I’ve got an archaeology degree & a linguistics master. I am involved in regulated healthcare. On the face of it, my degrees have zero to do with what I do, but I use most of the skills I learned getting those degree (research, writing, statistics, etc.) in what I do almost everyday.
I would never “un-take” either degree, but I do wish I’d gotten a business degree, too.
I don’t assume it across the board, but some people do, and was wondering about different perspectives.
I have a B.A. in English Lit from UCLA. My plan was to get an MLS, but I decided to take some time off. Ended up never going back, and the last 40 years of my working life (I’m retired) was in IT.
But I learned a ton of skills getting my undergraduate degree that have served me all my life.
I think a liberal arts degree is valuable, but more as a generic degree that isn’t always worth high tuition. With a STEM degree, often the degree directly translates into an associated career with well defined salary ranges. It’s going to be relatively straightforward to figure out how to earn back $100k in tuition spent for a computer science degree, but that’s not necessarily the case with a liberal arts degree. Often, the liberal arts degree itself doesn’t translate into a high-paying salary directly. It serves more as a generic degree that opens doors to many different kinds of jobs that require a college degree. It probably makes sense to be more financially conservative when going into debt to get a liberal arts degree since it will require more creativity and perseverance to pay for the debt.
Another related question is people getting a degree in a field that will earn them big bucks (or a comfortable living) but having no apptitude for the job. They can get the degree, but can’t perform in the field.
It wasn’t a college degree, but a technical school certificate (?) that one contract programmer I had working on my team had received. I don’t know what/how they taught him, but he had zero apptitude for the job. He had to be hand-held on everything. He had a three-month contract, and that was as long as we kept him.
I am not sure that’s true. One of the things you “get” at a fancy college is access to great internships and job placements, along with advisors to help you get into a professional program. An English degree is worth a lot more if you interned with Facebook and Bank of America before you graduate, and if they can hook you up with interviews with 5 Fortune 500s your senior year.
I mean, if it’s 30k a year for UT vs 70k for SMU, go to UT. But if it’s 20k a year to USC (with financial aid) vs 10k/at your local regional commuter College, I’d probably go USC.
Have a BS in engineering from a liberal arts university. I never held an engineering job but went into IT and then management. I feel like the liberal arts schooling made me a more well-rounded person and continues to help me. I am very glad I went this route and expanded my thinking. Of course, I love to continually learn and still read, learn foreign languages, play music, attend concerts and theatrical productions, etc.
I have a BA in English Literature. It does not apply to my current job, but there was never any intention of my specific major to apply to my current employment. I’m a photographer, so it really didn’t matter what I studied, as long as people were willing to pay me for pictures. I have also briefly worked (for a year or so) as a legal assistant at a small law criminal defense law firm, but that title isn’t really a true Legal Assistant, so much as jack-of-all-trades from office manager, to researcher, to IT guy, to process server, to picking up people from prison, to paper filer, to messenger, to transcriber of overhears/surveillance videos, etc. The English lit degree was actually good for that, as a lot of writing was involved, and my general research and high-functioning skills of being in college was perfect for that. It was a fun job I did while in an interim period doing photography at the same time on weekends before transitioning to full time photography again. (I had moved back to the US from Hungaray and pivoted my business to the event industry, so needed some time to get a foothold here.)
I think I’ve become convinced that the worst bang for your buck is the commuter state directional school. You simply won’t have the same opportunities as you would at the flagship state school or a good private school.
If you have close to a full ride, directional commuter schools can be a fine option, especially if you have a practical need to stay close to home. And some are much better than others. But yes, I’d happily pay an more for private or state flagship up to a point. That exact point is dependent on a lot of things.
Nope. B.A. in Film Studies. Had to get an M.L.S in order to be employable.
My partner did a BA in History, then MLS, and found her training in history gave her broad, general knowledge and the ability to dig for more that was applicable and helpful every single day. She was not asked, “When was the War of 1812?” or direct history questions, but she could understand the context of the questions and help the patron. Other liberal arts degrees did the same thing for her colleagues, plus they learned lots of neat stuff while at university. Which is where we met, so, another win!
I’ve been a medical librarian for 40 years, so the B.A. hasn’t helped. I never watched any surgical movies!
But that depends on the personality of the student and how much initiative he shows.
Many,many lib arts students are totally clueless about the working world. They just sit in their classrooms, getting good grades on exams, feeling proud of an “A” on a paper which was read by only one other person on the planet, who then deleted and forgot about it right after giving the grade.
So the student has nothing else at the end of 4 years but the dry grades. They often don’t even bother getting to know the professors personally, so they don’t have anybody they feel comfortable asking for a letter of reference.
They graduate as clueless as they began 4 years earlier, They just switch their part-time job at Starbucks to full-time…
I knew lots of people like this back in the 1970’s— when college was so cheap it didn’t matter.
Nowadays, it’s irresponsible for a parent to let their kid go deeply in debt for a liberal arts degree, unless the kid fully understands before he begins that he will have to do a LOT of extra work outside the classroom—taking the initiative to join groups, to volunteer, and then interning, networking, networking, and more networking.
For a kid like that, the expensive school is worth it, for the social and networking opportunities that lead to a good career… Otherwise–don’t waste money. Go to a cheap community college, or minor “directional” state campus , get a few A’s on your papers on Shakespeare and Aristotle, and enjoy working with your friends at Starbucks for long,long time…
But all that’s true for the kid with a business degree or a CS degree, too. If you don’t do anything but the course work, you also probably don’t apply anywhere interesting, and even if you get a job, you don’t learn anything and you sit in the same position for the next 40 years.
If you are going to do that, don’t go to any college. Figure something else out.
Tech jobs are pretty easy to walk into with no special effort and make $80k-100k as a new hire. A CS major will have a pretty easy time getting summer internships that pay well with included travel and room paid for. The same isn’t really true for most liberal arts degrees. An English major with a Bachelor’s degree will really have to be exceptional to have similar opportunities. An generic CS major with a 3.0+ average won’t really need to work very hard to get a job that pays $50k+ straight after graduation.
But one thing that might be different is later in their careers. A tech worker can do the same thing for decades and then the tech changes and their skill is not needed. Older tech workers are less likely to get hired and have a harder time learning new tech. A tech worker will typically need to continually keep up with the new technology. Liberal arts careers aren’t typically like that. A liberal arts graduate will likely have a more flexible career path with lots of twists and turns. They won’t be obsolete at 50 like many tech workers are.
But that’s my point. They need to go to an exceptional school to get the skills and the contacts to have those sorts of opportunities. Going cheap, to a school that can’t provide them, is a bad compromise. Better to give it up entirely that to do it in a way that is highly unlikely to work out, no matter how hard you work.
I see what you mean. I misunderstood. A well motivated liberal arts student will have opportunities at a more elite school that can make the extra cost objectively worth it. But someone who is just going through the motions to get a degree may be better off with something else.
I would say that about any student, though. If you are poorly motivated, college is usually a poor choice, and a selective school is an especially poor choice. Four years in the land of Try Hards is not going to magically motivate them.
What, you’ve never used Lebesgue integration in your actuarial work? 
I’m astounded, I tell ya!
I’ve got a doctorate in math, and for the past 20+ years, I’ve been a mathematical statistician with the U.S. government. My area of research was graph theory, which has been totally irrelevant to the work I do. And similarly to you, I can go for years without needing any math I didn’t learn in high school or earlier. But occasionally we need to make sure what we’re doing is in keeping with the body of theory that supports it, so once every several years, I find myself actually doing some college-level mathematical statistics.
The main benefit I got out of the doctorate was what one might call a systematized skepticism. When you’re working on your doctorate, you’re trying to prove new theorems that nobody else has proven yet. But you know that if you present your PhD advisor with proofs that aren’t actually proofs, it will lower his or her opinion of you. And if you do it too often, you may find yourself looking for a new advisor, assuming they let you remain in the program.
So you learn to go back over your chain of reasoning, testing each step for holes, before you show your advisor your cool new result. That saved my ass several times as I was working on my doctorate, and it’s been a skill I think I’ve done a decent job of carrying forward into the rest of my life.