Pursuing a “Useless” Degree
文科专业又如何，特长和兴趣才是选择大学专业的关键。
AT UNIVERSITY, when I told people I was studying for a history degree, the response was almost always the same: “You want to be a teacher?” No, a journalist. “Oh. But you’re not majoring in communications?”
In the days when a university education was a privilege (特权), perhaps there wasn’t the assumption that a degree had to be a springboard (跳板) directly into a career. Those days are long gone. Today, a degree is all but a necessity for the job market, one that more than halves your chances of being unemployed. Still, that alone is no guarantee of a job — and yet we’re paying more and more for one.
Given those costs, most of us want to maximize (使最大化) that investment — and that can lead to a plug-and-play type of approach to higher education. Want to be a journalist? Study journalism, we’re told. A lawyer? Pursue pre-law. Not totally sure? Go into STEM — you can become an engineer or an IT expert. And no matter what you do, forget the humanities (人文学科), such as history, philosophy and languages.
It’s true that the humanities come with a higher risk of unemployment, but the risk is slight
er than you would imagine. For young people in the U.S., the unemployment rate of those with humanities degrees is four percent, just a little more than that of engineering degree holders. Lower salaries may not be caused by the degree itself either. The gender pay gap persists in the humanities, whose graduates are more likely to be female. Is it any wonder then that English teachers tend to make less than engineers?
According to LinkedIn’s research on the most sought-after job skills by employers for 2019, the ability to communicate and get along with people, to understand what’s on other people’s minds, and to do full-strength critical analysis were all valued and appreciated. It goes without saying that you can be an excellent communicator and critical thinker without a humanities degree. And any good university education, not just one in English or psychology, should sharpen these abilities further. But few courses of study are quite as heavy on reading, writing, speaking and critical thinking as the humanities — whether that’s by debating other students in a seminar (研讨会), writing a thesis paper (论文) or analyzing poetry.
The whole question of whether a student should choose STEM versus the humanities might be misguided to begin with. The headlines most of us see don’t help. Whatever a student pursues in university, it must be something that they are not only good at, but interested in. Even if it means pursuing a “useless” degree — like one in humanities.
（选自Sciencemag）
1. The author’s experience was cited in Paragraph 1 to show that ______.
A. a history major can work as a journalist
B. a university education is no longer enjoyed by a small group of people
C. most people have a misunderstanding of the humanities
D. most students are more money-oriented than ever before
2. According to the article, the humanities are “useless” because graduates are more likely to ______.
A. ①②
何润东的电视剧B同居. ②③
C. ③④
D. ①④一二三四五线城市名单
①春节放假注意事项 follow a narrow career path
② face a relatively high risk of unemployment
③ receive low average salaries
④ see a widening gender pay gap
3. It CANNOT be inferred from the article that humanities majors tend to do well in ______.
A. exchanging their ideas with other people
充电电池什么牌子好B. fighting off competition in the job market
C. sharing other people’s feelings
妇女节演讲稿D. thinking outside the box
4. The author’s purpose in writing the article was to ______.
A. present readers with the fact that university education has greatly changed in the past century
B. help readers properly understand the relationship between university degrees and occupations
C. remind readers to choose a major they really enjoy without caring too much about financial success
D. offer readers advice on how to stand out from the rest while looking for jobs in the future
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