as someone who's currently studying history in university after two other botched courses, that's definitely a question I've had to grapple with quite a bit. keeping in mind that my reality is particular to my country, this much is what I've put together
choosing your degree based only on your passions is worthless, because the competition for jobs in this world is rather severe and one is seldom the only person who has passions. choosing a degree based only on high-paying jobs is also worthless, because there's no instant money-printing magic spell (besides inheritance, I guess). "become a compsci major to land a lucrative IT job" sounds great on paper, but it obfuscates a huge step-in-between, where you apply yourself to learning compsci and to building yourself up as a valuable job candidate for the IT industry. that's not easy to do, and someone who feels nothing for compsci might be altogether unready to keep up with it.
the question that one should instead be asking every step of the way is,
what can I do to land a job that suits my needs and expectations of a job? that doesn't begin or end with one's choice of a degree, although it does make that choice a lot less simple than it's usually made out to be
one by one on the other questions:
- Should you follow your passion and take a subject you enjoy, or purely go to university to build a career?
people can and do attend university to learn subjects for nothing more than the joy of learning -- but usually, that's people who already have careers. the sad reality of capitalism is that, whether that means going to university for one or not, making plans to get a job is a matter of life or death for most people.
- Is the expense of university worth a degree that doesn't provide a clear career path?
there are no degrees that provide a clear career path. some may be in higher demand than others, but studying a supposedly lucrative course doesn't automatically get people into jobs; they still have to do that all by themselves.
(and sometimes, demand is in unexpected places. for example, right now, there's a shortage of history teachers in my country; that means there's an upsurge of job opportunities for history majors. can you believe it?)
- If you took a humanities/arts degree, how true has the "humanities/arts students get low-paying jobs, if any" adage been for you?
did you know that, technically, marketing is a humanities course? it's not always as clear cut as "humanities/arts is for passion, sciences is for money"; there are quite a few jobs rooted on humanities that are the exact mind-numbing white-collar shit that's usually associated with making a lot of money, and quite a few jobs rooted on sciences that might starve you.
that said, when one is grappling with that above-mentioned question of
what can I do to land a job that suits my needs and expectations of a job, that includes what one needs and expects of the pay. contrary to all manners of societal pressure, pulling a huge salary isn't the only proper way to live; if one's priority isn't making a lot of money, they may actually find more happiness at a job with a modest salary and other advantages
- Are humanities/arts degrees "less rigorous" than those in the sciences? Does that change how valuable they are?
not at all. I'd argue that a degree in the humanities can be
more challenging, since you generally can't count on anything being an objective truth. I bet physicists don't normally have to grapple with studying tens of completely different schools of thought in their field,
humanities often speak truth to power, and that's the source of much of the pressure against them. centuries ago, academics were crucial to creating the foundation of the power that changed the western status quo from monarchy to democracy; people who are currently powerful are afraid of the same thing coming for them, and their currently favoured counterstrategy is to attack the humanities by all means necessary -- oftentimes by using their own understanding of the humanities, in fact.
