[Scubabear68]

I know my wife majored in English in the 90’s, when she graduated the job prospects were very weak. She got a job in book publishing that was barely above minimum wage.

She hated it so much that she went back to school to become a physical therapist, and she had been happily doing that for decades.

So it begs the question - can you live on an English degree, and be happy in the real world?

[mrguyorama]

A lot of popular youtube content creators have english or literature degrees actually. It's almost like being really good at writing for a given audience, and being able to write stuff that will be interpreted as genuine and good is a useful tool that we really should be using more.

Any technical degree that doesn't include some sort of technical writing class is deficient IMO, and degree programs that get closer to needing to work with other people more than math should have stronger writing classes as well. So many adult americans can't read at a highschool level. It's an essential skill, and has been since society first developed written language.

[VLM]

The problem is those are pyramid fields. In OPs example almost anyone with a physiotherapy degree is doing well economically; probably not wealthy unless they open their own chain of clinics but that's going into business major territory not physio anyway.

Pyramid fields are those like pro football quarterback or famous youtube personality where a handful of people with world wide famous names make 99.9% of the income in that field, and almost everyone else working in the pyramid is at minimum wage or volunteer income status.

As a concrete example of a pyramid field, the 1900th best football player in the USA is a wealthy NFL pro ball player, but the 2000th best football player in the USA is probably selling used cars right now, maybe coaching, maybe unemployed. On the other hand essentially 100% of physio degree holders are doing physio and not getting rich but not getting poor. I'm sure the number of men willing to play pro football somewhat exceeds 2000... there's over 73000 NCAA college football players right now so I would guess that the "20K or so" who graduate this year would all love to get pro ball salaries, but the entire pyramid is less than 2K total, so even if 10% of pro players retire each year that would be 100 applicants for every paid position, everyone else can become a barista.

[akamia]

My mother and my sisters all have degrees in English. My mother had a good career as a high school English teacher and one of my sisters is doing the same. My other sister works as an editor for an educational publishing company.

Outside of education, there is a need for clear and well structured communication across every field. Copy writing/editing for marketing and sales campaigns, internal and external corporate communications, technical writing. These are all areas I've worked on with English majors.

I once spoke with a law professor who said that English majors often make the best lawyers. Their undergrad experience prepared them for the volume of reading, analysis and writing that is required to successfully complete a law degree.

[newsclues]

"So it begs the question - can you live on an English degree, and be happy in the real world?"

Yes, publishing and communications professions can be perfect for English majors.

But how many jobs vs how many applicants is the problem.

[Scubabear68]

This is more or less what I was getting at. They’re some very nice jobs at the Editor level, but damn few of them. Many people seem to have to settle for peripheral jobs (my wife was in the physical book manufacturing and shipping end) that pays about as well as Burger King.

[vitaflo]

My college roommate was an English major. Now he is a professor of English at a university and is quite happy with it.

Of course the joke always was that he was majoring in English to teach future majors in English.

[cpr]

That's the dirty secret of the whole education-leading-to-PhD system -- it's only real and useful purpose is to create more educators.

[ryandrake]

Whether happy or not, an English major would know that it "raises the question" not "begs the question."

[spaced-out]

"Begs the question" is an idiomatic phrase in English that works in that context.

[somenameforme]

Languages change, especially idioms. The objection here doesn't even make any sense, since begging the question is grammatically and logically reasonable. I accept "I could care less" with some disdain, but at least there there's a reason to oppose the change.

[branweb]

It does make sense. "Begging the question" is a term of art from philosophy meaning to assume the thing you set out to prove--e.g. God exists because the Bible says so, and the Bible must be right because it is the literal word of God.

This shift towards using the phrase to mean "raise the question" makes it harder for a writer to tag a claim as being guilty of that particular logical fallacy.

But your first point is right: language changes, and we have to accept new usages, even bad ones.

[dragonwriter]

> This shift towards using the phrase to mean "raise the question" makes it harder for a writer to tag a claim as being guilty of that particular logical fallacy.

No, it doesn't; the petitio principii fallacy sense is inherently intransitive in structure (with no direct object), the “raises the question” sense is necessarily transitive (has a direct object, specifically, the question raised). They are unambiguous (and the intransitive sense cam be rationalized as a special case of the transitibe sense where the unstated object is the justification for the original claim, which is convenient since otherwise that sense is completely opaque in terms of any relation between the constituent words in current English and the meaning of the phrase.)

[branweb]

So put more simply, what you're saying is that the reader can tell by the context. When the writer says "this begs the question", if that phrase is followed by an actual question, the reader knows the writer is using it in the newer sense. If it isn't, the reader knows the writer meant it in the older, logical fallacy sense. I understand that. My claim that it makes it harder still stands. The reader must use context to determine meaning when he didn't have to before.

[SketchySeaBeast]

I don't think pendantry is a required course anymore.

[ryandrake]

Sorry, absolutely not intending to call you in particular out. I know that correct usage, grammar, and spelling are lost causes on the Internet, but it's always more amusing when the root topics of the article are things like humanities and English majors.

[djkivi]

For all intensive purposes, "begs the question" is acceptable these days.

[ryandrake]

"Queue" the language prescriptivists! We need to be "weary" of these folks. They are just trying to "flout" their English knowledge. Don't let them "effect" you. Personally, I'm "bemused" of all this. This "could of" been a good thread, too.

[djkivi]

I expect English majors might be nonplussed by this thread.

[ryandrake]

They're keeping the discussion "on read".

[InitialLastName]

There are two questions here really:

Can you thrive in a job that requires an English degree (Writing, teaching English, publishing or the like)? Yes, but struggle is likely.

Can you, with (just a tiny bit of) creativity, find a job where the skills trained by an English degree (reading critically and writing effectively and effortlessly) are valuable? Absolutely. PR, marketing, law and many parts of the management world would suit anyone with those skills.

The engineering and science world has made everyone think that the only jobs for a degree have to closely match the degree from a subject perspective; they've forgotten that the goal of a liberal arts education is to train generalists with a set of skills that can be applied to a wide range of tasks.

[98codes]

It depends on the individual; your college degree gets you your first job after college. After that, it's experience and relationships/contacts.

I know of English and Liberal Arts majors that are doing very well in tech fields doing work other than development: program management, developer relations, customer success, sales, marketing. Some in development too, just not as many.

The difference with those folks is that all of them kept a broad understanding of where they wanted their career to go, and allowed themselves to take on broader responsibilities and deeper challenges as time went on.

[ta1243]

> So it begs the question - can you live on an English degree, and be happy in the real world?

I have two friends who did English at university. One (who started doing Geography and switched after a year) is an editor of a major (niche) national magazine. The other is a senior journalist at a national broadcaster.

How much their English degree is needed for those jobs is rather meaningless really, I suspect their tenures on the university newspaper (former) and radio station (latter) were more relevant, but they are happy.

I don't think you get an English degree with the idea that you'll use it to go into a particular career, but then degrees shouldn't be like that anyway in most subjects.