"...the idea that students should choose majors by trying to guess what the job market will reward several years later is often nuts."

The Humanities Are in Crisis

Students
are abandoning humanities majors, turning to degrees they think yield far better job prospects. But they’re wrong.

"But although it would be better if students knew the actual data about majors—or, at least, if there were some psychology-major jokes to go along with the ones about art historians—the idea that students should choose majors by trying to guess what the job market will reward several years later is often nuts. There are some consistent trends; nursing remains a solid bet for the risk averse. Other majors, though, may prove greater gambles. As humanities degrees have fallen at elite schools, degrees in computer science have climbed much more quickly than at other schools. In the top 30 universities, according to U.S. News & World Report, there are now about as many degrees awarded in computer science as in history, English, languages, philosophy, religion, area studies, and linguistics put together. Set aside fears about what this will do to cocktail conversation down at the yacht club; how will students know when the United States is precisely three years away from having the right number of Ivy League graduates who can write the quicksort algorithm on a whiteboard? Computer-science degrees have already tumbled once in response to shifts in the job market, after the dot-com crash; I wouldn’t want to promise 18-year-olds today that a computer-science degree will guarantee them jobs in 2022."