The Real Value of A Liberal Arts Degree

The first time I walked through the doors of Eugene Lang, I looked up at my tour guide with such envy. He was young, enthusiastic, and spoke about our school as if it were a land of many opportunities. Ten minutes into the tour – he told the group that he had no idea what he was going to do with his life.

“I never danced a day in my life before coming to this school,” he added, “now I’m majoring in it.”

When I told my father that I wanted to go to Lang his immediate reaction was, “Why not go to Yale? Or NYU.”   Well dad, after coughing up $200,000, I will be able to claim that I’m a proud graduate of The New School University and honestly, I have no idea what that means.

In the midst of my senior year at Lang, I now know exactly what my tour guide was talking about. I came to this school in hopes of becoming a writer, focusing on the concrete rules of journalism. With a semester and a half left, I’m suddenly terrified. All jokes aside, what the hell am I going to do with my life?

Today, my generation is faced with this horrifying question everyday. After paying all this money for a name-brand school, I get to walk out of here with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, but where does that get me?  According to my professors, it gets us nowhere – we’re going to be broke.  Embrace it.

In April, Newsweek published a list of the most useless college majors today – they might as well have posted a list of college majors at the New School:

1.      Fine Arts
2.      Drama and Theater Arts
3.      Film, Video, and Photographic Arts
4.      Commercial Art and Graphic Design
5.      Architecture
6.      Philosophy and Religious Studies
7.      English Literature and Language
8.      Journalism
9.      Anthropology and Archeology
10.    Hospitality Management
11.    Music
12.    History
13.    Political Science and Government

With the exception of hospitality management, all of these majors are available at the New School. So where does that leave us?  Up shit creep without a paddle.

Which brings me to my next question: Which is more useless, getting a degree in business and making millions, or using your “useless” degree to add new circles of thought into the world? Perhaps the biggest problem isn’t that we are wasting our time on useless degrees, but rather wasting our time worrying about being broke. Maybe students like us are the ones who create new ideas about the world. We are the abstract thinkers. We shed light on things that business majors can’t waste their time on. We are more than just numbers – we think outside the box.