You might understand this but I would like to believe and employer won't.
Anyways, my main point is universities should focus more on tangible skills - accounting, engineering etc and should not have random useless degrees of little value. Maybe English major is still valuable, but I personally don't see the tangible value in it - other than being an English teacher.
You don't think about things from the perspective of someone who actually owns or starts a business, you think about things as someone who is an employee and wants to promote skills that help others get employed: accountant, engineer. Something great about engineers and accountants is that they don't ask too many questions, because many have bad social skills: many of them would never, on their own, be able to run a business or make deals or do the most important things involved in managing relations between large groups of people and making sure a product and/or service is delivered to happy customers and shareholders get paid off. Therefore, they don't constitute a threat to a business owner.
A student who studies English, on the other hand, is given skills specifically to critically engage with a text in such a way that they can ask these kinds of questions about why they are doing what they are doing, why they are talking to certain people and not others, why, even, they ought to study one thing or another, why one guy runs the show and they do all the work. None of this is very helpful if you want to be a good worker bee who meets all their deadlines and collects a pay check and goes home at the end of the day and never thinks about doing anything more with their life, but, if you want to have more in the world, you need to know how to question it.
I hate to use an example, but look at Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir. He has a PhD from the Institut für Sozialforschung, also known as the Frankfurt school, which is a research center whose members feature quite prominently on the syllabus of many English classes at the university level. Not exactly the same, but his education bears a remarkable resemblance at an advanced level to what many students with undergraduate degrees in English would have. But you wouldn't know that as an engineer; you would just be some employee, entirely replaceable.
Well that's the thing, there is a tiny market for your art historian or english Phd or whatever humanities specialty. And to get english professors you need english Phds and english students, who need an english professor. there is a need albeit a small one.
the universities also fairly say "choose your major we can't choose it for you"
so if too many people go for that english degree, at best you can make them aware the job market is tiny. But it is their choice to take their shot at their passion, a hypercompetitive field, not far different than being a hollywood actor.
the issue isn't any of that, that's all fine, the issue is why does it cost a gorillion dollars to get that english BA degree.
the spirit of it all is "pure learning is purely good, let us have you learn", and so we have english majors, that's all fine spirited, the issue is somewhere along the line someone at this so-called non-profit decided it costs 9999 gorillion dollars to reimburse the educator for this degree
There are many many universities and colleges and students/parents can make decisions about the curricula they choose, Which will in turn, over time, lead those schools to focus on what the market wants. Obviously you disagree about those choices but there you go.
Yeah, I did all that too. Why would English possibly be important? My job is to write code, all that matters is how well my programs work, whatever. Then I found out in the real world that I deal with other people and a lot of my job (and life!) is explaining and convincing people, not just writing good code. So, even though I went to school to be good at programming, I can see the value in people going to school to be good at communicating.
English is the global lingua franca. It’s how we interact with and transmit information, including ideas about accounting, engineering, etc.
It’s very fair to argue about the ROI of the average undergraduate English degree given the outrageous prices that universities are charging for them. But if you cannot see the tangible value in English language expertise, I don’t really know what to tell you.
I'm not sure an English degree vs. a history degree vs. a political science degree vs. just just working on the school newspaper is super useful. But certainly fluency and the ability to communicate is.
Anyways, my main point is universities should focus more on tangible skills - accounting, engineering etc and should not have random useless degrees of little value. Maybe English major is still valuable, but I personally don't see the tangible value in it - other than being an English teacher.