[codingdave]

Philosophy teaches logic and analysis, and teaches you to break down texts into their core points and arguments, then both support and refute them as well as apply them to other situations. It teaches you to see multiple perspectives, to compare and synthesize them, and use them in practice, whether or not you actually agree with them. Those abilities are needed in the working world, (and not just by lawyers), and absolutely could help our economy.

We can even look at my Fine Arts degree the same way. My whole career people have said it is odd for a Fine Arts major to be a coder, until I explain what that degree really taught me - to look at the existing body of work in a field, learn the techniques, and look for new and innovative ways to change those techniques. Then to create a vision of something you want to deliver, start from scratch, and build up to a final product that takes the field a step or two forward, while also effectively communicating with, and engaging, your audience.

You could draw similar parallels with any humanities degree. That process of deconstructing an entire body of work, learning the ins and out of its components, and reconstructing it into something completely new is common to all liberal arts educations. And that is why people with liberal arts degrees are often not the slightest bit concerned whether their degree and their career are a 'match'.

[lame88]

Glad to hear that - I can share my perspective too. Even given my graduate computer science degree, I only apply what I learned in a very shallow way to my work, which has generally been apps of some sort or another, web mobile etc. For example I studied a lot about operating systems that don't even come up in my projects, other than a process vs thread vs coroutine, blocking or nonblocking io. Similarly with algorithms and architecture. Of course, it's easy to shrug off what you already know as supposedly obvious, but I sure as hell never had to implement a complex algorithm and perform asymptotic analysis on it for my CRUD app, and all the concurrency and object-oriented programming stuff I learned has become more obsolete now that we have horizontal/vertical scaling, databases and cache servers handling concurrent state, and a tendency toward trivially parallelized code and event loops. What has really stuck? Discrete mathematics and deductive systems, theory of computation - abstract stuff I could not appreciate at the time and now wish I really tried at. So altogether, I feel that my CS degree helped in the short term, but on the long term, has left me only marginally advantaged over either not having a degree or having an unrelated degree, and still leaves me unsatisfied with my understanding of honestly more fulfilling subjects. And while I can pick up plenty of books and information on the engineering side, I face a much more uphill battle trying to understand concepts in economics, math, and physics, and my comprehension of creative writing, art, and philosophy is still really lackluster.