liberal arts

Does the type of degree we pick matter?
Choosing your future career is a very important step, and while you are picking your job, you have to look which profession will provide you with a good financial status. On the other hand, employment rates for new college graduates have fallen sharply in the last two years, which means to be a college graduate with a specialized degree does not mean you will have better financial status in the future.
According to Workforce Development at Rutgers University, just 56 percent of the graduates among the students of the class of 2010 found a job. In the section “many with new college degree find the job market humbling”, Catherine Rampbell discusses that only half of the specialized jobs are taken by these new graduates, which means that specialized degrees may not be worth it after all. Furthermore, she discusses that the median salary for students who graduated from four-year colleges in 2009 and 2010 was $27,000 down from $30,000.
The choice of major may not be quite as important these days, because the stats prove that young graduates who majored in certain majors were less likely to find a job requiring a college degree. Many have taken jobs that do not make use of their skills, and about half only of recent college graduates said that their first job required a college degree. Rampbell uses data showing the number of college graduates aged between 25 to 34 and working in food service, restaurants and bars has risen 17 percent. Not only is that waste of a specialized college degree, but it also displaces the less educated workers who would normally take these jobs. To follow what Mr. Sum said in Rampbell’s article, “The less schooling you had, the more likely you were to get thrown out of the labor market altogether. That is why the choice of major is not as important these days as the amount of schooling that students take.
It is clear that to be a holder for a specialized degree is not enough in this current time to get the salary students wish for or at least to pay back their loans for their education. As it is obvious that many students will need more formal education to be successful, going back to school does offer the possibility of joining the labor force when the economy is better. But it is easier to go through advancing education with less specialized degree because it gives the students more options than one field.
While some of the graduates with specialized degrees may be able to find a job, it will still be hard for them to earn more money than their predecessors. In “Job outlook for college graduates is slowly improving”, Lacey Johnson explains that about 70 percent of employers said they had no intention to increase the salary for new workers. All of that drive us to realize that getting a specialized degree from college may not provide the graduate the salary the student dreamed about, and the student maybe has to go through several jobs that require different skills to get that salary. Therefore it is going to be less hard for the students who major in liberal arts to find a job, as they do not need to have jobs that require only skills they learn from specialized degree, and they can use their liberal arts degrees to have many more options for finding jobs.