With decision day ever approaching, high school seniors all across the country are fumbling to figure out where they are going to go, and more importantly, what they are going to study. The answer for many people is, of course, going into a STEM field, such as engineering, medicine, computer science, or something of the sort. Everyone knows that’s how you “get rich quickly”. Because of this, students are beginning to see getting a humanities degree as useless or a waste of time and money. However, there might be value in ignoring what everyone tells you and getting a humanities degree.
Many people’s criticism of getting a humanities job is that they often don’t translate into a specific career. But that is often untrue. “Humanities” encompasses such a wide array of subjects, that there are bound to be plenty of well paying jobs and good opportunities for those in all fields. For example, many people consider philosophy to be one of the most useless degrees, especially today. However, philosophy is one of the best prerequisites for law school, and also opens the door for one to become a professor, writer, or ethics consultant, a career with a drawing demand in the age of AI. There are plenty of careers within the greater humanities field that have both high salaries, are emotionally engaging.
With the recent rise in news being delivered to people in the form of social media, media literacy is a good skill to have. A good way to strengthen your media literacy skills is by studying history and language arts. This way, more people will better understand the rhetoric and bias coming from the news they consume. Understanding media bias also helps people to form their own educated opinions, and maybe even get politically active, especially at such an uncertain time.
Many humanities jobs are in teaching. Teachers are the backbone of our society. If we have more dedicated teachers, more students will pursue their passions and feel motivated to do so. Students need guidance from those who are considered experts in their field to help them reach the goals they might think are too ambitious to complete on their own.
Many students overlook humanities degrees simply because they think they cannot be successful. Despite this, there are so many ways students can thrive in humanities fields. We should not suppress students’ passions, but rather, foster them in order to create a more well rounded society for everyone.
