Why There's No Such Thing As A Useless Degree
A passionate defence of those who major in their passions.
"Top 10 most useless degrees"
"Most regretted majors"
"Most jobless degrees in 2025"
I see video titles like this a lot. And not too long ago, while I was scrolling through YouTube looking for an interesting lecture recording to save (since there was no way I was watching one at 3 in the morning (yes, 3 am, it was summer vacation, sue me) I saw another one of these uncreative, yet still minorly rage inducing video titles.
“Most useless degrees”
"There's no such thing as a useless degree." I quietly sneered at the obnoxious looking man on the thumbnail. Tired of looking at his undeservingly arrogant face, I left my room to get a glass of water. This is when I started to consider why the sentiment bothered me so much;
"Useless degree"
There are a few reasons.
For starters, I knew he was probably just going spend the whole video listing off liberal Arts subjects. Art history, drama, and if course, the widely hated gender studies. These degrees may not have built in career paths, but they all contain valuable and meaningful subject matter. They teach about art, society, history, and human emotion. These things never lose their relevance to the human experience, which brings me to my second reason:
In this context, useless doesn't really mean useless. I can only assume (or hope) that youtube-man didn't actually mean "these degrees will teach you nothing" when he said useless. What (I think) he meant is, "there is not a high demand for people with these degrees in the job market", which is a different thing entirely. I've always been the kind of person who puts a lot of care into choosing the right words when expressing myself, and when other people use words inattentively and end up saying things that are different from what they mean, it irritates me. Words powerful things. They have meaning. When you use the wrong words, you convey the wrong meaning.
"Useless" is an especially powerful word. When you say a degree useless, the meaning you convey is "there is no value in the knowledge gained from an education in this subject, studying it is pointless." When what you more likely mean to say is "very few employers are looking to hire people with a degree in this subject". But why do people think this translates to uselessness? as I said before, words have meaning, so let's look at what our word of the day actually means.
Useless, as defined by the Oxford English dictionary (or, the Oxford English dictionary app on my phone- same thing) means "not fulfilling or not expected to achieve the intended purpose or desired outcome: a piece of useless knowledge we tried to pacify him but it was useless."
So, in calling a low-employment degree useless, one assumes that the "intended purpose or desired outcome" of getting a degree in a subject is to get a high paying job in that subject.
This assumption brings me to my third reason for being pissed off at some random YouTuber today:
Calling a degree useless on the bases of its employment rate or salary assumes that everybody who goes to university has the same objective (or implies that everybody should). In other words, it prescribes people priorities.
It's no big secret that certain people are expected to want certain things, usually on the bases of gender (women are expected to want a family, men are expected to want sex, etc) and of course, the one thing everyone is expected to want is money.
In a world where everything we need to survive costs money, obviously everybody wants some, but some is not the extent of what we are supposed to want. We are expected to want to be wealthy, because wealth is the ultimate marker success. If all you have is enough, you are expected to be discontent.
To be clear, I don't think there is anything with wishing you made more money, or with getting a degree for the purpose of making a lot of money. Being discontent in the face of financial instability is perfectly reasonable, especially if you work for a corporation that can afford to pay you much more.
What bothers me is the failure to even entertain the notion that getting a degree in something I'm actually passionate about, might be more valuable to me than having a variety of high paying job prospects.
Having a full time job in something you don't particularly enjoy is not something everyone can do. Some people need to care about what they do for a living in order to be content. Some people don't. This isn't a bad thing; as they say, variety is the spice of life, but when are we going to start letting people pursue their education in accordance with their own priorities without judgement? When are we going to start saying "oh that's interesting, what drew you to that?" instead of "lol, you're gonna have so much debt" in response to finding out somebody is an English major?
(Also, when are we going to stop acting like anybody with with a degree in the humanities is automatically doomed to eternal baristahood?)
When people and society devalue the humanities, it does much more than just hurt my feelings. It erodes the very spirit education; the idea that knowledge is is inherently valuable, and worth pursuing for its own sake. The idea that the process of doing or learning something is at least as valuable as the outcome. The idea that something can be both financially impractical and incredibly self fulfilling.
The loss of these ideas is obvious in modern society; it's what breeds the use of generative a.i., especially in college and university students.
I've been exited to go to university since I was twelve years old. I'm not there just yet, but I can't imagine finally getting there only to have chatgpt do all of my assignments for me, and the thing about people who do is that they have no intention of actually learning from the experience. They only go so that they can get a degree to put on their resume.
To them, employment is the one and only point of university, and when you're used to thinking like that, I can see how any degree other than the most employable one might seem pointless. But I also feel bad for those people; the ones making those presumptuous YouTube videos. Not because they have different priorities than me, but because they can't grasp the idea that loving something might be enough of a reason to study it.
That pursuing knowledge in any subject, especially one you're passionate about, could never be a useless endeavour.
People are always going to have something to say about you if you choose something that really brings you joy over something that's more likely to make you a lot of money, but personally, I think it's high time we re-popularised doing what you love.
