/lit/ - Literature

>working as a burger flipper
>not better than nothing.
What's your damage, it's better than welfare.

>>2601909
It's worse than majoring in engineering or something else that's actually useful to society.

>>2601909

yeah but you make more money if you majored in something useful like you can be a computer programmer or a doctor. when you see people who like art and they think they're really smart they aren't really because they make no money and aren't successful.

>>2601909

I PREFER "NOTHING".

NOT WORKING AT A DEPRESSING NOPLACE LIKE A "FASTFOOD ESTABLISHMENT" DOES NOT ENTAIL "WELFARE".

my friend got a job in a bank with a literature degree (albeit a cambridge literature degree). english lit still commands some respect as a staple subject, it's not like media studies or something.

I took it to supplement a course in writing. I now make a fairly significant income ghost writing. It varies from year to year, but I pull in around 30-60k. That's more than enough for a comfortable life.

>>2601912
But why is a degree's worth based on how useful to society it is?

Also, I've never met these elusive English major burger flippers

>>2601912
>Engineering
Sure, try find a job in an over saturated market.

>>2601914
I never implied not working at a fastfood joint means welfare, merely my interpretation of his term nothing.
Nothing would imply no real attributes, ergo no real ability to get a job.

>>2601918
I'd like to add that it's in £, not $.

>>2601924
>english
Sure, try to find a market where none exists.

>>2601944

Markets: teaching, publishing, paralegal, speechwriting, librarian, PR, etc...

>>2601922
Because people aren't giving you financial aid and scholarships to fuck around.

>Engineering and Mathematics

Good luck finding a job!

You either have to have a Masters or a PH.D. The market is way over-saturated with plain Bachelors at the moment.

It's the same with Business students at the moment. Large amounts of students went where the money was and now it has driven up demand for higher skilled individuals.

>>2601980
good luck i have one bitch! ahha i have no idea what this thread is about though.

>>2601950
there are more specific majors for most of those, with plenty of people already

English teacher onry. and you'd probably need some education classes and crap

not to be a jerk, but I consider reading fiction a hobby. You'd better be a cute girl if you major in English.

>>2601895
Good for personal growth, yes. But for getting a job, which we all need, not so much.

sage

>>2601980
hurr durr engineering is oversaturated

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2011/12/21/just-how-much-are-engineers-in-demand-very-much-so
/

>>2601922
>But why is a degree's worth based on how useful to society it is?

Get a load of this guy.

>not taking a major in business or economics and learning to speak chinese

>>2601922
>Also, I've never met these elusive English major burger flippers
I've never met any burger flipper. Usually the people I actually meet are the ones who work the counter and the drive through. But even then, our conversations are "Do you want your change?" Rather than "So, what did you major in?"

pic related

>>2602049
>Trying to learn a low-tier, excessively difficult and aesthetically unpleasing language like Chinese

>Implying you've reached a level of proficiency in Chinese that will facilitate business meetings or make you much of an asset to any company that hires you

>Implying Chinese businessmen don't do conduct their international business in English, like everyone else

i'm studying overseas and i'm in a teacher-training program majoring in history and english
i just got offered a job in a museum
about to make 40k a year
if i don't like it, i could become a high school teacher and make about the same
feels good man

the fact is, any and every STEM field is easily "offshored" to south and east Asian students; that is, they come to American universities to get a good education, and they end up staying in the country and working harder than you ever would.

With English/marketing/PR/journalism/etc, this is not the case. The liberal arts are a mainly black and white phenomenon.

Think of it this way. There's demand for 5,000,000 engineers in America. Universities can supply 6,000,000. Meanwhile, there's a demand for 50,000,000 lib arts majors. Universities can supply 60,000,000. Now which has the better job prospects?

>>2602068
>there's a demand for 50,000,000 lib arts majors.

This ladies and gentlemen is called being completely delusional.

>>2601918
I'm doing something similar starting next year. What kind of jobs did you get after finishing the course?

>>2602055

well this is stupid as hell. english ranked below journalism, even though journalism is useless seeing as employers hire english majors with better writing skills

This thread.

This fucking thread every day.

SHUT THE FUCK UP.

SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU DUMB CUNT.

THIS IS THE GODDAMN LITERATURE BOARD. WE DISCUSS BOOKS, NOT JOB PROSPECTS.

DIE. KILL YOURSELF. FUCKING TAKE A SWIM IN A POOL FULL OF GASOLINE AND LIGHT UP A SMOKE.

YOU ARE POISON. I HATE YOU.

I HAVE NEVER SAGED ANYONE HARDER THAN THIS.

Like STEM majors actually give a shit about improving the world or being a "useful member of society." You're in it for cold, hard cash, just like the rest of us. Don't make
me laugh.

>>2602055
>people become art, english, music, drama, etc. majors for the sake of employability
I want to reach out and slap who ever made this image. How anyone could possibly make such a massive oversight is beyond me. The only things that really belong in that tier are film and [fashion] design.

>>2602142
Wrong image.

The bar for entry to humanities majors should be a lot higher. Sure there are jobs out there for English & history majors, but less of them, and generally you have to be extremely intelligent & well-rounded to get them, e.g., a strong background in math including STATISTICS is critical for anything paying more than a public school teacher's $23k-starting, since most of those jobs require you to do research and other difficult stuff that not everyone can do (thus the high salary). Too many dumb pseudo-intellectuals get into humanities, then they wind up making "i am the 99%" posters for OWS complaining about their massive student loan debt that they couldn't possibly pay off before age 60, because they're not cut out for the work-force at the income level they'd been expecting.

[cont.]

>>2602157 - cont.
With the STEM fields on the other hand, once you can break down that initial barrier of thinking you're bad at math because the culture has told you that math is hard & only those with natural talent can do it*, the chances of succeeding at life are probably higher—ESPECIALLY for the mediocre student. There should be reeducation programs targeted toward bringing some 65% of humanities majors back into practical fields of study. It starts with forcing them to sit down and pass some basic math & science classes, to get them out of the thinking that they're bad at those subjects.

>>2602159
A lot of liberal arts programs already require that humanities majors take math and science. I just finished up my math course, and now I have to take two semesters of sciences, one with a lab.

>>2602159 - cont.
The mediocre student should be shuffled into STEM fields, because they're not smart enough to get a good job with a B.A. (likewise if they go on to get a law degree; the market is WAY THE FUCK oversaturated with law degrees); however, with a B.S. in a STEM field, they'd be more assured of actually getting a job, because they'll have SKILLS. In fact, they'll have a job that affords them FREE TIME, which can then be put to use for misc intellectual pursuits, such as, for instance, oh I don't know, pursuing a self-actualized study of English or history that you otherwise would have wasted a college education on.

*If you think you're naturally bad at math(s), then think again, asshole—Asian countries have universally high rates of math achievement. Maybe you have a bad teacher, but that's probably not it either. With all the educational advances of the past decades & constant revisions of textbooks to make it so much more flashy & engaging, ever explained better & better, steps laid out in so much detail, chances are you're just lazy and the "bad at math" thing is just an excuse afforded you by a lazy and anti-intellectual (yeah, I said it, come at me) culture.

>>2602124
Enjoy your worthless degree.

Stay mad, faggot.

>>2602157
>>2602159
>>2602164

This is all your personal opinion, none of which is backed up by fact. Fuck off, you STEM piece of shit. College students should not be forced to study anything. They are old enough to make their
own decisions. Do you want the market for graduating STEM majors to be even MORE saturated? It seems like even a basic understanding of supply vs. demand eludes you.

>>2602055
I majored in English knowing full well I was probably not going to get a job out of it.

I don't give a shit. I did English because I LIKE English.

>>2602185
>Do you want the market for graduating STEM majors to be even MORE saturated?Do you want the market for graduating STEM majors to be even MORE saturated?
STEM job markets are the ones with the most openings. Plain and simple. They are not saturated, and nowhere even close to being oversaturated. The only area you could make this claim is with low-level medical administration, not actual medicine.

>>2602196
I admire you. To some degree. I majored in philosophy for a while. Because I liked it. Then I switched to CS because I wanted to get a job. But I liked it too. Being able to create something with only a computer. And how they work is fascinating.

>>2602163
Except the math and science courses that count for lib arts credits are a fucking joke.

>>2602185
obviously it is an opinion, hence ubiquitous use of hypotheticals and phrases like "i think that..." so your discovery that it was just somebody's opinion was already obvious to everyone reading. also, the facts alluded to are well-known and widely documented enough not to require that being rigorously cited (oversaturation of law degrees, relative ease of getting a decent job w/ a STEM (which includes 2-year shit like nursing) degree vs. humanities degree, achievement gap between anglophone & asian countries in math(s))—these are all well-documented phenomena, and if you choose not to acknowledge any of them then you aren't exactly living in reality and i'm afraid that no argument could reach you. furthermore, the "STEM piece of shit" you're responding to acknowledged that english & history require *higher intelligence* than STEM fields, so i wouldn't exactly characterize that as a STEM advocate necessarily. in fact if your reading comprehension weren't so poor, then you probably would have picked up on that as an effort toward raising the bar in humanities & thus improving the reputations of degrees in those fields, in fact I'd call that being a humanities advocate (or a "humanities advocate piece of shit," if you prefer). if you think that just anyone who likes books should be able to major in english, then you're just trying to maintain the image of the english graduate working at starbucks.

>>2602055
Joke's on you pal, I'm a journalism major and I don't go to any parties nor do any drugs.

Yeah, it feels so...good, to be...r-right...

>>2602139
This. No matter how much anyone extols the personal and tangible achievements of any major, it always leads back to annual salaries, so stop acting like you're actually creative, engineers, when you know you're just going to be working out of a cookbook the rest of your life.

You have to be a fucking visionary now.