Respect for those "useless" majors

As I head into my final year at UNC, questions about my plans for the future keep cropping up.

I have said, “I’m an English major,” enough times by now to expect the response, “So are you going to teach?” No. I’ve never had any
desire to become a teacher.

When I tell them I’m not planning on going to grad school right away either, they give me a blank stare and say, “So what are you going to do?” But what they really mean is, “What else can you do?”

According to Newsweek magazine’s recent list of the “13 Most Useless College Majors,” trying to find employment with a B.A. in English is like Tennyson’s Ulysses trying to sail beyond the horizon. And if your major is remotely related to fine arts or humanities, you’re in the same boat.

Newsweek’s list ranks 13 degrees based on unemployment rate of recent and experienced graduates, earnings of those graduates and projected growth from 2010 through 2020.

With the national employment rate hovering at 8.2 percent, college grads are hungry for a means to a relatively seamless transition into the work force. Degrees in fields such as film arts (No. 3 on the list), philosophy (No. 6), English (No. 7) and history (No. 12) seem frivolous to a population driven by thrift and financial success.

The statistics are enough to make every hopeful humanities major pull an academic Sylvia Plath. Use value boils down to a distilled, impersonal assessment of monetary worth. In pursuing flashy resume boosters, we tend to neglect the cultivation of the more basic skills that are essential for any kind of success.

Every major on Newsweek’s list nurtures interpersonal communication, strong writing and creative thinking. These universally important skills tend to be undervalued precisely because they are so basic. Why spend four years of college developing things that should have been mastered before high school?

Everyone should know how to correctly construct a sentence and efficiently interact with their colleagues, but this is not the case. I’ve learned since coming to college that some of the most brilliant people are incapable of expressing themselves. Intelligence isn’t useful if it is made inaccessible by a communication barrier.

And let’s not underestimate the passion and tenacity of those who study these “useless” subjects. There’s a lot to be said for the tenderness with which a true literature lover handles a first edition of “Leaves of Grass” in Wilson Library; for the political science (No. 13) majors overseeing voter registration in the Pit, trying to amplify our generation’s political voice; for musicians (No. 11), who fill in the blanks when verbal and written communication are insufficient.

These people can have an impact that will linger long after the economy has recovered. These future Mark Twains, Alfred Hitchcocks and Walter Cronkites have the ability to create something timeless. And that should be respected, not doubted.