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

Great Debates
61

[QUOTE=scrambledeggs]
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.

(…)

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?
[/QUOTE]

As a political scientist, I have to take issue with the degrading way my field of interest is being discussed here. Given, for instance, the regularly poor level of the political discussions being held even on this fine board, I think a lot of people could benefit from some schooling in political science (why you put the word science in quotation marks is beyond me, to be honest). Also, as to ‘marketability’, I think you’re wrong when you’re suggesting that Political Science graduates have a hard time finding suitable employment.

62

[QUOTE=JRDelirious]
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…
[/QUOTE]

I think the misunderstanding here is exactly this. One expects people with electrical engineering degrees to get jobs as “electrical engineers,” people with veterinary degrees to get jobs as “veterinarians,” and people with chemistry degrees to get jobs as “chemists.” Logically, then, people with history degrees should be getting jobs as “historians,” people with political science degrees should be getting jobs as “political scientists,” and people with literature degrees should be getting jobs as “literaturians” (or something).

By the same token, it’s confusing that, in the job market, degrees in history, political science, and literature are essentially interchangeable. If the purpose of these degrees is, as some suggest, primarily the acquisition of thinking and writing skills, then why not get a “BS in Thinking and Writing” and drop the concentration on history or political science or literature? (Yes, I know why; I’m just musing on the source of confusion.)

63

[QUOTE=Cardinal]
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.
[/QUOTE]

As an ex-teacher I have a hunch there is some truth to this.

They also insist that all teachers be paid the same…so a harder to find math degree teacher gets paid the same as the glut filled LA one.

64

This is not the first time this semi-literate argument has reared its ugly head. Fortunately, some very intelligent people have already tackled this problem a long time ago, and there is not a whole lot left to add.

And by a long time ago, I mean the 12th century. This is a nice analysis of the Metalogicon of John of Salisbury. As a medieval Latinist, I had to translate much of it in college.

Now I am an extremely well-compensated financial statistician. My masters is in, of all things, political science.

Go figure.

65

[QUOTE=zut]
I think the misunderstanding here is exactly this. One expects people with electrical engineering degrees to get jobs as “electrical engineers,” people with veterinary degrees to get jobs as “veterinarians,” and people with chemistry degrees to get jobs as “chemists.” Logically, then, people with history degrees should be getting jobs as “historians,” people with political science degrees should be getting jobs as “political scientists,” and people with literature degrees should be getting jobs as “literaturians” (or something).

By the same token, it’s confusing that, in the job market, degrees in history, political science, and literature are essentially interchangeable. If the purpose of these degrees is, as some suggest, primarily the acquisition of thinking and writing skills, then why not get a “BS in Thinking and Writing” and drop the concentration on history or political science or literature? (Yes, I know why; I’m just musing on the source of confusion.)
[/QUOTE]
Very well put, wish I had thought of that – the way it works is, in the cases of the professional-specialty degrees, the market (the potential employers, by the prevalent hiring practices) or the regulatory agency (licensing boards) or the profession itself (guild mentality) come to the conclusion that a specific curriculum contains the knowledge expected at entry level of the person who fills position X. So right off the bat, every degree that does not contain that curriculum is struck off the competition for position X, so the labor-market supply/demand ratio is suddenly much more favorable for holders of degree X applying for position X.

The problem in the public perception is that if you got a real all-purpose degree in “Humane Letters”, folks would continually wonder WHAT did you study, because of the misperception that thinking critically and communicating effectively is not something you study for but some sort of innate gift (it’s as “innate” as athletic ability or musical talent: if you don’t train in it, it stays undeveloped!). As some of the posters above have recounted, in far too many schools and departments, not just “liberal-arts” but also professional curricula(*) have inexcusably foregone the part about preparing the student for thinking critically and communicating effectively, for the sake of either preparing them to pass some standard credentialling test, or perpetuating the Chairman’s oh-so-precious philosophical doctrine.

(Plenty of unintelligible science/eng/law grads out there, too. Just that we expect * them to sound like Greek to us!)

66

[QUOTE=Cardinal]
Unfortunately IME, the predominate ones are 2 and 8.
[/QUOTE]

What’s wrong with not enjoying/being good at a technical thing? It takes all kinds of people to make the world go round. I probably wouldn’t want to watch a TV show written by an actuary, have a biologist whose dedicated her life to studying the effects of avian flu on frog embryos as governor or read a tour guidebook written by structural engineers.

Now the standards that colleges expect their students to live up to is another argument entirely and one I can’t help with. My program was quite rigorous- we were told in sophomore year that the standard we’d be evaluated on was writing at the level of the texts we were reading. And it was true. After that, I got a job where I took material written by engineers, cleaned it up, and put it in language that an investor could understand. I can’t speak for other schools, but we did learn some very useful skills.

67

[QUOTE=scrambledeggs]
Political science is the 9th most ‘lucrative’ degree?

Can’t say I’ve seen ANY jobs for “political scientist” advertised, EVER
[/QUOTE]
So, even after everything that everyone has said here, you’re still thinking of college as vocational training for a specific job?

68

[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
So, even after everything that everyone has said here, you’re still thinking of college as vocational training for a specific job?
[/QUOTE]

He’s not thinking about the subject at all. Remind me never to hire him.

69

[QUOTE=scrambledeggs]
Why do so many kids earn liberal arts degrees when they are not marketable?

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

We can always use more people who know how to use apostrophes.

With regard to your question, this is not a new thing. William J. Whyte, in The Organization Man (1950), devoted many pages to just this issue. The skills of critical thinking, reading, and writing that come from a solid liberal arts degree transfer well to many types of jobs. At the time of this book, engineering graduates, and, to a lesser extent, B-school grads were widely preferred over liberal arts grads by recruiters, the latter generally did just as well once they were hired. The fact is, no employer needs everyone to be an engineer, accountant, or manager.

70

[QUOTE=zut]
I think the misunderstanding here is exactly this. One expects people with electrical engineering degrees to get jobs as “electrical engineers,” people with veterinary degrees to get jobs as “veterinarians,” and people with chemistry degrees to get jobs as “chemists.” Logically, then, people with history degrees should be getting jobs as “historians,” people with political science degrees should be getting jobs as “political scientists,” and people with literature degrees should be getting jobs as “literaturians” (or something).

By the same token, it’s confusing that, in the job market, degrees in history, political science, and literature are essentially interchangeable. If the purpose of these degrees is, as some suggest, primarily the acquisition of thinking and writing skills, then why not get a “BS in Thinking and Writing” and drop the concentration on history or political science or literature? (Yes, I know why; I’m just musing on the source of confusion.)
[/QUOTE]

Here’s the deal. If you focus on aquiring “marketable job skills” you will forever be at the mercy of whatever market those skills are being hired in. I see that happening to people with technical or vocational degrees or certifications in particular technologies. Not that you can’t earn a decent, and in some cases very lucrative, living, however those jobs will always be subject to labor market fluctuations and rarely make much more than the going market rate. Even worse, you end up playing an endless game of “catch-up” trying to keep your skills marketable while competing against an endless stream of fresh graduates.

The people who are truly successful generally don’t rely just on their professional skills and certifications. They develop skills like leadership, creative thinking, networking, persuasion and communication. Those skills take them into positions of management, enables them to come up with new and creative ideas for their own businesses or enables them to act as consultants to others.

The trick, as I mentioned, is that it can be harder for in the short term to sell a company on your background if they are just looking for x,y, and z skills. However, long term, you will progres further than people who just focus on the technical aspect of the job if you focus on some of the more “softer” skills.

71

[QUOTE=msmith537]
Here’s the deal. If you focus on aquiring “marketable job skills” you will forever be at the mercy of whatever market those skills are being hired in. I see that happening to people with technical or vocational degrees or certifications in particular technologies. Not that you can’t earn a decent, and in some cases very lucrative, living, however those jobs will always be subject to labor market fluctuations and rarely make much more than the going market rate. Even worse, you end up playing an endless game of “catch-up” trying to keep your skills marketable while competing against an endless stream of fresh graduates.

The people who are truly successful generally don’t rely just on their professional skills and certifications. They develop skills like leadership, creative thinking, networking, persuasion and communication. Those skills take them into positions of management, enables them to come up with new and creative ideas for their own businesses or enables them to act as consultants to others.

The trick, as I mentioned, is that it can be harder for in the short term to sell a company on your background if they are just looking for x,y, and z skills. However, long term, you will progres further than people who just focus on the technical aspect of the job if you focus on some of the more “softer” skills.
[/QUOTE]

While this is all true, and there is always a need for well-rounded individuals with general skills in creative thinking etc., and a good liberal arts degree can indeed provide these skills, the fear (and I think it is a justified one) is that this is only true of the truly self-motivated liberal arts student; whereas very many liberal arts students choose this form of degree simply because they haven’t really decided what to do, a degree of some sort is considered a necessary credential, and liberal arts are a lot easier than (say) any of the harder sciences and professions.

The problem, from the holder of such a degree’s persective, is that the relative value of the degree is thereby diluted compared to that of the others.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the time spent acquiring a mediocre liberal arts degree is wasted, just that all of the good stuff people have said about the relative value of a liberal arts degree has to be put in perspective - yes it is all true, but not for everyone. I suspect that taking the median (as opposed to the average) of salaries, that those with other forms of degrees tend to do better - those with liberal arts degrees are more likely to cluster at opposite ends of the income scale, a few making it in management and other enterprises, and a majority - not so much.

After all, how many management positions are there?

While it is true that those with professional or vocational type skills need to constantly update - the same is just as true for those with “creative thinking” type skills. In both cases, updating often comes on the job as it were.

Moreover, one should not assume that a person lacking a liberal arts education thereby lacks flexibility and creativity. To a large extent, when out many years in a job, the exact details of your university education are less relevant.

– Malthus, a B.A. in Anthropology ( :smiley: ) who like many liberal arts graduates found it difficult to get gainful employment, saw his classmates general un- or under-employed, went back to law school, and now a lawyer for the last decade.

72

[QUOTE=Malthus]

The problem, from the holder of such a degree’s persective, is that the relative value of the degree is thereby diluted compared to that of the others.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the time spent acquiring a mediocre liberal arts degree is wasted, just that all of the good stuff people have said about the relative value of a liberal arts degree has to be put in perspective - yes it is all true, but not for everyone. I suspect that taking the median (as opposed to the average) of salaries, that those with other forms of degrees tend to do better - those with liberal arts degrees are more likely to cluster at opposite ends of the income scale, a few making it in management and other enterprises, and a majority - not so much.

After all, how many management positions are there?

[/QUOTE]

Ultimately that’s the problem. Employers need people to actually “do” stuff, not just manage and pontificate. They tend to be more flexible in their hiring practices when it comes to tangible skills. Someone with a C in computer science can still get a job in information systems somewhere on the basis of their computer knowledge wheras a C in anthropology is kind of a hard sell anywhere. Not only do you not have the raw skills, it looks like you weren’t even that motivated anyway.

73

[QUOTE=Maeglin]
Now I am an extremely well-compensated financial statistician. My masters is in, of all things, political science.
[/QUOTE]

Ok, I am being pressured by an administrative to post more. So I shall respond:

I appreciate the discussion and replies. I believe that you have answered by question; there aren’t as many PS as I thought, and many do get jobs in fields besides PS. That being said . . .

The comment quoted above is nice, but you are well-compensated not because of your PoliSci degree, but because you are in finance and statistics. That hardly refutes my implication of my original argument.

Second, one of the above posters said it was false that “Political Science graduates have a hard time finding suitable employment”. Of course, you may try this:

Open up the local classified ads, turn to the employment section. Look under “Accounting”. Count them up. Then “Technical”. Then try “Political science”. See the difference? Yes you could get hired under the “Sales” ads, but then you wouldn’t really need your degree at all.

I believe I had a valid concern that we are pushing out too many people with Political science majors, and as a society and economy we dont need that many.

74

[QUOTE=scrambledeggs]
Ok, I am being pressured by an administrative to post more. So I shall respond:

I appreciate the discussion and replies. I believe that you have answered by question; there aren’t as many PS as I thought, and many do get jobs in fields besides PS. That being said . . .

The comment quoted above is nice, but you are well-compensated not because of your PoliSci degree, but because you are in finance and statistics. That hardly refutes my implication of my original argument.

Second, one of the above posters said it was false that “Political Science graduates have a hard time finding suitable employment”. Of course, you may try this:

Open up the local classified ads, turn to the employment section. Look under “Accounting”. Count them up. Then “Technical”. Then try “Political science”. See the difference? Yes you could get hired under the “Sales” ads, but then you wouldn’t really need your degree at all.

I believe I had a valid concern that we are pushing out too many people with Political science majors, and as a society and economy we dont need that many.
[/QUOTE]

The world can always use more people who are thoughtful and well-read and knowledgeable about history, and to that end a major in political science is as good as any other.

Ed

75

[QUOTE=scrambledeggs]

The comment quoted above is nice, but you are well-compensated not because of your PoliSci degree, but because you are in finance and statistics. That hardly refutes my implication of my original argument.
[/quote]

You’re absolutely wrong. Now I’ve refuted your original argument.

My background in finance was absolutely zero. I was hired because I was a social scientist with quantitative skills. Rational choice is a dominant political methodology that requires some technical competence. This is an interesting finding by one of the faculty members I worked closely with during grad school. It is fairly rigorous.

Amazingly enough, the United States is not a command and control society whose college students follow educational paths mandated by the government. We aren’t “pushing out” political science majors. Students are making educated guesses that there will be high returns to this course of study, and fortunately for our society many of them are right.

Incidentally, I was a history major in college. If my Wharton/Harvard/Whatever MBA colleagues had any real skills synthesizing disparate data from numerous sources and communicating it clearly, I would have more competition at work.

76

[QUOTE=Maeglin]

Now I am an extremely well-compensated financial statistician. My masters is in, of all things, political science.

Go figure.
[/QUOTE]

Do you think that having to learn and memorize the intricacies of Latin helped prepare you for being a statistician?

I went from a BA in German, to an MLS, and now I’m almost done with an MS in software engineering. Of course there were also many years of employment as a programmer and other roles in IT.

77

[QUOTE=scrambledeggs]

Open up the local classified ads, turn to the employment section. Look under “Accounting”. Count them up. Then “Technical”. Then try “Political science”. See the difference? Yes you could get hired under the “Sales” ads, but then you wouldn’t really need your degree at all.
[/QUOTE]

Ok, now open up the classifieds and find the range of jobs accountants can get hired to do and compare that to the range of jobs for poly sci majors can get hired to do.

FWIW, I also agree that there are some big problems with the liberal arts education system- particularly with degree bloat. I don’t think a masters in “conflict studies” is going to help anyone become a better middle management type. I see a lot of people spending a lot of time and money on these degrees that may be necessary for a job but ultimately have little to do with the job and don’t add any meaningful skills.

78

[QUOTE=Spectre of Pithecanthropus]
Do you think that having to learn and memorize the intricacies of Latin helped prepare you for being a statistician?

I went from a BA in German, to an MLS, and now I’m almost done with an MS in software engineering. Of course there were also many years of employment as a programmer and other roles in IT.
[/QUOTE]

Memorize? No. Memorizing morphology does not have much redeeming value outside of the ability to read the language in my experience.

Coding/decoding? Absolutely. I studied a bucket of other ancient and medieval languages aside from Latin and Greek, so I definitely enjoy that sort of thing. It has helped enormously with my programming. I am not an IT guy, don’t get me wrong, but we do write quite a bit of code to crunch numbers using a stats package.

My background is even more critical insofar as it developed my communication skills. There may be lots of jobs in accounting as per scrambledeggs’ assertion, but almost all of the accountants I have had to work with are incredibly dull and unpolished and will never impress senior management enough to get out of low level corporate hackery. They are going to spend their entire careers doing exactly what they studied in school. I have done a bunch of things already, and when I get bored, I will move on to something completely different with little loss in credibility.

No offense to the profession of accountancy: apparently there are insufficiently high returns to teaching elementary speaking and writing in school.

79

“Incidentally, I was a history major in college. If my Wharton/Harvard/Whatever MBA colleagues had any real skills synthesizing disparate data from numerous sources and communicating it clearly, I would have more competition at work.”

Right – your political science & history degrees got you hired, without any relevant experience, as an actuary or similar. And you are 1000x smarter at quantitative reasoning (something rarely done in your academic disciplines beyond arithmetic-level) than your many Wharton/Harvard MBA’s.

Right–and the GMAT needed for them to get into those MBA schools was also meaningless.

Even if your story was true, you would be the exception.

Also, students dont always base their choices of degree upon market demand. Usually, they are being subsidized by parental contribution or government backed loans, have little or no real work experience, and have a childish view of the world. They pick majors on many reasons but market forces.

80

I didn’t read this whole thread, but just wanted to share that some years ago the magazine Ad Age polled about a hundred CEOs and senior managers of Fortune 500 companies asking them which degree they would prefer interviewees have. An overwhelming majority said Liberal Arts. Their reasoning was that they wanted people who could 1) think and 2) communicate well. The feeling was that a general LA background did that the best. They also shared that when it came to doing a specific job, they were going to teach you how to do it there way anyway. Of course, this wasn’t true for jobs like engineers, etc. The thing they dwelled on was communication skills. Because no matter what job you do, you’re going to have to send memos, emails, write letters, proposal, etc.