There are many subtleties to this trope depending on the degree that you're attempting to ridicule: English, theology, philosophy, history, fine arts, purely abstract mathematics, and other Classical intellectual subjects tend to be academically respected and prestigious but have poor job prospects, except when these courses are used as a preparation course for a vocational degree (e.g., philosophy as pre-law course). There are jobs in every arts and humanities field, but in some fields there may be a few positions as humanities professors available per year in North America and tens of thousands of graduates... which means that these people are most likely going to end up wearing a barista's apron.
Newer degrees such as media studies or cultural studies are ridiculed for both their uselessness in employability and their perceived lack of intellectual rigor. Vocational degrees tend to be the subject of ridicule mostly based on how respected and "realistic/concrete" the profession is; natural sciences, engineering, and architecture graduates are generally off limits for making fun of, but journalism and political science are fair game.
The contemporary high price of education reinforces this stereotype. There is an epidemic of graduates with tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars in student loans that cannot be repaid, deterring people from borrowing only to spend it for useless degrees. The more the tuition fees go up, the more there is a large drop
in the percentage of students going for degrees in the arts and humanities. Statistically speaking, these degrees are a lot less likely to get you a job (especially a good one) than most other ones, but is still is possible.
People nowadays view education as a form of capital investment rather than an intellectual venture, hence the rise in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), Education and Business courses, which are overtaking more and more "unnecessary" subjects. In actuality, no STEM degree is really guaranteed to get a student a job (less than 2/3 of STEM graduates stay in their field), but somehow nobody mentions that: works of fiction go on pretending that students of physics, chemistry, higher mathematics, or biology can actually find work in their fields. STEM grads often work in government or in the business sector.
Another variable contributing to the fall of humanities courses is the rise of self-studying and the Internet; one can self-learn philosophy by searching on the Internet, downloading eBooks, or living like Socrates, and one can learn English literature in a more entertaining form through ThisVeryWiki and reading blogs about literature. Indeed, discussing the Meaning of Life with your friends over a Sunday cup of tea or studying Hegelian Deconstructionnote via the media examples provided by TV Tropes may be more satisfying and cost-saving than overspending on a degree. A major in philosophy is unnecessary to become The Philosopher; after all, Socrates and Jesus were poor and didn't need cash to spread their ideas. As a result, humanities degrees, despite being academically respected and prestigious, have acquired the same public status as Conspicuous Consumption ("I have this prestigious Liberal Arts major because I'm a trust fund baby rich enough to afford it"), and expensive colleges are reserved for more important and pragmatic courses such as technology and business.
It's worth emphasizing that regardless of the level of personal enrichment or prestige someone may get from their degree, the typical reason a modern person goes to college in the first place is to make a decent living and avoid living paycheck to paycheck. Thanks to the previously mentioned necessity of student loans for anybody not lucky or smart enough to be subsidized by others or earn scholarships, former students have a hard time avoiding substantial debt, which can make even a decent job a lot less worthwhile if it takes years or even decades to pay off loans.
Of course, that's assuming that the student can find a position in the first place; many new students don't realize just how difficult it can be to find work, having been told by their parents that having a college degree was a virtual guarantee of being able to make a decent living. Such advice may have been true back in their day (1960s/1970s), when only a small percentage of people got college degrees. Today there are far more college graduates seeking jobs than there are jobs that actually require degrees, so potential employees will need to have more on their résumé than just a degree to stand out. It's not unheard of for "entry-level" jobs either to require years of practical experience or to offer salaries on par with that of a Burger Fool. Thus, any degree that doesn't offer a high chance of a substantial financial reward to offset all this risk, i.e., the humanities, is often a huge liability and could ruin a person's life.
This attitude really started to take hold with the Great Recession of 2008, which caused a lot of economic turmoil, combined with the decline of traditional media, one of the major employers of liberal arts graduates. The subsequent tech boom reinforced the notion that only STEM degrees were worthwhile.
Sometimes averted in real life, at least for people who get humanities degrees from respected schools. It's not really surprising that world-changing historical figures who spread revolutionary philosophical ideas majored in... well, philosophy. (Of course, many of the best philosophers were double-majors and many people with no formal philosophical education have made solid contributions to academic philosophy, but hey.) Many writers of fiction, however, often tend to ignore the fact that such a thing is possible and depict characters who didn't choose a highly profitable and/or business-related major as penniless losers. Astute readers/viewers of such stories may find amusement in the fact that the writer themselves could very well possess a similarly "useless" degree. Self-Deprecation perhaps?
The increasing perception of the liberal arts as useless may be in part due to the flooding of the field by students who either don't know what they want to do or who simply, and erroneously, think the humanities are a "cakewalk" to get through, so they can enjoy the partying. This makes it especially difficult (and unfair) on humanities majors who pick the field because that is what they truly enjoy, or for educational enrichment.
Another factor is perception. As noted above, nearly half of STEM degree holders don't maintain lifelong careers in STEM, but their average earnings are still very high. A big reason for this is because job recruiters who offer on-the-job training and thus have no real use for specific skills learned from colleges are still looking for the best candidates. Since STEM degrees are near universally perceived as more difficult to get than, say, English degrees, recruiters then assume that the person who majored in physics or chemistry is either more hard-working or more intelligent (or both) than the person who majored in English, and thus would make a better employee.
However there are exceptions: an example of a liberal arts degree consistently outperforming most STEM majors is Economics (yes, it is classified as liberal arts, contrary to those who assume that all majors involving money are "business degrees" and that all "liberal arts" fields are humanities). An economics bachelor's degree has similar median income at all levels of experience to a generic engineering bachelor's degree, even though very few people with economics degrees become economists. While the skills those majors learn are very useful for being informed, Economics doesn't teach many directly applicable job skills below the master's level; they get good jobs because banks and other companies respect their achievements and like to hire and train them.
Additionally, STEM programs are more specialized than non-STEM degrees; the Omnidisciplinary Scientist is in the main an Averted Trope. A chemistry major will typically know as much about coding as a computer science major knows about complex chemical reactions: very little. An electrical engineer and a civil engineer have very little overlap with each other. By contrast, the liberal arts place an emphasis on interdisciplinary studies. This can lead to the assumption that a liberal arts graduate is a Jack of All Trades, but a Master of None. Since American universities require students to take both humanities and science classes to obtain an undergraduate degree, college-educated Americans have had at least some exposure to both hard and soft sciences.
Further compounding this impression is that STEM industries tend to have quantifiable, often technical, skills and certifications available. STEM not only tends to be more "specialized" but as one's career progresses, STEM majors tend to accrue an ever growing list of skills specific for that industry. This can take the form of learning new coding languages, engineering processes, experimental protocols, or specialized software like Computer Assisted Design (CAD) tools and statistics packages. This is one of the many reasons why many STEM majors cannot find work in their own industry; an employer often does not need a chemical engineer, they require a specific kind of chemical engineer. STEM majors can point to these specific skills more easily than liberal arts majors can quantify or qualify their skills. Many STEM industries also offer some sort of license certifying particular skillsets like a Process Engineer or a Project Manager. While the humanities and liberal arts have some analogous certifications, fewer people outside the same fields know, understand, and appreciate them.
Liberal arts and humanities majors are generally disproportionately represented among student activists through much of recent history. Whether it was the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the War on Terror, or the recent events such as those surrounding the University of Missouri, comparatively few from the STEM fields were involved compared to liberal arts and humanities. After all, the latter are often the best informed about current issues and often have been presented with in-depth analysis by their professors about the "whys and hows" of events.
From an employer's perspective, you are not only employing someone of dubious worth from the arts, but a possible troublemaker and agitator as well, one who may question instructions and get sidetracked in ethics debates.note The comparatively narrow training of people with STEM degrees means, more cynically, that they might have fewer ethical qualms about what their employers might ask them to do. Effectively, the proposition is the possible employment of someone who not only has experience and skill at organizing mass action to correct perceived injustices, but also a track record of doing so.
A few notable real-life aversions:
- Classics: C. J. Cherryh, C. S. Lewis
- History: Rick Riordan
- English: Stephen King, J. R. R. Tolkien, Toni Morrison, Beverly Cleary, Margaret Atwood, Diana Wynne Jones, Patricia A. McKillip, Robin McKinley, Douglas Adams, Amy Tan, Dave Barry, Stephenie Meyer, Lou Reed
- Creative writing: Colin Meloy
- Sociology: J. Michael Straczynski (double major with psychology, minors in philosophy and literature)
- Political science: Tom Morello
