While the Washington Academic Internship Program is open to all juniors and seniors at The Ohio State University, most of the John Glenn Fellows are students majoring in fields at the core of the humanities and social sciences: political science, economics, history, international studies, the modern languages, and so on. Those of us inclined to celebrate the virtues of the liberal arts and sciences are used to making the case that while a more vocationally oriented curriculum might be useful in landing an entry-level job in business and industry, the liberal arts have staying power and are correlated with career advancement over the long run.
Now, unfortunately, there is evidence that this may no longer be true, if indeed it ever was. In today's Washington Post, Peter Whoriskey describes the results of a new survey by researchers at Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce. Read it and weep.
I would never give up my liberal arts degree, even though, I am still looking for a job 3 months out of college! The liberal arts expand your critical thinking, give you a more diverse education than the STEM degrees, and force you to deal with problems that cannot necessarily be fixed with equations!
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