College: Making The Case For Useless Degrees - Newsweek - Education:"Ignore the grown-ups. Opt for an imaginative, if not lucrative, course of study.
During my junior year of high school, I sat near the window in English class. I wanted to be an engineer, so during most classes, I daydreamed about applying early to MIT while the class rambled on about short stories by Philip Roth. But sometime in the spring, not long after we'd finished a lesson about some strange thing called 'transcendentalism,' and started reading Shakespeare, I kicked my best friend Crary's chair.
Henry David Thoreau and Elizabethan sonnets had suddenly piqued my interest—I was fascinated, bewildered, hooked. Since his mother had been forcing books on him since he was 3 months old, Crary seemed to know everything about everything. 'Where does any of this lead?' I asked him. 'There's a major in college called comparative literature,' he said. 'They read books together like this all day long.' It sounded intriguing, but I was dumbfounded. 'What in the world would be the value in that?'
I later learned that there's actually a huge value in it. Computer science, accounting, marketing—the purpose of many majors is self-evident. They lead to well-paid jobs and clear-cut career paths. (One hopes, at least.) But comparative literature, classics, and philosophy—according to the new conventional wisdom—offer no clear trajectory. As my colleague Nancy Cook reports, many schools are even slashing liberal arts from their curriculum. It's true that studying the humanities will surely elicit snide comment from your uncle like, 'All that studying so you'll be able to ask, 'You want fries with that?' ' Tell your uncle to shove it. Majoring in the liberal arts is still the best use of your college tuition.
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