Posted on 05/26/2025 4:01:47 PM PDT by fwdude
Apparently, learning how to live wisely and justly is not a thing any more.
In case anyone was wondering, the “women’s studies” and “black studies” degrees are just permutations of some social science degree listed.
Good grief! I made more than that in the early 90’s with an Associates in IT.
You probably have to pick the right language to become fluent in. 40 years ago, French, German and Russian would have been heavily used in foreign diplomacy. Now, it would probably be a close tie between Spanish, Farsi and Cantonese.
There aren’t that many paying gigs as an interpreter.
> Not surprising, although I thought that foreign language majors could make a pretty good salary as interpreters. <
Supply probably way outstrips demand. A guy I know has a master’s degree in French. He’s darn near fluent, and that skill cost him a fortune in tuition.
He’s had interviews for professorships, and for professional interpreter positions. But every interviewer preferred PhD holders. So he didn’t qualify.
Now here’s the odd thing. He could have easily gotten a job teaching high school French. I told him that. But he never went for it.
Probably not so for Castilian Spanish speakers which is what you are taught in HS & college courses. The patois Spanish that spans Latin America would be more appropriate. However I doubt if there’s an actual shortage of such speakers if you look at the southwest, California and elsewhere. Perhaps the only microscopic positive of all this illegal immigration.
Never went to college,worked a career in the automotive field, a skilled job. It didn’t pay off either, but I never had a college loan to pay off.
Don’t forget that many of these end up working on Teacher’s union contracts so the low seeming amounts aren’t per “year” they are per “school year,” aka ~ nine months. Those and some others on the list are also government jobs which often offer (uncounted) benefits beyond private sector norms.
GWU’s Athletic Dept. in the 70’s was called “Dept. of Human Kinetics and Leisure Studies”. No wonder we didn’t have a football team.
Re "performing arts" is too wide a field for me to check and not going to look up the others.
But they left out some of THE most useless majors there are. I wonder why.
That should be...OVER $20,000 more than the stated salary. And that’s NOT counting pension and health care benefits that teachers get.
Also, the easiest to obtain.
Wanna make a quick return and great income for the rest of your life with high demand :study in STEM.
As a nation, we should subsidize the degrees for the areas that we need.
The liberal arts teach one how rise above the material world, as compared with the utilitarian (servile) arts, like carpentry, medicine, plumbing and law?
You really want to try to make that argument, when universities churn out one zealous, slogan spouting robot after another inculcated with lefty cant?
Give me a plumber who knows what he’s doing, who can unplug my sewer line over a know-it-all social worker lecturing on social justice and white privilege.
Trump wants to shift federal funding from Harvard to vo-tech schools. More power to him.
But government funding for such majors is NOT going to produce the best ones.
That was then. Now companies can hire cheap foreign workers with H1-B visa or outsource the IT work.
CIA and military need people with language skills.
Unfortunately, with the exception of military, intelligence agencies and State Department training, and a couple graduate programs that train for international business, that isn't at all how foreign languages are taught here.
Memorizing grammar and listening to recordings won't equip anyone to effectively converse.
When my high school offered Russian language for the first time (1968), I grabbed it.I was already in the business curriculum, fro 6th grade forward,I had a dream that The West would be doing open business in all the shops.
Some of my language classmates went on an internship at the U.N.
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