As I’m browsing through this board… and throughout life in general, I get kind of annoyed when people are like “I have a BA in English and because I don’t have a fancy technical degree, no one wants to hire me.” No, it’s not because you have a BA in English that no one wants to hire you… it’s probably because you didn’t intern or gain good marketable job skills while you were in undergrad.
I fully believe a degree should not restrict what jobs are available to you, and people should stop making equations like BA English = teacher/write. That’s total BS. A degree can be anything you want it to be - IT IS UP TO YOU TO GET THE EXPERIENCE YOU NEED TO PURSUE A CAREER THAT YOU WANT. Michael Eisner only has a BA in English… he never went to MBA school and he did pretty well with it.
For the record, I have a BA in History and when I was in undergrad I wanted to work in the music industry. Does a History degree have anything to do with the music biz? Not really, so I got an internship at a record label, woke up at 6 am M-W-F and drove 3 hours through traffic to get to Los Angeles to work. Ultimately, I got a job out of it although I didn’t stay in the music biz for long.
It’s a running joke where I work that you can get hired with a degree in basket weaving. Really, most places don’t care. I tend to agree with your assessment.
I have a degree in fine arts. I work in corporate America assisting a pack of research medical scientists. Gosh, how did that happen…?
When I had trouble making it as an independent artist I didn’t whine, I got off my butt and found a job. Actually, I found several jobs, many of them craptastick, but I persisted and took advantage of opportunities that came my way and after 3-4 years had the background and experience to get my foot in the door where I currently work. I wouldn’t have expected to wind up where I did, but I got there because I treated every job seriously, got my butt to work on time, and didn’t goof off on the job.
Getting a degree in anything shows a certain ability to set a long term goal and achieve it. While there are plenty of ambitious, intelligent, hard working, talented, and capable people who never finished high school, it hard to pick them out from the folks who didn’t finish high school because they’re lazy counch potatoes. You have to have a certain level of focus and ability to finish a college degree, particularly if mommy and daddy don’t have a lot of money to help you out.
Achieve yes; set…maybe. College is not our much-vaunted Real World - the goals are set for you once you pick a major/degree program, the path is clearly marked, there are resources to use along the way, and it is in everybody’s interest to see you succeed.
After college, unless you’re in a highly structured environment, it’s all about making yourself a part of something that is dedicated to profit (and knowing that at first, you will not share much in the profit). The path is not clearly marked - you’ll have to show just as much dedication to get and hold a job that turns out to be a dead end as you will the “perfect” job. And bright ambitious folks are as likely to get opposition from peers and superiors as support.
In short, college is about using the tools at your disposal; work is about becoming a tool, and placing yourself at someone else’s disposal.
Maybe what we liberal arts majors don’t get taught is the rude necessity of this. We’ve been trained to question and ask why, not to suck it up and deal, so we’re always looking for a smarter, better way. Sometimes there isn’t one.
I don’t think anyone equates a degree with being unemployed. I think many, *many * people end up in jobs that are unrelated to their degree, but that’s a completely different thing. Let’s face it; a lot of fields are saturated and others are rather obscure. It’s not what they got the degree in for most people; it’s the general education they obtained that is appealing to an employer.
After I got my honours degree in English, I attempted to do Masters in the same subject – but got sidetracked. So, after about 6 years of full-time study, I was on the job market. However, I didn’t stay unemployed for long: I got myself a job as a cleaner in a steel mill.
Fortunately, I only stayed there about 3 months, but I did return to the steel mill again a few moths later, this time as a Brinell tester – a job in which a degree in English is definitely an overqualification, since I learned all I needed to know about the job in half a shift, without even having heard of Brinell hardness before I stepped into the employment office that morning.
As a rebuttal, I have a degree in Computer Science and while my degree is more advanced than those of most of the people I work with on a regular basis (MS, going toward PhD, vs. BS for most of the rest), I would actually prefer to work with more people with less technical degrees.
Many of these jobs, while technical in nature, are not particularly difficult and often don’t necessarily need the deep understanding of what’s going on to perform the task. The problem is, I’ve met a lot of people with technical degrees who can’t write or communicate effectively and it makes my job more difficult because of that. I would prefer to have fairly intelligent non-technical degree and train them to do the technical stuff than a technical degree and train them how to write… it’s a hell of a lot harder. Of the people I do work around who CAN communicate well, they have degrees in things like Music and English.
Of course, I ultimately blame the schools for not putting a strong enough emphasis on language skills for technical degrees. I can’t begin to explain how frustrating it is to read a paper written by a grad student with the grammar and vocabulary of a high schooler.
As for the issue pointed out by the OP… I’ve rarely heard that any way other than as tongue-in-cheek by people with technical degrees, like the joke Q: “What does someone who just graduated with a BA say when he lands his first job?” A: “Do you want fries with that?” The people who ACTUALLY believe that they’re useless, unemployable degrees are probably like many of the people I’m stuck dealing with, who don’t understand the importance of writing skills, management skills, etc.
It’s been a long standing joke of mine that an English degree means that you get to flip burgers in life. So far, it’s not completely accurate, but there’s certainly hyperbole. There’s some truth to being an English major and being unqualified for just about everything. I’m not the first to joke about it, and I’m sure I won’t be the last. There’s a cute piece that Garrison Keillor does on the Prairie Home Companion that’s precisely about this subject.
When I was in school, there weren’t any internships for English majors. If you wanted newspaper gigs, they were Communications or Journalism majors. Anything else interesting required people working towards Business or Management degrees. I went to a small college in Buffalo, New York. It’s far from a podunk town, but the job market wasn’t exactly bristling with internships for interested students, just students that were working towards a degree they wanted. When I was in school, I was running a restaurant on campus. At first, I was just working there, but within a year, I was one of the people running the place. I’m 26 and I’ve got roughly 6 years of management experience already. I’ve run three different restaurants, ran housekeeping and laundry for a nursing home, did a small internship as a tax support representative, and I’m now unemployed.
The job market here in Detroit is bad, and I hate how I end up saying that same thing to some degree.
I’m glad you got a degree in English and were able to use that to jump to something completely different. That’s what I was working on doing and why I didn’t want to get typecast in a restaurant role (high turnover, not much fun, gets boring after a while). The last job I had was the small internship for the product support job. I took that to see if I could handle something that was completely outside of my element. I did, and I handled it very well. I thought I could handle it, but I had to know.
This is precisely the reason I apply to jobs that I’m clearly not qualified for. I’ve heard this complaint from everything from doctors to engineers and everything in between.
I don’t think that’s it. My degree is in chemical engineering, and we were trained to question and to ask why, not to suck it up and deal, so we’re always looking for a smarter, better way.
That is all stuff that everyone has to learn about the cold, harsh facts of real life away from college. When I graduated having had neither internship nor co-op experiences, it was tough for me to find a job – and my degree is pretty damn specific on the types of jobs society expects you to be working at! That sort of stuff just wasn’t part of even my very-focused studies. But, oh, how I wish someone had thought to mention it just in case the more oblivious of us hadn’t clued in yet.
Anybody can leave college unprepared to get that job, whether they’re liberal arts majors or engineers.