
The Economic Woe of Young Liberal-Arts Majors - petethomas
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/fear-of-a-college-educated-barista/500792/?single_page=true
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thrower123
A liberal arts education is a luxury good, and should be viewed as such. It's
pretty irresponsible the way this pipe dream of college being some magical
place to follow your passion and shoot for the stars and discover yourself has
been sold to young impressionable people. Maybe you could get away with that
in the 70s when you could work summers and a few hours a week doing workstudy
and pay your tuition bills, but that dog won't hunt these days.

Get a major in something useful first, and maybe a minor in something fun if
you want. If you just want to screw around and learn whatever, you don't need
to pay 50k a year to do it, you just need to grab a library card and some
syllabuses to point you in the right directions.

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rossdavidh
One thing I notice about articles like this, is they always try to pull their
punches at the end. I think that for first-generation college students, the
risk is greater that they won't get the truth of the matter. College students
whose parents went to college are, I think, more likely to hear (in blunt,
unmistakable language) that taking on a large amount of debt for (most)
liberal arts majors, is not a good idea. First-generation college students are
more likely to believe what their professors or college administration tells
them, which is that all majors are a good idea, and thus more likely to pick a
major which digs them a deep hole (in student loan debt) without giving them
the benefit of a highly marketable degree to help get out of it.

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Buldak
I can see it working the other way. That is, parents who are not college-
educated (who are immigrants, poorer etc.) are more likely to view education
in practical terms. You need a certain level of affluence to view college as a
more purely intellectual or artistic (or recreational?) pursuit.

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bootsz
Yeah. I feel like many personal economic problems (esp. in the US) boil down
to trying to emulate the lifestyle of the upper-class while actually being
middle-class. We tend to ignore the existence of an upper class in the US but
the distinction is very real.

