My point was that, if you're going to indulge yourself by spending 4 years studying something like Philosophy or english, be realistic and realize that there are few places out there ready to hand you a cushy job "in your field" just because you have the degree.

We've (relatively privileged Americans) gotten ourselves into a bit of trouble by telling kids that they can grow up to be whatever they want and that they should follow their dreams, along with sending most of the off to universities without a clue as to what they will study there or do when they finish.

FWIW I have almost no idea what I'm talking about. I haven't seen studies about who among my cohort of "millenials" has been affected most by long term unemployment, etc, is it really the newly minted philosophy majors? Or are these stories just gobbled up by the press and the sense that there are hordes of humanities grads working as waiters and waitresses somewhat of a myth? Likely the real story is something in the middle and more complicated.

You have to remember that Philosophy is not just Aristotle-Nietzsche-Kant-Mill. There's entire other worlds contained within the subject. I think a Philosophy degree, especially if the philosophy studied involved lots of formal logic and methods of reasoning (game theoretic decision making, fallacies, philosophy of language, other subjects that approach cognitive science) would have immense value in any field.

I think such a degree would be valuable in sales, marketing, journalism, editing, etc. Pretty much any job where clear-minded communication and analytic skills are more important than mere training.

In fact, if you accept the caveat that you will get out of many degrees what (work) you put into them, I can't think of a better general degree to get than a Philosophy degree.

You might not be learning syntaxes and compiler internals and what not, but there is a very heavy emphasis on logic and the nature thereof in philosophy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic#Logic_and_computation

Similarly the idea that a humanities degree would not lead to a wealthy lifestyle is not new either. The phase "starving artist" is not new at all. And US News and World Report and been publishing average starting salaries by degree for years.

The problem is that this isn't just the case in a bad economy, it's the case always. People that major in the humanities generally don't have a lot of job prospects..they never did.