In your opinion , what trades and degree programs are useful?

WARNING Aaron Cleary’s YouTube videos are NSFW from the start.

By useful I assume you mean likely to help you land a job. A college degree is like a high school degree used to be. You have a much better chance of getting a job with a degree in anything than if you don’t have one.

The ones that are useful are ones that you actually work for and complete. Liberal Arts degrees are useful if that is where your passion for work leads.

Liberal Arts done well is awesome because it lets students explore what serious engagement is like with a wide variety of subjects, letting them get more informed impressions of which ones they would actually want to work with, and which they wouldn’t. That information can also be useful for almost any field they get into, as are the learning/understanding/working skills developed by having to engage so many different subjects. It’s also useful to have engaged the thinking of so many disciplines, to understand the work, writings, and viewpoints coming from those fields and those in them.

Focus in any one program is useful within that field, of course.

Another consideration is that a good undergraduate program can teach students how to learn and how to think critically, as well as various skills (e.g. reading comprehension, research, writing, communication, managing time & energy, working with people, etc) that are useful in many fields, and that’s the main thing they teach.

I’m very happy with my Liberal Arts degree in English Language & Literature, because I use language and writing skills all the time. I worked as an editor for a while. I mainly work as a computer programmer, and I was able to take the few computer courses that seemed most like something that would be better than teaching myself. I’ve mainly worked as a software developer, which mainly requires mental aptitude and learning that doesn’t take a degree. The other skills and knowledge I picked up are invaluable both in and out of work, as particularly for the work I care about most, which is creative and benefits from all the various courses I took.