Review of “Major Trade-Offs: The Surprising Truths About College Majors and Entry-Level Jobs”

We are constantly told that the humanities (and, to some extent, the social sciences) are dying; sometimes these pronouncements are met with celebration. Who needs those woke navel-gazing disciplines anyway? Students should move over to more “practical” majors such as engineering and computer science. Even amidst an accumulating mass of stories reporting how AI has eviscerated many good jobs in these “hard/real” sciences, the media continues to report on, and public officials continue to decry “useless” majors such as English and sociology. Well, Corey Moss-Pech has news for them. Turns out, there is little connection between what skills students learn in school and what they do at work, at least in their first jobs. More than that, though, the practical skills students learn in the liberal arts turn out to be more useful than any of those skills learned in their more “practical” courses. Liberal arts students may find it more difficult to find jobs when they graduate, and those jobs may pay less, but it is not because they have less valuable skills. Something else is going on.