This paragraph amused me: > And while there’s often an assumption that the careers humanities graduates pursue just aren’t as good as the jobs snapped up by, s

This paragraph amused me: > And while there’s often an assumption that the careers humanities graduates pursue just aren’t as good as the jobs snapped up by, say, engineers or medics, that isn’t the case. In Australia, for example, three of the 10 fastest-growing occupations are sales assistants, clerks, and advertising, public relations and sales managers – all of which might look familiar as fields that humanities graduates tend to pursue. Sales assistants and clerks are pretty dull sounding jobs. the fact that humanities people pursue them and that they're available does not mean this is good for humanities people. This paragraph was similarly dumb > We also know that as more women move into a field, the field’s overall earnings go down. Given that, is it any wonder that English majors, seven in 10 of whom are women, tend to make less than engineers, eight in 10 of whom are men? Female engineers make more than male humanities on average, according to the charts they linked to. It's definitely not a gender problem. I've never bought the arguments for liberal arts. STEM degrees require plenty of critical thinking, argument formation, and learning to work with others. That's not to say you won't learn these things in humanities, but they're not special. They're a basic part of learning almost any subject that isn't rote memorization. The article points out that you can make a humanities degree work, but I'm not convinced this is a meaningful way to look at it. What fraction of successful humanities majors should attribute their success to the fact that their degree was in humanities? Maybe just being a reasonably intelligent person with a college degree in anything is enough to be a successful person. The article talks about salaries too. Overall humanities majors make less, but for some jobs they make more. That's probably not a good way to think about it either. Of course people who study pre-law are, on average, going to make less doing law. The law firms fill out their lowest positions from the masses of pre-law students. Taking an alternate path into something means you're more likely to be doing something special or having connections to a good gig. For the most part, I don't see your undergrad major driving a significant portion of your capabilities, regardless of what it is. Humanities doesn't have an obvious job market they signal baseline competence towards. That doesn't make them bad, but it also doesn't mean we need to create stories about why they compensate for this.