Just nitpickery, but the way I see it, it’s not possible for math in itself to actively contradict known physical relationships; all that’s possible is that attempts to interpret the math in a particular way as describing physical reality turn out erroneous (e.g., interpreting Euclidean geometry as describing physical space in the usual naive way). But that doesn’t mean there’s a contradiction; just that one shouldn’t interpret the math in that way. And, indeed, if there was no obvious correlation to physical reality of any sort, one wouldn’t even feel the urge to do such things.
Well you’re right, work experience is also valuable for employers, I was a bit flippant with the pizza joint comment. The point I was trying to make is that employers will look for something besides just showing up and passing the classes. (In your example - the discipline of working full-time while is school) And that beyond-the-classroom stuff is something that liberal arts majors can pursue just as well as business or engineering majors.
Heh, I’m glad I became a lawyer - I saved up some cash working during my undergraduate (my tuition was free 'cause my dad was a prof at the same university), and used that cash to travel through SE Asia for nine months … I guess I’d have had trouble getting a job if I’d gone into some other field.
I thought the point was to smoke a lot of dope and make out with 20 year-old girls with big eyes and freckles. No offense, but I think you went to the wrong college.
scrambledeggs writes:
> Political science is the 9th most ‘lucrative’ degree?
>
> Can’t say I’ve seen ANY jobs for “political scientist” advertised, EVER
O.K., let’s take this slowly. What job do many people who major in political science in college often end up in? That’s right - being a lawyer. There are a number of other jobs which are directly relevant to political science which they often go into - political consulting, analysts at the State Department, private consulting agencies, and the intelligence agencies. There are other jobs not directly relevant that they go into also. It’s not at all surprising that political science majors often make a lot of money in their careers.
To nitpick your nitpick with a little good humor, too, the concept of imaginary numbers was apparently first described in 1572, by one Rafael Bombelli. At the time, and for centuries thereafter, the concept was viewed as neat, mathematically valid, and completely contrary to reality.
Nowadays, imaginary numbers are used to describe the real interactions of voltages in AC powered circuits and semiconducting chips. As well as being useful for describing certain macroeconomic concepts.
I’ll stand by my assertion: Pure mathematics can contradict known reality, and if it’s internally consistent - it’s valid mathematics.
There’s an idea out there that one should choose a college major because it let’s you study in depth something you like. Not necessarily because it’s preparing you for a particular career.
For what it may be worth, I majored in a subject that has essentially nothing to do with my job.
My husband and I graduated with degrees in, no kidding, “Liberal Arts” (except in Latin) from one of the Liberal Artsiest colleges around. We’re doing pretty well, and so are our classmates: lots of executives, entrepreneurs, artists, educators, attorneys, astrophysicists, authors, a few doctors, members of the clergy, psychologists, mathematicians, lots of people at the Human Genome Project, museum curators, architects, yacht designers.
Ever try to pick up chicks as an electrical engineer?
Well, it’s all semantics now, but of course there wasn’t any sense in which imaginary numbers were contrary to reality; even if they never turned out to be useful in electrical engineering or any such thing, complex numbers not describing physical magnitudes wouldn’t make complex analysis contradictory to physical reality; it would just be about a subject that didn’t have much applications in analyzing physical reality. Assertions about math can’t contradict physical reality in themselves; only when paired with some kind of bridge principle (e.g., “This mathematical theory accurately describes this physical phenomenon”) can a contradiction be obtained, but in that case, it is the bridge principle which is falsified, and not the mathematics itself.
Taking “known” as factive, if only in order to salvage my nitpickery, I’ll stand by the claim that consistent mathematics can never contradict known reality.
(But I’m just being pointlessly pedantic and we really agree; mathematics doesn’t need to be legitimized by any correlation with anything external to itself; in fact, I even think inconsistent systems of mathematics can have great value)
Liberal arts degrees better position you for more intellectually creative fields like marketing, advertising, sales, law and so on. Engineering and technical majors tend to position you for more quantitative jobs. Technical majors can more easily find jobs, but they are often jobs where you are grinding out analysis every day. A lot of people don’t want to spend their career writing code and pouring through spreadsheets.
Liberal arts jobs can be “sexier” or more interesting, however they often don’t pay as well (at least initially) and the entry requirements might be higher. Not to pick on lawyers, but there are so many of them, I can’t believe it’s that particulary hard to get into law school, pass 3 years and complete the bar exam. What’s difficult is the competition within the field. There are only so many new hire slots at Cravath or Jones Day and they tend to take the creme of the crop. I would imagine it’s the same with many liberal arts degrees. A polysci major from Harvard or Berkley might go work for some political think tank while the same major from some average school might find himself selling insurance.
Whatever you study, you should think in terms of either professions (law, medicine, engineering,etc) or industries (airline, entertainment, etc) that you want to want to work in. That way you don’t end up with some jobby-job they give to anyone who can a) read and b) not piss off the interviewer.
And actually LIKE telling people like msmith537 that it’s “PORING OVER spreadsheets.” 
Unfortunately IME, the predominate ones are 2 and 8. I’ve seen so many teachers who seem to have gotten through college precisely because their major never required them to present information in a concise and fully accurate manner, and from what I can tell, let them put down almost anything they felt as the answer.
These people then find themselves in a job market wanting actual skills, and then they turn to teaching, which has a glut of liberal arts and social science majors. Then some of them decide that they LUURRRVE education and get their Masters in Educational Leadership (or whatever it is) to go into administration. Let me tell you: if it’s ANYTHING like getting a teaching credential, it’s basically buying the degree.
And so you have administrations who are run by freakin’ LA majors who can’t put down in words what they actually mean, and couldn’t organize a schedule or a data set with a $10k bonus attached.
Yeah, I have a personal issue with them.
That’s why we need more history majors.
Looking at that Wiki list of academic fields, I see that at least 90% of the people I work and associate with each day are liberal arts majors, or working in jobs that require no non-LAM expertise. I work in an advertising office with 20 people where the only non-LAM (including the accountant) is the IT dude, and he’s pretty much the poster boy for dead-end jobs. The larger ad agencies we contract with employ thousands to tens of thousands of people each, and the overwhelming majority of those are in LAM-friendly jobs: writing, design, sales, direction, marketing, analysis, management, etc. The ones who aren’t are either the network support staff (who are generally (fairly or not) looked at like the cleaning crew: necessary as a group but individually fungible) and people who’ve trained in specific technical tasks like audio engineering or video production (in which case they’re looking forward to eventual promotion to direction and management). And at both the large and small agencies, the big bucks don’t go to the engineers, they go to the LAMs.
One problem here is that the OP has never said what majors s/he thinks are marketable.
I work for a major retailer at their headquarters in the department that is responsible for the majority of data analysis. Out of 25 or so people, offhand, I can think of several LibArts majors. I was an English major, I can think of three History majors, our VP was a Philosophy major …we’re all doing okay in business.
I think the thread-title question betrays a misunderstanding or a distorted expectation. What a graduate of higher education “markets” is not his degree: it’s him/herself as an educated person, of which the degree is only part of the package.
In some areas such as medicine, engineering, law, etc., the part of the specifics of the degree** is ** a *sine-qua-non * deal-breaker, due to the need for specialized training to meet the high technical demands of the field. But even the Engineers are expected to have a (American: bachelor’s/ European: licenciatura) degree which means you have not been merely trained as a technician in your field (the Navy can train a high-school graduate to be a nuclear reactor operator in a year and a half, but that doesn’t make him an engineer) but have been exposed to a higher academic environment, which means that, ideally, you have demonstrated the intellectual aptitude to continue to educate yourself, including doing research, and design creative new solutions, as the environment changes.
As mentioned earlier, even among the specifically-professional degrees only a small top elite of graduates with a small top elite of titles from a small top elite of schools are self-marketing. Everyone else has to work to get in the door, and everyone (*) has to work hard to make it to the top, whatever their field.
(*OK, save for some “fortunate sons” with connections – but these then don’t NEED the highly-marketable degrees and grades, do they?)
Or, as my dad put it when I told him I was going for my MA, " A Master’s degree today is what a Bachelor’s degree used to be."
I majored in English because I wanted to. Most of the people I know who’ve graduated with literature degrees have found good jobs either working for various businesses or teaching. (Creative writing majors are a different story altogether, but we won’t go there.) Last year I had a moment of truth when I realized I had actually picked a very good major because I can analyze communication, write in an understandable and critical way, and express myself well to others. What is a large chunk of business if not communication?
And since we’re talking about where math fits in and someone mentioned xkcd: Fields Arranged by Purity
I believe the whole point of getting an education is so that you can pursue a career doing something you find interesting and fullfulling. Not to just do “ok” as some cog in a great corporate machine. Unfortunately what I think happens is that people get a degree without a clear idea of what they want to accomplish, take whatever job they can get and stay there as long as they can tolerate it.
Seriously? I hope you’re right, but IME, English majors don’t even know how to write grammatically, and I say that as someone who can score VERY well on the SAT Writing test (yes, I know it’s been rolled into the standard SAT, but it wasn’t then…)
We actually considered an English major to be a “kiss of death”, because even the UCLA English majors we interviewed were lacking in grammar and insisted on things like “having a little skill” equated to “having little skill”.
I’m personally done with people who graduated from college without ever making themselves clearly understood in an exact manner.
YMMV.
Good thing I don’t go to UCLA and can demonstrably use my language skills effectively, non?
Your broad brush, it does not reach this far.