14 Alternative Uses For Your Liberal Arts Degree

While useful for understanding the world and showing off at bar trivia, liberal arts degrees are financially untenable.

But there is hope! Those factory-made, wooden, paper and fake glass diplomas your alma mater handed you before unceremoniously kicking you into the real world are incredibly useful!
Just not in any of the ways you imagined.

1. Picture Frame

Picture frames often cost upwards of $1.25 at Kohl’s! That’s like twelve minutes at your Applebee’s job. Instead, cover your Anthropology degree with a childhood photo to remind yourself what happiness felt like.

2. Menu

Liberal arts degrees are deliberately menu-sized because Scandinavian Studies departments know all roads lead to customer service. The Applebee’s menu will perfectly fit inside your old diploma. You can carry around your five-year mistake while memorizing the 527 possible permutations of the 2 for $20 meal deal!

Your manager will smile wider than Norway’s Geirangerfjord after you correctly rattle off all 12 half-price appetizers on your first day! Once you begin explaining how Norway’s Geirangerfjord was once home to Norway’s King Haakon IV their smile will immediately vanish.

You will then be deservedly fired. Do not talk about Norway’s King Haakon IV.

3. Place Mat

Your one-room efficiency apartment probably (definitely) won’t come with a table. You could build one, but you never learned any useful life skills in Music Therapy. Instead your bachelor’s degree can simultaneously function as a plate/place mat/table and possibly napkin.

4. Kindling

The imitation pine border will be more than enough to start a raging bonfire while you are squatting on a green bean farm in Southwestern Minnesota. As long as you go halfsies with another Central Asian Studies student.

Its recommended to travel in liberal arts caravans so as to lessen the collective pain.

5. Recycle It

You’re not using it. So why not let the recycling companies re-use the paper for a My Little Pony coloring book to give an innocent five year old false hope?

6. A Shiv

After months of pathetically desperate post-graduation poverty you will rob a bank in the most naive way possible. The police will easily apprehend you since you vehemently refused to use a gun because, “Plato absolutely rejects all violence.”

Such is the traditional liberal arts path.

Smuggling an imitation pine shiv fashioned from your Medieval Weaponry degree into prison will represent the first forward-thinking decision of your short life.

7. Resume For Foot Locker

Whether they are currently hiring or not, Foot Locker will immediately hire you once you brandish a Victorian Era Studies degree.

Such degree holders are inherently desperate and easily molded by the Foot Locker corporation – and therefore in high demand.

8. Frisbee

Sure, the square, wooden, glassy make-up of your degree doesn’t easily lend itself to any semblance of aerodynamics – BUT you have time to conquer these minor quibbles.

ALL the time in the world. To practice, practice, practice, cry, dumpster dive, and then practice some more. Until your quadrilateral frisbee skills crown you the king of the local dog park.

Then you can start making crazy money ($7.25 in two days!) teaching rabid, stray dogs to catch your Abstract Art degree.

9. Replacement Window Pane

If you attended the University of Northwest Oklahoma or Stanford you are in luck! Their Shakespearean Drama departments spent seven years collaborating to manufacture a degree that doubles as a TRIPLE paned window!

Perfect for that recently condemned apartment you are illegally living in above the bowling alley/karaoke bar/drug front.

Sleep tight, the bed bugs will still bite!

10. Necklace

I dunno. Doesn’t really make much sense. But then again neither does a paleo diet or a seven-year Mapmaking degree.

11. Icebreaker

Who doesn’t love the witty, self-aware 27 year old philosophy major at the murder mystery party?!

“Hey guys, have you ever heard the phrase, if a tree falls in a forest, my philosophy degree is still worthless?!? That joke cost $89,483!”

Everyone will laugh! And probably give you free beer all night. Which is what you really wanted anyways.

12. Gag Gift

Nothing says, ‘I really don’t think much of you Aunt Sharon,’ like a framed Bowling Alley Management degree.

As an even funnier gag gift, she’ll write you out of the will!

13. Rolling Papers

After obtaining a cushy associate sales assistant position at Foot Locker your Marine Archaeology degree is finally meaningless!

So roll up a 24 inch joint up and try not to choke on the possibly (most certainly) carcinogenic inky fumes!

14. Bookmark

Impress everyone on the Route 34 bus with a Gender and Women’s Studies degree perched delicately in the middle of David Foster Wallace’s liberal arts tour de force, Infinite Jest – a book so long you would have to be unemployed to finish it.