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Comment by Avshalom | Hacker News Reader

>> Jokes about English majors asking if you want fries

Sure but that never stopped anyone from pulling out BLS statistics showing life-time earning potential of an BA in english vs a highschool diploma.

But the point of bringing up "any degree" isn't that any student thought (or any guidance counselor said) that underwater basket weaving and electrical engineering had the same potential it's that we were told to go to college even if we had no idea what we wanted to do with our lives. A degree was the important thing even if it was in something that we didn't want, even if we didn't want a degree at all.

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I’m an older millennial who went to a not great high school and an ok state university.

Of all the people from high school still working dead end service jobs, I don’t know any with a college degree.

Sure there are people who studied English who aren’t making tons of money, but they also aren’t stuck working at Walmart like some of the people who don’t have degrees are.

An English degree isn’t enough to get you a $100k a year job out of college, but it is enough for just about anyone to get their foot in the door to a career where they can make close to that eventually.

Your sample size and personal experiences are small. I can easily contast your story with my own limited anecdote. I grew up in a poor dysfunctional family in a high school so bad it nearly was state mandated. I dropped out of university two years in. The rich kids in my class and many of my peers got degrees. Yet very few moved away and of those who did they all struggle to be more than entry level office workers or interns making double minimum wage at best Yet somehow I'm making 6 figures.

And my anecdote was in response to the OPs anecdote, which was refuting BLS statistics.

My anecdote is much closer to BLS statistics.

When you say they are all making double minimum wage at best, that’s less than the bottom decile for college graduates. Your not experience is not representative at all.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t09.htm

On an adjacent note, I'm really tired of the "underwater basket weaving" short hand being used. There's either a real degree you think is useless (which the above thread notes doesn't look nearly so useless by statistics) or there's not.

There's a fairly long history of people inventing what they think is taught at colleges as a straw man to then criticize them in some way and it doesn't contribute to anything for the usual reasons a fallacy doesn't.

Maybe people want to use something made up rather than offend someone with a Youth and Community Studies degree.

At the college I went to (low-mid tier state uni) the Art History degree was basically a degree in social justice and feminism. I had close friends in that program and some other humanities and was able to observe the curriculum. The stuff you expect to learn was a tiny fraction.

Hell, I audited the main American art course. We spent multiple weeks on indigenous textiles and pottery (not quite baskets I guess), multiple weeks on modernist and feminist painters. We didn't even touch american sculpture and spent less than a week on 'serious' painters. Saint gaudens, Sargent and the Boston painters, not even mentioned.

All of this is a class about an Art History degree. You know what that isn't? A STEM degree.

How many jobs there are which require a knowledge of "American Sculpture"?

It's going to be less then the number which require a knowledge of the history of feminism and social justice.

Which is to say, by making the changes you are implying should be made...you'd probably be more unemployable at the end of it because their ain't that many museums.

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