"Worthless" College Majors

My eldest is a bright kid: 3.8 high school GPA, one correct answer short of a composite 2000 SAT, early admission into UGA, and enough AP and Dual Enrollment credits that he showed up at UGA as a second-semester sophomore. 

Double majoring and finishing in three years seemed like givens, so I gave him what seemed like the sage advice to "major in something you love, and major in something that will make you a living."  In other words, indulge the inner humanities nerd since he is the son of Lee and Alyse Jones.  But take a major in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) subject, too.

He's just past the midpoint of  his first semester in Bulldog Town, and he has decided to major in English and classics.  How could I have gone so wrong? 

Then, again, whom am I kidding?  All the college degrees in the Jones household are in English, history, and journalism.  I didn't even bother to earn a teaching certificate because I wanted to load up on undergraduate courses in philosophy and Latin, and those weren't even my majors!

The degrees and skills Alyse and I possess have kept us fed, housed, clothed, heated, and cooled for the past 24 years.  We don't live in the Country Club of the South, but it's not the ghetto, either.  My sister and I were swapping texts the other day and decided that if our mother were alive today, she'd consider us rich.  Which probably tells you a lot more about her than about us.

Look at one of those lists of "worthless" degrees whose graduates earn the lowest starting salaries, and you'll find both English and classics pretty near the top.  That has to exclude the folks who use those mad communicating and thinking skills to go to law school.

Still, I have to wonder if we've become such a technical, specialized society that people who earn a traditional liberal arts education are sentenced to a lifetime of delivering pizzas and packing Happy Meals.  If someone is smart, personable, and incidentally capable of declining the Latin noun mensa, do we really want to say he can't "leverage" his talents into a job in sales, communications, public relations, human resources, marketing, or some other profession?

Right now, the eldest says he wants to be a college professor somewhere that emphasizes teaching over the publish or perish climate.  I am immensely flattered, but I am also fully aware he's still a teen. 

The liberal arts have held up pretty well since Alcuin of York brought the trivium and quadrivium to Charlemagne's court some 1200 years ago.  For my family's sake, I hope they're good for at least another generation.