Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life

How are you supposed to know passion at 18? I do alumni interviewing for my college and most kids have no singular passion they want to pursue (and more often than not, they are hoping college will help them find that passion).

And I don't blame them. Finding a singular passion to center a degree around at a young age is not the norm. And yet we put a lot of pressure on our kids to be specialists before they're even able to vote. It's a very difficult situation to put children through.

> And while there’s often an assumption that the careers humanities graduates pursue just aren’t as good as the jobs snapped up by, say, engineers or medics, that isn’t the case. In Australia, for example, three of the 10 fastest-growing occupations are sales assistants, clerks, and advertising, public relations and sales managers – all of which might look familiar as fields that humanities graduates tend to pursue.

Sales assistants and clerks are pretty dull sounding jobs. the fact that humanities people pursue them and that they're available does not mean this is good for humanities people.

This paragraph was similarly dumb

> We also know that as more women move into a field, the field’s overall earnings go down. Given that, is it any wonder that English majors, seven in 10 of whom are women, tend to make less than engineers, eight in 10 of whom are men?

Female engineers make more than male humanities on average, according to the charts they linked to. It's definitely not a gender problem.

I've never bought the arguments for liberal arts. STEM degrees require plenty of critical thinking, argument formation, and learning to work with others. That's not to say you won't learn these things in humanities, but they're not special. They're a basic part of learning almost any subject that isn't rote memorization.

The article points out that you can make a humanities degree work, but I'm not convinced this is a meaningful way to look at it. What fraction of successful humanities majors should attribute their success to the fact that their degree was in humanities? Maybe just being a reasonably intelligent person with a college degree in anything is enough to be a successful person.

The article talks about salaries too. Overall humanities majors make less, but for some jobs they make more. That's probably not a good way to think about it either. Of course people who study pre-law are, on average, going to make less doing law. The law firms fill out their lowest positions from the masses of pre-law students. Taking an alternate path into something means you're more likely to be doing something special or having connections to a good gig.

For the most part, I don't see your undergrad major driving a significant portion of your capabilities, regardless of what it is. Humanities doesn't have an obvious job market they signal baseline competence towards. That doesn't make them bad, but it also doesn't mean we need to create stories about why they compensate for this.

That's overstated. There's plenty of good scholarship being done, in the humanities and especially in the social sciences, that is by necessity either non-political or extremely careful and overt about any political claims that they do make. But you're absolutely right that there is a growing far-left fringe, driven by Red Guard-inspired ideas from the 1960s and 1970s about "culture" and "academica" being nothing more than bourgeois privilege that one shouldn't have anything to do with. (And yes, that's especially in the Anglosphere - since by and large, other Western countries did their own Maoist thing in academia literally decades ago, and they've gotten it out of their system by now.) At the end of the day it just functions as an enabler of corruption and laziness, since the political stance is pretty clear as you say. They basically spend their time awarding "B's and A-'s" to one another, with basically no-one else caring much at all about the whole thing.