It’s a politically-charged talking point to discuss “useless” degrees. I have a question—should we determine whether a degree is useful or useless based on how

It’s a politically-charged talking point to discuss “useless” degrees. I have a question—should we determine whether a degree is useful or useless based on how much money you can earn using the degree? My answer is no, for the following reason: degrees provide some benefits other than benefits that can be directly realized as salary. If you put universities on the hook for student financial outcomes, what you’ve created is a lever for people to dismantle humanities in universities. You can dismantle the arts, literature, sociology, history, and philosophy. Regardless of whether you think people should get degrees in those fields, I think we are better off having those fields around, and it is also students’ right to determine for themselves which fields they study. If you want to say that universities are liable for students’ choices, then you have to explain why the students are somehow absolved of personal responsibility. Were they deceived? If they were deceived, why does the legislation not target the deception itself? This out of the way, we can circle back to the complaint—that students, their parents, taxpayers, and donors are paying a lot of money for these degrees; the students are promised career opportunities afterwards; and they often end up in massive debt but without a solid career path. I think there are other ways we can approach this problem—we can look at the perverse economics that make tuition so expensive, we can provide loan structures that account for which degree you get and your projected future earnings, and we can look at ways to provide better transparency about career outcomes for different degrees. We can work on this problem without taking away students’ self-determination (they should be able to choose degrees that aren’t economically productive) and without dismantling humanities departments.