4 ms·

We should stop invoking "the market" as some sort of almighty deity who is always right. Sometimes what "the market" does is fine, sometimes it is not.

• mc32 3y ago
  That’s not what poster is claiming. Poster is claiming Higher Ed provides majors that are in demand by students, be the majors useful to gain employment or not.
• adamisom 3y ago
  It's just shorthand for something like "what people (show they) want". In the past, college-degree holders were scarce, so a history degree had "economic" value. It's not that the past valued the humanities more. It's just that good jobs were a thinner slice of society and tended to be filled by the also-thin ranks of degree holders.
  • ghaff 3y ago
    Of course, plenty of people who get history majors do perfectly well professionally. Many of us have mostly worked in things only tangentially related to our undergraduate major.
• ghaff 3y ago
  I'm not judging it as a good or bad result. I'm just describing a system whereby a student in the US can study pretty much anything they want that's offered by the schools that have admitted them and that they're able to pay for. Individual schools may also require, for example, taking some number of liberal arts courses even if you're in a technical major and that's part of the bargain you sign up for. But, unsurprisingly, courses are different than they were 100 years ago in general mostly because there's less demand for certain things such as fluency in Latin and ancient Greek and more for majors that companies are actively seeking. (Although there are still Classics majors.)