Also, I did double major in Architecture and CE for about 2 years but decided to drop the Architecture. Plus I did take a lot of liberal arts classes as electives.
I didn’t really care for the engineering part, but the math courses definitely helped in the more quantitative business courses.
That’s easy. You demonstrate that you know how to organize ideas and information, and communicate them through writing and speech.
Sounds dumb, but I am continually astonished at the sheer number of people in the business world who simply cannot organize their thoughts and write them down. Writing, to many people, is voodoo.
The thing is, once you actually spend time in the corporate world, you see that 90% of what people do is read and write. Period. Yes, programmers crunch code. Accountants crunch numbers. But any higher-level/management job is really about organizing information or arguments into a clear format that others can understand.
And, since they spent their entire college careers reading, writing, and debating, liberal arts majors are uniquely qualified for these jobs.
The question here is why the hell would you major in English if your intent is to become an investment banker? If that is what you want to do, by all means, the smart thing to do is major in Finance, MAYBE Econ at a top school - not get a History B.A. from State College of the Midwest and show up in Manhattan expecting a six figure job. That’s like showing up at the hospital with an M.B.A. and expecting to be the next chief of surgery. Anyone who does that is frankly stupid. Now, there are probably people who major in History and then, their Senior year, discover that their passion is bond trading - and go looking for that job with the wrong background, but I doubt most people start there.
But not everyone wants to be a New York Investment Banker or a McKinsey Management Consultant. If you want to be an editor or a writer, that English degree is good. If you want to go into Marketing - that Sociology/Anthropology double major may be just as useful as a B.A. in Marketing. Want to be a project manager? - all sorts of former liberal arts students there. User Interface design - liberal arts is going to serve you better (currently) than CSci (although CSci departments are starting to realize that they can’t just teach C++ and Java and let you out in the business world). If you want to get an MBA anyway (or a law degree, or even go to med school), getting a less serious undergrad may not hurt, may help, and might be a hell of a lot more interesting than being an Econ major to you.
Most 18 year olds don’t have a clear picture of what they want to be when they grow up - and most of the jobs on this planet don’t have the easily laid out educational path that the sorts of fields you are talking about do. Want to be a doctor? - your educational path is laid out. Engineer? - well, you’ll need an engineering degree. Work in customer analytics - there isn’t an easy major and most people - much less most recent high school graduates - don’t even realize there is a job there.
Eh? Plenty of openings for BS/BAs in chemistry. All those entry level chemists in all the wonderful chemical companies that make all the stuff you use. Or parts of the stuff you use. Heck, I’m finally managing to fill spots that only look for an A.S. level after 3 months or more.
I got a BA in Chemistry with a minor in Medieval Studies. Since there weren’t any openings for alchemists, I went with straight chemistry. After a few years I had my second company pay for me to get a M.S. Then I left them and am entering management. They don’t want an MBA guy in my position, they want someone who can understand not only the people but also the science behind the job and how to overcome problems that occur. Sure anybody can learn the FDA regs, but few can learn the basis of what we do without a background in chemistry.
This is true; there are lots of English and History majors out there in software. There’s a sizeable portion of the population that does like building things and solving concrete problems, but for whatever reason just didn’t cut the mustard mathematically in public school, thereby barring themselves from the true engineering and scientific fields. The problems with mathematics teaching deserve a thread of their own, but I believe that many of these people would not have been so inept at it if they could have gotten the right attention at the right time. So these students may choose the majors that don’t require much math, they take non-rigorous Calculus Lite intended for liberal arts majors, but they still do have good logical minds. Many of the people who become programmers are these people, but I don’t know if you can get into it as easily as you could 20 years ago.
When Morticia Addams went looking for a job, she mentioned she’d majored in curses, potions & hexes.
“Ah, Liberal Arts!”
And then there’s “armchair anthropologists”.
I don’t know. Ask Ravenman.
As many others have said before, there are plenty of good reasons to take on a liberal arts degree vs. earning a professional/trade degree. It’s something to help enrich your life in general and make you a more interesting person, but it also helps you analyze and communicate information more effectively.
I was an anthropology major with a minor in museum studies, but I originally started out in criminology before taking the bridge step to international relations, which was multidisciplinary at Florida State. Through all three majors, I learned quite a bit about myself, the world around me, and how to “read” situations, people, and places in a manner that would help me deal with them more effectively. I also learned a whole bunch of random facts in the process of learning how they shaped the world, which makes me one of two things in the eyes of a lot of people who didn’t go the liberal arts (or even the college) route: I’m either interesting and intelligent or a know-it-all pedant. However, most people who’d think I was pedantic would see the intelligence and ease of communication with them as a form of snobbery. I’ve done very well in all of the job positions that I’ve had and been encouraged to take on positions of authority; if I had not learned more communicative and analytical skills during the course of my college education, I probably would not have been given opportunities to succeed as I have.
Sure, you may not see my current situation as a form of success (entering library school and working as a receptionist), but I must admit that, in order to achieve a larger goal of having a master’s degree, I’ve had to step away from better opportunities that were offered to me. (Had I not moved out of Tallahassee and applied to graduate school, I would have been working for the Department of State on the recommendations of my supervisors and peers at the state museum that I had interned at during my senior year. It’s not an easy place to get a job in if you don’t know someone to recommend you as a reliable worker with an ability to learn the skills required.) I honestly do not believe a business or other professional degree would have served me as well, especially in light of having seen that there are a lot of business majors in the program at Florida State* have such a difficult time in a non-business school environment while taking relatively easy classes to “round out” their studies. A lot of them don’t have the flexibility to get past the “one true answer” goal of a lot of these business courses and tend toward a black-and-white method of solving problems afterward, which just doesn’t work in a shades of gray world. However, unlike a lot of the business students that aren’t doing so well out in the business world, my goal was to be happy with my career choice, not to make boatloads of money and have flagrant displays of materialism.
[sub]*There’s a GPA requirement and some prerequisites that are supposed to be pretty difficult, and even then, they don’t take everyone who meets those requirements as a business student.[/sub]