What? Mathematics is both a STEM major and a liberal arts major now? I digress.
But few courses of study are quite as heavy on reading, writing, speaking and critical thinking as the liberal arts
There is no evidence that any particular university major produces more gains in critical thinking skills over any other. Additionally, there is no evidence that critical thinking skills gained in university persist after graduation [1].
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.
What? A sales assistant is someone who works the floor at a retail store. Is the author really trying to say that a retail job is as good as an engineering job? Wow.
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?
It took a while to get here, but we've finally arrived. There's a correlation between men leaving a field and average earnings in that field declining. Has she not considered reverse causation? Research indicates that men prioritize earnings growth more than women [2]. It seems entirely more convincing to me that men depart a field due to the decline in earnings, not that greedy employers see women and think "cheap labour."
This speaks to a broader point: the whole question of whether a student should choose Stem versus the humanities, or a vocational course versus a liberal arts degree, might be misguided to begin with. It’s not as if most of us have an equal amount of passion and aptitude for, say, accounting and art history. Plenty of people know what they love most. They just don’t know if they should pursue it. And the headlines most of us see don’t help.
A somewhat ambivalent conclusion to a troubled piece. The reality is that people really do agonize over the decision between pursuing their passion and looking for the best economic opportunity. Not everyone who completes a liberal arts degree can get a nice job blogging for the BBC. Tons and tons of them end up severely underemployed, usually in retail or low-level office positions. It's irresponsible to tell people anything other than the reality of this situation. Trying to convince them to just go for the "worthless" degree, despite these economic realities, is unfair and unhelpful.
[1] http://www.johnnietfeld.com/uploads/2/2/6/0/22606800/huber_k...