I was watching a video recently in which someone complained about having a bachelor’s degree and being unable to find work. A stitch appeared almost immediately with the retort that was already loading in every comment section: you did not even tell us what your major was. Both are familiar refrains. Both go viral on a regular basis. And as I was making myself an espresso the other morning, something clicked: they are both right. I have an area studies degree and I am making espresso.
Except that is not quite the confession it sounds like.
I finished my mathematics degree in 2002. My public policy doctorate in 2014. I had been working in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence for years before I ever enrolled in an East Asian Studies program. I completed that degree in 2020, as a working professional with a full career behind me, because I wanted to study something I found genuinely interesting. Not for a credential. Not for a pivot. Because I wanted to know things. The espresso is just coffee.
What I want to say to both parties in that video is this: you agreed on the wrong premise before either of you opened your mouths.
The Premise Neither Side Questioned
The person who cannot find work with a bachelor’s degree believes that college is job training and that the training was defective. The person demanding to know the major believes that college is job training and that the first person chose the wrong trade. They are having a genuine disagreement about which curriculum produces better tradespeople. Neither one is questioning whether the trade school model is the right way to think about a university education.
It is not.
Outside fields where a specific degree is a prerequisite for professional licensure, employers doing cognitively demanding work usually stop caring very much about your major after the first few years. What they care about is whether you can read carefully, reason under pressure, construct an argument from evidence, and learn what you do not know when a problem demands it. These are not job skills. They are the qualities of a better person. That is what a serious education produces. That it also tends to make you more employable is real, but it is a byproduct, not the point.
What an Area Studies Degree Produced
My capstone project in East Asian Studies applied Eastern philosophical frameworks to the ethics of autonomous vehicle decision-making. The problem is real and hard: self-driving systems will encounter situations in which a crash is unavoidable and choices must be made, in milliseconds, about how harm is distributed. Most of the people working on that problem are engineers. Most of the philosophical resources being brought to bear come from a single tradition in Western The dominant frameworks applied to these decisions draw on trolley-problem scenarios and utilitarian tradeoffs. The question I was asking was what Confucian frameworks of relational obligation, or Daoist conceptions of contextual harmony and naturalness, contribute to that conversation that the utilitarian account leaves out.
This is not an exercise in cultural flavor. It is a substantive philosophical intervention into one of the most consequential design questions in contemporary AI. It requires exactly the kind of cross-cultural understanding that an area studies program develops. An engineering degree does not teach you to ask it. A philosophy degree from a department with a Western canon orientation is unlikely to equip you to answer it. The area studies degree produced the work.
I am still waiting to hear which majors are useless.
The Right-Wing Attack and What It Costs
For years, the political right has run a sustained campaign against universities. The indictment is familiar: overpriced, ideologically captured, producing unemployable graduates with grievances instead of skills. There is a legitimate concern buried in there about the cost of higher education and the gap between credential inflation and genuine learning. That concern has been largely abandoned in favor of something less honest. Between 2015 and 2024, Republican confidence in higher education fell from 56 percent to 20 percent, according to Gallup. That is not a response to declining quality. It is the result of a decade of deliberate delegitimization.
The conclusion that follows, in policy terms, is that universities should be defunded, discredited, or replaced with vocational training. This is self-defeating in a way that almost never gets named directly. You cannot simultaneously want a competitive, knowledge-driven economy and systematically delegitimize the institutions that produce knowledge. You cannot spend a decade telling people that expertise is a form of arrogance and then be confused when the supply of expertise declines.
What has happened, in practice, is that in much of our political rhetoric, “elite” has been quietly redefined. It no longer describes the powerful or the wealthy. It describes the educated. The banker is respectable. The professor is suspect. A billionaire who dropped out of college is a folk hero. A high school teacher with a master’s degree is part of the problem. This is not an analysis of higher education. It is a cultural resentment with a policy costume on.
The person in the stitch video is not a political operative. But the “what was your major” retort lands differently after years of preparation. When we have spent a generation teaching people that humanities and social science degrees are punchlines, the punchline becomes reflexive. The sneerers did not write the joke. They inherited it.
What Education Actually Is
The defense of liberal education keeps being made on the wrong terms. It gets framed as a jobs argument: workforce development, transferable skills, economic mobility, STEM investment. These are real goods and they are not nothing. But they concede the central point before the argument begins. If the only thing you can say for a literature degree is that it makes you a more versatile hire, you have already agreed that the purpose of a degree is employment, and you are arguing about efficiency on terms the other side set.
The stronger claim, the one that is almost never made in polite policy discourse, is that education is not job training. It makes you a better person. That is the whole argument. Everything else follows from it. Last year I wrote about the 1595 imperial diploma elevating Thomas Arundell to the nobility. The document justified his status first by noting that he had devoted himself to the liberal disciplines, traveled, encountered other cultures, and formed his judgment. Not a battle. Not an estate. The cultivation of the mind as a form of honor is not a historical curiosity. It is the view that held for most of Western intellectual history, and it is the view we have spent the last several decades carefully dismantling.
As I argued recently, disciplines do not map neatly onto functions, and pretending they do produces a badly distorted picture of how intellectual work actually proceeds. My policy training does not flow directly into machine learning. It shapes how I think about what machine learning is for, who it affects, and how its consequences should be weighed. Those questions are not solved by engineering. They require people who have been trained to think about context, history, and the distribution of consequences across populations. That is not merely a STEM competency. It is an education competency.
What I Tell My Students
At some point every semester, a student asks me what they should major in if they want a good job. I give them the same answer every time: I do not know, nobody does, and that is not the question worth spending much energy on.
The question worth asking is what you find genuinely interesting. What problems make you want to understand them better? What would you still want to study if there were no credential waiting at the end? Start there. The discipline will teach you to think in ways you cannot fully anticipate in advance, which is part of what makes it work. College will not tell you what job to do. It will make you a better person. That is worth more than any credential, and it is the one thing that compounds over a lifetime.
I have a mathematics degree, an East Asian Studies degree, a doctorate in public policy, and several graduate degrees in fields that do not obviously connect to each other or to my current work. None of them maps cleanly onto a job title. All of them shaped how I approach a problem. That is the point. It has always been the point.
The espresso was excellent, by the way.