Your setup is false. Obama is only taking a shot at the "value" of an art history degree if your definition of "value" is how much money a typical graduate makes.

Still, you're in a position of privilege if art history is a realistic option for you. If you entered this world with the deck stacked against you, aspiring to make money in art is just about as foolhardy as thinking you're going to get a job in the corporate office. You can go tell poor kids to go right a head and take art history if it makes you feel good, but you're blowing sunshine up their ass. Obama is right about the skilled trades.

Truth is, if art is what you are passionate about, live for it on your nights and weekends and get a degree that will provide a middle class living for you and your family.

When I trade stories with car mechanics, I feel I'm with the most-levelheaded cool cats out there, even if I'm having my wallet yanked a bit. I think yahoo news recently listed them as the unhappiest profession, that's a crock. There's too many people making stuff anyway. Try think-repair, repair-think.

S.E. Cupp has an art history degree, which simultaneously proves that you can be successful with such a degree (if you're somewhat good looking, really stupid, and willing to sell your soul for a buck) and that it's a degree for lightweights.

The fact is that you can bullshit your way through an art history degree far easier than many other degrees, even other degrees in the humanities and social sciences.

An Art History degree is for the good times, the fat times of a culture. we are on the other side of the good times, the decline that ends in the end of empire.

Art is a joy to produce and sometimes interesting to see, but it is not a way to make a living wage in these times. We will rely on young people in rising countries, places where the good times are coming, to get the Art History degrees.

Oh noes. I thought Obama envisioned an America where everyone could do well, except those pesky art history majors. Well then, he needs a little education.
I think an America which support its artists and its factory workers is a good goal for all of us. I can't think of the play at ACT last year but is based on just such opposition. And actually it was the factory workers turned artists who thrived.

“The opposite of the factory worker is not the intellectual. It is the corporate office.”

That’s a rather tenuous (and unhelpful / unnecessary) statement…

I’d argue that, if the factory worker has an opposite, it is the unemployed recipient of public funds. Granted, in some situations, arguably, the factory worker and the corporate office may be perceived as each other’s enemies. That, however, does not make them opposites. In-fact, I’m hard pressed to think of a successful large scale factory operation that has no corporate office. They are, clinically speaking, systemic and complementary to each other regardless of any peripheral enmity. (If such were not the case, surely, they would have divorced from each other long ago). The factory worker, intellectual, and corporate officer are all of the same genome in that they all earn what they receive through some form of industry. (That is not to say that reasonable people do not disagree on the perceived value of their industry, and who receives too much money for it, and who receives too little money for it, and how much opportunity each had, and how fair the world is or isn’t). The unemployed recipient of public funds, however, is of an entirely different species in that it does not earn through its industry, it simply receives from those who do earn through their industry. (Again, reasonable people can disagree on if it receives too much money and/or services, or if it receives too little money and/or services, and what opportunity it has, and how fair the world is or isn’t).

Blake had it right-
“Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to endless night.”
And such is life.

Stating an empirical fact about the world should never, ever be considered a gaffe. As a liberal arts major (one of few it turns out -- fewer than one in ten recent college grads), I don't regret choosing the examined life. I would be lying, however, if I said I don't wish I'd gotten a minor or some mathy shit so I could a job with, I don't know, health insurance.

14 - what is your definition of liberal arts? I do not think it means what you think it means...

Ugh, not this argument again. Even as recently as 2010 when my 7/8 of a degree husband was looking for a job, there were a lot of positions advertised that wanted a person with a college degree -- ANY college degree. That's what those art history degrees are for.

I don't know why people act like degrees are completely interchangeable. If you're not good in math, you don't suddenly become good in math just because you're majoring in it. So there's a good chance that you'll spend a lot of money without even getting a degree out of it. And if you struggle and struggle and manage to barely eke out a BS, you still have to be able to actually DO that stuff to get jobs.

Anyway, I still think the most useless major is the business major.

@14 Put your mind at ease. Nobody cares what you minored in.