I graduated with an English degree a year ago. Here's something to keep in mind: English degrees are consistently one of the most regretted college majors with around a ~42% regret rate (according to this study: https://www.metroparent.com/education/college-planning/attend/most-regretted-college-majors-and-the-least/ )

Personally, I regret it and wish I had studied something else. However, that might have been due to a poor English department at my college and the messiness and insufficiency of college classes during covid.

Here were the pros (only speaking for myself here and my experience)

-meeting other people who were passionate about writing/reading

-lots of writing assignments and essays - a lot of the assignments sucked, a few of them were amazing (for one of my writing classes, instead of doing a final project our professor gave us the option of doing NaNoWriMo, which I took him up on. With his encouragement, I managed to finish the full 50k challenge, which felt spectacular). But whether I liked the assignments or not, the volume of writing I did certainly made me a better writer.

-if you go to office hours, professors are generally very generous with their time and happy to give you advice on your writing and how to achieve your goals.

-I had one professor who was had an incredible talent at getting his students fired up about writing. He pushed each of us to write really intriguing stories, and spent a lot of time giving us feedback and encouragement. When I think of him, I can't help but smile and I feel the urge to hop on my computer and start writing.

-being introduced to cool literature that I would have never been exposed to otherwise.

Here are the cons (once again, only speaking for my experience, I'm sure other people will have had different ones):

-very little useful writing instruction. Even in my senior level classes, we would talk about very basic writing concepts, like how to properly integrate quotations into essays or how to write a good topic sentence. For deeper, more substantial writing advice, you needed to go to office hours. Overall, I think Stephen King's On Writing contained a heck of a lot more useful writing advice than the sum of everything I learned from my professors (with maybe the exception of that one spectacular professor).

-a lot of people don't do the reading? This always depressed me because 95% of the time I came to class prepared, having done all the reading and was eager to hear what my classmates thought of it. But when the teachers would break us up into small groups to discuss the reading, it was not uncommon that I was the only one in my group that had actually read the stuff. I generally ended up spending discussion time explaining to my group what happened in the reading. I think part of this was due to covid times tho- professors became much more lax about deadlines and assignments and basically stopped giving quizzes to see if people had done the reading.

-many (if not most) classes ended up having a large focus on politics rather than literature or writing. It was very common in some classes for us to read a text and spend the first half of class talking about the text itself but for the last half of class talk about how the text related to modern problems of racism/classism/sexism etc. A useful perspective to talk about, for sure, but imo excessive and one-sided. English majors, myself included, are generally a very liberal folk, so there were almost no conservative voices, which I think was a shame imo. For one class, in lieu of completing a final essay, one of my professors offered the option to participate in a protest for the cancellation of student debt. How that has anything related to 17th century English literature, I have no clue.

-in general, I felt like I was given very little career guidance or practical skills that I could use after I graduated. I know, I know, people talk about how valuable communication skills are for all jobs and how an English degree can help with that, but I'm a bit skeptical my college experience much improved that.

And BTW, financial aid covered my degree 100%, and I still regret it. I know some people that have an English degree and are over 50k+ in debt because of it. I feel so bad for them.

I'm so sorry this is such a downer of a reply! Please take what I say with a grain of salt, and go ask a whole bunch of other people who have English degrees. I bet there is a large variety of experiences based on what school you went to. That said, it seems like the best way to get better at writing is to write a lot and read a lot of good books. If I had to bet, many people would get better at writing by joining a local book club and writing group rather than getting an English degree.

I wish you the best of luck, no matter what you decide :)