William Klein�a story may sound familiar to his fellow graduates. After earning his bachelor�s in history from the College at Brockport, he found himself living in his parents� Buffalo home, working the same $7.25-an-hour waiter job he had in high school.
LOL.
A history degree?
What if he had earned a degree in Engineering or an Accounting Degree or Computer Science or got a full Cisco Certification?
And he is going back for a Masters in History?
He is an idiot!!!
He could then make a good living and read history on the side.
I think your comments are a bit strong. I have known history graduates who made a successful transition to the business world.
I will encourage my children to pursue STEM majors for career reasons, but the decision has to be theirs. (And if everyone graduated with a STEM degree, the wages for such graduates would fall.) I respect the subjects of history and international relations, and they can be "relevant". For example, currently a big issue for financial markets is whether countries such as Greece, Ireland, Portugual, Spain, and (in the long run) even Italy can keep the Euro as a currency. It is as much a political and cultural question as an economic one. NYT columnist Tom Friedman recently wrote a column "Can Greeks Become Germans?". To analyze the prospects of the Euro currency and European government debt, a deep knowledge of European history would be helpful.
Regarding history as a career, tenure track history professor jobs are much scarcer than the supply of history PhDs, but many gifted people love knowledge for its own sake. Weighing intellectual interests vs. financial prospects is hard and depends on one's values (which evolve over time).
