If you were an employer...

[peeplj]

Just to add my own $.02 to the mix:

Iw ould say to get a job, you need to show either

--that you already possess a skillset sufficient to do the job, or

--that you have a background which shows you are capable of acquiring the skillset needed to do the job.

If you can't already demonstrate the skillset (and just saying that you have or can learn this or that ability isn't going to convince many employers), then you need something to open the door for you, and to convince the prospective employerer that you are worth spending the time and money on to train.

That's where a degree comes in. Even more than showing a skillset, it demonstrates that you have the ability to learn, to adapt, and to aquire new skills and then perform them.

All of that said, many forms of employment are quite specific about what degree(s) they require. Applying for a job that requires a Masters of Physics if you don't actually have a Master of Physics (for instance) is a waste of your time and theirs.

Again, just my $.02, based on my own experiences.

--James

[mutepointe]

More likely somebody will think you can write an English sentence. Lots of business majors can't. Employers know it.

jim, now you've gone and got me all upset. i happen to be a business major and we had a course called business english. it was how to write a business letter. ok, you're right, most business majors can't write a letter but a whole lot of other degreed folks can't write letters either. and when everyone started doing their own typing, things got even worse. i should have started a letter collection back when i had the chance. i'm appalled at the official letters that come my way.

[Jack]

Today I got another job, this one off-campus at a local drug store as a cashier. I will work it 20 hours a week in addition to all my classes, my 2 other jobs, and volunteering at the foodbank one hour a week. I hope this counts as "experience" after I graduate, because if it doesn't, nothing does.

[Jack]

From a practical standpoint, why on earth would anybody pursue a job that is completely unrelated to their degree? Conversely, why would anybody get a degree in anything different from what you want to do for a living?

Because the job openings for me are next to nil. The number of jobs in religious studies, without being religious/theological/clerical in nature, are next to nothing and they all require PhDs. There are professors or religion and professors of sociology/history of religion. Nothing more is out there that's not religious in nature, really.

I'm not "pursuing a job that is completely unrelated to my degree." If, after graduating, I could get a job in some college's religious studies department, I'd be happy. I know that's not going to happen though. I'm going to aim for "paying my bills." That's all I'm asking for, and I know I don't deserve even that.

[awildman]

Another thing to consider is how much money you want to spend on school. I've heard of people racking up 300k in school debt and end up with 60k jobs. That's a deep hole from which to extricate oneself.

[KatieBell]

It is interesting to see the responses here. I swear California and Texas are two totally different worlds! In California, having a degree from a Christian college or a "Got God?" bumper sticker will get you blackballed from jobs and PhD programs. Here, it wouldn't be considered in the least. As a matter of fact, two of the best colleges in the area are Methodist and Catholic and graduating from them is more likely to get you a degree.

So I guess where you plan to live after graduating is something to take into account.

I am one who wanted to study religious studies as well. Like you, I did not want to go into a religious field and did not plan to get a doctorate before entering the workforce. I just enjoyed the study and wanted to do it. A religious studies undergraduate degree is practically worthless. It ranks right around a psychology undergraduate degree (which is another field I enjoy). Getting it will only meet the check box requirement of having a degree while others with more relevant degrees will have the advantage of applying their studies to their experience time. And I'm in Texas where it wouldn't be counted against me and it was still worthless. I decided to pursue religious studies as an avocation and to pay for a more useful degree. It came down to my view of college.

I didn't believe undergraduate school was going to teach me much of anything. I had to pay them, then jump through their hoops, in order to prove that I could be compliant and responsible, stick to something long-term, and communicate on some basic level in English. I wasn't about to go through all that and come out with a worthless piece of paper at the end. I can study whatever I want for free. I was paying them for that piece of paper, so I wanted to make sure it would be worth as much as possible.

Of course, that means choosing an area you have some interest in so that you can make it through and get decent grades. But it doesn't mean that area has to be something you are passionate about. You can study your passion in the library in your free time when you get a good job. If you end up flipping burgers for a lifetime trying to pay off the college debts and keep up on the house payment, you won't ever have time to study more and the four years will have been wasted. Doesn't seem like a prudent plan to me.

[Jack]

Another thing to consider is how much money you want to spend on school. I've heard of people racking up 300k in school debt and end up with 60k jobs. That's a deep hole from which to extricate oneself.

This is true. I already have tens of thousands of dollars in debt, due to medical bills. So at this point, debt doesn't scare me.

[jim stone]

Another thing to consider is how much money you want to spend on school. I've heard of people racking up 300k in school debt and end up with 60k jobs. That's a deep hole from which to extricate oneself.

Again, a graduate program that wants you will pay your tuition
and give you enough money to live. So you aren't accruing
more debt in grad school.

Student loans are not
collected by the gov
while you are in school. When you do graduate and get work there
are reasonably low monthly payments. This is doable.
I did it.

I sure wouldn't sweat the employment thing now. I graduated
with a BA in philosophy. It posed no problem in getting 'normal'
work.

Once again, Cranberry, as your workload probably already
exceeds that of grad school, why not consider it at least
as an option?

[Tyler]

Just one more from an employer's POV...
A lot of the advice that's been given is fairly good.
By all means, do what you love in college. Like Jim said, it's where you put in the work that lets employers know you're 'housebroken.'

FWIW, if I have two resumes from candidates for employment on my desk and one has a degree while the other doesn't, but they both have similar experience, I'll usually give preference to the guy with the degree.
I have found it to my benefit to hire, when I can, college graduates (or even students working towards a degree) because often this line of work requires critical thinking on the fly. College students and graduates have a higher probability of having this skill than someone who is just a H.S. grad (I won't hire a H.S. dropout, no exceptions).

Here's the rub though, cran (and I can only really speak for my situation); if I have two similarly experienced people submitting applications for a position and both candidates have degrees, I'm going to look at their degree next.
If one guy has a degree in English while the other has a degree in Religious Studies, I'm going to offer the job to the guy with the English degree (I've been presented with this kind of situation before, as our close proximity to BYU has spouted a few theology majors into the local workforce ). In the workplace we have here locally, we have a market that has many college grads working 'burger-flipper' type jobs; there are a lot of degrees out there, and when two degrees come walking through the door asking for a job, we absolutely have to look at what areas those degrees specialize in during the application process. When I hire for a position, I want the MOST qualified person for the job, and what someone in my position considers qualification to be is the combination of experience and education.
An applicant with a degree in Basket Weaving among five other similarly experienced applicants without degrees is usually the more qualified applicant, but the degree in Basket Weaving isn't going to offer much competition against a group consisting of applicants with English, Criminal Justice, Fine Arts (I just hired a guy with a BA in Fine Arts from BYU three weeks ago), Computer Science, etc.
Like I've indicated above, if I had two similarly experienced applicants and one had a Religious Studies degree, while the other had a H.S. education, the job would more than likely go to the person with the degree. I use 'likely' as there are some situations where the ammount of experience accumulated by one person is worth as much as a college degree, but those situations are rare.

Anyways, my 2c...
YMMV.

[jim stone]

More likely somebody will think you can write an English sentence. Lots of business majors can't. Employers know it.

jim, now you've gone and got me all upset. i happen to be a business major and we had a course called business english. it was how to write a business letter. ok, you're right, most business majors can't write a letter but a whole lot of other degreed folks can't write letters either. and when everyone started doing their own typing, things got even worse. i should have started a letter collection back when i had the chance. i'm appalled at the official letters that come my way.

No offense intended. I didn't mean to limit to bus majors.
The most widespread problem among graduating seniors,
in my experience, is functional illiteracy. Education majors
are also especially in trouble--not everybody, but the problem
is widespread, I believe. People in the humanities
are maybe more likely to have written something down.

At my university, writing skills degraded with time spent
at it. At another local university the graduating education
majors were given a teacher competency test, which
consisted of simple brief paragraphs about the French Revolution,
say, then multiple choice questions about what it had said.
36 out of 36 graduating seniors failed it. The test was published
in the local newspaper. There's no question the students failed
because they can't read.

Universities went big after WWII, when thousands of returning
soldiers went to school under the GI Bill. Lots of buildings
were built, lots of faculty hired. When the bubble burst around
1970, qualified students were in shorter supply
and state funding began drying up too, to maintain the jobs
and the buildings they had to
keep enrollment up. They desperately needed tuition, that is, students.
That couldn't be done at university level
standards, usually, so many institutions dumbed down.

We also went through a decade or so of open enrollment, where
anybody who graduated highschool (by then taught by products
of university education departments, protected against competency
tests by powerful unions), could go to university. When I began
teaching in 83, we lost 50 to 60 percent of our freshman
class the first year. The first exam would come back with
just the student's name on it. So lots' of people entered
universities who were virtually totally illiterate. To
survive the university had to keep them.

As standards descended, it became harder for faculty who were
trying to teach anything to do so. It's pretty hard to fail everybody.
The pressure to lower standards is hard to resist, and
it's hard enough to really teach without being despised.
Students responded with animosity to profs who tried to
teach--they felt they were being wronged. Their other teachers
didn't treat them this way! The easy path is to dumb down
with everybody else. Meanwhile a number of universities, desperate
for tuition, reduced or eliminated freshman comp courses
and foreign language requirements, pretty much putting
the last nails in the coffin.

The results can be terrible to behold. Given a take-home
exam in an upper division course
'Compare positions A and B, what are their strengths
and weaknesses. In your view ,which is better?' many
graduating seniors will submit a brief paragraph of
six or seven unintelligible non-sentences, and consider
it a job well done.

Also junior colleges, in which I have taught, are often
teaching nothing. Perhaps their vocational courses
are operating. Students coming in from a couple of years of
junior
college would often get scores like 10 out of 100
on their first university exam.

When I taught in Austria it became obviousl that Austrian
high school grads write English better than most American
college grads. If the universities could routinely turn out students
who could read and write at the level of junior high
school grads of my generation it would be
a major improvement.

This isn't everywhere, but again, it's widespread. As to the idea
that employers dealing with these consequences care
what your major is--not to worry. The product of
a small Christian college is likely to be most welcome.

[gonzo914]

Major in whatever the hell you please. A BA doesn't qualify a graduate for anything other than retail, food service, or crime, so it doesn't make much difference what it is in.

It does make a difference, however, that you have some kind of degree. My degree is in medieval history, which only qualifies me to work in retail and food service at ren fests. However, I have a very nice job now thanks to that degree because at one point in the succession of jobs that led to this one, the minimum requirements for one position consisted simply of "degree from a four-year college."

As for your resume, just put "Bachelor of Arts, Berea College, 2008" and leave off the major. No one cares.

If you want to work in a religious studies department at a university without an advanced degree, get some office management experience, even if it is basic clerical work from a temp agency, then pick a university and get a job there. Sooner or later, the office manager in the religious studies department will die, and you can apply for that job.

And for now, stay with that retail job and try not to piss anybody off with heavy-handed religiosity. If you show up for work, do your job, and don't whine or proseletyze, you'll at least have a reference.

[jim stone]

Again, it's conceivable the religious studies major will
be a disadvantage somewhere somehow, but you just
need a job, not every job. Any major might be
a liablility somehow.

And isn't it possible that the employer
will like the major
because she is deeply religious herself or
powerfully interested? Not unthinkable that the major
will somewhere somehow help.

As Gonzo says, typically they just want somebody
housebroken. Coming from Berea you will
probably have a leg up on a lot of other
graduates from other places.

You know you get into the workforce and you start
moving up. You do well at your job and you find a
better job....And so it goes. I've done most everything.
Not to worry.

[Flyingcursor]

I swear California and Texas are two totally different worlds!

That's the understatement of the year

[Jack]

(I won't hire a H.S. dropout, no exceptions).

Not even if it's Cher?

I wonder why not. If you have a high school drop out with 20, 30, 40 years of good experience verses a brand new college grad with no experience, you pick the college grad?

[Jack]

I swear California and Texas are two totally different worlds!

That's the understatement of the year

California and Texas are both geographically large desert-type states with large populations that border Mexico and are each extremely influential politically (on the federal level) due to their large number of representatives. I'm sure there are more similarities that I'm not thinking of.