Major in English

ucbalumnus
Wed, 16 Mar 2011 11:49:46 +0000

compmom:

Study what you love to study, and things will work out in the end.



That may have been true years or decades ago, when university education was less expensive and any bachelor’s degree was more distinctive in the labor market.

Today, a student cannot completely ignore job and career prospects, because graduating with a huge amount of student loan debt and no job is hardly a good place to be. In some of the university career center surveys that I have seen, some of the job title reported by graduates are low end retail jobs that could have been gotten without a bachelor’s degree – not a good place to be after graduating with student loan debt.

This does not mean that a student should not major in English, but that the student should know what s/he is going into, look for internships, aggressively look for jobs early in senior year, etc… Also, courses in additional subjects can help; the OP may want to consider whether Chinese or French would help in journalism or other writing involving places where those languages are used, as well as whether math can help with writing books or articles about math for the general public.