@TheGFG you make a great point. My S is at a selective school for stem. Already as a frosh he’s programming statistical models and working on projects with his prof. He’s landed an internship for the summer shadowing a clinical applications manager to do statistical data analysis. I don’t think a humanities major would have been a fit for this position at this early stage.
Yes. But it still boils down to the individual kid, her awareness and willingness to broaden. Harvard doesn’t sprinkle its own fairy dust. It attracts and filters for kids they hope have it. Unfortunately, many colleges kids can just roll into get a large number who focus on tasks at hand, not the wider opportunities.
It’s true nurses need nursing training. But we can’t confuse professions with an expectation of a professional education (doctor, nurse, accountant, etc,) with opportunities not requiring that specific directional focus/training or certification. Rather, it’s skills and experiences of other natures. Not “training,” per se, but baseline skills in demand and learnability and other attributes.
I wouldn’t be so quick to put down a Fairfield. Just by its location, it’s going to attract a number of motivated kids, who take advantage. Some programs will offer experiences that go beyond. A young person can swing with the best of them, if he chooses.
Or, just work for the degree, then get frustrated the world isn’t knocking his door down.
it’s not just Lib Arts kids that don’t work in their “major” - the number of engineers that become managers is pretty high too. If everyone knew what they were good at, loved and would be successful (or not successful) at when they turned 17, we’d be a different species. More like Bees!
“it’s not just Lib Arts kids that don’t work in their “major” - the number of engineers that become managers is pretty high too.”
Sure, many engineers move off into management or make other career changes. But if they do, most of the time it’s because they chose to make this move, not because bachelor degree level jobs in engineering don’t exist in the first place. The same cannot be said for say Classics majors. There are VERY few jobs out there that involve analyzing ancient Greek poetry and the like.
But there are many jobs in the world that involve interpreting difficult to understand, fragmentary, and culturally remote material, including language, images, and data.
I know two classics majors around 30. One works for the publications arm of a famous art museum. The other is a psychiatric social worker (having taught Latin for a while at a boarding school and then an urban private school). They’re both fine; neither has come close to starving, or been unemployed other than by choice.
NOBODY (or close to nobody) majors in classics with the goal of a career in classics. Students who study classics do so because they LIKE it. They find it interesting and stimulating. It gets them excited. The type of person who’d study classics is not the same type of person who wants to go to college to learn a professional skill.
So how does the classics major become employed after graduation? First, many go to grad school. Not because they have to, but because the type of person who majors in classics likes scholarship and the life of the mind. Law school, medical school, business school, or a PhD in something. An old friend of mine was a classics major at one of HYP and then went on to get a PhD at an HYP in operations research and financial engineering. (Don’t want to out the person or myself).
Second. those who don’t go to grad school may have a career in mind and get internships to prepare them for post-graduation life. Classics majors work in almost every field of business, including investment banking, real estate financing, advertising, journalism, consulting, etc.
OR, many have NO intention of grad school, law school, med school or an MBA.
And the best of them find work! Yes, not in classics or phil or American studies…and are satisfied. Good corporate, non-profit, entrepreneurial, the arts, public interest, etc, areas, even in tech. Why is it so hard to fathom?
Why this assumption you major in X only to get a job in X?
“Second. those who don’t go to grad school may have a career in mind and get internships to prepare them for post-graduation life. Classics majors work in almost every field of business, including investment banking, real estate financing, advertising, journalism, consulting, etc”.
So stated another way,a humanities degree prepares you for a career in everything in general but nothing in particular.
My own brother went down that route. He got a degree in Film because he liked it, which IMO might have been fine if he had been willing to move to a media center such as NY or LA*. Perhaps he could have fashioned a career there. But he went back home and after extensive searching for a couple of years he concluded that there was not one single job in the entire state of Oregon that his college education qualified him for. There was just no demand for film artistes.
He eventually got a job first working in a Borders bookstore and was soon promoted to manager. He thought a bookstore might be interesting because of his knowledge of the literary aspects of film and the books they were based on. He had dreams of discussing and recommending great books to his customers. But he quickly found out that about 99.9% of the customers had no interest in great literature. They just wanted the latest hot best seller by Turow/Brown/Cussler or perhaps yet another stack of Romance novels.
Borders folded of course. He then tried opening his own used bookstore. But that didn’t do any better than Borders.He eventually got a job as a sort of tool maker at leather goods company. That has lasted. He’s been able to feed his family, but even with adding in what his wife has been able earn in various retail jobs, they don’t have any money to send their daughters to college. Which I suspect is okay with him, because he’s not so sure college was worth it. He basically bought the line about “Do what you love.” Just major in whatever really interests you and work hard and a fulfilling career will unfold for you. He now sort of thinks he was sold a bill of goods.
If he had to do it over again I don’t think he would have majored in engineering or some other employable field. I think he would have skipped college altogether and got on with finding whatever blue-collar work was available. He’s concluded he didn’t need to spend all that time and money and work so hard in his classes in order to become a Jack-of-No-Trades. He could have achieved that that right out of high school.
*I’m a big believer in going where the jobs are. But for him LA or NY were big stressful places where he didn’t care to live.
Any bachelor’s degree will be accepted as a credential for major-agnostic jobs that expect a bachelor’s degree (whether for the actual indication of general reading, writing, math, and research skills, or for credentialism). Bachelor’s degrees in some majors will be accepted for jobs where those majors are directly applicable, and major-specific skills and knowledge are expected of entry-level employees.
Obviously, this means that those graduating with majors that do not have much in major-specific job prospects must compete for all of the major-agnostic jobs. Obviously, this means that students in those majors must realize that their jobs at graduation may not necessarily have anything specific to do with the college major that they chose to “do what they love” (or may have only a marginal relation). Otherwise, a film major may find it futile to look for scarce jobs in film, or a biology major may find it futile to look for scarce jobs in biology, or a game design major may find it futile to look for scarce jobs in game design, if that is all that s/he looking for.
Thanks, Scipio, for stating the unpopular truth. This is a perennial topic on CC and each time I say the same thing: Getting a job with one of those general ed majors was much, much easier when we did it, than it is now when employers demand specialization and very specifically applicable skills. Today you can be an Ivy League econ major with professional banking internships under your belt and the company looking for a recent grad will want specific experience in mergers and acquisitions, whereas you’ve dealt with industrial stocks so you’re out of luck. An acquaintance’s son (good kid) graduated with a degree in CS–supposedly a good pre-professional major as far as getting a job right after graduation. Granted, it was not from a top school, but I was surprised at how much trouble he had finding a job. Apparently, the companies all wanted various job-specific computer skills he hadn’t learned in undergrad, so he had to spend a year teaching himself and taking more classes. Same story for another CS kid from our second best state school. He had to go to grad school and focus on a specialized field (cyber security in his case) to be employable. Another girl–top student in college–was an English major with international job experience. Got a one-year contract after graduation and is now unemployed. I could go on.
Even back in the day, one needed something more than just a general degree. When I started looking after graduation, I realized I should have gone to secretarial school instead because all the relevant jobs required shorthand and fast typing. Ultimately, being fluent in another language was my job ticket. But I didn’t acquire that fluency because of my major course requirements; it was somewhat accidental. Today that same fluency likely wouldn’t help me much since we have so many immigrants that companies can easily find native speakers. Getting a job is tough today, at least in the NY metro area, what with all the international competition. Middle class folks like us can’t risk letting our kids major in __________ Studies and then hope for the best.
Well, going where the jobs are is basic, no matter what you major in. His not being able to get a professional job has nothing to do with his film major. It has to do with the fact that he didn’t go where the jobs were.
Actually, I think your POV is way more popular. Fans of liberal arts majors are not the norm now.
In a general sense, the pickier one is, the less likely one will be able to find a job. Someone graduating with a major with few major-related job prospects but is only willing to look for major-related jobs with geographic limitations that do not include those where the few major-related jobs are is likely to be disappointed.
Even when one’s major does have more major-related job prospects, being geographically picky in excluding regions where such major-related jobs are more plentiful can limit one’s ability to get a job.
^ it’s not just an issue for new grads. So many people can’t make ends meet, are unemployed or underemployed, because they won’t move where the jobs are or where the living is cheaper.
Sometimes, “where the jobs are” and “where the living is cheaper [or even just barely affordable]” are difficult to find together.
Also, those who are not new graduates are more likely to have other constraints on where they can live:
- Spouse’s employment.
- Responsibilities to nearby relatives (see caregiver threads).
- Kids’ school (including effect on where one gets in-state tuition for the high school junior/senior looking at college).
- May be in a house with negative equity. Defaulting would harm credit score, which some employers use to screen out job applicants.
I have a relative with an ME/Aerospace degree from a very well-regarded state university. Decent GPA, but family circumstances made it impractical for him to leave an area that does not have a lot of aerospace openings. He is on his 3rd or 4th year of tending bar.
Getting a film degree and hoping to stay in Oregon, if you aren’t incredibly driven (ie. making youtube movies non-stop in your backyard until one catches someone’s attention, interested in teaching or doing something very tangental to the film business is simply an unfortunate decision. I understand how people make those decisions or get caught in circumstance, but the best thing to do is look at statistics. Of the 2 million or so bachelor degrees awarded every year, something like 350k are business or business related, 200k iirc are health/health sciences, I think humanities/social sciences is <20% of all bach degrees. Engineering degrees have risen quite a bit since 2000, if I remember the stats I saw. By 50% or more. Most students are “trying” to build an education that translates into marketable skills, but some, like the poster’s brother or my relative, don’t really know at the college level what that entails or who they will want to/be able to be at the end of 4 or 5 or 6 years.
Wrong, dangerously wrong
^ how hard would it be for a smart person to learn how to do those things?
Cleaning the lab could entail a knowledge of safety procedures, depending on the task, but chem majors don’t have all that memorized either. That’s what the MSDS info is for. My son as a high schooler worked in a chemical lab one summer and had no trouble performing the required tasks safely. (Heck, if we believe the anecdotes on CC,many high school kids work in labs and perform complex graduate level research to boot.) That said, my point was that a lab won’t generally hire someone who doesn’t have a relevant major (unless there’s some nepotism involved), so no one need worry about the potential danger.
Is there any reason that they need to worry, since there seems to be an endless supply of biology graduates who did not get into medical school applying for those jobs?
So true, lol. But the question for this thread is what the State U bio major has to do to beef up his resume to land the job over the Elite U bio major.