I've noted your past fixation on English majors and their lack of financial success, and not sure why you single them out. Lit crit-saddled academia and coffeeshops aren't the only path for the English major. Writing is not only a noble pursuit but a lucrative[1] one (even if you skirt the legacy publishing industry), with as much a combination of hard work and dedication to craft (and luck) as, for example, selling bingo card generators for a living, or mobile phone games, or b2b CRUD apps, or facebook farming simulators.
Aside from fiction writing, there are ad copy and marketing writers, technical writers, screen and television writers, bloggers, journos, etc. Most of those are salaried positions, not necessarily part time/contract work.
It's really not that bad out there. For the record, I've never worked at a coffeeshop :D
[1]http://www.bnet.com/blog/technology-business/will-write-e-po...
Majoring in English to write marketing copy is like majoring in CS to write soundboard Android apps. It'll help, but ...
Also, going to college is supposed to be about training your mind. Writing an Android app doesn't require a CS degree, but getting a CS degree instills certain habits that enable you to succeed in programming.
If you want job training, go to welding school.
Here in Australia, law is mostly taught as an undergraduate degree. It has essentially taken over the role of a liberal arts degree.
Arts is very easy to get in to in Australia. Law is far harder. At most of Australia's top Universities you have to be in the top 0.5% of high school students.
Admittedly a large number of Law Grads use Law as an engineering decree for government and other administrative work, but still.
As for getting into law, there are universities outside the Group of 8 who'll accept lower scores.
I'm just sayin'.
I'm sure there are CS majors now in the workforce that just crank out their requisite number of lines each day, the work that many like to deify as an analytical blend of art and science becoming a routine drag.
And there are welders who take pride in their work and are treated with religious respect by civil engineers.
Maybe it's more about the person than the major.
I worked on a farm in high school, mostly throwing hay, feeding animals and doing various odd jobs. That experience taught me alot, and left a much stronger mark on me than my CS education.
You'd earn much less than a Stanford CS graduate.
William Bernbach, founder of DDB, famous copywriter, and... drumroll please English major. Note, this is just a famous example I knew off the top of my head, but if you go look on LinkedIn there are tons of people in the ad industry with English majors.
Here's another famous copywriter/English major: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfax_M._Cone
Even if it's literary criticism, for today that's mostly done in a way that's much less broadly focused, right? E.g. who outside of academia and some narrow related circles cares about deconstruction? (Admittedly, some of that is due to cultural changes where literature has lost a tremendous amount of "market share" to modern media starting with movies and radio.)
English degrees, on the other hand, do not ordinarily teach or imply possession of commercially valuable skills. They're hardly the only liberal arts degree with this problem: I have one in East Asian Studies from an excellent school. I learned to speak Japanese in the course of getting that degree -- that makes me employable even in the absence of any of my other talents. However, many people with my degree don't end up conversational in any other language. Virtually no business anywhere will pay for my ability to tell you, at length, about how the history of the Japanese family register screws over nth-generation Japanese Koreans. (To say nothing of the vastly more common research focus of EAS graduates: Naruto fandom.)
For example, I have a degree in economics. Literally speaking, I don't do economics on a day to day basis. But the skills it taught me in dealing with complex situations, making quantitative decisions, and dealing with uncertainty has been incredibly important in my business career, even though nobody's ever asked me to diagram an AD/AS curve.
Writing is an integral (I'd say a keystone) component of an English degree: The critique and analysis of others' writing as well as your own. Additionally, the development of said writing skills is supplemented with supportive activities such as peer review of others' papers and theses as well as incidentals such as submission to academic journals and creative writing periodicals, both on- and off-campus.
That's why newsdesks and tech writing bullpens as well as copywriting departments often require an English degree; it infers a seasoned level of both creative and expository writing and a supposition of deadline steadfastness (in the context of writing) that is simply not taught in any other concentration.
But, you're right. Degrees of any stripe shouldn't determine the fitness of one's abilities in the real world. After all, Larry Wall studied music and linguistics (with the intent on transcribing and creating a writing system for indigenous African tribal languages) in college, then turned around and created Perl while working at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Not everyone lives their lives according to the principles of capitalism, just consider yourself lucky that at this moment, it's working out in our favor as developers.
It's not just finance+energy salaries driving up programmer wages.
Google, for example, pays $8,000 a month - just for interns!
Do you have a source for this? That seems exceedingly high. And even higher on an annual basis that the entry level salary you're mentioning.
Though I could see how paying a few extra thousands could help convince a college grad to take an internship there. Google then has their foot in the door… (but still, it would be odd to then get an offer for less than what you were making as an intern)
Also, these salary threads from the past couple of days make me feel underpaid.
Also, the Stanford CS department conducts a salary survey of graduates every year, and for 2009-2010 the average salary offer for CS/EE undergrads was $79,333 and the median was $80,0000.
You can have a look at stats of Cornell CS grads: http://www.engineering.cornell.edu/resources/career_services...
The median was ~ 75K in 2009
After taxes and other deductions I took approx 2200/month. $475/ month for rent living with a roommate. $55 for internet. ~$50 for monthly bus pass. $150/month for food. $100-150 miscellaneous utilities. All in that's about $880 a month for essentials. That left me with $1320 a month spending money. I bought video games, went to movies etc and still had a lot of spare cash. This with co-op pay of 3k a month. I cannot see a reason how anyone can say that 50-70k is not enough, except greed run amok.
A 1br apartment in SF in a part of town where you don't have to step over human excrement on a daily basis is $1800-$2000. Add another $500 for a new building (the one I live in is 100 years old). A new-ish car payment is $500 + expensive insurance. Add your $400 or so for food + utilities and your starting burn rate here just as a single guy is much closer to 3k per month, let alone what it costs to have a family. Also, $5 a day for food? Really? Around here lunch is $10.
Just saying, I don't think it's greed.
Not that I agree with him.
Most importantly, I think everyone who's willing to work hard enough to learn to program deserves the opportunity to earn dev wages.
If the theoretical CS courses are brimming with dollar-seekers, Stanford can add more practical programming courses. Everyone wins.