For years, students in the arts, humanities, environmental studies and other degrees that do not lead neatly to one obvious job have been met with the same smug question — “What are you going to do with that degree?” The question pretends to be sensible, but more often serves to police ambition, curiosity and value.

It suggests that education is only worthwhile if it can be translated into a familiar salary, a clearly marketable career or a job title that impresses other people at dinner. At a moment when governments are making student support more precarious, that question feels even more insulting. It shows up when Doug Ford dismisses students with lines about “basket weaving” courses, and when the federal government claims to care about the climate, but keeps cutting the research, scientific capacity and public investment that would let people work on protecting it. 

The problem is not that too many young people are studying the wrong things. It is that we have built a political culture that wills them to be practical while shrinking the grants, institutions and public sectors that would let meaningful work exist. 

My degree is in human rights, and I would love to spend my career helping to protect and advance them, especially at a time when we are confronted with human rights crises and injustices, both close to home and around the world. But that requires governments, institutions and employers to care enough to fund the work, sustain the programs and treat labour as necessary rather than ornamental. 

The same is true for people who study the environment, work in museums or libraries, pursue writing or build careers in the arts. This is no longer just a gap between words and action. Governments are moving in the wrong direction, cutting support, weakening institutions and treating work tied to human rights, the environment, culture and public life as expendable.

This is why the lazy joke about the “useless degree” wears so thin. It turns a political failure into a personal one. Instead of asking why meaningful work has become harder to fund, sustain or even imagine, the burden is placed on students to justify their interests as if the real problem were poor choices rather than a shrinking public vision. 

Along with the discussion about jobs, it is also about what kinds of knowledge and values are treated as legitimate. The contempt for certain degrees often reflects an older worldview, one more comfortable with conformity, hierarchy and economic usefulness than with critical thinking, social change or work aimed at making public life more just and decent.

Part of what makes this rhetoric so frustrating is that it narrows education into obedience. It treats learning only as worthwhile as far as it supports the kind of order governments prefer, rather than when it supports fields and areas they gut or demonize.

Trades, healthcare, engineering — they all matter. Skilled labour keeps the country running. But it is a failure to treat them like they are the only legitimate destinations for “serious” students.

A good society needs more than what can be measured in quarterly outputs. It needs archivists, artists, conservationists, writers, librarians, advocates and researchers. It needs people who preserve memory, protect dignity, explain the world and make life richer than work alone. Education should not be limited to addressing labour shortages. It should also be building a society worth living in.

This is part of what so many people in my generation are reacting against. More and more young people understand that employers do not automatically reward loyalty, that hard work does not reliably produce stability and the distance between effort and job security keeps growing. In that environment, being told to choose a more “useful” degree feels less like advice and more like a lecture from people who have no intention to support the many kinds of work a healthy society depends on. 

What frustrates me most is how narrow the whole conversation has become. The world does not exist just for us to work. It is also about enjoying the planet we are on, preserving culture, understanding history, creating joy, asking difficult questions and imagining something better than permanent exhaustion in service of someone else’s bottom line. 

The issue is not that young people expect too much. It is that the government keeps asking them to expect less —less support, less beauty, less imagination, less hope — all in the name of economic necessity. But, a society cannot cut its way to meaning. If we want a better world, we cannot stay complacent while the things that make it worth living in are treated as dispensable.