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This might be true, but for most non-humanity majors, they have a degree that signals a marketable skill and therefore they can often get a job that pays decently enough without the need to go and take a second degree to avoid working at Starbucks or something. Humanities don’t teach you skills businesses need or want. And on the art end, it’s almost anti-career skills. Nobody will ever ask you to write a screenplay or make an oil painting in an office. At least the psych degree requires researching and producing reports, often presenting findings to the public or peers.
The other negative of an artist is that quite often they don’t understand just how unlikely success is in their field and thus some will spend a decade or more “trying to make it” and keeping a low wage job that doesn’t make demands on their “art”. I know a guy who was still spending hundreds every month booking himself studio time to make cds of his music into his thirties. He’d spend time on the weekends playing gigs for free as well. Everyone knew he was wasting his life on this — he’d never actually have a career even as a local artist. But at the same time, he wasn’t moving forward in an actual career until well into his thirties.
Most of the office people in my local government and private business days had humanities degrees, I think you underestimate how little most bog standard employers care about whether the degree is humanities or not. A degree is a degree (with the exception of STEM). As long as you can signal enough that you can sit down, follow instructions for 3 or four years that is good enough.
Now that is seperate from people who think they will succeed in industries which are famously hard to break into.
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Depends on the humanities degree, doesn’t it? Like history majors are doing fine on the job market, and that’s a humanity.
Intellectually rigorous humanities study teaches skills which are valuable in the workplace (rapid assimilation of unstructured information, critical evaluation of qualitative arguments, persuasive writing). I learned to write in history class, not by writing lab reports as part of my physics degree, and definitely not from preparing for the compulsory essay questions in the capstone physics paper.
The problem is that humanities courses are the easiest to grade-inflate without it being obvious what you have done, so most students with high GPAs in humanities majors never actually engaged in intellectually rigorous humanities study. Employers will only hire humanities graduates if they are sufficiently clued in to know which are the intellectually rigorous schools and programmes. Harvard philosophy majors are as hireable for a MBB or Wall Street analyst role as the STEMlords.
Again this may be true for very high end employers but for most all they look for is a degree and they don't care how rigorous that degree was. I did recruitment for both private and government organizations, and while the civil service did care, no-one else did, including blue chip communications companies and local government. And the reason for that is they are not getting to pick from Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard grads or wherever in the first place. Your middle of the road office manager type can easily get a job with a non-intellectually rigorous humanities degree. Sure they might not get into Wall Street or quant jobs, but they were never going to. Your point only applies for the very top slice of jobs, for all the others, just need to have a degree to tick a box on the form, you will be fine with a degree in basket weaving or creative writing or musicology.
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