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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]He's my take on this.  Degrees have long been about class and separation.  It didn't matter so much what the degree was in but that you had one signaled to your potential employer that that you were of a certain class (not so much class of origin because if you had the means and wherewithal to make it through 4 years of study, you belonged in the safe, middle to upper-middle, employable class, especially if your degree was from a recognizable place).

More people are going to college and BA/BS rates will go much higher than 25%, making a college degree not carry the same weight. What will separate out potential applicants - what the degree is in.  If you get a vo-tech degree (business especially) then you will be sorted lower unless you went to the very best schools.  Liberal arts degree will be the marker of a certain class that employers will look for - someone with the means to study the liberal arts.  Add to that that liberal arts so teach critical analysis and writing skills (I promise that the graduates in history and English at my college do WAY more and WAY better writing than our business graduates), and liberal arts majors will be more employable and will make more money in the future.  Even now salary studies show that while they start lower their life-time earnings rise above those with more practical degrees.

Education is about class and always has been.[/quote]

I am am sure graduates from YOUR college get those jobs through networking, not their critical thinking and writing skills. This process only holds true for top institutions and is slowly going away because the "prestige" is not what is use to be.

As for salary studies I am sure if you took out the liberal arts kids that ended up getting an advanced degrees, roughly 40%, the life-time earnings would be far lower. There earnings are often due to the graduate degree in a certain field, not an undergrad degree.

Here are decent stats, basically the differences are marginal. - http://www.aacu.org/leap/documents/nchems.pdf [/quote]

pp here. I am not at a prestigious college.  I am talking about the kind and quality of writing that our students in different majors do.

That study is interesting and still refutes the op's stance (though not as starkly as the studies I've seen).

Back to my theory.  If you get a vo-tech college degree (except at an elite university) you are marking yourself as a certain class.  Same with liberal arts.

So here's my take:
practical major at elite university and liberal arts major at second tier private schools and state schools = what a college degree was in prior to the last decade

Practical major at state school = what "some" college was prior to the last decade

There is probably some further gradiation for second tier state schools; again, liberal arts majors will sort higher

any degree from for-profit online school and any associates degree = what high school diploma was the prior to the last decade[/quote]
Who cares about class?

The so called "practical majors" that I graduated with from state school five years ago had no problems finding jobs.  Many of my business undergrad friends now work at the big 4 accounting firms.  The liberal arts guys are working retail jobs and some are still waiting tables.  Some went on to law school because they had no other options and couldn't get a job.

It's nice to think that majoring in something like liberal arts makes you a certain class, but every single study proves that they have the most trouble finding work.

The whole class debate is nonsense.  It's probably a way for people to feel better about dropping 200K for their kid to study history or English.  [/quote]

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