Whose interests are advanced by demeaning the humanities?
This pointless Washington Post story bounced around drawing comment last week.
Regretters, the Post suggests, “include a healthy population of liberal arts majors, who may be responding to pervasive social cues.” Those cues are not just social but financial. They’ve matriculated into a dismal job market:
As a rule, those who studied STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — are much more likely to believe they made the right choice, while those in social sciences or vocational courses second-guess themselves.
There doesn’t seem to be much relationship between loans, gender, race or school selectivity and your regrets. Though, as you may have guessed, our analysis of Fed data shows that the higher your income is today, the less you regret the major you chose back in college.
Before I climb onto my soapbox, here’s Roy Edroso’s take on the survey (emphasis mine):
The general idea — again, you’ve heard it a million times — is that you’re supposed to be practical and treat college as a trade school; if you’re more inclined to study something that is not a cinch to pay off big, you must suppress that instinct because money’s the only reason to go to school or, really, to do anything.
Within the money-making margins there is some flexibility: If you can’t stand the sight of blood but love logic puzzles, for example, you can pursue the law instead of medicine, notwithstanding it’s marginally less well-paying. And if your parents don’t think they can bully or beat you into the hard work necessary for either, you can do something further down the money tree — the MBA track is a hot one; God knows talent and taste are no prerequisite for success there.
But if you really want to learn how to paint or act or write or dance or just contemplate the Verities, unless your family is large and rich enough to approve of a cultural addition to the clan, you are destined for violent headwinds.
Unless, for you, a child of God on whom no man has claim, this stuff is absurdly beside the point.
Edroso pursued acting and does not regret it, although he has no IMDB entry. There was a little rock and roll, and some writing as well. “I am content. In no alternative Life of Edroso was I ever going to study anything sensible, because Anything Sensible has always bored the piss out of me.”
The Post allows that “critical thinking taught in humanities courses allows students to adapt to jobs that may not have existed when they enrolled in college.” Fine. But their studies may also have made them more adaptable in general. But that’s not what The Market wants, is it? Or critical thinkers.
Still, being educated was once an end in itself, and the premise underlying the Framers’ vision of this democratic republic. “There shall be reserved the lot No. 16, of every township, for the
maintenance of public schools,” they wrote in Land Ordinance of 1785. “Schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged,” reads the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Both were passed before ratification of the U.S. Constitution. By education the Framers, men of letters, did not mean apprenticeship to a trade.
“The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.”— Letter from John Adams to John Jebb, September 10, 1785
Today universities are seen as glorified tech schools. It’s offensive — perverse — the notion that the purpose of education is to mold one to serve the economy rather than oneself and one’s community.
The idea that the value of a person is measured in wealth or income is also offensive. “Money answereth all things,” declared one of those prosperity gospel preachers who once ran on AM radio on Sunday, misrepresenting Ecclesiastes. The love of money is poisioning our society and debasing people’s souls, not that most notice or care.
From a thread by Stonekettle (Jim Wright):
A lot of Americans seem to think the only courses of study offered nowadays are “gender studies,” “CRT,” and “wokeness.”
Lot of responses on my timeline said any major other than “STEM” is worthless woke indoctrination.
Science, technology, engineering, and … math?
LOL
When science tells them they are wrong, suddenly they don’t believe in any of THAT anymore either and you don’t have to look beyond the most recent pandemic and a public cheering a president telling them to inject aquarium cleaner and shove lightbulbs up their asses.
Last year about 3 million undergraduate degrees were awarded in the US. Of those, less than 0.4% were in some variation of cultural and gender studies. Less than 0.4%. Hardly a tsunami of wokeness there.
And, hey, what do you even do with a Gender Studies major anyway? Well, funny thing, a lot of the people with those degrees also got LAW degrees and are now lawyers, judges, magistrates, and judicial workers. Seems understanding people makes them better at their job.
Many become managers, social workers, human resource specialists, doctors, nurses, teachers. Some even join the military. Professionals with an in-depth understanding of how people fit together in large groups? That’s important to making a lot of organizations work better.
That is, if your pea-brain is limber enough to stretch that far.
Back in 2015, the New York Times consulted Cheshire Calhoun, chairwoman of the American Philosophical Association and a philosophy professor at Arizona State University:
Ms. Calhoun notes that philosophy is not about toga-wearing thinkers who stroke big beards these days. Rather, she says, the degree denotes skills in critical thinking and writing that are valuable in a variety of fields that can pay extremely well.
And so what if they don’t? I posted this in November 2015:
At Salon, Avery Kolers, philosophy professor at the University of Louisville pushes back at the notion that market price is any measure of social worth:
… What kind of person would assume without justification or explanation that an endeavor (or a person’s) value, derives solely from the amount of money it can make?
A market economy is a tool for securing human welfare and promoting human freedom. It may or may not be effective at those things, but either way, that’s what it is: a tool. Sadly, the contemporary Republican Party has elevated that tool into a religion, bowing before it and disparaging those who don’t.
Ed Kilgore had a little fun with that as well, speaking of religion:
But here’s the thing: Rubio (or my recruiter, for that matter) could have made the exact same point using religious studies or theology as an example of a pointy-headed field of study we should not be subsidizing. Church gigs on average pay even more poorly than philosophy, I’m pretty sure, and why should taxpayers be encouraging private religious training?
I have a philosophy degree myself, as I’ve mentioned before:
I grew up thinking that education was its own reward. In college, I studied, philosophy, art, drama and science. Yeah, I waited tables and traveled for awhile. After college, I was appalled at the attitude of many customers. They’d ask if I was in college. No, I told them, I’d graduated. Next question: What was your major?
When I told them, their eyes went blank. “But what are you going to do with it,” they’d ask. You could see the gears going round in their heads. How did that (a philosophy degree) translate into *that* as they mentally rubbed their finger$$ together.
Then again, there were those two suited, young businessmen dining on their expense accounts one evening at Table 29.
“Tom, where have you been? Haven’t seen you here lately,” one asked as I approached their table.
I told them I had taken the summer off for a solo, cross-country trip. I’d driven out to Los Angeles, then up the coast and as far as Alaska. I had just come back to work.
They looked at each other and you could see it in their eyes: What the hell are we doing?
Life’s not always about size (of your paycheck).
At Netroots Nation-Pittsburgh last month a philosophy major who designed U.S. factories (me; second degree in engineering) and a communications major with a theater background who negotiates labor disputes were discussing a mutual friend with a Ph.D. in comparative literature who once consulted for the auto industry and is now perhaps the internet’s premier independent journalist in national security and civil liberties. It’s funny what those liberal arts types can manage.
We don’t get rich, but then rich was never the point. Of course, back in the day the costs of schooling were not what they are now.
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