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Originally Posted by Radb707  Well now it's no fun to joke about semi-useless degrees. I have to feel sad for that. I assume you're going to go the professor route?
On a unrelated note, anyone else find it odd you can get paid more than some BA graduates by having an associates in something technical?
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I didn't mean for this to get serious, but I totally appreciate the condolences--although I'm still overreacting (haven't been rejected for sure yet!).
To be honest, I think if you major in something like literature, film, or music, you're doing that so you can study something you like and hopefully work in a field that interests you thereafter. Sure: job prospects suck, but you're trading employability in general for the chance to (at least hopefully) enjoy your no-pay job and the education that leads to it. If you're super passionate about computer tech support or plumbing more power to you, but I don't think it's unfair at all that vocational degrees are the most immediately lucrative--because most people get those degrees primarily for the money and not solely for some kind of intellectual or personal fulfillment.
I also have big issues with college as an institution. I think after the GI bill or whatever a lot of the elitism that surrounded education disappeared, but as the country has become more politically and economically polarized in the past 30 years, the "elite" education has returned. My school cost about $45,000 a year (more now) and I'm sure I had classes where the majority of students were children of millionaires. And the curriculum was tailored toward that kind of person specifically. Even state schools cater to a wealthy white audience; as silly as some of what Kanye West says is, the complaints he launches against American higher education (particularly w/r/t race) are valid and troubling. That public high schools are locally funded (and private ones are feeders to the Ivies) only helps uphold this unfortunate and fast-growing elitism.
The "education" is a joke, too. Take a school like Brown or something. Students choose whatever classes they want, there's no rigid curriculum or single theory around which majors are structured, and you can choose to take almost anything pass/fail. How can an employer look at a liberal arts major from that kind of school and want to hire that person based on anything but nepotism? How can there be any expectations of what a BA in the liberal arts is actually capable of? The liberal arts education is a mess right now. There's no longer any core curriculum structured around the Classics, so students effectively create majors out of ten or twelve arbitrary and unrelated intro-level classes. A math major or physics major might be worth something because you've got a pretty standard basis there and forward progress from it (there's no Post-Lacanian physics, and if there were it would be prefaced by useful Newtonian physics), but, amazingly, math and science majors are borderline vocational these days. I think the curricula at state and vocational schools might actually be more structured and more rigorous than at Ivy League liberal arts schools, which are increasingly resembling country clubs or high-end sleep-away camps for the young and wealthy.
