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Comment by threetonesun | Hacker News Reader

As someone who went to school for English in 2000, I can say that while those jokes existed the context here is misunderstood, they were told by business majors about the liberal arts, or anything academic. Heck in 2000 a CS degree wasn't positioned as that much more valuable than an English degree, and if you looked at the preceding decade you'd see that was statistically true.

The change for the current generation is that for everyone graduating in underwater basketweaving in say 2000, many would find unrelated careers and, because they had a college degree, do fine. With rising college costs and more expectations that workers in high paying fields have specific degrees, that's no longer true.

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> in 2000 a CS degree wasn't positioned as that much more valuable than an English degree

Ha! By whom? We had a pretty good idea that it was a solid choice in the early 90s and before. We teased my older brother for going for a bachelor's in business while I went into CS, because we were pretty sure the CS degree would be worth a lot more. He's doing just fine, but mostly because he backfilled the equivalent of a CS education into his work experience.

Right after the dot-com bust, a CS degree was seen as having no future by a lot of people.

The glut of graduates that have come off the pipeline due to the hot tech sector prior to the bust fell off after 2-4 yrs. This actually led to the huge lack of supply of CS graduates in the ensuing decade!

I think it is partially responsible for the high salaries that CS graduates get (of course, it's a small portion of the cause, the bigger factor being huge growth in the sector).

What? I'm not sure where you pulled this concept of that English vs computer science were in anyway comparable in terms of overall pay even in the early 2000s but you might want to cite your sources.

I went to school in 2001 and computer science was one of the hottest fields around by that time, significantly more so than a BA in English. The Georgia institute of technology (Gatech), my alma mater, had a highly competitive computer science career path.

In fact the general advice was that if you really wanted to major in English that it was better to pursue a degree in an adjacent field such as communications so you could more easily transition into journalism, etc.

STEM (doctors, scientists, engineers, etc.) has almost always been a safer career path than liberal arts, assuming you're cut out for it.

I remember seeing something in the late 90s / early 2000s (when I was in college) that broke down the incomes of liberal arts majors who went to law school and those who didn't. It should have convinced me to switch to STEM, but all it did was convince me to go to law school.

Yeah, so a CS degree was positioned as more valuable and it was obviously so than English in 2000.

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