During this time, Zhang Xuefeng frequently rushed to the hot search. Recently, Zhang Xuefeng said in the live broadcast room that liberal arts are all service industries, and his radical remarks rushed to the hot search again, at that time, some parents of students in the live broadcast room said that their children's mathematics could score 140 but did not want to study science, in order to persuade the student, Zhang Xuefeng said that liberal arts are all service industries, and it can be summed up in one word: licking.
Zhang Xuefeng's remarks caused a huge controversy, and a large number of people said that liberal arts are indeed not as good as science, and liberal arts, such as majors in business administration, if their academic level is not high, it is difficult to find a good job, and most people go to jobs without thresholds such as administration and clerkship.
But there are also some people who think that Zhang Xuefeng's words are too crude and offensive to many liberal arts students. After the matter fermented, even the official media criticized Zhang Xuefeng for being a philistine, saying that these words were to cater to the market. Afterwards, Zhang Xuefeng issued two apologies in a row, saying that he was wrong, but he did not say that there was anything wrong with the service industry, and he was also a service industry.
In fact, objectively speaking, some liberal arts majors are indeed not as employable as science majors. But Zhang Xuefeng's remarks are also really radical, so let's take a look at the remarks of an expert whose views are very different from those of Zhang Xuefeng.
Documentary writer George Anders once published such a book, called "You Can Do Any Work: The Surprising Power of the "Useless" Liberal Craft", this book is like a career guide for liberal arts students, but this does not mean that liberal arts students are not easy to find a job to produce an employment guide, the original intention of this book is that liberal arts students are actually better than science students to find a job.
In his opinion, for a long time in the past, people from science and engineering have been receiving high salaries, and Chinese and American societies have attached great importance to science and engineering. However, the latest data shows that in the U.S. job market, liberal arts students now have a growing employment advantage.
From 2012 to 2016, 10.1 million new jobs were created in the United States, but only 5 percent — or about 540,000 jobs — were in computer-related fields. Even if you count all the jobs related to the Internet and computers, it's less than 10% of the total. So what are the remaining 90% of the new jobs? In fact, most of them are related to liberal arts, that is, they need to do social work.
For example, jobs like "market researchers" created 550,000 jobs, an increase of 30 percent, and are more popular than programmers. There are also things like consulting, education, entertainment, etc., which are not purely technical jobs, but they are in great demand.
In the future, the development of AI will be faster and faster, which will lead to the possibility that programmers may be unemployed, but as long as AI and real people are not 100% similar, then liberal arts students will definitely have jobs.
As the saying goes, the difference between AI and real people is that AI will not make mistakes, and not making mistakes seems to be an advantage, but this actually stifles the possibility of innovation, and AI can never surpass real people.
However, the liberal arts students mentioned above are not liberal arts students who can only memorize by rote, but those who are "high-end" liberal arts students. High-end does not mean that the liberal arts field should be divided into three, six, nine and so on, but that the useful liberal arts students are those who have a critical mind.
Speaking of which, you may be a little confused, but in fact, in simple terms, the liberal arts need to be combined with critical thinking, that is, you need to combine liberal arts knowledge with science and engineering technology. For example, curiosity + big data = market research; Empathy + Gene Sequencing = Genetic Counseling Services; Literary Creativity + Internet = Social Network Manager.
You can be a liberal arts student who knows some technology at the same time, or you can be a science and engineering student who understands the humanities and arts, in short, you can't rely on one thing to gain market favor, if you only rely on a certain skill to make a lot of money, you can only say that you are lucky, but this luck cannot always exist.
In this day and age, if you think it's enough to be good at technology and care about everything else, that's not going to work. You may wish you had a simple life, but the reality is not. Ignoring the real world is dangerous. The world belongs to those who can handle complex problems.
With the continuous development of automation technology, the barrier to entry for technology use is getting lower and lower, which makes liberal arts students more valuable. Your key skill is not just a specific piece of expertise, but your ability to "think critically". The best route is to skillfully combine liberal arts and new technologies.