what do you do with an English degree?

The conventional answer to this has always been that you can do anything with an English degree, and a recent MLA report bears that out: people follow a wide range of careers after getting their English degree. That said, some careers are more common than others. Here's the table reproduced from the report of a survey of English degree grads from 1990-1999.

 

What you can see here is that 21.4% of grads are in Education at some level (this includes teaching in non-educational institutions). I think it is reasonable to say that those grads are probably making direct use of their English degree. The next largest category is artists, editors et al (14.4%). There's a good argument for saying English is as good a preparation for such careers as any major (particularly if the English degree includes professional writing curriculum). But after that it gets a little sketchy. That's not to say that English wouldn't help you; it's just hard to say that English would be more appropriate than History or Philosophy or Comm Studies or Psychology or Economics or whatever.

In short, more than 60% of English grads end up in professions that are only tangentially related to their undergrad study. The report also notes that 46.4% received graduate degrees. It might be interesting to see how the career distributions of those with grad degress as opposed to those without, but that information isn't in the report.

I am not one to say that English degrees ought to be constructed primarily around job preparation. In fact, I think prepration for a specific career is generally not a good strategy for an undergrad major, with some exceptions (e.g. those that require certification--public school teacher, nurse, etc.). So I'm somewhat curious to know what others think of this data. What, if anything, should it tell us about our degree programs?