Article is here: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2013/01/09/Jilting-Liberal-Arts-Can-Hurt-the-US-to-a-Degree.aspx#1JGF89qQDoZHBlpe.99
This is pretty much my dilemma. I have a liberal arts degree (in philosophy) and am now about half way done with my with my masters in public administration. For those of you who don't know, the MPA is a degree aimed at teaching you how to run a government or nonprofit agency. Half of the required coursework is microeconomics and statistics based (i.e. public finance and public policy), and the rest of the required coursework is management theory and budgeting. I also have a large amount of student loan debt, and it is going to take me a long time to pay it off.
Unfortunately, the MPA degree is not particularly well regarded even in government, and by that I mean that I have yet to see a job where they would not rather have a business/finance/accounting person with the exception of being a city manager. The city manager is the top executive of a city, and yes they do get paid well, but the positions require a significant amount of experience and also have a very high turnover rate. So it is not realistic to hope to do that anytime soon if ever, and this is something few people realize when comparing this degree to other graduate degrees. They mistakenly overestimate the value of the degree based on the salaries of city managers.
I do have a rare paid internship in the field currently, but even with it, I am afraid that job prospects are not so great for me when I am finished. I guess I headed in this direction because I did want to do something important and maybe even beneficial for society while gaining a more practical skill set that would lead to a career, which is a very INFJ thing to do I think; however, I am disappointed on both counts (but still nowhere near as disappointed as I am with undergrad, which is another story). I did not sign up for the program out of idealism. I did it to have a career path, but essentially the degree wont guarantee a career path.
It does seem more and more that the world outside academia really is limited to commerce, medicine, and engineering, and even though that is not really the case, it has effectively become a self-fulfilling prophecy because people believe it to be so. There is massive potential to improve the government and nonprofit sectors (and society by extension), but I do not think that potential is going to be realized anytime soon if ever.
So I have been contemplating doing finance. What this would mean is doing some prerequisite work and some work on my own, and then either doing attempting the chartered financial analyst track (which deals with investment management), doing a masters in finance, or both. The chartered financial analyst track is really more focused than the masters degree, so I still haven't given it full consideration yet. I would take any job I could get after I finish my current one (hopefully one financially related, which might be feasible) and then work toward the professional degree probably in a couple or few years after earning money.
I don't know what I am trying to ask here. Going to college has effectively destroyed any idealism or hope I ever had for anything, and I am depressed and angry at myself for doing what I thought was good instead of what is socially acceptable because it appears that those are mutually exclusive. I switched from economics (and then sociology) to philosophy as my major because I was so sick of being forced to endure even more memorization/regurgitation based coursework. I had enough of it in high school. I gave up before I started on advanced study in philosophy, which is also another story.
Thinking about this all has been making me so miserable lately. The prospect of becoming a hermit is increasingly appealing.
