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[quote=Anonymous]I am as pro-liberal arts and humanities as they come, and I agree that there’s a fair amount of fear in many of the anti-LAC posts, as well as a lack of vision. The best parts of my life — and my biggest financial rewards — came from having engaged deeply with huge ideas that at the time served no obvious practical outcome. (And no, I was not rich — far closer to LMC than UMC).

That said, I have real empathy for people who are concerned about ROI, and who are focused on the data that are available. College costs far too much, and we’ve probably all seen lives broken or made lesser because of crushing student debt. I’d argue that these were policy choices (as one example, we allowed 100% of the risks of student loans to accrue only to the borrower), but they happened.

And while the first job salary data is both limited and limiting, it is the only real clean data. You can’t put the same kid into two career paths concurrently. Everything after that first job gets very murky, bc there are so many variables involved in any one individual’s success.

Personally, I’m still willing to bet on the value of the liberal arts in the long term — at least for kids who are drawn to these subjects naturally, and whose guts are telling them to follow that call. But I would never, ever advise someone to take out loans for an English degree, or a classics degree, and I think it’s critically important to have conversations with liberal arts majors about career paths and calculated risk. And I absolutely understand people who have witnessed the astronomical rise in cost for an undergraduate degree, and are looking to minimize risk. [/quote]

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