Minor tech skills are important for non-tech people. The tech people really hate having to ask whether the monitor is plugged in or if the battery is dead.

Anonymous wrote:STEM vs. liberal arts is a false dichotomy.

http://www.chronicle.com/article/Liberal-Arts-Majors-Have/236749

The answer is not either/or - it is both.

http://burning-glass.com/specific-skills-make-liberal-arts-graduates-more-marketable/

+10000

You need technical skills and you need to be able to think.

STEM vs. liberal arts is a false dichotomy.

http://www.chronicle.com/article/Liberal-Arts-Majors-Have/236749

The answer is not either/or - it is both.

http://burning-glass.com/specific-skills-make-liberal-arts-graduates-more-marketable/

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Thinking about this whole conversation over the weekend. Thinking it's kind of a rehash of those previous generations where Junior was required to either go into Dad's business or go to medical school - regardless of his actual inclinations or happiness.

Here's my take on it: You're being a selfish parent if you force your child to do something that will make them deeply unhappy because you are not the one who will pay the price for that child's unhappiness. You know who will? Your son's unfortunate spouse and your son's unfortunate children.

My dad was forced to go to medical school and he HATED being a doctor! He hated his life. He hated working 60 hours a week at a job that he was really, really ill-suited for. He became a mean drunk and took it out on my mom and us kids.

He hoarded his money and quit as soon as he possibly could. The moment he stopped working at a job he hated he was able to quit drinking, he got a job that he loved in our city government, he made friends and he's actually a delightful person to be around.

THe problem is that his kids are still paying the price for having been raised in a house with crazy people who screamed and yelled all the time. His parents? Not so much. THey enjoyed the high-end appliances he bought them, the car, the trips and then they went home.

They were selfish and clueless. Yes, maybe my dad would have been a mean drunk even if his parents didnt force him to be a doctor -- but I suspect it had a lot to do with it.

If you force your child to spend most of their waking hours doing something they hate and are ill-suited for, you are being selfish and self-centered. ANd kind of immature.

"Forcing" or more accurately willing to fund a practical degree is not the same as requiring your kid to go into a specific field. I plan on telling my kids that I will only pay for a degree that has an actual job that can be done with a B.S. I'm not paying for a degree where someone would ask"What are you going to do with that?" My kids can major in STEM, Business, Elementary Education, whatever as long as there is a job that is associated with the degree. That is far different than telling your kid that they can only be a doctor or a lawyer.

Perhaps. But it's still not a very smart position to take.

Agreed. And the parents often may not be familiar with the jobs that may be related to a particular major.

No matter the field, parental pressure to go into something that is a bad fit for the kid is a recipe for misery. I dated a very nice guy for a while who worked in finance. He hated it. His real love was gardening and he'd wanted to study landscape architecture but his dad would only pay for a business degree so he bowed to parental pressure. I encouraged him to start back to school to do what he really wanted but he wouldn't (felt at 30 he was too old to start over). We broke up because I could see that he was just going to get more and more miserable as he tried to keep living the life his dad expected. Sad.

Useless majors. Floundering. STEM is more rigorous. wow.

From my own experience, having a degree in philosophy with A LOT of physics, math and computer science, I can say without hesitation that philosophy was a lot more rigorous. It required a lot more thinking and intellectual exploration. And the people in upper level courses had a far broader scope of intellect than the upper level STEM students.

I also find that STEM degrees tend to approach everything in a very regimented and formulaic fashion. And the vast majority of life cannot be reduced to the simple application of rules. Sure, STEMs may be immediately employable at a higher salary. But is that the goal? If it is, then by all means pursue that, but it seems to sacrifice a substantial amount of life's richness in pursuit of a 6000 sqft home. That's pretty empty to me.

I personally would hope that people encourage their children to pursue a path that encourages life long learning and exploration. I've noticed over the years that those who were "forced" to pursue degrees they really weren't interested in because it was a career path tend to abandon learning later in life. Education became a chore to be tolerated and not a process to be embraced. It's sad.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How does a parent force their kid to change their major? Do they threaten to stop paying? Would they rather their kid be miserable? Does not sound like a real life problem except maybe if your parents are overseas or first gen immigrants.
My few friends who are struggling with student debt all went to law school and later realized that working in the field was ruining their life.

I knew someone who wanted to be an anthro major but her parents said only engineering/science or busines or they would stop paying. She drifted from job to job as a business major and basically hated her life. She also tried to getinto anthro afterward but no one wanted a PhD student in anthro at a top school with a business degree.

While anthropology is a very interesting field, there is very little paying work in it. Chances are she couldn't get into a PhD program because it's extremely competitive and there are very few openings. It probably had little to do with her existing degree.

I work in marketing research and know a number of people with anthropology degrees. It is a good base for going into qualitative research.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I feel like certain people will flounder no matter what their major.

And picking a useless major is just one symptom of floundering -- why be an enabler? Unless the kid is at HYPS --- they can do anything and still do well.

But what a lot of us are saying is that they're not (necessarily) useless majors. Listen, I have a BA in theatre from AU, and I have a full time paying job in a theatre non-profit, plus a thriving freelance career. DH has a degree in Poli Sci, also from AU, and he's a lobbyist. Sure, I put in my time as a bartender, but I made a crap ton of money doing it, and also learned a lot about customer service and work ethic. It. Can. Work.

Me again.

Just wanted to elucidate on why I put "necessarily" in there. For me, the student/graduate has as much to do with it as the institution and degree. I absolutely could have floundered after graduation, decided I just wanted to audition for plays and do nothing else, and ultimately decide that theatre wasn't for me and I should get a law degree. But my degree got me a preschool-teaching assistantship, a great gig tutoring, and ultimately my non-profit job. And as I said, I also learned a lot by tending bar and waiting tables.

Networking happens in the liberal arts as well, so you can't discount it, even from schools "like AU."