Well well well, despite a lot of cheap jokes from certain precincts of the internet where unhappy people dwell, it turns out that people who graduate from college with degrees in easy, fake fields may, in fact, be the smart ones after all.

A college degree in art? Ha. Yeah right. As if. Gee maybe you've heard of a famous artist by the name of THE CAVE PAINTERS OF LASCAUX? No college degree, ended up in all the art history books. QED, my friends. (Look that up in a real textbook.) However: there does appear to be some evidence that arts majors are, you know, happy, a quality which is valued in the "hippie" culture in which artists live, in squalor. A new survey of arts grads found a rather stark absence of the sort of suicidal depression that we assume to be standard issue for recent college graduates, these days. Among the findings:

Only 4% of SNAAP respondents report being unemployed and looking for work – less than half the national rate of 8.9% (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2011).
84% of employed alumni agree that their current primary job reflects their personalities, interests and values, whether their work is in the arts or other fields.
Only 3% of all currently-working arts graduates are "very dissatisfied" with their primary job.
Those with degrees in the performing arts and design are the most likely ever to be employed as professional artists, with 82% of dance, theater and music performance majors, and 81% of design majors working as professional artists at some point.

Those of you who are not currently working as professional artists are failures.

[SNAAP via Inside Higher Ed. Photo: Sterling College/ Flickr]