(10-13-2015 03:46 PM)KPJ Wrote: (10-13-2015 02:40 PM)realistEagle Wrote: (10-13-2015 01:29 PM)EMUAARON Wrote: (10-13-2015 11:40 AM)KPJ Wrote: I've said this before and will continue to say it as long as this topic is brought up. Saying that an African American Studies degree is worthless is more of a reflection of an individual's values than it is a statement of fact.
https://www.aacu.org/press/press-release...-long-term
well said. i would like to add that it's absurd for anyone on a message board to judge the career aspirations of someone that they do not know personally.
I guarantee you that his career aspiration is playing basketball in Europe. After that he will end up like the majority of college athletes with same type of degrees. They are being put in these programs because no one believes in their ability to play basketball and go through school actually earning a meaningful degree. Sad thing is that the two sports that get hurt by this the most is basketball and football. Both filled with minority students who could use a MEANINGFUL degree.
I'm not going to discuss this much further, but I will say that many people with liberal arts degrees go on to run community centers, become librarians, go into successful careers in sales, or go back to school to get more education and transition to a completely different field.
I work in higher ed and recently met with a group of managers from Yazaki. Not a single one of them came from the engineering discipline, but all had "engineer" in their job title. This actually happens more than one would think.
So you can bold and caps the word "meaningless" to emphasize your point, but that doesn't make it any less inaccurate.
You make some decent points - all come back to same thing - people with liberal art degrees have to work in unrelated fields to get employed or they have to go back to school to become attractive to employees. That is what I did. But what if you are not versatile or smart enough to do that. Or you don't know how to market yourself with that degree? Walgreens Sales Associate job is awaiting you.
Second point. That study is a little silly. It is based on people who entered the work force 40 years ago. The economy is completely different now than what it was when they were first graduating from college. I guarantee they won't even attempt to do the same study 40 years from now. To add to this bias of the study - it was made by people who's whole livelihoods depend on people attending college - no matter for what degree.
That study also states that there is only 1 % of unemployment difference between the two groups. Well depends on how you look at it - that can mean 1/4 people with liberal degrees are unemployed (sounds about right to me).
Finally, the only thing I can take away from this funny study is that if you get your degree in liberal arts or similar, than go on to get a higher degree and by the age of 60 you might make more money than someone with a professional degree.
So that is all I will say for this. And yes there is a place for people with liberal art degrees because if we didn't include them into our workforce we would have no workers to do the job at all. You want to know what is the biggest trend in business right now ? Outsourcing. Because people in other countries can do things better, faster and cheaper than we can do them here. And I am not only talking about manufacturing here. Service industry is being largely outsourced as well - especially IT.
But yeah lets roll out more AA Studies and Communications majors to fix that up for us.