I posted this on another thread on a similar topic today. The story of the young lady who is in high demand as a petroleum engineer is contrasted with the post of another freeper who notes that years ago someone graduating with a degree in petroleum engineering could not get a job in his field because economic conditions were different. Sometimes kids pick one field to major in because market research at the time they’re freshmen indicates that that major will lead to a great job. Then conditions change.
The current crop of unemployed graduates may be unemployed because they studied history or Ethnic Women’s Literature, but they might just have signed up for something useful four or five years ago, only to see that the world changed abruptly when they were two or three years into a program. Four years ago it looked like a business degree would be valuable, but the Great Crash terminated that idea. In the last two years a lot of kids were told they could get jobs as medical coders, and they invested in coding courses, but now the field is overrun and they can’t get jobs.
So don’t be too hard on them; they’re not all Occupy morons.
There is never a good time to study literature in college. That is a hobby not a career.