poor students struggle as class plays a greater role in success

[sakuraberries]

GALVESTON, Tex. - Angelica Gonzales marched through high school in Goth armor - black boots, chains and cargo pants - but undermined her pose of alienation with a place on the honor roll. She nicknamed herself after a metal band and vowed to become the first in her family to earn a college degree.

“I don’t want to work at Walmart” like her mother,

Comments

[maladaptive]

And the worst part is that a degree is touted as some kind of magic automatic job-getter with no explanation of how much connections and networking and degree relevance factor into being able to get into a field or career.

This exactly. I was reading an article (Hipsters on Food Stamps maybe?) where there was a conversation about the uselessness of humanities/liberal arts degrees, and one comment pointed out that lib arts degrees are and can be useful-- the problem is that, unlike many STEM programs and medical students, lib arts students get absolutely zero help in learning how to find jobs. Not just networking but even knowing what kind of jobs exist. My school had a lot of focus on grad school. I got an anthropology BA which requires a PhD, but it absolutely fascinates people that I talk to and gets me a foot in the door in other fields.

I have a law degree and a lot of the jobs I've been looking at that aren't legal want some sort of liberal arts degree. The jobs exist, but you don't know how to look for them until you dive into the deep-end and people you talk to in hopes of getting a job ask "have you looked at XYZ?" and you're like, I don't even know what that is. Networking? I didn't hear about that until law school, and even then they really don't tell you how to do it effectively.

[nesmith]

Exactly. When I tell people that I have an MA in English they always say "Oh, do you want to teach?" Because for most people that's the only thing you can do with an English degree; I had to teach myself over the years how to articulate how valuable an English degree can be in many fields, but convincing corporate business types of that is a different matter all together.

[maladaptive]

Corporate business types don't know the value of anything, I've found-- like who needs publicists, it isn't like the written word is one of the most important communication forms for the market right now. We'll just hand that stuff off to the bored interns! We don't need professionals.

I didn't realize how useful an english degree could be until I got into the business world and saw how many of them are out there doing jobs that need english degrees. I already knew it was useful for teaching you things (my anthro degree gave me invaluable thinking skills which unfortunately no one cares about until they hire someone with the right degree who couldn't think their way out of a wet paper sack), but for straight up job-getting? Didn't see that coming, because all you ever hear is how useless they are.

[bestdaywelived]

That is absolutely my pet PEEVE. I have a BA in English, and that's the sort of thing my ignorant family would say.

[martyfan]

Ugh, I only have a BA in English but people are always asking me that, and look baffled when I say no.

The way I tend to explain it to people is that English is far more useful than just a teaching tool, and if all that I do with it is teach, then it's a self-perpetuating cycle that goes nowhere. I study English so I can teach English so my students can study English so they can teach English, etc. It makes it sound so purposeless if that's all it's for, and there's so much more that can be done with it.

[nesmith]

Reminds me of Richard Jeni's bit about studying political science: "I go 'What do I do now?' They go 'You can teach political science.' I go 'To who?' They go 'Some other people.' I go 'But what will they do?' They go 'Well, they'll teach it to some other people.' You go 'This isn't college, this is Amway with a track team! What is this? I spent $40,000 on a pyramid scheme!'"

[elialshadowpine]

Just curious as to what other careers are connected with an English degree? I ask because that's part of why I dropped out; I had planned on studying English, but literally everybody I talked to, including professors and college advisers, told me that the only use for an English degree was to teach. Which... I didn't want to do, so...

[nesmith]

Basically the way I "marketed" myself when I was job hunting is that by and large English majors have excellent written skills, are articulate (if, like me, you had classes with spoken presentations that required good speaking ability), have good grounding in rhetoric and reasoning, as well as analysis. I know for my own part all the papers I had to write gave me the ability to absorb a lot of complex material and condense it concisely (i.e. for a report) and my teaching experience as a grad student gave me a good basis for being able to train others in a work environment. YMMV on all this, though.