The manager of the Starbucks next door has a PhD in Caribbean Studies.

He’s a really smart dude, total waste.

I find the attitude that only STEM is worth studying (which is not coincidentally believed most fervently by STEM grads) really pernicious.

Let me restate the common argument--there's this feeling that it's useful to measure people by the good they're doing for society, and that getting a PhD doing postmodern feminist readings of Christopher Marlowe is less useful to society than getting one doing Alzheimer's research or whatever.

I'll just say that it's worth considering whether an academic discipline's contributions may be difficult to notice but in fact substantial. Some academic disciplines like history or cultural anthropology must operate more qualitatively simply because the phenomena they aim to account for admit of no other approach, with the result that their intellectual products (especially when considered from the perspective of general society) will not often be as concrete as, say, a vaccine. But it'd be premature, of course, to dismiss a discipline just because its methods do not reach our desired level of formalization and its output is intangible.

If the issue you're raising is more narrowly one of your belief that within the scope of an _individual_'s wellbeing studying some subjects will leave them worse off than others, that's obviously true in at least financial dimensions, but that doesn't make a discipline a "fake subject".

I'm not in that camp as I am a History/CS major. My dad had a PhD in English. My CS education was much less relevant to me than the History side. Love liberal arts. ;)

It's bullshit in the sense that if you're going to be a PhD, you generally want to move to industry, enter a career path where the rigor of the PhD process pays off or tenure track academia. If the academic prospects are so poor that you get a raise managing a Starbucks rather than being a contract visiting professor for 18-36 month stints, that's bullshit in my book.

I assume you do draw the line at some point, below which you would consider a discipline a fake subject. Where do you draw that line?

Problem people have with non STEM is that they almost always have so low quality, not the subjects itself.

I think a first rank classics PhD is probably worth more than an average PhD in physics. The problem is, exactly as you say: the majority of "classical scholars" these days don't even read Greek or Latin; something the average high school graduate could do in the 1800s.

The social justice disciplines which are pseudo-sciences, as illustrated in the Sokal hoax.