March 30, 2010
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Do You Regret Your Major?
Most of my friends and I are liberal arts majors. We spend $37,000 per year indulging in history, art history, literature, philosophy, government and other fascinating “useless” subjects that won’t necessarily lead to a job at Goldman Sachs or the cure for AIDS, but do teach invaluable communication, critical thinking and reading skills. We also make snarky comebacks that only our intellectual peers could understand. (You don’t like this blog post? Well, Proust would disagree.) Yes, we took it seriously when our high school counselors told us to pursue our dreams.However, the reality is a lot less rosy. With the rising unemployment rate, even engineering students are finding it difficult to land entry level jobs. Law school used to be the catch-all backup plan for humanities majors who failed to land a job writing for the New York Times, but with the poor economy, the number of law school applications are skyrocketing for the same number of spots, and the number of associate positions are shrinking just like every other sector of the economy.
Once upon a time, everyone majored in the humanities: when Harvard was first founded, the most popular subjects were theology, law, literature, and government. However, that was before the explosion of more lucrative fields of science, later social science and now information science. Nowadays, consolidation and contraction seems to be the theme in most humanities departments as universities struggle to weather the recession. Will this trend continue? How should humanities students cope with this economy? Are we living in an increasingly inarticulate, unexamined world?
Are you a humanities major? Do you regret your decision?
