wealthy and universally admired; he gets his picture in the NY Times society pages. He has been doing work he loves – including teaching French – his entire career.</p>
<p>There’s a Harvard career path for you. Talent, intelligence, commitment, leadership, ethics, and drive made him an enormous success (including monetarily) despite never doing anything conventionally marketable.</p>
<p>People make choices for many different reasons, leading to different paths in life. Some bright kids choose liberal arts/ humanities because those courses widen your mind-set, making it possible for you to derive more meaning out of this existence or life. Going to top colleges also help in landing better jobs, though not necessarily related to the major that you learn.
Some prefer to take pre-professional or professional majors, hoping to ensure more stable employment outlook.
There are so many other factors that impact a graduate’s employment opportunities and career position after 10 or 20 years in the market, making preplanning often meaningless.</p>
<p>However, I am in the opinion that going into debt for your studies is perhaps too hazardous. There are other more practical and safer options if one truely wants to improve his quality.</p>
<p>“I also know someone (not a STEM major either) who basically subsisted as a freelance private tutor for a few years while doing stuff she wanted on the side”</p>
<p>One of my dearest friends did this for years while auditioning in musical theater in NYC. He now has a thriving business with a great lifestyle and a Saudi prince among his clients. I don’t think he auditions any more. Harvard psychology BA.</p>