Stay in school, VRB. You owe it to yourself. It doesn’t matter if your degree isn’t in a marketable field, who knows what a “marketable field” will be when you graduate? Twenty years from now? Take it from me, I studied Astronomy in college. I wound up as a city planner for county government. During my life I've also worked as a manual laborer, maritime navigator, public relations shill, air photo mapper, scientific programmer, remote sensing specialist and a computer cartographer.

A degree in French will get you a job as a management trainee because it’s seen as a rite of passage, an indicator of social class, a guarantee that you are disciplined and moderately intelligent–that you can learn. If the Human Resources departments and Daddy Warbucks of this world don’t care what your major was, why should you lose any sleep over it?

Study what you want, what you enjoy, and even if you never use it you will have the satisfaction of knowing you have a good understanding of at least one branch of human knowledge, thus you have an appreciation about how complex and wonderful the branches you DON’T understand are.

It will also do wonders for your pride and your dignity. No matter how much you are sneered at and abused for your lowly professional position, you will always know you know something beautiful and of real value, whether it be Middle English verb conjugation or crustacean taxonomy. If you study something useful, like dentistry, you may wind up spending your whole life forcing yourself to work at it and keeping up with it. That’s fine if you enjoy dentistry, but hell if you don’t, no matter how much they pay you.

But there’s more than just what you learn in your field. In college you’ll be exposed to all those other fields of knowledge your fellow students are struggling with, and the fraternity of teachers that preserve and pass on the accumulated wisdom of the race. You will become part of the community of learning, an unbroken chain of scholars and universities that stretches back to Medieval Europe: perhaps the greatest single cultural achievement of Western Man.

You may be in the last generation to get that chance, right now the one percenters are doing everything they can to turn the university into a taxpayer-subsidized training program for business, one that is primarily designed to ideologically indoctrinate the worker bees in the commercial ethos and to create a specialist surplus in every technical field so that salary costs can be kept under control.

Being a student now may have its challenges, and it may seem a nightmare. It certainly sounds a lot scarier than when I was your age and doing the same thing. (Actually, when I was 19, I was flunking out of school, worried about getting drafted into the infantry, and whether Mary Ellen was pregnant.) If it makes you feel any better, if I could I’d swap places with you in a heartbeat.

Good Luck, comrade. And give ‘em hell. This old fart envies you.