What does the law of averages have to say about 435 out of 2 million? My point is that Rayiner was more right than the parent comment: AOC's election doesn't refute the point that a huge number of humanities degree recipients are durably underemployed.
A "huge number"? Rayiner offered a few anecdotes about a few people a few years out of college... he brought up AOC; I merely tried to highlight how silly it was to draw any kind of conclusion from (that) one person.
I know the uselessness of humanities degrees is an article of faith among developers, but the data do not support it.
> It’s also interesting that although it’s a popular target of those who insist that a college education should connect to a good job, majors in “Liberal Arts and Sciences, General Studies, and Humanities” left a scant 18,824 underemployed grads after five years. “English Language and Literature/Letters” had just 16,422 similarly underemployed. And the major with the fewest underemployed graduates, according to the report, was “Foreign Languages, Literature, and Linguistics.”
AAAS found that humanities degree holders earn less on average than those holding engineering or computer science degrees but have nearly equal levels of employment and job satisfaction:
Georgetown found that STEM jobs pay more, but that across all degrees, BA holders have almost twice the median earnings of those with only a high school degree. Some associates degrees beat some BA majors.
> For example, in 2015, 67% of production supervisor job postings asked for a college degree, while only 16% of employed production supervisors had one.
When companies start requiring college degrees simply because it's an easy way to filter out the bottom of the barrel in a world where we've pushed everyone to get a college degree, the degree isn't adding value. It's just overcoming a self-created hurdle.
> In the present study, I use ASEC data and skill ratings derived from O*NET to test the relative education hypothesis, investigating whether college degree-holders increasingly find themselves in lower-skilled jobs as more of their peers attend college. The findings support the hypothesis that as educational attainment rises in the population, individuals with college degrees are increasingly shuffled into lower skilled jobs.
I think the fact that liberal arts majors have such a hard time getting a job out of college is an indication that college isn't actually adding value. If they stumble around and eventually get a career, it may well be that it's the experience they gain in the meantime that is really adding the value (even if the college degree is checking a box).
You have to be careful not to conflate degree inflation, which is about over-zealous filtering in an organization's hiring process, with college education and the personal benefits it confers upon the individual who receives it.
Put another way, the recipient of a bachelor's degree gets two benefits: 1) a pass through certain HR filters, and 2) the improvement of their personal knowledge and abilities.
The distinction matters because we can fix degree inflation where it happens: in HR. That's why HBS is writing about it. We don't need to deny the obvious benefits of post-secondary education to people, just to fix a problem with over-zealous HR filters. (Those aren't unique to college BTW--think of silly requirements like "10 years experience with React.")
> I think the fact that liberal arts majors have such a hard time getting a job out of college is an indication that college isn't actually adding value.
This would make sense if liberal arts majors had an unusually hard time getting a job out of college, but they don't. Here are some majors and their probability of underemployment in first job and 5 years out.
And my point is I'm not sure why that matters. A huge number of highschool graduates are unemployed, therefore does that mean we should start charging for basic education? Just start defunding it further because it has no value?
This linking of career to college education is exactly the problem I'm talking about. People should be free to study what they want, because educated citizens have more value than what they can contribute to the corporate bottom line. European countries understand this and it's time we follow suit. And some of the best software engineers I've known came from education such as the humanities or teaching.
Resources are finite. People should be free to study what they want, but we shouldn't be allocating resources to subsidize all postsecondary study for its own sake. This is why a lot of people think community college should be free: it's largely pin-compatible with the first several years of university education, but has none of the social status and leisure components that have turned college – yes, including state universities – into a Veblen good.
