Why Philosophy is a genuinely AWESOME degree

Sometimes this is true, and philosophy is not always that bad. But have you actually read some postmodern stuff? Are you familiar with the Sokar affair (and it has been repeated since)?

Software has taken over the world and is growing exponentially. All you do in philosophy is ask questions like "What is the colour of smell."

Some starting salary statistics from
http://www.savethestudent.org/student-jobs/whats-the-expected-salary-for-your-degree.html

It would appear are only about £500 off Computer sciene subjects - yet still get to study the subject they love, and both are among the highest paying. Not bad eh? Philosophy even beats Physics

Accounting & Finance £27,149
Archaeology £21,500
Architecture £21,500
Art (creative, visual, performance) £19,000
Biology £22,950
Business Studies £24,027
Chemical Engineering £27,000
Chemistry £23,353
Civil Engineering £24,500
Classics & Ancient History £21,667
ComputerScience £27,942
Dentistry £30,132
Economics £23,604
Engineering £23,125
English £21,219
Geography £24,018
History £23,300
HR £24,333
Law £18,000
Languages (modern) £18,000
Maths £25,902
Mechanical Engineering £24,923
Media Studies £21,571
Medicine £23,813
Nursing £21,692
Pharmacology £18,500
Philosophy £27,429
Physics £26,487
Politics £20,333
Psychology £20,667
Religious Studies £24,000
Veterinary £26,000

Erm, just a quick tip: the philosophy degree doesn't pay, it is the jobs that the philosophy graduate goes into that will average out to the figures you see above. Same with Computer Science, not every CS grad goes into software or tech.

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I studied Literature in college with a heavy emphasis on philosophical and critical responses to art. I love your post, thanks for starting it. We urgently need to educate people about the the validity and the significance of subjects like philosophy but also the humanities in general.
I had a job before I graduated college and in many cases, I earned as much or more than my friends who were engineers or in other vacational fields. In some cases, I earned less but I wasn't working at Mcdonalds as many assume in caricature.

Some starting salary statistics from
http://www.savethestudent.org/student-jobs/whats-the-expected-salary-for-your-degree.html

It would appear Philosophers are only about £500 off Computer scientists - yet still get to study the subject they love, and both are among the highest paying. Not bad eh? Philosophy even beats Physics

Accounting & Finance £27,149
Archaeology £21,500
Architecture £21,500
Art (creative, visual, performance) £19,000
Biology £22,950
Business Studies £24,027
Chemical Engineering £27,000
Chemistry £23,353
Civil Engineering £24,500
Classics & Ancient History £21,667
ComputerScience £27,942
Dentistry £30,132
Economics £23,604
Engineering £23,125
English £21,219
Geography £24,018
History £23,300
HR £24,333
Law £18,000
Languages (modern) £18,000
Maths £25,902
Mechanical Engineering £24,923
Media Studies £21,571
Medicine £23,813
Nursing £21,692
Pharmacology £18,500
Philosophy £27,429
Physics £26,487
Politics £20,333
Psychology £20,667
Religious Studies £24,000
Veterinary £26,000

It's like @PrincePieMan says. The reason philosophy grads have a higher rate of employment is because there is really no specific job they go into.
Engineering grads tend to go for engineering roles. Computer Science grads tend to go for Computer Science jobs but there are no philosophy roles for philosophy grads.
So they apply for all the grads schemes (if you buy enough lottery tickets you're bound to win something).
Philosophy isn't what's valued. It's the degree itself which allows those grads to apply for those positions.
If you want to be a chemist, then do a chemistry degree. If you want to be an IB then do an IB degree.
We're just going to have to agree to disagree.

It's like @PrincePieMan says. The reason philosophy grads have a higher rate of employment is because there is really no specific job they go into.
Engineering grads tend to go for engineering roles. Computer Science grads tend to go for Computer Science jobs but there are no philosophy roles for philosophy grads.
So they apply for all the grads schemes (if you buy enough lottery tickets you're bound to win something).
Philosophy isn't what's valued. It's the degree itself which allows those grads to apply for those positions.
If you want to be a chemist, then do a chemistry degree. If you want to be an IB then do an IB degree.
We're just going to have to agree to disagree.

That's perhaps the most pitiful thing I've ever read. You're all but agreeing with my point that Philosophy equips its students intellectually, and gives them the transferrable skills to apply for many different, well paying jobs, and be successful at it, resulting in excellent earning potential. We have nothing left to disagree on, my point that Philosophy is an excellent subject Totaboth for the person and their career prospects has been proven. I think even you, who've spent hours bashing it, can see that now.

Some starting salary statistics from
http://www.savethestudent.org/student-jobs/whats-the-expected-salary-for-your-degree.html

It would appear Philosophers are only about £500 off Computer scientists - yet still get to study the subject they love, and both are among the highest paying. Not bad eh? Philosophy even beats Physics

Accounting & Finance £27,149
Archaeology £21,500
Architecture £21,500
Art (creative, visual, performance) £19,000
Biology £22,950
Business Studies £24,027
Chemical Engineering £27,000
Chemistry £23,353
Civil Engineering £24,500
Classics & Ancient History £21,667
ComputerScience £27,942
Dentistry £30,132
Economics £23,604
Engineering £23,125
English £21,219
Geography £24,018
History £23,300
HR £24,333
Law £18,000
Languages (modern) £18,000
Maths £25,902
Mechanical Engineering £24,923
Media Studies £21,571
Medicine £23,813
Nursing £21,692
Pharmacology £18,500
Philosophy £27,429
Physics £26,487
Politics £20,333
Psychology £20,667
Religious Studies £24,000
Veterinary £26,000

What you're telling people is very one sided and hugely misleading.

I'll come back to this thread later but in brief, I'm a Philosophy grad (4 years since graduation) and I'm retraining with an entirely different degree for another field.

I've researched this area for at least 5 years.

These stats that you posted come mainly from the GRB so they're not representative of the whole of the UK - only a small portion of people who gained employment via the GRB. They're completely misleading.

I advise any university applicants to look at uni stats (official stats) and read the employment stats very carefully. As I've pointed out here on TSR before, just because a university course may have a rate of, for example, 95% of grads in further study or employment does not mean at all that most of those grads are in well paid graduate jobs.

If you look at the breakdown of those 95%, often it's further broken down into something like:

40% further study
50% working
5% unemployed/unknown

Now, here's where it gets even more interesting:
Of those 50% in employment (which itself isn't a great amount), you will see a further breakdown of:

Professional role
Non-professional

With Philosophy grads, a lot of that 50% fall into the 'non-prof' category.

So what's in that category?

Bar work
Retail
Junior office roles
Cleaning
Temp work
Low-band NHS staff - care/domestic/clerical

I could go on.

So of that 95% you may only have about 25% of those graduates in a professional role.

So please don't throw out stats and imply that they're great. They need to be read carefully - either employment rates OR salaries.

Another issue I have with this thread, OP:

The point I've raised above is the case for even Russell Group unis, so how do you think the employment situation looks for Philosophy grads from Ex-polys/Non-RG?

Take a look here:

https://unistats.direct.gov.uk/Subjects/Overview/10000291FT-K00048/ReturnTo/Search

Or here for balance:

https://unistats.direct.gov.uk/Subjects/Overview/10006840FT-K0052/ReturnTo/Search

Just read through for any uni - look at the stats, study them. Look at a wide variety. Also, a great this to do is look on 'indeed' the job site and go to the 'search CVs' option and type in BA Philosophy, you'll find a lot of grads on much less than 25k+.

Overall, it is not as good as you're making out and it's not helpful to give such a strong one-sided view of Philosophy degrees.

Some people make a living after a BA Philosophy, I don't deny that. Some people do really well. But let's not make it out to be something it isn't. It's not anywhere near as secure in it's employment prospects as a vocational degree such as Medicine or Nursing or degrees such as Engineering. With a degree like Philosophy you really need to know exactly why you're doing it and get specific internships/work exp OR you need an element of luck plus relevant experience to apply for general grad schemes.

Another final point - grad jobs or not, most Philosophy grads don't do work that is in any way related to their studies (aside from transferable skills) unless they take the MA/PhD route and lecture OR do a PGCE and teach R.S/Philosophy at secondary or college level. Most Philosophy grads don't do work which requires their detailed knowledge of Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics or whatever. It's not like they need to flick through that or the Meditations on First Philosophy to do their job selling car insurance over the phone etc. So it might be lovely to study it for 3 years, but in the grand scheme of things, you could get that enjoyment by learning it via a local library/book club/Wikipedia and saving yourself at least 30k and a piece of paper that can become pretty worthless pretty quickly.

Thought I'd give this thread some balance - from a person who actually has this degree and has experienced the graduate job market (along with my peers).

That's perhaps the most pitiful thing I've ever read.

You're all but agreeing with my point that Philosophy equips its students intellectually, and gives them the transferrable skills to apply for many different, well paying jobs, and be successful at it, resulting in excellent earning potential. I think even you, who've spent hours bashing it, can see that now.

Then you clearly don't read much. If you had undertaken a STEM subject then you would've had an opportunity to read a wealth of material.



Nope. I'm completely disagreeing with you're position.
Philosophy makes no specific claims that aren't claimed by any other subject (transferable skills, critical thinking blah blah blah).
You can keeping stating it but philosophy isn't the thing that's getting these people jobs. It's the DEGREE part of that statement.
Philosophy degree, David Beckham studies degree, Paint-watching studies degree. It's the fact that they a DEGREE that helps, not that it's specifically a philosophy degree (I can keep explaining it to you but i can't understand it for you. You're on your own for that part).
If you had taken a STEM subject your critical thinking skills would've been more developed.

Er, there is no IB degree and IB falls under the realm of 'any degree will do', as does 70-80% of jobs out there. So your buying tickets analogy applies to virtually all graduates that aren't studying a degree leading to an almost guaranteed career (i.e. Nursing, Medicine, Vet Med etc).
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To add, that reasoning isn't really what I was after, I just wanted to point out that the CompSci datapoint may not represent the avg salary of someone going into software engineering or tech, considering only ~50-60% of CSers go into tech and that the diversity of roles Philosophy grads go into basically renders the specific salary avg. pointless as a measure of expected earnings potential.
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Philosophy produces a more rounded intellectual than any science subject, for reasons explained in the first two points of my original post.

As these statistics showed, Philosophy graduates from good institutions are prolific in the jobs market, probably because of the skills of analysis, logic and argumentation perfected by Philosophy. You're consistently failing to understand these points, and blindly persist in your naive 'philosphy is stupid' routine. I didn't realise science taught its students to be blind to fairly obvious truths.

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Nope. Philosophy is nothing special. Everything you claim about philosophy can be claimed by other degrees.
It's because of they have a degree they get a wide array of jobs. Not because it is specifically a philosophy degree.
You're free to be a delusional person, just don't be one of those 'climbing the clock tower with a sniper rifle' delusional person.

What other degrees combine the skills of the arts with the sciences? Go on. The only others are joint honours (perhaps economics at a pinch - but the linguistically analytical side is lacking compared to traditional humanities). So, yes, Philosophy is something special.

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Nope. Philosophy is nothing special. It doesn't combine anything with anything. It's good, if you're not concerned with earning a living but if you are, not so much.

I would've mentioned economics, I could claim Comp Sci mixes both art and science. I've seen some beautiful, simple pieces of code by Knuth that does the most amazing things.
I could claim physics and maths combine art and science in order to help understand the beauty of the universe.
I could claim Golf Management studies combines art and science. Seeing a ball fly smoothly and beautifully through the air towards the putting area using golf clubs developed by science, is so beautiful you can't help but to call it art. It has a beauty you can only see through golf management studies.

You see, I can play on words and twist things around to make those subjects more interesting than they are.