Why do so many kids earn liberal arts degrees when they are not marketable?

Great Debates
1

Why do so many kids earn liberal arts degrees when they are not marketable?

I notice that when I graduated high school i got TONS of advertisements from the endless numbers of liberal arts colleges. Not only those, but at most universities the biggest section is that of Arts. Hordes of English majors, political science majors, etc.

Ok a few of them want to teach that subject – and a few (ugh) want to go to law school so it doesn’t matter. (Please no more lawyers).

But that doesn’t explain why in today’s age there are so many liberal arts majors. It’s as if the concept of modern society is beyond them – the point is to earn marketable skills and education to produce something of value to society, which undergraduate level political ‘science’ doesn’t seem to do.

So what is with this? How many bachelor’s in poli sci do we need?

2

(Please, no more gratuitous, unmerited jabs at lawyers.)

3

Who says they aren’t marketable? The reality is that many of these people do not have the inclination or desire to major in business, hard sciences, or something similar, so they choose the most interesting major that will earn them a degree. Many jobs today don’t care what your degree is in, so long as you have one. They would rather graduate having spent their time relatively engaged and academically successful, then bored and perhaps unsuccessful.

4

In fact, less people earn liberal arts degrees than you think. Only 36% of bachelor’s degrees at U.S. colleges are liberal arts degrees. This counts humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences as liberal arts. It doesn’t count education, engineering, music performance, business, nursing, art (unless it’s part of art history), or the various odd things that you might not even realize there are bachelor’s degrees in, like computer game design. In fact, there are no more bachelor’s degrees in most liberal arts subjects than there were forty years ago. Despite the fact that the number of students getting bachelor’s degrees in the U.S. is quite a bit larger than it was forty years ago, the numbers of degrees in every liberal arts subject is the same or smaller except for psychology and some biological sciences.

5

What exactly do you want people to major in? Accounting? And do you think all people with technical degrees get great jobs? What about all those people who jumped on the comp-sci bandwagon who spent some time stuck in tech support and now find there is no call for their mad Pascal skills? Technical degrees come with their own set of liabilities, including that today’s hot job won’t be tomorrows, you don’t have a lot of flexibility or chances to change fields, and tech skills become obsolete pretty quickly and you can be completely screwed if you spend some time outside of the field.

Reasons to opt for a liberal arts degree include:
[ul]
[li]You aren’t sure what you want to do, and don’t want to narrow your options[/li][li]You don’t want to do or are not good at the jobs technical degrees lead to[/li][li]You have a burning passion about a liberal arts subject[/li][li]You want a job that requires a lot of writing/critical thinking[/li][li]You believe that critical thinking/writing, etc. can only be learned in a classroom setting, whereas tech skills can be acquired on their own or on the job[/li][li]Money isn’t the most important thing to you[/li][li]You think you are good enough that you will rise above the odds[/li][li]You want a job that isn’t a technical one- a biology degree isn’t going to do much for someone who wants to be an ambassador[/li][/ul]

Choosing what you want to major in isn’t just a matter of looking up what is the most marketable and choosing that one. It’s worthless to choose something you hate, or something you suck at. And most people are willing to accept some risk in their life if they feel like the reward is worth it.

Finally, believe it or not but liberal arts majors do teach you something important and there are things you learn in college that are more important than 'marketable skills". I’ll leave it to someone else to explain all that.

6

Can we get some evidence that the degrees are not marketable? Also, what is the definition of marketable?

7

For that matter, what percentage of people who get post college jobs actually end up in a field that their degree was in? One may argue that this is a reflection choosing unmarketable degrees, but often it is simply a reflection of the flexibility of a liberal arts education. Forex, my sister has her bachelor’s and Ph.D. in Anthropology. But while she’s done some work in what someone would consider the field, the vast majority of her work has been with special Ed. students and teachers. My sister would say she’s simply applying her anthropology discipline to a concrete situation, and to blazes with what other people’s understanding of the discipline might be.

For that matter, just how marketable would the OP consider a Ph.D. in herpetology? I know someone who had a very successful career in business with just that degree.

In a large part, I believe that the greatest merit of a college degree is not so much that it describes what a person knows or has been trained in (Though, of course, there are many degrees where that is a major boon.) but that is a demonstration that the person with the degree has shown an ability to learn.

8

A few want to go to law school?

Wow. There are so many weird and questionable assumptions here, I don’t know where to start. Why must people choose their own goals based on some ethereal “concept of modern society”? Who says that modern society is all about marketable skills? Who says liberal arts fields such as literary criticism and philosophy aren’t of value to society? Who says liberal arts degrees aren’t marketable?

I would say that those who are already fairly well educated when they leave high school tend to be confident that they will find a decent job no matter what their bachelor’s degree is in. If their families are somewhat wealthy it makes them even more confident, since they aren’t desperate to get into the highest-paying job right away. So I would not expect many students from poor backgrounds to take the liberal arts route. A lot of disdain for liberal arts education seems to stem from the perception that it’s a frivolous pursuit of the rich. But of course it is fallacious to say that that which many people can’t afford must not be worth pursuing. I know people who can’t afford to get their missing teeth replaced.

9

I’m a bit vague on the definition of a US liberal arts degree, but it clearly has marketable skills. The OP is not seriously suggesting that an English degree offers nothing in the way of usability or skillset to society, are they?

I think it’s true that it’s tough to beat a hard science degree as a formative education. You learn the communication and thinking skills normally associated with liberal arts studies, in addition to all of the analysis and creativity that goes along with the science.

Science is not everyone’s cup of tea, though. The question ‘How come everyone is taking political science degrees when they should be studying organic chemistry’ is not really a great debate. It’s a fatuous question, really. I mean, not everyone likes organic chemistry.

The real difference maker is not your degree, it’s your university. I think it is a very tough question for a kid facing a choice of taking political science, for example, at a mediocre institution, or just not going to university at all and getting a job out of school.

10

There has actually been a “popular sense” here in the US for a couple of decades now that liberal arts degrees are “useless”, mostly stemming from the misconception that the purpose of getting a college degree is solely to instill information/techniques for a particular career.

Take Avenue Q, the Broadway musical…the first song after the overture is called “What Do You Do With A B.A. In English?”

Four years of college
and plenty of knowledge
have earned me this useless degree

11

College is not vocational training. It’s acquisition of thinking and writing skills that allow BA holders to choose from a variety of options. I happen to think that the ability to write superbly is about the the most marketable skill for an entry-level job applicant.

12

I’ll echo what everyone else here has been saying – college really isn’t the same as vocational school. We have vocational schools, such as ITT Tech and UTI, which teach a specific skill set that funnels people into certain occupations. But even in colleges where you get a non-liberal arts degree that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have any better chance of getting a job than a liberal arts major. I mean, if you major in biology in college and I major in political science, why would you think that you have a better chance of getting a job than I would? Most jobs for college graduates are entry-level and you work your way up by learning on the job.

13

Because liberal arts degrees are good training for being able to think - which is what most corporate management jobs require. You get your degree in History, you don’t get a job in History, you get a job working in some sort of corporate entry level position. You work your way up the corporate entry level position, with only a few doors closed to you.

I know Accountants whose degree was in English Lit (granted, not CPAs). Computer programmers who majored in Economics. Executives who majored in Political Science.

And, if your future includes a graduate degree (JD or MBA) your undergrad doesn’t really matter.

14

If you’re going to waste four years of your life and untold amounts of money, you might as well study something you’re interested in.

15

So a lawyer doesn’t have marketable skills, or produce something of value to society?

I disagree.

16

Well, duh! Didn’t you know that you’re all leeches whose sole purpose is to get criminals back on the street again as soon as possible?

17

Is the college degree the end of the line or do the real jobs in science and technology require education beyond college?

If one assumes that the better opportunities go to those who end up with education after college, then maybe we should look at which kind of education ends up producing more PhD.s?

Now even if one does not assume that a PhD in a science or technology field opens more doors in today’s marketplace, this information still shows that liberal arts colleges do a fantastic job preparing students to learn and apply themselves in the future. Do those in the business community recognize that when they hire? Some claim they do.

In fact many top CEO’s came out of small liberal arts backgrounds. And argue strongly that the broad knowledge they acquired there prepared them for their futures career better than a narrow business education would have. The argument made in the business world for liberal arts is that technical training prepares you to be expert with one sort of technology, but that technology itself is likely to be obsolete within a short period of time. Better to know how to communicate effectively and to have a broader set of skills that is transferable between industries than only adapted for a particular niche.

18

IME as an engineering major, just having the degree itself is not actually enough to just go land yourself a 55K/year job. You have to do internships to get a good full-time job. To get the internships, you have have good grades and do some sort of extracurricular stuff around campus. If you don’t do these things, and graduate with a BS ME, 2.8 GPA and 4 years working at the pizza joint, it will take you a while to get in at ACME Inc.

And its not necessarily any different for liberal arts grads, just perhaps more competitive. If you’re a anthropology grad with a 3.8 GPA, writer for the college paper, and have two summers working in at a local nonprofit, then my bet would be that you will land a job quickly enough. No, it won’t pay as much, but we assume in this case pay is not a top priority here.

19

[harumpf] So much for the quaint notion that college is a place to become a well-rounded and broadly educated human being.[/harumpf]

20

First off, job training is not what college is for. There are technical schools and other institutions that do specialize in job training, and students who primarily care about becoming qualified for a particular job are generally better off attending one of these institutions.

But most 18- to 21-year-olds don’t actually know what they want to do for the rest of their lives; most will end up changing careers at some point; even those who do know for sure that they want to go into, say, business or computer science will probably end up doing most of their learning on the job – both because the field has changed and because there’s a limit to what you can learn in a classroom. The fact is, college isn’t all that good at providing job training. It is pretty good at providing students with flexible, transferrable skills that they will use in most careers: how to write clearly, how to think critically, how to learn and retain new information, how to complete a long-term project when there’s no one standing over your shoulder. This is why many employers and some professional schools just want a BA from a respectable school in any subject. If you know how to learn, you’ll be able to learn the specific things you need to know for your new job quickly enough.

But even those skills aren’t the purpose of college. The real purpose is pursuing study and learning for their own sake – a luxury that used to be available only to a small minority of the population. (In fact, “liberal arts,” by definition, means the studies that are appropriate for a free person, someone who isn’t bound by the immediate necessity to earn a living.)

This may sound like an archaic and elitist notion today, but in fact, we have the rare good luck to live in a society where almost everyone can afford to be free for a few years. Most students who truly want to spend four years pursuing the life of the mind can find a way to swing it. That’s a precious opportunity, and it shouldn’t be squandered; students can and should be encouraged to find their intellectual passion, whether it’s computer science or medieval French literature, and spend those years living and breathing it, because the chance won’t come again. (Not all of them do find it – there are certainly people who earn a bachelor’s degree without discovering any passion whatsoever – but it’s sad when that happens. It’s a sign that the student has truly failed college or the college has failed the student, even if they’ve got the piece of parchment.)

If you’re one of the lucky ones who get to pursue your passion for a living, great. That’s icing on the cake. But it’s still a pretty darn good cake without the icing. I’d feel enriched by my humanities degree even if I had gotten a data entry job instead of going to grad school; it has made me more capable of enjoying books and film and art, more aware of how many things there are out there to enjoy, more capable of following an interesting discussion on the SDMB or in real life, more aware of the influence of history and culture all around me. I expect this will still be the case long after my working life is done, if I live that long.

That’s why.