The Feel Good Major

As an American you should pick a major that will keep you gainfully employed or even get you a job. I would personally like to know if there is a major that offers this. Sure, healthcare seems to the hot pick right now. But that is assuming that people will be able to afford to healthcare in the future. That seems cynical to say, but really, if healthcare cost keep rising faster than the rate of inflation something is going to bust.

So, what looks hot right now, might mean those people with smart degrees looking for a job when the next bubble hits.

Megan McArdle has a piece in the Atlantic about the Occupy Wall Street protest, and she mentions the people graduating with a "fun degree" are now taking part in these protest. She discovered this by spending a lot of her own time looking at the Occupy Wall Street website.

Yes, some people with fun degrees do graduate with a lot of debt and no real job prospects. Ms. McArdle graduated with a "fun degree," but she also went on to get her MBA, and her allegences are strongly tied to business, so her arguement always takes a pro-business bias. But in her piece she also fails to mention that a lot of college students are graduating with a lot of debt because college keeps getting more expensive.

Maybe people shouldn't be allowed to get degrees if they can't afford them, because in a free country free people might pick majors they like or feel are the right fit for them. Maybe those degrees the business class think won't yield a job should be minors, instead of majors, but who is to say that those fun degrees might lead to those fun degree holders doing well in a MBA program or law school program. .

The important thing is to remember is this recession is unlike any other recession, because we know what caused it, but yet nothing concrete was done to fix it so it doesn't happen again. The Dodd-Frank bill isn't strong enough to fix the problem. So, voters should be mad. Nothing is being done to fix the problem, or so they feel and they making their voices heard.

What is really discouraging about the Occupy Wall Street protest is that their doesn't seem to be an honest debate on how to fix what ails our country.  The media seems confused that Americans would be made about being unemployed for so long, and both political parties seem willing to wait for the next election to do anything to help. A side can cry "class warfare," but people are waking and discovering "trickle down economics" really means the rich get richer.