Good points, Richard. I applaud the education you're providing your students.
Community colleges offer a good education to many; and they are increasingly the only schools those of modest means can attend. They're great bargains; the calculus course I took at my local school, more than twenty years ago now, was a great bargain. Unfortunately, as legislatures' support for education decreases, even community colleges will be forced to raise tuition.
But I think English is a good major; most of the recent college grads I see could use some work on writing. I think students get a lot of that in philosophy, too. And they probably could get that in women's studies courses, too, if they were so inclined. Hard to say. English and statistics--that's what I'd recommend.
I agree on the English major. I hesitated to put the arts in, as I was a Fine Arts major, visual arts, and I never felt like my degree was wasted. English majors find work in a wide variety of places, although frequently not what they'd envisioned. You're correct about writing capabilities having dropped. I think that's because so much testing is done by scantron now. Few teachers will take the time to grade written assignments, and as grading essays is much more subjective, it's also more open to challenge. Women's and ethnic studies are actually a detriment to getting employed, as basically, they teach people to have a chip on their shoulders and file lawsuits. I've never known an employer outside of academia that hired more than one person who had majored in women's or ethnic studies.