Comment by smoyer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smoyer | Hacker News Reader

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"For humanities majors, TFA is a clear path to a job that both pays a living wage and provides a stepping stone to leadership positions in a cause of national importance."

Universities have no incentive to steer students away from their areas of interest, but if it's this hard for a humanities major to earn a living wage, we're producing too many of them. Humanities departments have a vested interest in maintaining their output but I can't help but think that they're hurting themselves in the long run.

Humanities are an important part of a well-rounded student, and there are lots of instances where a humanities minor with a technical or business related major is a powerful combination. I'd hate to see the humanities die, but can they keep living like this? There should be more outrage among their graduates ... when that happens (and I've seen a few articles), things will get much harder for them.

As an aside, making 0xx and 1xx level introductory classes in the humanities, which are required as part of the GenEds or BDRs (Basic Degree Requirements) too hard is in many cases teaching students in other disciplines to hate you ... you should draw those students into your minors programs.

As someone who took enough history classes to ALMOST get to major reqs while an undergrad, I agree with you about class difficulty. There was actually very little difference in the difficulty of a 100 and a 400 class. The difference was in depth. Your 100 would be a European History class while your 400 would be about Postwar Germany. I loved history so I was biased toward enjoyment but I can see how those who had little background in history having real difficulty.

There's another side to that--the cool thing about history as a major was that the dept. structure was flatter. It was basically about doing interesting research. You could take 600 level classes with your TAs if you thought you could hang with them in reading. Definitely not the case in the more skill based fields.

Research, of course, is a skill, which is probably what they ought to be teaching more of in 100 level classes. Most kids when they get to college have not been asked to say, write a paper only from primary sources.

In my observation, it is very hard for a humanities major at a non-elite university to get a good job outside of sales. You can get away with majoring in history at Princeton, but don't expect a good job with the same degree from Fordham.

In terms of usefulness, I do find they help a lot in combination with practical degrees. Philosophy on it's own - not so useful. Philosophy with Computer Science - now you have someone who understand logic and linguistic processing. English on it's own - useless. English and Accounting - now you have someone can explain complex jargon-riddled Accounting statements in plain English.

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