> "online marketing" degrees are just part of this category, not anything special in themselves.
I disagree in that many of the other topics have a real academic history and tradition, involve the expression of genuinely important ideas. Being immersed in that for years has value: in the facts learned, the overall experience, and an appreciation for aspects of the world that you might not have understood or appreciated before.
The fact that that arts degrees often have a very good return on investment /might/ be because they are a waste of time and irrelevant but it seems like the preponderance of evidence indicates that they are not a complete waste of time.
https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/collegeroi/
Pushing students towards STEM and trade schools is probably not a good idea, creating markets that actually work properly and then letting the students sort all that out for themselves seems like a better way.
From your source, a NPV of ~$680k in accumulated earnings over 30 years is the average return. That is ~$22,600 earnings per year. I don't think that is a good return by any means.
Am I reading the chart correctly? If so, I don't see how your link favors your argument.
I agree. And the market is telling us that more jobs in these fields are not needed, while STEM has endless technological problems to address and high salaries for the taking.
I think it's a tricky question, because the provided link seems to distinguish liberal arts schools from other non-technology, non-business schools, and I don't know how that distinction is being made. It could be that their subjects are largely similar, but the schools being explicitly marked as "liberal arts" schools are of an elitist class separated by grades and/or family privilege. And that these aspects of the student rather than the content of the degree are what account for the return. Certainly some liberal arts degrees are warranted by the market, but if what's happening is that all the ones from a second rank of colleges are simply not being considered as liberal arts, then that kind of misrepresents what's going on.
There isn't a crisis of unemployed liberal arts majors in America or the world, there is a reason for that. Of course there are a lot of people that have convinced themselves that there is such a crisis!
I disagree in that many of the other topics have a real academic history and tradition, involve the expression of genuinely important ideas. Being immersed in that for years has value: in the facts learned, the overall experience, and an appreciation for aspects of the world that you might not have understood or appreciated before.
The fact that that arts degrees often have a very good return on investment /might/ be because they are a waste of time and irrelevant but it seems like the preponderance of evidence indicates that they are not a complete waste of time. https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/collegeroi/
Pushing students towards STEM and trade schools is probably not a good idea, creating markets that actually work properly and then letting the students sort all that out for themselves seems like a better way.