Great, @doschicos. Can you name them for the benefit of the young job seekers? The platitudes are nice, but as Apple shows, it is easy to extol humanities majors but not actually hire them .
It includes both group. The job posting specifically mention both looking for both math and history majors â https://employers.ocs.fas.harvard.edu/event/fidelity-investments-emerging-leader-program-information-session-webinar . They also have their share of traditional economics hires, which is also a liberal arts major . The reference for economics hires gets flagged for moderation if I include it in the post, but will come up in a Google search.
See references above. I encourage students to visit their career offices and parents and families to do their own homework online, through friends and classmates. Use those research skills. 
I do know is many liberal arts grads working in corporate America. Get summer experience, build that resume.
Iâll post as I come across stuff but Iâve got other more pressing things tIâd rather attend to than being everyoneâs job finder.
To me, the real âplatitudeâ is that only engineering, business, CS and other pre-pro majors can find decently paying jobs. It just isnât true.
And lest anyone think that Fidelity is only hiring from Harvard, they arenât. I initially saw the posting on one of my kidsâ collegeâs career center emails.
You donât think STEM subjects teach analytical and critical reasoning skills?
Can you point to any definitive studies that show that humanities and social sciences programs are actually more effective at teaching soft skills then STEM programs? If AI is going to see more of the technical roles automated it doesnât necessarily follow that by virtue of having a humanities degree an applicant will be better suited to the remaining roles than a STEM student. Studying STEM doesnât mean that you are an antisocial illiterate hermit living in your parentâs basement playing video games any more than studying humanities means that you are a woke empathetic social justice warrior who is capable of writing a manifesto.
If I were hiring at an accounting firm, say for an auditor position, then I likely wouldnât be recruiting someone who had not seen an income statement and a balance sheet before and doesnât know double entry accounting. But thatâs me.
The jobs in question value skills and knowledge. Most people start learning such skills and knowledge by studying toward a relevant college degree. But the jobs do not require such a degree per se â they may hire those who demonstrate such skills and knowledge, even if they learned it through self-education.
However, most people would more effectively start learning such skills and knowledge in school with the assistance of instructors and curricular structure. It tends to take a higher level of ability and motivation in the subject to successfully self-educate from the beginning.
From that linked pageâŠ
This is incorrect. CS learned 25 years ago is still relevant today, even though additional knowledge has been discovered and developed since then. The foundational knowledge a CS graduate learned 25 years ago should have been used for continuing self-education throughout his/her career to learn whatever new that has come up that is relevant to his/her career areas.
The need for continuing self-education is not unique to careers in CS or STEM fields. The state of the art in business, social studies, and humanities is not static either, as that linked page implies.
But you canât have critical thinking skills, unless you understand probability and statistics. You canât understand probability and statistics unless youâve had at least enough calculus to do basic integrals and derivatives. Math is the foundation of critical thinking skills. If you donât understand what a p-value is or a logistic regression, you canât begin to engage with any modern research in fields ranging from the social sciences to medicine.
1 Like
I would expect that a number of my actively researching faculty friends who do serious qualitative social science research would like to have a word with you.
(That is, most of them probably do understand such things, but they also know their limitations, and that those limitations are a lot huger than quantitativists like myself or, it would seem, you would like to let onâand also that all too often a reliance on statistical significance and effect size and such can actually obscure whatâs really going on.)
âAnd lest anyone think that Fidelity is only hiring from Harvard, they arenât. I initially saw the posting on one of my kidsâ collegeâs career center emails.â
I went on linked-in which has almost 50K Fidelity employees as members and no liberal arts major is in the top-10, unless you count econ. This seems to be a one-off kind of recruiting and not the mainstream recruiting that Fidelity does, which is good, but if you wanted to work for Fidelity or a company like it, why wouldnât you major in one of the top 10 fields.? From L/I:
Finance, Business Administration and Management, Computer Science, Economics, Information Technology, Marketing, Accounting, Finance and Financial Management Services, Business/Commerce, General, Mathematics
The next 5:
Political Science and Government, Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Electrical, and Communications Engineering, Psychology, Computer Engineering
They mainly hire finance and stem majors, but if your point is that there is a program for liberal arts majors as well, sure, but thatâs more of a specialized kind of hiring they do.
Sure, they hire folks with CS, Info Tech majors and the like because they have hundreds if not thousands of jobs in those fields. And no doubt they hire plenty of accountants for accounting specific jobs, etc. I really donât get the point of your LinkedIn search and how it has bearing on Fidelity actively seeking grads with liberal arts majors. Fidelity employees over 50,000 people. It is but one example of a company making liberal arts hires. The program is there. They actively recruit from college. Call it âone offâ if you want but it is a program that was developed with needs in mind.
The mental gymnastics used attempting to discredit the fact there are corporations that value liberal arts grads is a bit much.
Looks like three liberal arts majors (two of which are also STEM) in the top ten.
It looks like all of the rest of the top ten are business or specialized business majors.
It isnât mental gymnastics, @doschicos, it is simply reality. I am glad Fidelity has one small program open to liberal arts majors, but the majority of its hires are business related (and econ, often used as a substitute for business). Black Rock, which you cited previously, has internships for college kids- any major can apply, but knowledge of finance and accounting is expected, they say. So I suppose one could self study those subjects but it can be hard to do so. Many finance firms give quantitative tests as part of the hiring process, and a fair number expect analysis of business metrics during interviews.
It isnât surprising. Millenials change jobs very quickly-often every 2 years. Companies have neither the time nor the inclination to train such employees but expect them to be profitable immediately.
When our S19 was deciding on âwhere to go and what to doâ my H was very much â do what you likeâ and â donât focus on prestige â. This is because he has worked for the same company for 20 years in many different departments, in various states and he said it is so surprising to hear where people went to school and what they majored in. From Bloomsburg to Princeton and a Business major to a sociology major. He has two younger folks he works with who have the same responsibilities- one went to Millersville University in PA and the other went to a T20.
If you are hiring an accountant at an accounting firm, they will need to have a lot of accounting hours (because you presumably want them to be a CPA and to sit for the exam, you need a lot of accounting hoursâŠso much so that alot of kids end up needing 5 yrs to graduate).
One thing I know about attorneys is if you want to make most of them sweat, tell them you are going to do some math. LOL I have had incredibly smart attorneys ask me what kinds of voodoo I was undergoing while doing what amounted to pretty basic arithmetic and maybe a little algebra. And send around a spreadsheet will make their heads spin.
I will say in defense of @doschicoâs argument, that you in the U.S. are in a unique economic situation at present with a historically low unemployment rate. It is very possible that employers are being forced to change long held employment practices and look further afield to fill their vacancies. Itâs not that humanities majors are incapable of doing these types of jobs itâs just that when competing with graduates of more typical degrees for the jobs in question having to acquire the necessary technical skills on the job puts them at a disadvantage. With employers finding it harder to find applicants already possessing the skills they are seeking it is entirely possible that you may see a partial return to the old days where employers were willing to train and groom their employees in house rather than expecting universities to do the work for them (at the taxpayer and individualâs expense) or poaching from the competition. How AI is going to change that landscape is anyoneâs guess.
I will add as a caveat however that in one of the links doschico posted, the additional skills training taken up by humanities graduates was not being provided by the employer but rather via post-graduate certificate programs at the applicantsâ expense. If you are a humanities major who acquires additional tech skills, which got you hired your humanities training or your skills training? I also reject the notion that a) humanities graduates are any more predisposed to having soft skills than STEM majors and b) that those skills are harder to teach than tech/quant skills. The reality is that successful applicants need both and it doesnât matter whether your background is in the humanities or STEM provided you have the full package of skills that employers are seeking. To that end if you are a humanities major take some math and science courses and if you are a STEM major make sure you include humanities and social science courses in your studies. A well rounded applicant is going to trump a more one dimensional applicant any day.
The employment landscape here in Canada is not as robust. It will be a while before humanities graduates are on a level playing field with STEM majors when hiring decisions for the more lucrative entry level jobs are made.
1 Like
Also using Fidelity as the basis for liberal arts success is not a good basis for understanding the overall job landscape. Fidelity is a financial company so naturally will lean towards finance and related fields. Pick a huge conglomerate with multiple lines of business and you will find many backgrounds including some you may not have even heard of which are liberal arts based. There are STEM folks too. And advancement is usually based on skills ( learned or educational).
I havenât delved into internships lately but I think you would likely find jobs in all fields. The kids who have the most trouble are usually the ones who donât have any skills and wind up at Starbucks. I think there are LA majors and STEM kids on their staff.
Companies also lay off employees more frequently than in the past, so employees have less reason to be loyal. Also, employers prefer hiring those currently employed, creating incentives to be disloyal. So it is not surprising that people change jobs more often now.
Maybe, but it looks like many Ivy students are not taking chances. Econ is the most popular major at 6 of the 8 Ivies, only coming in second to engineering at Cornell and finance at Penn. Google business insider most popular ivy majors for a detailed breakdown.
The CPA education prerequisites include 150 credits (5 academic years worth) and a bachelorâs degree, although the subject requirements can be completed in the usual 120 credits. Credential requirements creep?