I graduated from a top 100 university with a degree in social sciences, and I couldn’t land any job. I started searching for something relevant to my field, hoping to find a position in an NGO. But eventually, I ended up pursuing something completely unrelated, though still challenging.
What frustrates me even more is that even my friends who graduated from Ivy League schools like Harvard or Oxbridge are struggling to find jobs.
Non-technical courses often feel like they’re doing nothing for us. So why do universities continue to offer them, charging us a massive amount of money for something that seems almost useless in the job market?
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Universities are in a decades long transition from being a place of knowledge/learning to an advanced vocational program.
what do you mean by technical courses?
Anyway uni are for teaching you higher level concepts, do research and introduce you to the current state of scientifc knowledge, they are not for job training.
if you ask why do universities, especially US-based ones charge you such massive amounts of money for that? It’s because they are run for-profit and they can.
They are very useful. However, there are fewer jobs and your skillset can be more abstract when compared to a more traditional stem degree. Social sciences are important for society as a whole. For example understanding how politics impacts citizens is very important to avoid being used by politicians or other actors.
The fact that you weren’t persistent enough to find an NGO job and that badly needed services are currently underfunded and underpaid doesn’t mean that your degree was “useless”.
As it is, the assault on non-technical degree programs is advancing aggressively. Smaller public institutions are closing programs left and right as they are forced to comply with market pressures, as if education were a business rather than a public resource. The more prestigious schools you mention will likely hold out longer because they have the resources to do so.
I suppose they offer them for the same reason you decided to take them. That may be some combination of thinking the field is important, interesting, worth preserving, etc.
Why do you write this as if you didn’t choose your major with full information at hand about what your employment prospects were, given the existence of sites like Indeed? It’s not like someone forced you to study it.
There are simply too many graduates in humanities. Also those courses have a reputation of being much easier than STEM courses. If I just compare the free time I had vs. some of my friends in humanities.
Universities should make those courses more selective, turning the degree into a real accomplishment, lowering the number of graduates and boosting their opportunities in the job market as a consequence. But that will not happen, universities are incentivized to produce as many graduates as possible.
I’d say those non technical courses often develop skills that feel less obviously like “skills” but rather frameworks for thinking, and that this will actually have more staying power. Technical training is good but as folks often say, the technical skills someone might learn year one in programming, for example, may well be no longer relevant by the year someone graduates. If you only know how to pull levers but can’t step back to think critically and creatively about how to adapt to the next technical development, you’re not going to get far.
The job market blows. And of course not all humanities courses are great, just as not all technical courses are great. Good luck