Last year, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said that he believed in the value of college, but only for math-based majors, rather than the "softer stuff," like English or philosophy.
"I'm sure it's fun, but the average college graduate with a degree in something like English is going to end up working in a shoe store,"he said.
Andreessen's comments ignore the fact that you get more out of college than job-specific skills. You learn how to think critically, write well, sell ideas, and interact with people. And the statistics on humanities majors' ability to secure jobsaren't as bad as people think.
Even philosophy, one of the more cerebral and seemingly less practical majors out there, has produced some incredibly successful people. Here are some of our favorite examples.
Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina was a medieval history and philosophy major at Stanford University.
Fiorina was president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard Company from 1999 to 2005 and served as chairwoman of the board from 2000 to 2005.
In addition to her undergraduate history and philosophy degree, which she earned in 1976, she holds an MBA from the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, and an M.S. in business from MIT's Sloan School.
Activist investor Carl Icahn was a philosophy major at Princeton University.
Icahn is the chairman of Icahn Enterprises and is one of the most well-known and aggressive activist investors of our time, buying and eventually folding Trans World Airlines, and more recently trying to take over Netflix.
His philosophy thesis for his 1957 degree was titled "The Problem of Formulating an Adequate Explication of the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning." He also went to New York University's Medical School, but dropped out without graduating.
Former FDIC Chair Sheila Bair was a philosophy major at the University of Kansas.
Until last summer, Bair served as the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, having been appointed by George W. Bush in 2005. She helped prevent the financial system from collapsing in 2008. She's since written a book, "Bull by the Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself."
Bair received her B.A. in philosophy from the University of Kansas and later got a J.D. from the same school.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider