People always trot out this canard but you should look at how few actual degrees get awarded. cultural gender studies only produces about 15,000 degrees[1] compared to nearly 42,000 for Computer Science [2].
The problem here really isn't unmarketable degrees. It's low wage jobs that require college-educated workers.
Also - in my subjective opinion as someone who has been in the workforce for nearly 20 years: that Gender Studies student is going to be a better writer than the STEM major with a B.S. Too often they barely capable of professional writing. 90% of the good technical writing I see is done by less than 10% of the engineers. And the best writing I see is from the self-taught people who got a History major or something like that. Being able to produce a 100-level college paper is just table stakes.
Totally agree that liberal arts folks take an unfair beating -- the skills they develop are often more valuable than Computer Science skills, which are mostly unused. Very few of my colleagues have wielded any of the math or other skillsets that are core to Computer Science. Honestly, for 80% of developer or IT jobs, CS is just a hazing ritual to filter the weak.
I used to be the sponsor of an intern program and I'd say based on my experience is that, like anything else, ymmv with programs. One of the schools that I used to get folks from have a very good English, History, Caribbean Studies, and African Studies program, and the students are awesome. Some of the other programs have lower standards or are less mature, (or are landing zones for people who wash out of things) and the students suffer for it.
This happens for all things though. At my alma mater, the Business school was a recruiting funnel for big-5 accountants had a strict GPA requirement. So the frat boys and others would squeak out with an Economics degree. At another school, the Classics department was fossilized and core classes were solely graded on a bunch of multiple choice exams virtually unchanged for 30 years... you can imagine what type of student is attracted to that.
Are these even people solely majoring in gender studies? That seems to be the sort of degree that might work as a double-major with something more general and practical. Perhaps there may be even a handful of CS/gender studies double majors.
I have no idea what they study in this degree. But I assume it is based in part on philosophy/ethics, history and social sciences.
To me gender studies in particular seems to be an overly specific field to warrant such a high number (comparatively). I'm also very suspicious of its implementation (and I say that reluctantly as a feminist).
That said, I think there is huge value in philosophy/ethics but also in history and social sciences.
We need more smart, scientifically minded people studying these things globally and generating results, because we suffer from a severe lack of meaning and rational discourse.
To me it seems like half-baked ideology, fundamentalism, religion, cynical propaganda and tribalism are suppressing the advancement and refinement of our value systems and the resulting long-term goals of our societies.
While today's youth and intellectuals are squabbling over superficial things like gender pronouns, the powerful greedily disregard their responsibilities (at best) in the name of self interest. They're not only ignoring the consequences but actively try to discredit everything that gets in their way, even scientific fact, without repercussion!
People are still getting, murdered, mutilated and enslaved/oppressed and nature is starting to beat down hard on everyone, while the media and politics only further the divide and stir unrest by fighting over attention.
What value systems do we have today? Many base theirs still on provably toxic, incoherent and cynical ideologies like Marxism, Neo-Liberalism, Nationalism, Imperialism, Social Relativism, religion and so on. And in the middle we have a huge gaping "meh": An unreflective hodgepodge of tribalistic, after-the-fact values resulting in a pessimistic, regressive mindset: full of conservative nay-saying and hostile cancel-culture.
None of this is good enough and I feel like we are not advancing, but regressing. And none of this is solved by having more CS graduates who end up tuning the knobs on some ERP-system, analyzing customer data or building marketing websites.
[1] https://datausa.io/profile/cip/cultural-gender-studies [2] https://datausa.io/profile/cip/computer-science
The problem here really isn't unmarketable degrees. It's low wage jobs that require college-educated workers.
Also - in my subjective opinion as someone who has been in the workforce for nearly 20 years: that Gender Studies student is going to be a better writer than the STEM major with a B.S. Too often they barely capable of professional writing. 90% of the good technical writing I see is done by less than 10% of the engineers. And the best writing I see is from the self-taught people who got a History major or something like that. Being able to produce a 100-level college paper is just table stakes.