Bl. Cardinal Newman on the Educated Man's Versatility and "Usefulness"

The man who has learned to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze, who has refined his taste, and formed his judgment, and sharpened his mental vision, will not indeed at once be a lawyer, or a pleader, or an orator, or a statesman, or a physician, . . . but he will be placed in that state of intellect in which he can take up any one of the sciences or callings I have referred to, or any other for which he has a taste or special talent, with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success, to which another is a stranger. I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace to every work and occupation which it undertakes, and enables us to be more useful, and to a greater number.

Source: John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 124-126.

Bl. Newman wrote those words around 1852, based on lectures he had given. Contemporary statistics confirm their general truth. Philosophy majors score highest in the verbal and analytical sections of the GRE; score highest in the LSAT (although tied with economics majors); the third highest in the GMAT; and earn higher salaries than most non-hard science/non-mathematics degrees for mid-career salaries. A telling statistic, however, is how financially well those with degrees in the hard sciences are doing (http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2014/majors-that-pay-you-back). STEM pays because that's the primary demand of our world currently. There is much else that could be said about these trends.

But one final note is that Bl. Newman's point isn't merely about who does best at the statistical game. Newman was also responding to the need for a fully-formed human, not simply one who could make the most money or supply whatever demand the world currently was making. This aspect of the fully-formed human is why Newman's words transcend the merely fiscal success measurement, for Newman himself said that the educated man can approach any science or calling not only with success but "ease, grace, versatility." We could speculate on how a philosopher-turned-scientist might approach these technological demands.