Amadan
Banned
- Joined
- Apr 27, 2010
- Messages
- 8,649
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To be clear, I don't actually think English Literature or Medieval History or fill-in-the-blank studies is a useless thing to study. (Well, most fill-in-the-blank studies are.) I am all for learning and enriching the mind, and it's great if our society can support a certain number of people to spend their lives studying some small niche subject and adding to our net body of knowledge by doing so. And I personally like reading books about English literature and medieval history.
But, if you study those things in college and think you'll be able to get a job afterwards, and especially if you are going into debt to get your master's degree in fill-in-the-blank studies, then unless you have a clear and practical plan for employment when you graduate, you are being sold a pig in a poke. That is just not the modern job market.
Incidentally, my undergraduate degree was in Linguistics. The only job I found out of college was working at a CopyMat. A year later, I joined the Army.
Yes, linguistics is useful for lots of things. It taught me many basic skills that have actually served me well in areas from teaching to writing to software development. But employers, generally speaking, do not care, except in a very abstract and non-quantifiable way.
Writing papers in 19th century literature does indeed teach valuable skills, if you actually learn them, but because of the decreasing value and increasing commodification of college degrees, I really don't expect someone who supposedly wrote such papers in college to have actually learned them.
But, if you study those things in college and think you'll be able to get a job afterwards, and especially if you are going into debt to get your master's degree in fill-in-the-blank studies, then unless you have a clear and practical plan for employment when you graduate, you are being sold a pig in a poke. That is just not the modern job market.
Incidentally, my undergraduate degree was in Linguistics. The only job I found out of college was working at a CopyMat. A year later, I joined the Army.
Yes, linguistics is useful for lots of things. It taught me many basic skills that have actually served me well in areas from teaching to writing to software development. But employers, generally speaking, do not care, except in a very abstract and non-quantifiable way.
Writing papers in 19th century literature does indeed teach valuable skills, if you actually learn them, but because of the decreasing value and increasing commodification of college degrees, I really don't expect someone who supposedly wrote such papers in college to have actually learned them.