Thanks for calling a spade a spade. I haven't run across this much, but it is a stereotype: "I served, therefore I am better than you." Okay, fine. "I was smart enough not to do that, therefore I'll humor you." It's not a problem you run into in nations with conscript militaries. THE PROBLEM WITH COMM AND ENGLISH DEGREES: You're talking about a basic proficiency at, well, "basic proficiency." That's the classic argument against liberal arts degrees: they teach you no specialization, they simply refine the stuff you should be good at already. Let's take two people: Amber and Eggbert. Amber has an English degree, Eggbert has a Chemistry degree. Both of them are free-falling into an economy with no jobs and a great deal of disdain for them. Amber is well-spoken, well-read, well-groomed and well-received everywhere she goes. Eggbert is awkward, plays Starcraft, wears Wolf shirts and can fix your computer. Amber can head out into the market and get "people-facing" jobs. At her level of experience, these are likely to be retail or volunteer. Her only true path from there is management. Once she has risen to the level of site manager, she is immune from promotion until she has a graduate degree, at which point she will be judged solely on her graduate degree. Her liberal arts degree is pretty much going to top out at $40k a year. Eggbert is completely locked out of "people-facing" jobs because he sucks at it. However, he can be a lab tech. He can work in manufacturing. His ladder is from "protected entry-level" to "protected industry-specific." Without an additional degree he's still on a pathway towards specialization where his income is going to outstrip Amber's. We can presume he's not going to get better with people, and we can presume he's not going to become a snappier dresser (a cruel presumption, but functional for this discussion). Eggbert, without spending an additional $50-$150k on an advanced degree, is on a pathway into the land of $80k jobs. Now let's take Amber's sister, Angela. Angela grew up in the same household as Amber and has the same people skills. She's also a snappy dresser. Instead of a liberal arts degree, however, she pursues Chemistry like Eggbert. She has two pathways open to her: Amber's and Eggbert's. More importantly, she has access to the management track within protected industry: she can write reports, she can deliver results at meetings, and she can communicate with non-experts from other fields. Should she spring for the same MBA Amber's looking at, she'll be in technical management and six figures isn't far off. Finally, Eggbert's brother Eddie hates school because he's seen what a wreck it's made of Eggbert's social life. He rides his skateboard a lot and smokes dope. He still needs a job, though. He lucks into a retail position at Starbuck's where, through the miracle of personal application, he learns the value of showing up on time, working hard, and not sucking at his job. He's on the same management track as Amber, minus the liberal arts degree. He's a lot less polished than she is, but not so much that it's critically injuring his employability. His manager suggests he look into the management track - or hell, Eddie gets pissed off enough at his boss that he thinks he can do it. He's held up by his lack of a degree, for sure… but he's also 4 years ahead in the workforce and can crank through a diploma mill on nights and weekends. And, dollars to donuts, he's gonna spend a lot less money to end up in the exact same spot as Amber. The argument against Comm and English degrees is that they give you more polish to do the basic stuff, but the basic stuff is rarely enough. The guy who wrote the article is a tard, and with an English degree, he'd be a tard with a better command of English. With a mechanical engineering degree he'd be a tard with a $50k a year salary.
I must confess I am at a disadvantage (or perhaps a bias) here. I have had tremendous opportunities in the workforce which I acknowledge are not average. I have also used my initial work opportunities to leverage my way to even better work opportunities and so therefore have managed to kinnear* those opportunities into further opportunities which have given me a foothold in Corporate America (TM) which a person of my age is not usually afforded. But, caveats aside: I find people tend to forget the "back office" side of many jobs. For instance I work in the back office of a bank. The bigger a company, the bigger and more sprawling the "back office" is. If you aren't aware of these hidden back offices, you won't think to apply for them - and there the mystery is. These jobs are out of sight and out of mind but very real and occasionally very well-paying, certainly at least on par with the average retail role, but in general at minimum better for quality of life, and with better opportunities for advancement. You don't have to deal with customers or if you do, it's in a much more minimal role than a direct customer-facing role. You work 9 to 5 hours, which sure that might sound like 'slave labor' or 'buying out' but you know what? The hours are always stable and will never get in the way of your social life. You can get into these jobs with virtually any degree. I had a manager at a bank whose major was Etymology. My own major is (perhaps of course) in English. You all know what I do and how unrelated it is. Banks have these jobs. Big box stores have these jobs; that's what "corporate" is - the back office. Hell I just linked an article not too long ago about Target and their analytics department. Would you have ever thought Target had an analytics department? But they do. The insurance industry is another big one for this, but most places have some sort of back office where you don't have to deal with customers. You deal with more etheral, less tangible things, like say compliance. Or analytics. Or whether or not an insurance claim or a bank claim is fraud. In these situations, I assure you, your liberal degree will not top you out at $40k a year. No graduate degree is necessary, though if you have a nice company, they'll help you pay for it. I'm not saying there are jobs all over the places in these industries and again I stress that I was very lucky in getting my job - but these jobs exist. It's not all retail or specialty knowledge, especially if you can impress an interviewer with your personality, your knowledge, your ability to communicate - in other words if you can interview well. For a long time I felt I didn't deserve my job and that I brought nothing to it. You know what? They hired me anyway. Long story short I don't think it's all retail vs. specialized knowledge. I think there are jobs people forget about and jobs people don't know about, jobs that don't have minimum requirements for majors, just jobs that seem boring and unappealing. *This is a made-up word. In this context, I use it to mean something approximately like "finagle." There is a backstory here and here but I have further appropriated the word from "stealthily photographing someone" to mean "stealthily/trickily doing - anything."At her level of experience, these are likely to be retail or volunteer.
I agree with you about "stealth jobs" and that they're not a bad way to back door your way into something. Work experience is work experience. A parable if you will, however: My wife graduated magna cum laude with a degree in math. It did not do much for her. I acknowledge that she's still within that vaunted "STEM" cohort but the "M" is far and away the least useful from an undergrad standpoint. So she spent some time tutoring for Sylvan, she spent some time answering tech calls for Sierra. And, while she was busy being under-employed, she took a couple free courses at Egghead Software (back when it existed) in Microsoft Access. Up jumps one of these jobs about which you speak - back office at an insurance plan administration company. So she applies with her freshly-minted BS in Math, one of too-many applicants, even back then. She got the gig - basic data entry with a pathway towards her CPA, eventually, after a lot of time. Two months go by and a woman from another department stops by her shared cubicle. "I hear you know access." "A little," she said. "Why?" Within 24 hours she'd gone from "data entry" to "database administrator" and within 2 months she'd gone from "database administrator" to "software architect." Her new department head had let the data entry pool take the risk on vetting competent candidates and then skimmed through looking for anyone with the barest database competency. My wife's salary doubled and she went from "being on the path to being a CPA" to "being on the path to being a director." No offense meant to English or its majors - had I not had a driving and substantial need for financial independence as soon as humanly possible, I would have been one. But that drive did put me in the pathway to an elevated salary. Simply by taking "music mixing" as an elective instead of "music performance" gave me an after-school job that is most directly attributable to my current $63-an-hour-when-I-can-get it "profession." If it's remuneration you're after, there's a reason STEM tends to lead the pack.
Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. (A quote I used in my latest interview, I think, if I remember correctly.) I have advantages others don't. I can articulate well, I can present nicely - I have all those great people skills of the example-girl in your first comment. I'm smarter than your average bear. People seem to think I'm good-looking besides. Of course, I still make less than half you do ;) but my goal is 100k by the time I'm 30 and trust me, it's a reachable goal. (OKCupid, by the way, tells me I am "very ambitious." That and independence are my most exaggerated bars. It makes one wonder much less why one is single, sometimes.) I think the crux of your comment, (although not perhaps your intended point) is to learn as much as you can across as many useful fields as you can. I've taken like 12 hours of online Excel classes. Some day, maybe it'll come in handy. Maybe I should look into access instead. Maybe Python. I recognize that math and programming and logical thinking are better areas for me to sink time into than poetry if I want to move forward in my career. This, however, is why you help co-workers out. Because it helps you out a lot in the end. If you can establish yourself as a subject-matter expert in something, and let it get around the department, who knows where it will lead. At first you might be like "Ugh this is a lot of work for no recognition" but the truth of the matter is, the recognition comes. - unless you're at a shitty company.
Or, being in the right place in the right time. Those who are prepared have a better chance of being in the right place, and they tend to linger there longer. By and large, yes. And by all means, follow your bliss. If poetry really turns your crank, and you want poetry to be a big part of your life, study poetry. But if you're majoring in "college" and you're choosing majors based on workload, it'll come back to get you. My experience with college English was that it was high school English - in my case, a lot less rigorous at that. The tech writing courses we were required to take in the College of Engineering dusted the shit out of them for stringency but were still no great shakes compared to, say, Mohr's Circle. And granted - I never once applied Mohr's Circle once I was out of college, while high school english I use regularly in online forum fights. So what it comes down to, really, is are you studying stuff that you don't know in order to know it, or are you studying stuff you know in order to know it well? Proficiency goes a long way and excellence is nice, but graded on a curve. Someone with passable grammar and passable Perl will likely make it further than someone with excellent grammar and a deep and abiding loathing of Pascal. Had I learned how to program back before it was cool, hot damn the things I'd be doing now.Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
I think the crux of your comment, (although not perhaps your intended point) is to learn as much as you can across as many useful fields as you can.