Too many people here forget that gender/race studies degrees are just a tiny portion of liberal arts.

I know lots of young people with liberal arts degrees who have great, well-paying careers -- in a variety of industries.

They are lots of jobs that require a college degree but not necessarily a specific major. You get the job, prove yourself, learn the industry, work hard and make a career.

Sid Farkas said:

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The world needs liberal arts majors. Just not so many of them.

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The same can be said about lawyers and the world needs ditch diggers, too.

Class of 09
Liberal Arts Degree here
Major in Communication

Wanted to learn how people communicate

In medical device sales...doing just fine

91AggieLawyer said:

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Jeeper79 said:

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PCC_80 said:

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When asked I tell young people that if the Degree Program is not also a Job Title it is not something you should study. Accounting, Business Admin, Engineering, Medicine, Finance, etc. Brief and to the point advice.

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This is sound advice.

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Unfortunately, it isn't.

It is going overboard the other way. What if the guy with the accounting degree no longer wants to be an accountant when he's 40? Sure, he has some marketing, management, econ, and possibly the newer biz school classes (supply chain, etc.) classes he slept through to "fall back" on but will that be enough? He can teach, I guess, but he has to return to school to get a certificate and multiple hours in a teaching discipline. But if he wants to get into IT or most other fields he has to start completely from scratch.

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I'm a good example of how wrong your thought process can be. Accounting grad, CPA, got to my 6th year of accounting and was miserable. I had a penchant for systems, so I was asked to lead the Y2K implementation of my company's finance/accounting/HRMS apps because my accounting background gave me meaningful knowledge of the business. That lasted three years.

Then my company decided they wanted to grow much more quickly, and they needed someone who understood capital markets/business/technology/operations to go out and talk to investors to obtain growth capital. I was asked to lead this because...my accounting background which lead me to understand how the business/industry worked which lead me to implementing new systems for Y2K, which gave me an understanding of corporate legal structures and financing arrangements, blah blah blah...

Point being if I had not gotten my accounting degree and gotten my foot in the door in that manner, I never would have gotten all of the opportunities that came after. I didn't need another degree to do that. Just doing the work of getting the right degree, then showing up, then raising your hand when opportunities arise will do wonders for many of us. I suspect the next generation could use this advice as well.

Jeeper79 said:

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My daughter wants to be an artist. She's only 8, but I'm trying to steer that into more of a hobby than a career.

She also wants to be a zoologist. Seems awfully specialized, but more stable than art.

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Zoo pay is crap, and the job usually sucks. There can be great perks like interacting with a very wise variety of incredible animals, but you'll find yourself working weekends and holidays very regularly and the actual job involves a lot of cleaning (**** shoveling) and food preparation. It's not really stable per se, as few can really do it as a lifetime career. It wears you out, and the hours and schedule are not really conducive to having a family. Openings are also sometimes hard to come by because there is a limited number of zoos and aquariums in the US.

That said, zoology as a major is actually very usable. It can be premed or prevet. It covers a lot of the same material as biomedical sciences, but it gives a much wider knowledge base because you're covering just about everything, not just people. You can also do a fair amount of research and other work with it because it involves a lot of anatomy, chemistry, and other applicable classes that can prepare you for work somewhere in the medical field.

My youngest graduated from UT (the University of Tennessee) two years ago with a degree in Communications. She wanted to go into PR but those opportunities are few and far between for a newbie. She's now the Historian for a major media company.

Poli Sci '92

Obviously a different political climate then. You could steer clear of the few liberal leaning classes for the most part. I had no interest in a career in politics, so I went with the more practical classes to prepare for law school -- those involving law or statistics rather than theory. When the professors gave students choices of what they wanted to present -- like in Interest Groups -- you'd see the libs choose Amnesty International and Greenpeace -- I chose Ducks Unlimited.

Liberal Arts majors can also de-liberal / de-worthless themselves with a useful minor. I chose management, which if not already knee-deep in Poli Sci would have steered me toward a business degree. A lot chose the _____Studies path for minors. In hindsight, another useful minor would have been Spanish.

So there is a path for LA majors, or at least there was.

Old Ag Here with lots of kids.

I have come to some conclusions on this topic lately:

1) The vast majority of bachelor's degrees are pretty useless. Exceptions would be hard sciences/pre-med/some stem. Everything else could be replaced with a library card and access to the internet.

2) The vast majority of careers, even those that claim a degree is required, don't really need a degree to do the job. I have a very good career in business - everything I learned that actually matters in my career was learned in middle/high school and on-the-job training. Not a single thing I learned from A&M that helps with my career couldn't have been learned with a library card.

3) The smart move for many (not all) young kids/high school aged kids is to seriously consider a trade. I'd gladly help my son get an apprenticeship with a plumbing company and eventually help set him up with his own business down the road instead of a business degree.

4) Some of the happiest and most successful people I know didn't go to college. The lady who is the 'go to' interior decorator in our county. The mom who started her own real estate shop. The electrician that wired my outdoor kitchen etc.

5) Working in corporate America is the goal for the majority of kids in college but working in corporate America should be considered a stepping stone, not the destination. In honesty, it kind of sucks most of the time.

Liberal Arts taught properly has a lot of value because it focuses on critical thinking and making arguments while studying different perspectives. That's why it traditionally has been valued, especially as an undergraduate degree. Unfortunately most of that has gone to hell.

For instance when I got my POLS degree at A&M I had a class where we read Thomas Sowell and Noam Chomsky. I had no idea whether my prof was a liberal or a conservative but we had to write about both of them and explain the positives and negatives of both of them. I had another class on Public Administration and as a part of it we read a book about a Great Society program designed to get more doctors in rural areas. It went through the entire process of how they constructed the bill and program with the best of intentions and had full support but then showed how it ultimately failed and turned out to be a huge waste of money. The prof was a liberal who truly believed that his students who were going into Public Administration needed to understand the pitfalls of government and how difficult it is to accomplish real change and most of all that just throwing money at a program rarely if ever works. In almost all of my classes we would have fierce debates from all sides and the prof actually liked having dissenting and conservative viewpoints. The prof rarely gave personal opinions but rather discussed what the opinions were from both sides.

Classes like that allowed me to really think about problems from all sides and have been very helpful in business and life since. The problem is that now many of those same classes don't have a counterbalance. They are all from one side and actually discourage dissent. If they teach debate at all it is left vs hard left and anything to the right is either ignorance or racist/sexist/etc. Profs openly penalize conservative opinions and students so most conservatives find those classes useless and a waste of time.

Sometimes I wish I had gone another path and stayed in POLS to fight the good fight. I just never imagined it would all turn to crap the way it has. All the conservative students seem to have not actually gone into the field in terms of academics.

If you guys are just looking for a career, go to a trade school. If you want an education, if you want to read and think and grow, get a good old school classical liberal arts education. (Not the worthless academic fields - like critical studies - that despise true liberal arts education.)

Jeeper79 said:

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My daughter wants to be an artist. She's only 8, but I'm trying to steer that into more of a hobby than a career.

She also wants to be a zoologist. Seems awfully specialized, but more stable than art.

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Maybe she can train the next Elephant Picaso!

Agree with that a liberal arts education has great value - but the cost has reached the point where the value isn't worth it.

Plus, one can learn everything they want to know about Sowell and Hobbs and Art and history etc with a library card.

Seamaster said:

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Agree with that a liberal arts education has great value - but the cost has reached the point where the value isn't worth it.

Plus, one can learn everything they want to know about Sowell and Hobbs and Art and history etc with a library card.

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Don't even need that, it's all basically online. Some tremendous videos out there as well. I think the future is that Liberal Arts will be done through an online basis and there is real potential there.

That said that's just the reading component. The real learning comes from the discussion and having to make an argument and defend it while respectfully listening to others do the same. It's part of why I enjoy coming here though I recognize the conservative bend of this board you do have real discussion and you have to back up your arguments.

It still is that way. The top corporate law jobs are for high performers at top tier institutions. It's a steep drop off career wise after that.

fat girlfriend said:

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If you guys are just looking for a career, go to a trade school. If you want an education, if you want to read and think and grow, get a good old school classical liberal arts education. (Not the worthless academic fields - like critical studies - that despise true liberal arts education.)

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This.

Other than engineering and education, there aren't any bachelors degrees with a clear vocation.


A university education is about who you are, not what you do.

That being said, 70% of current university students should be in a vocational school, which is training as opposed to education.

smucket said:

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91AggieLawyer said:

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Jeeper79 said:

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PCC_80 said:

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When asked I tell young people that if the Degree Program is not also a Job Title it is not something you should study. Accounting, Business Admin, Engineering, Medicine, Finance, etc. Brief and to the point advice.

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This is sound advice.

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Unfortunately, it isn't.

It is going overboard the other way. What if the guy with the accounting degree no longer wants to be an accountant when he's 40? Sure, he has some marketing, management, econ, and possibly the newer biz school classes (supply chain, etc.) classes he slept through to "fall back" on but will that be enough? He can teach, I guess, but he has to return to school to get a certificate and multiple hours in a teaching discipline. But if he wants to get into IT or most other fields he has to start completely from scratch.

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I'm a good example of how wrong your thought process can be. Accounting grad, CPA, got to my 6th year of accounting and was miserable. I had a penchant for systems, so I was asked to lead the Y2K implementation of my company's finance/accounting/HRMS apps because my accounting background gave me meaningful knowledge of the business. That lasted three years.

Then my company decided they wanted to grow much more quickly, and they needed someone who understood capital markets/business/technology/operations to go out and talk to investors to obtain growth capital. I was asked to lead this because...my accounting background which lead me to understand how the business/industry worked which lead me to implementing new systems for Y2K, which gave me an understanding of corporate legal structures and financing arrangements, blah blah blah...

Point being if I had not gotten my accounting degree and gotten my foot in the door in that manner, I never would have gotten all of the opportunities that came after. I didn't need another degree to do that. Just doing the work of getting the right degree, then showing up, then raising your hand when opportunities arise will do wonders for many of us. I suspect the next generation could use this advice as well.

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Hell, I got a Bachelor's in Accounting, no masters, no CPA and it was still hugely useful. I worked in-house for small business, corporate, govt, and non-profit. I was tapped for consultation at each job for various projects due to knowledge of the business processes and ledger familiarity. When I decided to leave the accounting world and start my own business, my accounting knowledge was invaluable and has saved me thousands of dollars in fees paid to a CPA.

I never grew up wanting to be an accountant but I couldn't hack the engineering program and transferred to the business school. Accounting made sense to me and the rest is history.

Proud to see several folks defending the classical liberal arts here. You won't find a more staunch defender of the liberal arts than me, but honestly....I don't believe they're salvageable at A&M. Do any of you think so?

If I won the powerball I'd pay to retire the history, English, Econ, Classics, and Anthropology departments and hire away people from Hillsdale to rebuild them. Or maybe combine them all into a true Liberal Arts College that just grants one degree, a BA/BS in Liberal Arts. Yes, I know there are some gems in all the current faculties, but those people aren't on the hiring/interview committees anymore. So my advice here: absolutely study the liberal arts but absolutely don't do it at A&M or any other big school.

Actually, most degrees aren't worthless and I'm really sick of this bull**** line of thought.

I have an Econ degree, and the classes that have benefited me the most were algebra and statistics classes. I use both everyday with my job. Also, understanding prices and the impacts that drive them in an open market has helped, which came from my intro Econ classes.

IMO, college is nothing more than to show you're capable of committing to something and finishing it. Very few classes taken help with majority of jobs. My BIL has a mechanical engineering degree and works for one of the oil companies. His job is nothing more than submitting bids to customers who send RFQs.

BusterAg said:

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Arguably, most college degrees are.

A college degree was supposed to make you well rounded.

For example, a college graduate should understand that Marx made significant contributions to the field of economics, but made several critical errors, including the error that concentrated power corrupts. The result has been that Marxism has killed more people than any other single cause since the black plague.

But being able to argue that Marx had both some interesting insights and also some critical flaws takes nuance.

There is no nuance in college today. Only propaganda:

Quote:

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A college graduate should understand that Marx made significant contributions to the field of economics, but made several critical errors, including the error that concentrated power corrupts. The result has been that Marxism has killed more people than any other single cause since the black plague.

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Unless your liberal arts degree is used as a stepping stone for graduate or law school.

Jeeper79 said:

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My daughter wants to be an artist. She's only 8, but I'm trying to steer that into more of a hobby than a career.

She also wants to be a zoologist. Seems awfully specialized, but more stable than art.

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My oldest (15) wanted to be a nurse until her little brother sliced his knee open and required stitches a week ago. For her behalf she held it together and applied pressure while the wife and I were out Christmas shopping and headed home when all this went down, she decided she wants to do something else.

aTm2004 said:

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I have an Econ degree, and the classes that have benefited me the most were algebra and statistics classes. I use both everyday with my job. Also, understanding prices and the impacts that drive them in an open market has helped, which came from my intro Econ classes.

IMO, college is nothing more than to show you're capable of committing to something and finishing it. Very few classes taken help with majority of jobs. My BIL has a mechanical engineering degree and works for one of the oil companies. His job is nothing more than submitting bids to customers who send RFQs.

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Big difference between engineering degrees and most liberal arts degrees.

DD88 said:

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This reminds me of this now-deleted tweet:

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Sad but true.

Adolf Gunderson. Poli Sci 206 my fish year which was supposed to US politics post Civil War. I knew I was in trouble when the syllabus showed six days of environmental policy and one day of military/war policy. Turns out one day was too much for him.

I butted heads with him regularly as I was a 21 year old fish and far less star struck than most fish. I'm a fourth generation veteran that went to Panama for the 1989 invasion and had close friends that went to Desert Storm. Everyone in the class knew military day was going to be interesting. During our one day of military discussion he broke down each war since basically 1900 and praised our efforts and accomplishments during WWI and WWII. So far so good. Then he went off the rails and said that since WWII every war we fought was against the will of the people of the other nation and we were wrong to engage.

I spent 43 days in Panama the first time and another 63 trying to help get the nation moving forward again. During that first 43 we spent time in various parts of the country with the most memorable the two weeks or so at the airport in David which is where we were when Noriega was captured. The Army allowed the local civilians to enter the airport and run the concession stands each day which was cool but the most memorable part was dinner each night. The locals made huge amounts of food and served us buffet style every day we were there. Every meal was served with comments like, "thank you for giving us our country back".

So back to military day. When Gunderson specifically said that Panama was an unjust invasion because the people didn't want us there so we should have stayed out it felt like every single student turned to look at me and I didn't disappoint. I stood up and loudly interrupted him to tell of my first hand experience in Panama, the celebration and the home cooked meals. The hugs, the thank yous and the tears of joy. He tried to talk over me but anyone that knows me knows that's not happening. I firmly told him he would not lie to the class about my war and that since he was lying about it I had to assume he was lying about the rest of them as well. I was visibly angry and frankly had he bowed up we probably would have fought. I walked about a few loud minutes and the class was stunned.

Incidentally there's a young lady that grew up in Bryan whose then 12 year old mother lived in David during the invasion and she told her daughter stories about taking food to the soldiers at the airport each day. I met her when she and my daughter were 3rd grade classmates and one day when I went to have lunch with my daughter she randomly said her mom grew up in Panama. I welled up with tears when she told me about the stories of feeding us and told her to tell her mom one of those soldiers said thank you.

That was my introduction to the fact that liberals lie. It's all they have.

LOYAL AG said:

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Adolf Gunderson. Poli Sci 206 my fish year which was supposed to US politics post Civil War. I knew I was in trouble when the syllabus showed six days of environmental policy and one day of military/war policy. Turns out one day was too much for him.

I butted heads with him regularly as I was a 21 year old fish and far less star struck than most fish. I'm a fourth generation veteran that went to Panama for the 1989 invasion and had close friends that went to Desert Storm. Everyone in the class knew military day was going to be interesting. During our one day of military discussion he broke down each war since basically 1900 and praised our efforts and accomplishments during WWI and WWII. So far so good. Then he went off the rails and said that since WWII every war we fought was against the will of the people of the other nation and we were wrong to engage.

I spent 43 days in Panama the first time and another 63 trying to help get the nation moving forward again. During that first 43 we spent time in various parts of the country with the most memorable the two weeks or so at the airport in David which is where we were when Noriega was captured. The Army allowed the local civilians to enter the airport and run the concession stands each day which was cool but the most memorable part was dinner each night. The locals made huge amounts of food and served us buffet style every day we were there. Every meal was served with comments like, "thank you for giving us our country back".

So back to military day. When Gunderson specifically said that Panama was an unjust invasion because the people didn't want us there so we should have stayed out it felt like every single student turned to look at me and I didn't disappoint. I stood up and loudly interrupted him to tell of my first hand experience in Panama, the celebration and the home cooked meals. The hugs, the thank yous and the tears of joy. He tried to talk over me but anyone that knows me knows that's not happening. I firmly told him he would not lie to the class about my war and that since he was lying about it I had to assume he was lying about the rest of them as well. I was visibly angry and frankly had he bowed up we probably would have fought. I walked about a few loud minutes and the class was stunned.

Incidentally there's a young lady that grew up in Bryan whose then 12 year old mother lived in David during the invasion and she told her daughter stories about taking food to the soldiers at the airport each day. I met her when she and my daughter were 3rd grade classmates and one day when I went to have lunch with my daughter she randomly said her mom grew up in Panama. I welled up with tears when she told me about the stories of feeding us and told her to tell her mom one of those soldiers said thank you.

That was my introduction to the fact that liberals lie. It's all they have.

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Thank you for your service and for setting the professor straight. I think you and Professor Terguson would have gotten along famously.

IDaggie06 said:

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Kvetch said:

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Some liberal arts degrees are still of value. It's the critical theory based one's that are poison. And those bleed over into the more substantial topics since the department is all connected and academia is becoming woke.

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It's of value if your plan is to become a liberal arts professor. Outside of that, it is 90% useless.

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So what should a person major in if they want to be an anthropologist, archaeologist, economist, historian, psychologist, sociologist, or specialize in Naval Science or Air Force and Space Force Science?

hgc159 said:

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IDaggie06 said:

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Kvetch said:

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Some liberal arts degrees are still of value. It's the critical theory based one's that are poison. And those bleed over into the more substantial topics since the department is all connected and academia is becoming woke.

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It's of value if your plan is to become a liberal arts professor. Outside of that, it is 90% useless.

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So what should a person major in if they want to be an anthropologist, archaeologist, economist, historian, psychologist, sociologist, or specialize in Naval Science or Air Force and Space Force Science?

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Hip hop feminism then graduate school.