"We Need To Have A Talk"

I totally agree with you but I think it is more of a problem stemming from the parents of these children. My parents always pushed me to do whatever I am passionate about. I got lucky and developed an obsession with finance, which happens to be a high paying job. However my brother is passionate about acting and it took a lot of convincing on my part to get him to give something else a chance that would have a more stable career. (For him it is law.) I see a lot of this do whatever you are passionate about attitude in parents these days and a lot of parents are afraid to talk about money with their kids. A lot of kids just don't understand proper financial management and do not know what they are getting into until they are there. In school we focus on meeting arbitrary standards and passing tests instead of herding the students towards their interests and helping them to understand what the real world is like. We need to be more honest and blunt with the kids and teach them that you can't just be an art major and expect to paint pictures for the rest of your life and never have any problems.

That's just my opinion

Isn't the idea of liberal arts to teach you how to think? I'd imagine that employers value creative and innovative thinkers, sometimes more so than those who have majored in more technical skills that can be easily learned. Just an opinion, I'd fall into the technical major category.

This type of thinking is incredibly short sighted. I'd be happy to speak with anyone who would like a few stories on the value of a liberal arts degree

I majored in Middle Eastern Studies and now I work at a BB in ER from a semi-target. I'm a first year associate, and I had no connections. Thank you.

I'll add to this discussion. I majored in Political Science from a semi-target and received a FT offer at a top BB in IBD. No connections at all. Applied through OCR and competed against students who all went to better schools than I did. Found out I was the only liberal arts major during final round interviews. Have a nice day.

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-Degrees_that_Pay_…

By mid-career the 75th percentile of majors like History, Film, Philosophy and Poly Sci and comparable to the median for the engineers. So while a liberal arts major may be a slight disadvantage, as long as you're better than some of your peers you'll do fine.

I'd even argue that it might be even closer, because liberal arts probably has more graduates who take teaching/non-profit/art jobs that bring the median down. So the expected salary for a liberal arts graduate who wants to be rich someday might be higher than the median.

I think you also have to take university name into account as well. Like the other guy said, if you're from HYP or similar, even if you majored in art history or philosophy there will be firms that will be interested in you from prestige alone. The argument probably applies more to non target schools you never heard of. But then again this is WSO so I'm sure there are exceptions who are ready to announce their success in banking.

Well I'm majoring with a B.S. in "Making Stacks on Stacks on Stacks"

I think the biggest problem with this post is that it is focused on a tiny fraction of college students. The example here of a "mediocre/low-tier" school the University of South Carolina, which is still a great school relative to the vast majority of college options (community colleges, junior colleges, some of the for-profit schools, online colleges, etc.) that most of those who are having trouble with unemployment attend. In fact, I know more than one USC grad on Wall Street - hardly a "closed-door" career path.

The reason why we have student debt problems isn't because people are borrowing money to attend Stanford, it's because we have people borrowing thousands to pay for colleges that have advertisements in subways (ironically, the NY local governments have started posting PSA advertisements warning people about attending these schools). It can hardly be doubted that there are thousands of schools that add virtually zero value to their students and receive >85% of their revenue from government subsidized loans. This has bid up the price of college and led to the glut of unemployed graduates we see today.

I'd say the next greatest problem is students choosing to borrow even more money to pay for graduate degrees (usually because they couldn't find employment after undergrad), only to find themselves equally unemployable afterwards. I know very few people who have gone through non-technical, non-MBA graduate schools who work in a field relevant to their graduate degree.

This is a subsidy problem.

No. I enjoy the less competition.

I can't say I totally agree with this. I think its naive to say "You will have trouble making money as a liberal arts major." unequivocally. There are a lot of liberal arts majors out there making more than STEM majors, just not in something that's directly related to their major, as evilbyaccident noticed. I went to a top 20 school and knew plenty of liberal arts majors that busted their ass when exploring career opportunities outside of graduate/law school and as a result, they're in great jobs right now. On the other hand, many liberal arts majors sat on their hands throughout college and whined at the end when they had no career prospects because they had not a) marketed the skills learned through their major properly and b) done zero networking. Like evilbyaccident said, a lot of success/getting a good job is not always perfectly correlated to the perceived "usefulness" of your major, but also related to the amount of work you put into ensuring you have plenty of career options. Sure you aren't going to be able to be an electrical engineer with a history degree, but you can certainly succeed in a number of other great careers.

Now, if you're a liberal arts major at a shitty school, you probably aren't going to work in careers like finance or consulting right out of college, and yes, your chances of landing a great paying job out of school are diminished. But that doesn't mean you need to resign yourself to PhD or bust, you just have to be a little bit more creative and hardworking in exploring your career options.

What makes u think college admins have any sense of reality? If they did they wouldn't be college admins would they? Blind leading the blind.

"I did 'X', therefore your argument is baloney" line of reasoning is ridiculous. I have a liberal arts degree too, but as other posters have mentioned, the problem lies in liberal arts majors from subway-advertised universities. My example of SC was a bad one, I'll give you that.

If you're passionate about liberal arts, major in one and hedge against your unemployability by doubling up with a technical major. That said, there are people in Finance majors that are just as clueless as your average Psychology major. It all boils down to your employability as a human being. Engineers generally seem to know what they're doing, although you need to have real interest in the subject to be successful.

totally agree. i went to a non-target and just thought nothing of not interning in the summer, no one did it, no one thought of you as a waster if you didn't and no one promoted it. this doesn't mean that the individual is absolved, but it volunteers a piece to the puzzle

I think you've got a great point here.

It's always bewildered me why someone would go to some super expensive, Ivy or close to it, school and major in philosophy. Right, you're going to be 80k in debt and, if you're lucky, could get a 25k/year job teaching at some community college. I never understood the logic behind "it's what I wanted to study!" and them not looking at the prospective job outlook, cost of school, ROI, etc.

Perhaps that's why we're all quants/engineers/consultants/etc and those types are working at Starbucks (or, in the case of my philosophy top-10 UG school friend, a bike shop).

evilbyaccident:

The point here is the stereotypical science grad is no better off than the stereotypical liberal arts grad.

Agreed. But, their skill profiles will be different. I.e. scientist may be more intelligent, but liberal arts grad may have better interpersonal skills.

All of the liberal arts majors who have succeeded: That's wonderful, but I think what OP is trying to do is help those people who are trying to make a major decision a priori, in which case your individual experiences -- while heart-warming -- don't really matter all much.

Ceteris paribus (i.e., same social skills, connections, networking ability, etc.), a STEM major is probably going to have an easier time than a liberal arts grad. I don't think that's a very difficult position to defend. (Empirically speaking -- and I know I'm drifting into 'useless territory' with second-hand observations -- what I've found is that liberal arts grads succeed in spite of their majors, whereas STEM grads succeed because of their majors. In other words, STEM grads are fucking weird -- another position that isn't very difficult to defend, assuming you've ever taken an upper division Comp. Sci or Mathematics course).

OP's other point is arguably more profound, and one I completely agree with: Colleges do not have honest discussions with their students about what comes next. Some people manage to figure it out on their own, but it really should be a discussion that happens before college, not during senior year when your parents ask, "So what is it that you're planning on doing?"

1) I love how I am the poster child for polarized responses.

2) We have plenty of ways to help students with crushing debt.

a) Income adjusted payments b) Loan forgiveness after 20 years where you only pay 10% of your disposable income c) Public service loan forgiveness

So why do we have an problem? Well first off, because we give for profit universities the same standing as established, public/private not for profit universities. This is leading the charge of student loan defaults. Then we have kids looking at college as an experience instead of a place to learn. Just about everyone can get a 4 year degree with minimal debt if they transfer, work during school, do their degree in 5 years instead of 6, apply for grants, live frugally.

The vast majority of kids with $100K or more in debt and menial jobs got that way from having the "college experience" and going to whatever name brand school they could get into. This is commonly referred to as INDIVIDUAL CHOICE.

So how do you fix it? Well what should really happen is the spigot of endless college money should be turned off. The bachelor degree has become a defacto high school diploma because of the college business. If you can't borrow endlessly the realities of life will dictate things for you. You will choose the state school or a junior college instead of NYU at full cost. People will work, pay for college out of pocket and colleges will decrease their tuition to get students in the door.

But this isn't going to happen. Because government is a parasite that will only stop when it kills its host (ie you and I). And the worthless sheeple that make up this nation want the government to solve all of their problems.

So what will happen is a problem government created will be further exasperated by government. They will restrict loans to for profit schools, but minority groups will bitch and moan. So more pressure will be put on not for profit schools to let these people in. Which won't happen at the best universities, but BumFuck U will do it because they want the money (see the influx of foreign students at marginal US universities because they pay full freight, even though there is no chance to get employed in the US).

So the problem will simply metastasize and the sheep will cry out for more help, which the government will gleefully provide, ultimately fucking things up even more.

Lets not care people. It is like trying to explain complex things to children. We all know about ROI. Let the morons bankrupt themselves and writhe in misery. Fuck em. Lambs to the slaughter.

I'll make a few assumptions before bringing up another problem with college advising:

1. Most college advisors, in an effort to get to know you, ask about your family, your upbringing, etc. -- in effect, they have a rough idea of your financial situation at home, even if they do not have access to your financial aid information (which they may or may not have access to on a case-by-case basis)

2. Most college advisors, while probably not the most knowledgeable people about how to follow specific career paths, do have a good idea of the earning potential (vs. debt necessary) of popular careers like finance, law, medicine, academia, compsci, counseling/therapy etc.

Assuming both of these things are true, advisors not providing kids with honest advice is borderline criminal. As atomic mentioned, there are a lot of kids without a lot of money who simply do not know any better, and while they probably should "figure it out" by themselves, there should also be someone in the advising office who can actually help them.

If you know that I have two "regular" parents in blue-collar jobs who aren't fronting my education, based on either word of mouth OR finaid information, and can extrapolate from this information that I am not automatically going to gravitate to a field that will allow me a solid opportunity at socioeconomic mobility, in my opinion, it is extremely irresponsible for you to not give me honest advice about the future $$$.

Hilarious seeing all the Liberal Arts majors here trying to convince themselves everything will be alright. There is simply nothing to argue about here, STEM majors have an easier time finding high paying jobs than Liberal Arts majors. Harsh, but true. ERTW.

People can choose "hobby majors" as they please, but I think they need to understand the magnitude of that decision. I've never faulted anyone for what they chose, but I do fault them for their unrealistic idea of what happens after college when choosing xyz major. Administrators will shy away though because each student is too much $$ coming in.