English BA/MBA works for $9.25 at Goodwill and on food stamps (unemployed, jobs)
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A degree in english isn't too brilliant but it need not be a professional death sentence.
You can always find semi-decent office jobs with that background. I have a colleague who studied literature in university. She's not using her degree directly but it did allow her to be hired here. She does all kinds of admin stuff around the office and she's a decently smart girl. I think you can become an insurance agent or underwriter too. Any degree works and you certainly make way, way more than at that warehouse job.
The woman in the story is a very poor decision maker.
Right. I have a friend who majored in English and she's in the marketing field.
If it were an absolute death wish, as implied by many posters here, the unemployment rate for this particular degree would be 100%. People make do with what they have and work their way up. Some can have very lucrative careers. Just look at Michael Eisner as one extreme example.
I'm sick of people saying an English degree is worthless. You have to make that degree work. If you don't try, then of course it'll be worthless. I don't regret my English degree or my masters. What I regret is not networking enough.
English majors are some of the smartest students in all of the soft sciences. It's along the lines of Philosophy. Studies show they have high IQs just short of STEM students. Both, Philosophy and English, have analytically driven course loads that Business majors would have a hard time in.
Had I graduated from the first school I went to, in a hard science or math field, I'd have probably been handed a very nice paying job without having to do much to get it, because it was the kind of school where all the high paying firms went to court the graduates. I'm not saying that i'd have been unqualified for such jobs. Just that they'd have been easy as pie to get. I'd certainly be making 2x as much as I am now.
Instead of graduating from one of the top 3 schools in my country, I didn't take things seriously and dropped out. I eventually went back to a lesser school and graduated with a degree in math. I'm doing alright but graduating from the top school would have been better in every single way. I'd have been handed more interesting, better paying, more international jobs and I'd have spent my time with more interesting people with better connections.
Price was not much of a concern because all schools cost more or less the same here.
Yup, hind sight is 20/20. A very close friend of mine went to a top notch engineering school, but did not major in engineering. He majored in a social science and is currently earning about $50,000 - $55,000 a year, but he has been out of college for 3.5 years now and would be earning $80,000+ by now if he majored in engineering.
English majors are some of the smartest students in all of the soft sciences. It's along the lines of Philosophy. Studies show they have high IQs just short of STEM students. Both, Philosophy and English, have analytically driven course loads that Business majors would have a hard time in.
Mind you, this forum is full of bloviated, fat old engineers that have cozy automated office jobs and nothing better to do than troll anonymous forums. They are so fat and miserable in real life that this sort of thing gives them joy (happy people don't spend their time trolling and making fun those less fortunate). This is partly why you see liberal arts degrees get hammered on forums like this. It doesn't surprise me.
Yup, hind sight is 20/20. A very close friend of mine went to a top notch engineering school, but did not major in engineering. He majored in a social science and is currently earning about $50,000 - $55,000 a year, but he has been out of college for 3.5 years now and would be earning $80,000+ by now if he majored in engineering.
Considering the average salary per capita in the US is around $30k/yr, $50k/year isn't a bad deal. And only 3.5 years out of school? I'd say your "close friend" made out pretty well.
First of all, I was under the impression that on City Data we are not allowed to quote more than two sentences of an article due to copyright infringement. I received an infraction once when I quoted four sentences. Mods should be consistent.
To address your post, OP, I don't know where the person lives (sorry, did not read the whole post), but if she cannot "make it" on her salary, then she needs to move or get a second job (or maybe a third too). From what I *DID* read she has a classic victim mentality and until she decides to lose that, she won't get anywhere.
Hasn't bought any NEW clothes for TWO WHOLE YEARS? Oh the suffering. I haven't bought new clothes for 8 or 10 years. Don't come crying to me baby. I'd love to have a job that pays that kind of money.
Mind you, this forum is full of bloviated, fat old engineers that have cozy automated office jobs and nothing better to do than troll anonymous forums. They are so fat and miserable in real life that this sort of thing gives them joy (happy people don't spend their time trolling and making fun those less fortunate). This is partly why you see liberal arts degrees get hammered on forums like this. It doesn't surprise me.
Not that you are making wild assumptions based on little to nothing, right?
Liberal arts degrees get hammered because national statistics shows them to be poor paybacks. You know...looking at facts and statistics, not random opinions?
Not that you are making wild assumptions based on little to nothing, right?
Liberal arts degrees get hammered because national statistics shows them to be poor paybacks. You know...looking at facts and statistics, not random opinions?
Poor paybacks relative to engineering/other technical degrees. Sure, yeah, nobody is debating that. That's not the issue here. The issue is that this forum is full of trolls who sit around with nothing better to do and thus come here to instigate trouble, harass and mock those whom they feel to be inferior, etc.
Nobody here is making the claim that a liberal arts grad deserves $100k right off the bat. I would even attack and refute that argument if anybody were to ever try to make it. That said, it makes absolutely no sense why so many people feel that it's necessary to kick people who may be down already. Instead of telling people how worthless the education is they just spent four years and god knows how much in tuition to attain, why not encourage ideas on how they can use it to make themselves more marketable in today's job market. Be a decent human being and help them, don't denigrate them even further.
Stop making it out to be a death sentence. After reading this forum and the hostile remarks aimed at their achievements, I can imagine some people getting extremely depressed and wanting to kill themselves. Why not? After all, you've all just gone on about how worthless they are to society and how they'll never amount to anything other than a burger flipper. Oh, on top of that you have another poster on here gleefully posting about how even those jobs are diminishing and being replaced by robots. So yeah, here's the bullet and the gun. Do you want me to load it for you, too?
And yeah, those who partake in this childish mocking and taunting are bloviated, fat pieces of excrement IMHO.
If it were an absolute death wish, as implied by many posters here, the unemployment rate for this particular degree would be 100%.
Even if the employment rate for English majors is 100%, that says nothing about whether the degree is worth it. After all, anyone can be employed if they really lower their expectations. In evaluating whether a degree is worth it, you have to look at whether the people with that background get a job they couldn't have gotten straight out of high school and also look at how much they are able to advance due to that background. If all you can get is an office job for $35k/yr with your degree giving you no special advantage in moving up in the company, then what was the point of going to college?
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Huh?
