It’s also interesting that although it’s a popular target of those who insist that a college education should connect to a good job, majors in “Liberal Arts and Sciences, General Studies, and Humanities” left a scant 18,824 underemployed grads after five years. “English Language and Literature/Letters” had just 16,422 similarly underemployed. And the major with the fewest underemployed graduates, according to the report, was “Foreign Languages, Literature, and Linguistics.”
In other words, for every cliché of a barista or bartender with a liberal arts degree, there were ten with a degree in business.
It may be true that if you’re chasing a nice college-level job, studying STEM subjects is among the safest bets. But from a policy perspective, considering the actual and subsidized costs of college, colleges that churn out degrees in business and health professions may be a serious problem – pumping hundreds of thousands of underemployed graduates into the economy every year.