Since this is an interdisciplinary major, you have some flexibility in what you focus on and which classes to take. Some typical courses for American Studies majors include American art, American popular culture, ethnicity in America, religion in America, the American wilderness and women in American society, according to The College Board. You could major in the Classics, with a starting salary of around $47,000. Or Philosophy, the Liberal Arts, Humanities, History, Sociology, English Literature, Social Science, Foreign Languages, Linguistics, Religious Studies or Art History. Or Psychology, which can certainly feel scientific, until you realize there are many schools of psychology, which don’t agree: structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism, gestalt psychology, psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology, and cognitivism, for a start. So it’s not science but ideology.

All these fields have one definitive thing in common. They all deal in Grand Abstractions. No, they don’t teach you how to build things, fix things, but it can feel really good to know you have a larger, grander concept of things than those who merely know how to fix or build real things. Right? But just how does all this have roots in the real world? The seduction of grand abstractions can be absolute. But really, in the actual world, the question remains: So What?