What do you do with a humanities degree from an ivy, if you are not going to grad school?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kid is on a lot of AI course work in his poem curriculum Ivy. Liberal arts is the best place to be for the future. Nothing too specialized.

Open, not poem

Brown is poem as well as open in my book. 🤎

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The amount of replies on here talking about entering consulting or other lucrative career tracks with an art history Ivy degree are giving me hives.

First of all, almost none of us on this thread will be able to get our kids into an Ivy right now, unless seriously hooked (I say this an a parent at a private feeder that gets mentioned here) or rural low income. Wait another 5 years, spots will open up.

Secondly, the people who are already in consulting now who would be hiring your humanities grads are themselves deeply concerned about being replaced by AI. They won’t have time to hire more human overhead onto their team. The managers who migrate more of their budget and output to AI vs human employees will get to stay. That’s what pretty much all of the conferences and half of the strategic meetings I attend know talk about these days. Those entry level consulting jobs will be extinct by the time your DCs graduate if they are entering college now.

If you are filthy rich and your kids won’t have to work for a living, let them do whatever they want; spend it on at Ivy even. If they need to work for a living, best you can do is put them in robotics or chemical engineering (energy jobs), preferably at a state school so you can save at least $50k a year on tuition. Use that savings for a downpayment to buy them a commercial property near a city where AI data center buildout are getting approved so they can collect rent when they graduate. AI will replace a lot of jobs but can’t replace real estate and food, at least not for a while.

All of you who still care about the Ivy names are seriously delusional about what’s ahead. No one will care about the Yale name in 15 years; they care about the names of your AI agents. There will be drastically different markers for wealth, status and influence; the Ivies with all their 80-year-old tenure professors and old buildings made of stones that won’t have enough compute to run the most rudimentary AI data centers won’t be one of them.

If the AIpocalypse is really coming (and it might be) no one can predict what jobs will be safe. Your guesses of robotics and chem engineering are no better than anyone else's. I know a robotics engineering grad who's currently unemployed. In the doomer scenario, why not yolo your way into a degree in medieval studies? Now is the time of monsters. You can always go into real estate later.

You surely have the common sense to know that there are people not good at their job in every industry. And if if your friend is a robotics engineer now and is your age, they are likely working on "robots" like a Roomba, totally different than robotics in the next 20 years.

[Anonymous]

My friend’s daughter graduated from an Ivy last year with an English degree and is working for a PR firm that does a lot of crisis management for public figures. I don’t know how much she makes but she is living on her own in an apartment with a roommate so she’s doing ok.

[Anonymous]

My history major kid who a senior at Harvard now will be working at McKinsey when she graduates (high salary). In high school, she got As/all 5s in AP Calc BC, Physics, Chem but her passion/extracurriculars were focused on the humanities.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:CS graduates have had a horrible time with jobs this year due to AI. 20% of med school graduates don’t get matched with residencies. The STEM majors are not a sure fire path to employment anymore.

Meanwhile I know a recent philosophy grad who got a great job offer in an AI company.

eh, and I know CS grads not from ivies who got offers at quant firms.

[Anonymous]

I’ve had 2 CEO’s that had philosophy degrees. Also a CTO with a history degree. I have a non-ivy psychology degree and will make over 400k this year. If you are good there are jobs, you may start a bit lower but you move up.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Don’t understand why folks says humanities students are critical thinks and write well and assume engineers and stem students don’t. Engineers are critical thinkers and write well too.

They're not. They're just emphasizing that humanities students bring something valuable to the table, and it's not uncommon that they are desirable in all kinds of fields. Also, I'm still surprised that people don't know that you can major in anything and go onto med school and law school. Pre med is not a major or any formal track that you declare. You just fulfill the prereqs in undergrad and take the MCAT and apply to med school.

Yeah good luck getting a 4.0 as an engineering major while still having time for law-related ECs

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ethics department at Lockheed Martin

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The amount of replies on here talking about entering consulting or other lucrative career tracks with an art history Ivy degree are giving me hives.

First of all, almost none of us on this thread will be able to get our kids into an Ivy right now, unless seriously hooked (I say this an a parent at a private feeder that gets mentioned here) or rural low income. Wait another 5 years, spots will open up.

Secondly, the people who are already in consulting now who would be hiring your humanities grads are themselves deeply concerned about being replaced by AI. They won’t have time to hire more human overhead onto their team. The managers who migrate more of their budget and output to AI vs human employees will get to stay. That’s what pretty much all of the conferences and half of the strategic meetings I attend know talk about these days. Those entry level consulting jobs will be extinct by the time your DCs graduate if they are entering college now.

If you are filthy rich and your kids won’t have to work for a living, let them do whatever they want; spend it on at Ivy even. If they need to work for a living, best you can do is put them in robotics or chemical engineering (energy jobs), preferably at a state school so you can save at least $50k a year on tuition. Use that savings for a downpayment to buy them a commercial property near a city where AI data center buildout are getting approved so they can collect rent when they graduate. AI will replace a lot of jobs but can’t replace real estate and food, at least not for a while.

All of you who still care about the Ivy names are seriously delusional about what’s ahead. No one will care about the Yale name in 15 years; they care about the names of your AI agents. There will be drastically different markers for wealth, status and influence; the Ivies with all their 80-year-old tenure professors and old buildings made of stones that won’t have enough compute to run the most rudimentary AI data centers won’t be one of them.

If the AIpocalypse is really coming (and it might be) no one can predict what jobs will be safe. Your guesses of robotics and chem engineering are no better than anyone else's. I know a robotics engineering grad who's currently unemployed. In the doomer scenario, why not yolo your way into a degree in medieval studies? Now is the time of monsters. You can always go into real estate later.

You surely have the common sense to know that there are people not good at their job in every industry. And if if your friend is a robotics engineer now and is your age, they are likely working on "robots" like a Roomba, totally different than robotics in the next 20 years.

No, this kid graduated two years ago.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Daniela Amodei, president of Anthropic, was an English literature major.
So to answer your question (and to follow up on many other answers here): a humanities major can do ANYTHING

...as long as their siblings is a competent STEM major who can set them up? That's a pretty dim view, don't you think?

[Anonymous]

What do you do with a BA in English?

Great song from Avenue Q - wish they revived that show.[/quot-e]

You co-write Avenue Q, Book of Mormon, Frozen, Winnie the Pooh, etc. From Wikipedia:

"Lopez went ......to Yale University where he graduated in 1997 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English (the type of academic degree expressly discussed in the second song of Avenue Q)."

[Anonymous]

This is depressing. All the tech overlords that people seem to think are hot stuff were all humanities majors, or social science majors. The third-world thinking that you need STEM degrees to be valuable are the reason that India continues to produce zero innovation. Also the reason that China is finally able to innovate without just stealing IP from America--they have western educated elites now, so they are moving away from the test robot STEM zombie system.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:CS graduates have had a horrible time with jobs this year due to AI. 20% of med school graduates don’t get matched with residencies. The STEM majors are not a sure fire path to employment anymore.

Meanwhile I know a recent philosophy grad who got a great job offer in an AI company.

eh, and I know CS grads not from ivies who got offers at quant firms.

Doubtful since there are very few of those offers in any given year and you are highly unlikely to know one. But if making stuff up makes you feel better then you be you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Humanities teaches you to think and question and review material.

I now run my own business, it has helped me every day in making decisions.

Yea, all those people with tech backgrounds who are CEOs.. they don't know how to make decisions and run a business. They must rely on humanities majors to do that. /s

I am not saying that at all, but I was not trained in one narrow little field, I took tons of classes across many subjects.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You don’t sound like you know much about Ivy league degrees. Students have already signaled their worth to future employers by being admitted and being a candidate for their degree.

Students with Ivy humanities degrees are easily employed by consulting firms, Silicon Valley companies, the financial industry, media companies,and government.

Elite universities publish a post-graduation report summarizing where their students are employed or attending grad school each year. Typically 90 pct are employed within 6 months of graduation. You can take 5 minutes to google and read if you’re actually interested.

But your post seems to me more like you want to concern troll about majors such as “medieval studies.”

I don’t think a lot of people know about Ivy League degrees and the doors they open. The narrow focus on STEM, law school and medicine by parents has got to be hard on kids who want a different life.