Comment to quote a professor (Score 1) 574
To quote the chair of my old Classics department:
"A liberal arts education prepares you to fully enjoy a life it will never help you to afford". Equally apropos, "Majoring in philosophy prepares you to seek the answers to life's big questions -- like, 'do you want fries with that?'"
Personally, I find that a liberal arts education has value and is worthy of pursuit. However, unless you have a head start in life, or are prepared to suffer, you may not want to actually major in something soft, or at least not end there.
Studying literature helps you to understand that words matter and how to parse text for meaning. That's valuable if you decide to become a lawyer, but then you're making money from having studied the law, not from having read Milton. Likewise, studying history ought to help provide ample examples of decisions having long tails of consequence.
Whenever this topic comes up, I find it helpful to reference John Adams:
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
At the macro level, he's talking about the struggle for independence, followed by the struggle to build a functioning state that can support a vibrant culture. At the micro level, he's saying that a family's arch is usually begun by a struggle in one generation get their children educated with the hopes that those children will study practical arts and sciences that will get them employed. They can then, hopefully, build a fortune that would allow the third generation the opportunity to study more "frivolous" topics.
the tl;dr is that if you're the first in your family to go to college, you're probably better off not majoring in anything with the word "studies" in the title.