The Humanities Are in Crisis
August 24, 2018 4:47 AM Subscribe
People have been proclaiming the imminent extinction of the humanities for decades. A best-selling volume in 1964 warned that a science-focused world left no room for humane pursuits, even as Baby Boomers began to flood the English and history departments of new universities. Allan Bloom warned about academics putting liberal ideology before scholarship in 1987; humanities degrees quickly rose. While coverage of individual academic disciplines like musicology, history, or comparative literature often deals with the substance of scholarship, talk of the humanities in general always seems to focus on their imminent extinction. In 2010, Wayne Bivens-Tatum provided a useful walk through the first 50 years of the humanities crisis, until about 1980. Because of this long history, I’ve always been skeptical of claims that the humanities are in retreat. But something different has been happening with the humanities since the 2008 financial crisis. Students are abandoning humanities majors, turning to degrees they think yield far better job prospects. But they’re wrong.
One who doesn't have the huge network of connections and simply must select a major that they think will have the biggest ROI.
The thing is, the "must" is not a must. You don't have to choose based on that criteria. I had no connections and selected a major that pretty much everyone rolled their eyes at: music performance. Then I changed to one that the same share of people sighed and shook their heads at: French.
I literally had university counselors telling me that I would never find a job and telling me I was out of my mind (in so many words) thinking that, further, I would find work in France without a network.
*waves hello from her office in Paris where she now does program management that spans continents*
Y'know what my criterion for choosing a major was? It was what I had always loved: literature and languages rolled into one.
People are reeeeeaaalllly into bashing on that lately – doing what you love – but I notice it also often boils down to separating love from hard work, which is not a separation I've ever made. I identify what I love as what I still do even when I don't feel like doing it. Also often called "discipline."
Also, like, dudettes and dudes, if I die tomorrow, I'll have always done what I love.
posted by fraula at 5:14 AM on August 24, 2018 [91 favorites]
The thing is, the "must" is not a must. You don't have to choose based on that criteria. I had no connections and selected a major that pretty much everyone rolled their eyes at: music performance. Then I changed to one that the same share of people sighed and shook their heads at: French.
I literally had university counselors telling me that I would never find a job and telling me I was out of my mind (in so many words) thinking that, further, I would find work in France without a network.
*waves hello from her office in Paris where she now does program management that spans continents*
Y'know what my criterion for choosing a major was? It was what I had always loved: literature and languages rolled into one.
People are reeeeeaaalllly into bashing on that lately – doing what you love – but I notice it also often boils down to separating love from hard work, which is not a separation I've ever made. I identify what I love as what I still do even when I don't feel like doing it. Also often called "discipline."
Also, like, dudettes and dudes, if I die tomorrow, I'll have always done what I love.
posted by fraula at 5:14 AM on August 24, 2018 [91 favorites]
I would have loved to have taken a less vocational major than CS myself but I had a kid to raise and a mortgage to pay. Getting a degree in something like the humanities is a luxury most of us can't afford.
posted by octothorpe at 5:16 AM on August 24, 2018 [11 favorites]
posted by octothorpe at 5:16 AM on August 24, 2018 [11 favorites]
I'm a professor. I chose my subject because I was fascinated by it. "How much will I earn" ROI is a mindset that I abhor.
but
It becomes inescapable when the bonecrushing cost of I looms so large in people's lives.
posted by lalochezia at 5:23 AM on August 24, 2018 [41 favorites]
but
It becomes inescapable when the bonecrushing cost of I looms so large in people's lives.
posted by lalochezia at 5:23 AM on August 24, 2018 [41 favorites]
I am a bit confused by the blunt assertions here about humanities being an economic privilege, when the argument of the article is that this is much more a matter of perception than of reality. I mean, maybe you don't agree with that, it might well be wrong, but I don't think it makes much sense to respond to an article that says "actually humanities subjects are pretty economically viable" by saying "that's not true because humanities subjects aren't economically viable". That's not an argument, it's just contradiction.
posted by howfar at 5:26 AM on August 24, 2018 [71 favorites]
posted by howfar at 5:26 AM on August 24, 2018 [71 favorites]
Anecdotally speaking, growing up in a country where one out of two young people is unemployed, tends to orient you towards fields that may be more in demand. Some are even interesting! A pure humanities degree may have been great, but I read literature, studied a new language and played music all the same. Lack of appreciation of the humanities may be a greater issue along with lack of free time after managing to get a job.
posted by ersatz at 5:26 AM on August 24, 2018 [7 favorites]
posted by ersatz at 5:26 AM on August 24, 2018 [7 favorites]
Though one of the most interesting things about this article is that the data indicates that humanities majors often do just as well salary-wise as many majors we think of as “more practical.” IE, people are moving away from humanities majors because they assume they’re impractical, which might not actually be as true as we think it is.
One can also make the argument that “the ability to write well” is actually very practical in Today’s Economy.
posted by faineg at 5:27 AM on August 24, 2018 [14 favorites]
One can also make the argument that “the ability to write well” is actually very practical in Today’s Economy.
posted by faineg at 5:27 AM on August 24, 2018 [14 favorites]
I remember back in college, a friend told me about how she asked for an extension on a paper. The professor asked for a reason and she mentioned work, and the woman went berserk on her: "HOW do you expect to derive any value from your education if you are wasting your time and attention with WORK?" Well, howcome y'all are charging $14k/year tuition, if this is such a pure enterprise of the spirit?
posted by thelonius at 5:27 AM on August 24, 2018 [30 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 5:27 AM on August 24, 2018 [30 favorites]
I read this yesterday, and I think there's some truth there and also some stuff that the author misses. So yeah, students often make decisions about majors based on their perception of a given major's employment prospects, and that perception is often wrong. Majoring in Health Studies does not make you more employable than majoring in English. Like a lot of people, I'm pretty dismayed by the rise of majors that seem pre-professional but that lack academic rigor and aren't actually valued by employers. But I also think that some of it has to do with a change in students' priorities, and that's fine. This may come as a surprise to him, but students are aware that Psychology majors don't make a lot of money. They do joke about it. But they're really aware of and interested in mental health issues, and they want to help people. He's upset that students no longer say that an important goal of college is to develop a coherent life philosophy, but I think that's because students are less inward-looking and more outward-looking than their Baby Boomer grandparents were, and thank fucking God for that. I bet they're more likely to say that they want to help others and make a positive difference to the world. That's why students are majoring in psych, not history. They're interested in helping people, and psych seems relevant to that goal.
On our campus, there are a few departments that are doing a really good job developing general education classes that appeal to students who probably aren't going to major in their subject. Classics does an amazing job with this. They put a lot of effort into creating interesting, well-taught classes that fulfill distribution requirements. They may not get a ton of majors out of it, although I think they get some minors, but they get butts in seats, which makes it harder to justify axing the departments altogether. There's also a trend of traditional humanities majors developing pseudo-pre-professional tracks in an attempt to lure in some of the kids who want to do their major but are scared about job prospects. I'm not sure how I feel about that.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:27 AM on August 24, 2018 [23 favorites]
On our campus, there are a few departments that are doing a really good job developing general education classes that appeal to students who probably aren't going to major in their subject. Classics does an amazing job with this. They put a lot of effort into creating interesting, well-taught classes that fulfill distribution requirements. They may not get a ton of majors out of it, although I think they get some minors, but they get butts in seats, which makes it harder to justify axing the departments altogether. There's also a trend of traditional humanities majors developing pseudo-pre-professional tracks in an attempt to lure in some of the kids who want to do their major but are scared about job prospects. I'm not sure how I feel about that.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:27 AM on August 24, 2018 [23 favorites]
Searched for 'credentialism' in the text: no results found.
posted by gimonca at 5:32 AM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
posted by gimonca at 5:32 AM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
A thing that I wish people would explain to high school students: a "STEM" degree, on its own, is not necessarily worth that much......a BS in biology can get you a job as a lab assistant at best, I think. It qualifies you for more school, med school or a PhD, and then maybe a career in science. Going down that road because you think it's frivolous to major in English, not because its what you want to do (when, after getting the English degree, you can get an MBA or pursue other professional education, and probably do fine) is not a great decision.
posted by thelonius at 5:35 AM on August 24, 2018 [28 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 5:35 AM on August 24, 2018 [28 favorites]
*waves hello from her office in Paris where she now does program management that spans continents*
That's just like a lottery winner saying they didn't give up buying tickets every day even though they kept losing because with discipline and hard work you can pull through in the end like them. The data on this is pretty clear -
Broadly speaking it really depends on the data set you use: this one says in general, STEM has a median income of $63,000 and unemployment of 5% while humanities has a median income of $48,000 and unemployment of 7%.
This lines up with what the article in the OP states - "Much of that evidence does indicate that humanities majors are probably slightly worse off than average—maybe as much as one more point of unemployment and $5,000 to $10,000 a year in income." - where the "average" includes the humanities dragging down the average.
I actually wonder if they controlled for the impact of immigration - speaking as an Asian who studied in a Western university... very few Asians would go on to study anything in the humanities, for a host of cultural reasons.
posted by xdvesper at 5:38 AM on August 24, 2018 [39 favorites]
That's just like a lottery winner saying they didn't give up buying tickets every day even though they kept losing because with discipline and hard work you can pull through in the end like them. The data on this is pretty clear -
Broadly speaking it really depends on the data set you use: this one says in general, STEM has a median income of $63,000 and unemployment of 5% while humanities has a median income of $48,000 and unemployment of 7%.
This lines up with what the article in the OP states - "Much of that evidence does indicate that humanities majors are probably slightly worse off than average—maybe as much as one more point of unemployment and $5,000 to $10,000 a year in income." - where the "average" includes the humanities dragging down the average.
I actually wonder if they controlled for the impact of immigration - speaking as an Asian who studied in a Western university... very few Asians would go on to study anything in the humanities, for a host of cultural reasons.
posted by xdvesper at 5:38 AM on August 24, 2018 [39 favorites]
Searched for 'credentialism' in the text: no results found.
Yeah, this.
I think the actual lesson here is not, "humanities aren't worse than other degrees in terms of ROI". The lesson is, the ROI of college degrees in general has been in freefall for years, because of credentialism.
posted by tocts at 5:38 AM on August 24, 2018 [13 favorites]
Yeah, this.
I think the actual lesson here is not, "humanities aren't worse than other degrees in terms of ROI". The lesson is, the ROI of college degrees in general has been in freefall for years, because of credentialism.
posted by tocts at 5:38 AM on August 24, 2018 [13 favorites]
Yeah, I recall Professor Jeremy Zwelling telling me that he didn't put books on reserve at the library because if I didn't "care" enough about the class to buy the books then I didn't belong in it. I did a humanities degree but as the first person in my family to go anywhere beyond community college the economic pressures on me were intense.
posted by 1adam12 at 5:38 AM on August 24, 2018 [16 favorites]
posted by 1adam12 at 5:38 AM on August 24, 2018 [16 favorites]
Was "STEM" originally something other than a cynical but effective effort to staple scientific fields with terrible job prospects to engineering and computer science?
posted by zymil at 5:41 AM on August 24, 2018 [25 favorites]
posted by zymil at 5:41 AM on August 24, 2018 [25 favorites]
Y'know what my criterion for choosing a major was? It was what I had always loved: literature and languages rolled into one.
Was this before or after the expectation that you spend nearly the rest of your life paying back student loans regardless of the degree or institution attended?
posted by griphus at 5:55 AM on August 24, 2018 [12 favorites]
Was this before or after the expectation that you spend nearly the rest of your life paying back student loans regardless of the degree or institution attended?
posted by griphus at 5:55 AM on August 24, 2018 [12 favorites]
"Being the type of person inclined to view a college major in terms of return on investment will
Student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy.
It's insane NOT to view a college major in those terms.
posted by ocschwar at 5:56 AM on August 24, 2018 [45 favorites]
(Seriously though those kind of comments from people who did not attend college after the x-fold jacking up of tuitions across institutions public and private are basically identical to the “thank god I’m married!!!” comments everyone was pissed off at in that Tinder fakeout thread.)
posted by griphus at 5:59 AM on August 24, 2018 [25 favorites]
posted by griphus at 5:59 AM on August 24, 2018 [25 favorites]
I would have loved to have taken a less vocational major than CS myself but I had a kid to raise and a mortgage to pay. Getting a degree in something like the humanities is a luxury most of us can't afford.
As others have noted, half of the article is about this perception being wrong. My sense from talking to parents and students over and over and ooooovvvveerrrrr again is that people tend to fundamentally misunderstand the ways in which majors and employment overlap, at least outside of professional programs like engineering or nursing.
Outside of professional programs, very few people have jobs that "use" their major in any significant degree. Relatively few bio grads have jobs where their boss runs up and demands that they use some particular skill or knowledge that's closely related to their major. Few history grads have their boss run up and demand to know something about the Treaty of Westphalia or about how drunkenness was portrayed in popular media in the 1870s, few English grads have their bosses run up and demand to know something about influences on Joyce, few polisci grads have their bosses run up and demand to know why independent voters are mostly lunkheads. I could go on, but I won't. But I could.
Not "using" your major in this way doesn't mean you're not using your major; it just changes how you're using it. Most nonprofessional majors can be understood as information processing majors. You take in a whole bunch of stuff that's notionally information, sort through it to find the pieces that are relevant to some particular purposes, analyze and synthesize that, and communicate what you found to someone else. This, it turns out, is highly relevant to lots of businesses and governmental entities. It's just that most of the time, nobody cares whether you learned to process information about literature, history, physics, or even political science.
What I end up telling people is not to stress too much about majors. If you're decent with math, take some coursework that develops and demonstrates that you can do quantitative analysis. Beyond that, major in something that you like or at least tolerate well enough to really bust ass for so that you can graduate with a 3.7 instead of a 2.1 in something "saleable" that you have trouble forcing yourself to get out of bed for.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:04 AM on August 24, 2018 [75 favorites]
As others have noted, half of the article is about this perception being wrong. My sense from talking to parents and students over and over and ooooovvvveerrrrr again is that people tend to fundamentally misunderstand the ways in which majors and employment overlap, at least outside of professional programs like engineering or nursing.
Outside of professional programs, very few people have jobs that "use" their major in any significant degree. Relatively few bio grads have jobs where their boss runs up and demands that they use some particular skill or knowledge that's closely related to their major. Few history grads have their boss run up and demand to know something about the Treaty of Westphalia or about how drunkenness was portrayed in popular media in the 1870s, few English grads have their bosses run up and demand to know something about influences on Joyce, few polisci grads have their bosses run up and demand to know why independent voters are mostly lunkheads. I could go on, but I won't. But I could.
Not "using" your major in this way doesn't mean you're not using your major; it just changes how you're using it. Most nonprofessional majors can be understood as information processing majors. You take in a whole bunch of stuff that's notionally information, sort through it to find the pieces that are relevant to some particular purposes, analyze and synthesize that, and communicate what you found to someone else. This, it turns out, is highly relevant to lots of businesses and governmental entities. It's just that most of the time, nobody cares whether you learned to process information about literature, history, physics, or even political science.
What I end up telling people is not to stress too much about majors. If you're decent with math, take some coursework that develops and demonstrates that you can do quantitative analysis. Beyond that, major in something that you like or at least tolerate well enough to really bust ass for so that you can graduate with a 3.7 instead of a 2.1 in something "saleable" that you have trouble forcing yourself to get out of bed for.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:04 AM on August 24, 2018 [75 favorites]
The thing I kept wondering while reading was: has a decrease in the numbers of college humanities majors actually resulted in decreased humanities-related intellectual abilities in the post-college-aged-population? I don't know the answer, but I'd think one possibility might be that there's increased availability of non-higher-ed-based sources of humanities education, resulting in a reduced market value for a humanities degree on the front end, as it were, instead of as measured by potential future salary or perceived potential future salary.
Back in the nineteen-hundreds, my U.S. liberal arts college had a “native speaker” component to its mandatory foreign language program wherein small groups of students would meet and converse in a less-formal setting with a native speaker of the language. I took Russian and would never have otherwise encountered something like a native Russian speaker out in my community.
But today, for free, I could have as much interaction as I'd possibly want online with Russian speakers and/or intelligence operatives, and in comparison to my limited access to written materials in the form of class textbooks and the college library's small dusty collection of books in Russian I can find stuff on any topic over the internet, down to collections of Soviet childrens' books.
posted by XMLicious at 6:08 AM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
Back in the nineteen-hundreds, my U.S. liberal arts college had a “native speaker” component to its mandatory foreign language program wherein small groups of students would meet and converse in a less-formal setting with a native speaker of the language. I took Russian and would never have otherwise encountered something like a native Russian speaker out in my community.
But today, for free, I could have as much interaction as I'd possibly want online with Russian speakers and/or intelligence operatives, and in comparison to my limited access to written materials in the form of class textbooks and the college library's small dusty collection of books in Russian I can find stuff on any topic over the internet, down to collections of Soviet childrens' books.
posted by XMLicious at 6:08 AM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
Student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy.He notes that these trends hold even at schools where almost nobody takes out student loans.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:09 AM on August 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
i wonder how much of it is also that, as hinted at in the article, humanities subjects often don't do a particularly good job at having a diverse curriculum? by no means are they worse than other areas, but the option of studying a subject you 'love' just often isn't there. for instance i love literature and writing but would expect what i would study as part of a mainstream course to be alienating. it's just such a big risk when dealing with 'big' questions that you're in an environment where people fundamentally don't really understand where you're coming from and are even actively hostile.
posted by mosswinter at 6:14 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by mosswinter at 6:14 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
If only the article actually engaged the data on labor market outcomes. It's 1 para, a link to an ACS analysis, and an assertion of endogeneity. It spends a lot of time setting up a soft comparison: traditional humanities may not do much worse than the less quantitative social sciences. Blowing off a $10-20k/year difference is probably not great. It's a short run outcome, but the ~ 10% unemployment rate for humanities vs 4-6% for STEM during the recession is pretty noticeable (2008 bachelor's in 2012) ! Not so sure why terminal bachelors are the right crowd; it excludes the largish number of people who get eg MSN, MSW, MS in science or engineering, MEd, etc. The effect of MDs on the median won't be huge, but they are fairly concentrated in biosciences.
Is the job market for science majors that bad? My understanding was that a chemistry degree was a fine entry point to lab work in the relevant industries. Those are middle-class jobs, but so is eg teaching. Physics majors seemed to do well in a variety of industries with their strong quantitative and analytical skills.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 6:17 AM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
Is the job market for science majors that bad? My understanding was that a chemistry degree was a fine entry point to lab work in the relevant industries. Those are middle-class jobs, but so is eg teaching. Physics majors seemed to do well in a variety of industries with their strong quantitative and analytical skills.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 6:17 AM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
I have a humanities degree. I entered the field that my degree was in for a while. I'm broke as fuck.
However, the reason I am broke as fuck has nothing to do with a) the degree itself, b) the size of my student loans, c) the field I was in, or d) whether I was able to "use" my degree.
Rather, the reason I am broke as fuck has to do with a) the recession we were in in the early 90s, b) the recession we were in in the late 90s, c) the recession that hit New York City just after 9/11, and d) the recession we went through in the late 2000's.
Tell me, does the calculation of the ROI and rate of return for a given degree calculate the projected overall health of the economy in question? Can this calculation predict the vagaries of the overall economy in a particular region over the course of an individual's life, be those vagaries national, regional, local, or personal?
.....Oh, it can't? Hmm.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:19 AM on August 24, 2018 [26 favorites]
However, the reason I am broke as fuck has nothing to do with a) the degree itself, b) the size of my student loans, c) the field I was in, or d) whether I was able to "use" my degree.
Rather, the reason I am broke as fuck has to do with a) the recession we were in in the early 90s, b) the recession we were in in the late 90s, c) the recession that hit New York City just after 9/11, and d) the recession we went through in the late 2000's.
Tell me, does the calculation of the ROI and rate of return for a given degree calculate the projected overall health of the economy in question? Can this calculation predict the vagaries of the overall economy in a particular region over the course of an individual's life, be those vagaries national, regional, local, or personal?
.....Oh, it can't? Hmm.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:19 AM on August 24, 2018 [26 favorites]
Uni is cheaper here, and repayment much more humanely organised, so that's relevant.
Given that, I'm not at uni for any sort of career pipeline. If critical thinking skills or whatever help, if they want to see a degree on the CV, that's great, but there's also a solid chance that, as GCU says, any field I go into will ignore 99% of what I've learned as an anthropology/history major. Or I'll get technical training, whether it's a trade or something as simple as a forklift license if any of the stevedoring applications ever go through successfully.
My cousin graduated with a double major in anthropology and english literature, and was ecstatic to go into a job running CD copying machines for the music in stores and shopping centres. They wouldn't have hired her without that qualification.
A job, let alone a career, is not my concern, it's understanding the world I'm in, the forces making decisions about me and others. To not be blindly wandering through life with no idea why politicians say the things they do.
I came back to uni to learn how to organise. How to speak to others, make coherent political arguments, how to give a talk on the mythical nature of 'Western civilisation', Australian imperialism in PNG, or the history of social unionism in my state. I came back after failing out to learn how to radicalise others, and I'm confident I'm learning that.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 6:21 AM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
Given that, I'm not at uni for any sort of career pipeline. If critical thinking skills or whatever help, if they want to see a degree on the CV, that's great, but there's also a solid chance that, as GCU says, any field I go into will ignore 99% of what I've learned as an anthropology/history major. Or I'll get technical training, whether it's a trade or something as simple as a forklift license if any of the stevedoring applications ever go through successfully.
My cousin graduated with a double major in anthropology and english literature, and was ecstatic to go into a job running CD copying machines for the music in stores and shopping centres. They wouldn't have hired her without that qualification.
A job, let alone a career, is not my concern, it's understanding the world I'm in, the forces making decisions about me and others. To not be blindly wandering through life with no idea why politicians say the things they do.
I came back to uni to learn how to organise. How to speak to others, make coherent political arguments, how to give a talk on the mythical nature of 'Western civilisation', Australian imperialism in PNG, or the history of social unionism in my state. I came back after failing out to learn how to radicalise others, and I'm confident I'm learning that.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 6:21 AM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
As others have noted, half of the article is about this perception being wrong. My sense from talking to parents and students over and over and ooooovvvveerrrrr again is that people tend to fundamentally misunderstand the ways in which majors and employment overlap, at least outside of professional programs like engineering or nursing.
So if I'd gotten a humanities degree, the placement office would have twenty interviews at local businesses lined up for me during my last semester and I could have walked into a job right as I graduated? 'Cause that happened when I graduated with a CS degree and frankly I was so far behind on my utilities at that point that I was a month away from having my lights and gas turned off and I didn't have time for a prolonged job search.
posted by octothorpe at 6:26 AM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
So if I'd gotten a humanities degree, the placement office would have twenty interviews at local businesses lined up for me during my last semester and I could have walked into a job right as I graduated? 'Cause that happened when I graduated with a CS degree and frankly I was so far behind on my utilities at that point that I was a month away from having my lights and gas turned off and I didn't have time for a prolonged job search.
posted by octothorpe at 6:26 AM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
Yes, obviously I was making a highly specific counterfactual claim about your own personal employment prospects.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:30 AM on August 24, 2018 [18 favorites]
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:30 AM on August 24, 2018 [18 favorites]
Longer: you lucked out. What would your prospects have been if you'd been graduating with a CS degree in the middle of the dot-com crash? If, like a fair number of people I knew, you were graduating with a degree in aerospace engineering right as the cold war collapsed?
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:32 AM on August 24, 2018 [11 favorites]
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:32 AM on August 24, 2018 [11 favorites]
The Great Recession Never Ended for College Humanities - "Economic considerations weigh on students who came of age in the aftermath of the financial crisis."
posted by kliuless at 6:36 AM on August 24, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by kliuless at 6:36 AM on August 24, 2018 [4 favorites]
There is a lot of useful nuance in the article. I think “ROI” is the wrong term here- as the author states students don’t appear to be deeply researching employment prospects as there isn’t great alignment between sub discipline employability and enrollment. I’d say that, as ever, students choose majors they value, and that at this moment those values are heavily weighted towards perceived utility. However, it also has driven a twofold growth in linguistics majors and a slow drop in business and communications. Some of the strongest growth has been in kinesiology and environmental studies - those sound like value based choices to me (albeit pragmatic ones). The majors that have really cratered are the bigger, more broad categories like general humanities, liberal arts, history, and English literature.
It’s often seemed to me that “STEM” is more narrowly construed to mean “computer programming” in primary school. I have a quick question to the CS majors out there - is this a good of a choice now as it was twenty years ago?
posted by q*ben at 6:38 AM on August 24, 2018
It’s often seemed to me that “STEM” is more narrowly construed to mean “computer programming” in primary school. I have a quick question to the CS majors out there - is this a good of a choice now as it was twenty years ago?
posted by q*ben at 6:38 AM on August 24, 2018
20 years ago was 1998. It was a great choice in 1998. It was a terrible choice in 2000, because that’s when the dot-bomb crash happened, followed closely by all the tech companies outsourcing their IT to India and then the recession that followed 9/11. I wasn’t a CS major, but I worked in tech starting in 1996, and I spent late 1999 to early 2004 being mostly unemployed.
posted by Autumnheart at 6:41 AM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by Autumnheart at 6:41 AM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
(And my experience was typical at the time)
posted by Autumnheart at 6:42 AM on August 24, 2018
posted by Autumnheart at 6:42 AM on August 24, 2018
As far as I know, it's a great choice now career-wise. The availability heuristic may be skewing my perception here because I'm currently trying to hire a programmer.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 6:46 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 6:46 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
As with all things, varies by people and place. I graduated with a CS degree in 2002, in the midst of a terrible economy for CS majors, and I have been gainfully employed with zero unemployment in this industry the whole time since (I was laid off in a mass layoff once, and had a new job lined up before my last day).
For sure some of it was via networking; my first job came on the heels of a successful internship, which I got because of a recommendation. Obviously that first job then helped springboard me into future ones.
With that being said, would I recommend CS to someone today? Tough call. I think it's still a good career with interesting work and good pay, but both of those things are so incredibly variable. In general, the less "cool" the job, the more likely it is that your coworkers will be nice, fun people, and your workday will be reasonable. The more "cool" the job (e.g. videogames, startups, movie industry adjacent stuff), the more likely it's going to be a sweatshop that's intending to grind mid-20-year-olds into dust that is sold for high price but relatively low pay to those who made it, and the employee is discarded when they finally have nothing left to give.
posted by tocts at 6:46 AM on August 24, 2018 [11 favorites]
For sure some of it was via networking; my first job came on the heels of a successful internship, which I got because of a recommendation. Obviously that first job then helped springboard me into future ones.
With that being said, would I recommend CS to someone today? Tough call. I think it's still a good career with interesting work and good pay, but both of those things are so incredibly variable. In general, the less "cool" the job, the more likely it is that your coworkers will be nice, fun people, and your workday will be reasonable. The more "cool" the job (e.g. videogames, startups, movie industry adjacent stuff), the more likely it's going to be a sweatshop that's intending to grind mid-20-year-olds into dust that is sold for high price but relatively low pay to those who made it, and the employee is discarded when they finally have nothing left to give.
posted by tocts at 6:46 AM on August 24, 2018 [11 favorites]
You should pick a college major where you perform well and enjoy yourself. If the economy says that you can't support yourself unless you major in STEM, even if you perform well and enjoy yourself, that's the economy's problem--but see below for a caveat. If you don't like STEM and you aren't any good at it, majoring in it sets you up for a lifetime of not liking or being good at your work. If there is no such major where you perform well and enjoy yourself, you should drop out of college.
I double majored in philosophy and computer science and my opinion is that the struggle that humanities students have on the job market is often because it isn't made clear to them that they aren't performing well in college, so their expectations are out of step with their ability. This has to do with grade inflation in the humanities, and the essential disputability of humanities grading. The lowest grade you can realistically get in a humanities course is a C if you come to class and do the work, and the default grade at the reasonably prestigious universities that I attended and taught at is a B. And you can always dispute your grade in a hundred different ways, "The professor didn't like me or just didn't understand my amazing point in this essay" so you can delude yourself about your performance.
But in any college math class there are people who absolutely can't do the work and maybe some people for whom the work is obviously too easy. You get a 40% on your exam and you say, "Ah, a math major is not for me." So a B+ math student has on average a much better understanding of the material than a B+ humanities student. There's no such thing as getting a 40% on a philosophy paper, and there are a lot of mediocre students who can make humanities A's because there is no bottom to the grading curve-"Well that student turned in a paper, so that's a C. That paper exhibits some basic facility with the English language, so that's a B." So then there is a vast space of papers better than that, that get A's.
So there is an extra burden on humanities students to determine whether they are performing well, and many of them don't do it well, and then they get on the job market and say, "I got straight A's in English, why can't I find a job that pays?" It's because they weren't fairly evaluated when it didn't matter, and didn't learn enough about their actual strengths and weaknesses, especially when they don't really know something and when they need to get better, which are the really essential job skills.
posted by Kwine at 6:50 AM on August 24, 2018 [12 favorites]
I double majored in philosophy and computer science and my opinion is that the struggle that humanities students have on the job market is often because it isn't made clear to them that they aren't performing well in college, so their expectations are out of step with their ability. This has to do with grade inflation in the humanities, and the essential disputability of humanities grading. The lowest grade you can realistically get in a humanities course is a C if you come to class and do the work, and the default grade at the reasonably prestigious universities that I attended and taught at is a B. And you can always dispute your grade in a hundred different ways, "The professor didn't like me or just didn't understand my amazing point in this essay" so you can delude yourself about your performance.
But in any college math class there are people who absolutely can't do the work and maybe some people for whom the work is obviously too easy. You get a 40% on your exam and you say, "Ah, a math major is not for me." So a B+ math student has on average a much better understanding of the material than a B+ humanities student. There's no such thing as getting a 40% on a philosophy paper, and there are a lot of mediocre students who can make humanities A's because there is no bottom to the grading curve-"Well that student turned in a paper, so that's a C. That paper exhibits some basic facility with the English language, so that's a B." So then there is a vast space of papers better than that, that get A's.
So there is an extra burden on humanities students to determine whether they are performing well, and many of them don't do it well, and then they get on the job market and say, "I got straight A's in English, why can't I find a job that pays?" It's because they weren't fairly evaluated when it didn't matter, and didn't learn enough about their actual strengths and weaknesses, especially when they don't really know something and when they need to get better, which are the really essential job skills.
posted by Kwine at 6:50 AM on August 24, 2018 [12 favorites]
I recall Professor Jeremy Zwelling telling me that he didn't put books on reserve at the library because if I didn't "care" enough about the class to buy the books then I didn't belong in it.
Tenure is a helluva drug.
posted by Damienmce at 6:53 AM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
Tenure is a helluva drug.
posted by Damienmce at 6:53 AM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
1adam12: "Yeah, I recall Professor Jeremy Zwelling telling me that he didn't put books on reserve at the library because if I didn't "care" enough about the class to buy the books then I didn't belong in it. I did a humanities degree but as the first person in my family to go anywhere beyond community college the economic pressures on me were intense."
Fuck, I went through my last year of school reading from xeroxed copies of chapters from library copies of books because I'd totally run out of money and couldn't afford the $100 each they charged for each.
posted by octothorpe at 7:00 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
Fuck, I went through my last year of school reading from xeroxed copies of chapters from library copies of books because I'd totally run out of money and couldn't afford the $100 each they charged for each.
posted by octothorpe at 7:00 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
I feel like I can say this with some authority, because I'm both an academic advisor for CS students and also a non-degree student in major-level CS classes. (I'm taking my third major-level CS class this semester.) Not everyone can be successful in the CS major. I think it's an awesome major for people who enjoy thinking in that particular way, although I agree with the article that it's not possible to know whether the job market will stay as strong as it currently is. But some people can't hack it, and some people don't like it. And it's really hard to do well in a major that you hate, plus there's that added thing where you're probably also going to hate the well-paying career that you're being trained for, and it's ok not to want to spend your life doing something lucrative that makes you miserable.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:01 AM on August 24, 2018 [9 favorites]
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:01 AM on August 24, 2018 [9 favorites]
I have three kids. The oldest is 17 and probably going to take a gap year before going to college. She just got back from Morocco, where the State Department paid for her to study Arabic for 8 weeks. My middle kid is 14; he currently has an internship at the zoo, where he gets to handle animals and teach people about them. My youngest is a regular ol' kid.
I tell my kids there are going to be two types of jobs for people in their future: jobs that people don't want robots to do (like masseuses) and jobs that are complex enough that we can't program our way to a solution.
I work in tech the tech industry. I'm a product designer in a large consulting firm. I help clients who are mostly large old enterprise companies build new products. Most of my colleagues were CS majors. The majority of my work is less about tech and more about cutting through client bullshit: internal politics, lack of vision, inability to communicate up or down the chain.
My bachelor's is in theater. I studied under an old-school classic liberal arts program, starting with the Greeks and working our way up. What I learned from that was the nuances of drama, and what Aristotle had to say about why Sophocles was effective, sure. But mostly we learned how to look at things critically, and communicate those findings effectively to others. And that's basically my entire job now. I'm considered a leader in my org and most of my work involves communicating first principles of design to clients and people inside my company: explaining why design is effective and even financially sound. I credit my ability to do this effectively at least in part due to my liberal arts education.
posted by nushustu at 7:04 AM on August 24, 2018 [12 favorites]
I tell my kids there are going to be two types of jobs for people in their future: jobs that people don't want robots to do (like masseuses) and jobs that are complex enough that we can't program our way to a solution.
I work in tech the tech industry. I'm a product designer in a large consulting firm. I help clients who are mostly large old enterprise companies build new products. Most of my colleagues were CS majors. The majority of my work is less about tech and more about cutting through client bullshit: internal politics, lack of vision, inability to communicate up or down the chain.
My bachelor's is in theater. I studied under an old-school classic liberal arts program, starting with the Greeks and working our way up. What I learned from that was the nuances of drama, and what Aristotle had to say about why Sophocles was effective, sure. But mostly we learned how to look at things critically, and communicate those findings effectively to others. And that's basically my entire job now. I'm considered a leader in my org and most of my work involves communicating first principles of design to clients and people inside my company: explaining why design is effective and even financially sound. I credit my ability to do this effectively at least in part due to my liberal arts education.
posted by nushustu at 7:04 AM on August 24, 2018 [12 favorites]
It's because they weren't fairly evaluated when it didn't matter, and didn't learn enough about their actual strengths and weaknesses, especially when they don't really know something and when they need to get better, which are the really essential job skills.
Speaking as someone who spent most of her University life in the literal "Arts" side of the Humanities (I was in Literature, Creative Writing and Theatre) who spent most of her collegiate life (and many years after) surrounded by others working in creative fields, let me assure you that knowing the actual strengths, weaknesses and (often) limitations of my work was probably the thing I most confidently came out of college knowing. To a sometimes devastating degree.
Anecdotal: I have a large number of friends, many of whom are younger than I am, who have undergraduate degrees in things like Classics and Drama and History and Art. Many of them have MFAs. Many of them were first-gen college students, from non-white, non-middle class backgrounds. They're doing okay. The only people I know who are truly drowning in debt and facing battling increasingly limited job prospects right now are the ones that buckled under pressure and took their Undergraduate Humanities degrees to expensive law schools.
posted by thivaia at 7:05 AM on August 24, 2018 [12 favorites]
Speaking as someone who spent most of her University life in the literal "Arts" side of the Humanities (I was in Literature, Creative Writing and Theatre) who spent most of her collegiate life (and many years after) surrounded by others working in creative fields, let me assure you that knowing the actual strengths, weaknesses and (often) limitations of my work was probably the thing I most confidently came out of college knowing. To a sometimes devastating degree.
Anecdotal: I have a large number of friends, many of whom are younger than I am, who have undergraduate degrees in things like Classics and Drama and History and Art. Many of them have MFAs. Many of them were first-gen college students, from non-white, non-middle class backgrounds. They're doing okay. The only people I know who are truly drowning in debt and facing battling increasingly limited job prospects right now are the ones that buckled under pressure and took their Undergraduate Humanities degrees to expensive law schools.
posted by thivaia at 7:05 AM on August 24, 2018 [12 favorites]
This has to do with grade inflation in the humanities, and the essential disputability of humanities grading.
This also affects the humanities skills that non-majors have. I taught freshman composition for two years, and the grading guidelines handed down to us pretty much ensured that that all of my students would pass as long as they showed up and turned in their assignments.
The students also expect that they, personally, will be able to get an A. I had one student tell me that he believed that if you tried hard enough you should be able to get an A. It actually led to a really interesting class discussion about grade inflation, admissions, etc - my kids weren't dumb, but they were raised in a culture where humanities are graded on effort.
"I got straight A's in English, why can't I find a job that pays?"
On the other hand, though, I don't think that this is why humanities majors have a hard time finding jobs. It's not because they got an undeserved A in a class - no one is evaluating their skills to that level of detail during the job search and, frankly, you don't even need that level of skill for many jobs. It's hard to find a decent job because too many decent jobs have been removed from the job market. And that's down to runaway capitalism and the valuing of profit above all else.
We aren't going to fix the job market by fixing colleges.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 7:06 AM on August 24, 2018 [33 favorites]
This also affects the humanities skills that non-majors have. I taught freshman composition for two years, and the grading guidelines handed down to us pretty much ensured that that all of my students would pass as long as they showed up and turned in their assignments.
The students also expect that they, personally, will be able to get an A. I had one student tell me that he believed that if you tried hard enough you should be able to get an A. It actually led to a really interesting class discussion about grade inflation, admissions, etc - my kids weren't dumb, but they were raised in a culture where humanities are graded on effort.
"I got straight A's in English, why can't I find a job that pays?"
On the other hand, though, I don't think that this is why humanities majors have a hard time finding jobs. It's not because they got an undeserved A in a class - no one is evaluating their skills to that level of detail during the job search and, frankly, you don't even need that level of skill for many jobs. It's hard to find a decent job because too many decent jobs have been removed from the job market. And that's down to runaway capitalism and the valuing of profit above all else.
We aren't going to fix the job market by fixing colleges.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 7:06 AM on August 24, 2018 [33 favorites]
If someone is making a rational, evidence-based decision purely on ROI, they sure as hell wouldn't go to university at all...not in 2018. They would go to college and into the trades, where they would enjoy little to no debt (easy to get tution paid for in most places if you do the homework) and have all their certifications paid for by an employer. Their starting pay would be great, their job security would be great, and after a few years they could probably even start their own business without even needing huge loans. They'll live with lower stress, retire younger, and be happier than the vast majority of their university friends.
If someone is making a rational, evidence-based decision purely on ROI...which very few people are.
posted by trackofalljades at 7:20 AM on August 24, 2018 [7 favorites]
If someone is making a rational, evidence-based decision purely on ROI...which very few people are.
posted by trackofalljades at 7:20 AM on August 24, 2018 [7 favorites]
I'm not well-versed in the research about why undergraduate students select their majors; I wish I was but there is only so much time in each day. But I do recall a study that was released just last week that explored one facet of this process that many of you are discussing: Does median pay affect students' major selection? The study was only conducted with Rutgers students and it was only conducted once so it has many important limitations but it appears to be methodologically solid. (Inside Higher Ed also wrote a news article about the study if you want an even shorter description with commentary from other researchers and scholars.)
In this study and another that is cited in the paper, the conclusion is that (improved or changed) information about prospective earnings is not influential in students' choice of major. However, the researchers did find evidence that students often have unrealistic expectations about salaries with low-income and first-generation students have more unrealistic expectations.
posted by ElKevbo at 7:23 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
In this study and another that is cited in the paper, the conclusion is that (improved or changed) information about prospective earnings is not influential in students' choice of major. However, the researchers did find evidence that students often have unrealistic expectations about salaries with low-income and first-generation students have more unrealistic expectations.
posted by ElKevbo at 7:23 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
I guess I'm one of the people being complained about since I went into STEM partially because it was far more likely to result in a job than my other interests at the time (psychology and art). I am happy with my decision and my career so far.
The only people I know who were never able to get a job in their field, 5-10 years later, were arts/humanity students (history, english, music...). I would never say it's a universally bad idea as certainly some people get great jobs with an arts degree, but you also have to be realistic about the job market and how competitive you personally will be within it. There are really not a huge number of amazing jobs out there compared to the number of graduates. If you're amazing then you'll probably be fine. If you're average or worse and have no particularly special abilities (and/or connections, luck, etc), you may have trouble. This does apply to STEM as well but less dramatically so, in my experience.
posted by randomnity at 7:34 AM on August 24, 2018
The only people I know who were never able to get a job in their field, 5-10 years later, were arts/humanity students (history, english, music...). I would never say it's a universally bad idea as certainly some people get great jobs with an arts degree, but you also have to be realistic about the job market and how competitive you personally will be within it. There are really not a huge number of amazing jobs out there compared to the number of graduates. If you're amazing then you'll probably be fine. If you're average or worse and have no particularly special abilities (and/or connections, luck, etc), you may have trouble. This does apply to STEM as well but less dramatically so, in my experience.
posted by randomnity at 7:34 AM on August 24, 2018
I was an English major because there was no way in hell I could do calculus for a science degree. I knew English was a loser major (sorry, but that's literally what we're discussing here) financially, but that was what I was good at to complete a degree. I kind of agree that one should major in what they are good at so that they can finish and if you're terrible at being an engineer it's not worth flunking out trying to be an engineer. But "everybody knows" that those who are good at English just aren't worth much money in this world. You are expendable.
On the other hand, I can say that I've heard more stories of people who did major in science still ending up in brokeass jobs, theirs just happen to be in labs instead of clerical work. So that's a scary new trend we don't hear as much about.
I don't know what's a guarantee any more of being able to make enough to live on and pay your loans back, and I don't think anyone at all knows. But we're still sure that sciences have better odds than learning how to read literature (most of us can't do that for a living anyway), so you have to go with what's more likely to be better.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:36 AM on August 24, 2018
On the other hand, I can say that I've heard more stories of people who did major in science still ending up in brokeass jobs, theirs just happen to be in labs instead of clerical work. So that's a scary new trend we don't hear as much about.
I don't know what's a guarantee any more of being able to make enough to live on and pay your loans back, and I don't think anyone at all knows. But we're still sure that sciences have better odds than learning how to read literature (most of us can't do that for a living anyway), so you have to go with what's more likely to be better.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:36 AM on August 24, 2018
This has to do with grade inflation in the humanities, and the essential disputability of humanities grading.
That's the main reason I dropped out of college. I couldn't take the grades I was being given as measure of anything after seeing other work that received high marks. If I couldn't use the grading as measure, then pursuing a degree didn't seem worth the effort, especially since the discussions weren't providing much benefit and most of the other students I talked to were just there marking time because it was something they needed to do to get a better job.
If the alleged value of the humanities is tied to the pleasure and experience of learning, there really needs to be some way to renew emphasis on that without making people broke and unable to find jobs. I should have loved college, in theory, but ended up feeling the values around learning for its own sake were more window dressing than reality. The other students I talked to had it right the whole time.
posted by gusottertrout at 7:37 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
That's the main reason I dropped out of college. I couldn't take the grades I was being given as measure of anything after seeing other work that received high marks. If I couldn't use the grading as measure, then pursuing a degree didn't seem worth the effort, especially since the discussions weren't providing much benefit and most of the other students I talked to were just there marking time because it was something they needed to do to get a better job.
If the alleged value of the humanities is tied to the pleasure and experience of learning, there really needs to be some way to renew emphasis on that without making people broke and unable to find jobs. I should have loved college, in theory, but ended up feeling the values around learning for its own sake were more window dressing than reality. The other students I talked to had it right the whole time.
posted by gusottertrout at 7:37 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
"The thing I kept wondering while reading was: has a decrease in the numbers of college humanities majors actually resulted in decreased humanities-related intellectual abilities in the post-college-aged-population? I don't know the answer, but I'd think one possibility might be that there's increased availability of non-higher-ed-based sources of humanities education..."
"A pure humanities degree may have been great, but I read literature, studied a new language and played music all the same..."
"i wonder how much of it is also that, as hinted at in the article, humanities subjects often don't do a particularly good job at having a diverse curriculum?"
Per the cited comments, I think it's important to remind the author and others like them that the humanities themselves are not in crisis. It's merely enrollment in humanities undergraduate classes that's declining. The humanities, in my estimation, are still going pretty strong. Perhaps never before has a society had so many member interested in literature, history, language, etc.
The so-called "Golden Age of TV" is often just literary fiction in a new medium. Dickens wrote novels because that's how people wrote detailed narrative fiction in the 19th century. David Simon wrote "The Wire" for TV because that's how people write detailed narrative fiction in the 21st century.
Literary fiction, both classic and contemporary, still sells pretty well. Jonathan Franzen's Freedom sold 100,000 copies even before Oprah selected it for her book club. (By contrast, a recent #1 album by Drake sold about 100,000 physical copies in its first week.) And I remember a few years ago when Oprah selected Anna Karenina for the book club, it seemed like every woman I knew bought a copy, and many actually read it.
Rap lyrics are now so dense and poetic that entire websites like Rap Genius and Song Meanings exist to analyze and discuss them. And the denser and more poetic they get, the more people like them! If you agree that rap lyrics can be classified as poetry, I doubt poetry has ever been more popular than it is today.
History podcasts like Dan Carlin's Hardcore History and Stuff You Missed in History Class are among the most popular podcasts in the medium. Popular historians like Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough regularly make the best-seller charts.
Historical re-enactment is such a common hobby that it's possible to find a Civil War re-enactment or Renaissance Fair almost anywhere in the US.
There are 300 million people using Duolingo to learn a foreign language. Duolingo claims it has more users than the US public school system (which is in part because schools have cut language learning, but still...).
Arts such as photography and graphic design are now popular hobbies, probably more popular than ever before. They have become so popular that amateur participation has actually affected the labor market for professionals.
Does this sound like a country that has lost interest in the humanities to you?
Perhaps, instead, the problem is something with the way university humanities classes are taught. There are plenty of hypotheses there, from plain boredom to exclusion to politicization, many of which seem more plausible than "welp, I guess the kids like science now" or "welp, kids only care about money". Perhaps we humanists could start using our vaunted critical thinking skills to explore that...
posted by kevinbelt at 7:44 AM on August 24, 2018 [30 favorites]
"A pure humanities degree may have been great, but I read literature, studied a new language and played music all the same..."
"i wonder how much of it is also that, as hinted at in the article, humanities subjects often don't do a particularly good job at having a diverse curriculum?"
Per the cited comments, I think it's important to remind the author and others like them that the humanities themselves are not in crisis. It's merely enrollment in humanities undergraduate classes that's declining. The humanities, in my estimation, are still going pretty strong. Perhaps never before has a society had so many member interested in literature, history, language, etc.
The so-called "Golden Age of TV" is often just literary fiction in a new medium. Dickens wrote novels because that's how people wrote detailed narrative fiction in the 19th century. David Simon wrote "The Wire" for TV because that's how people write detailed narrative fiction in the 21st century.
Literary fiction, both classic and contemporary, still sells pretty well. Jonathan Franzen's Freedom sold 100,000 copies even before Oprah selected it for her book club. (By contrast, a recent #1 album by Drake sold about 100,000 physical copies in its first week.) And I remember a few years ago when Oprah selected Anna Karenina for the book club, it seemed like every woman I knew bought a copy, and many actually read it.
Rap lyrics are now so dense and poetic that entire websites like Rap Genius and Song Meanings exist to analyze and discuss them. And the denser and more poetic they get, the more people like them! If you agree that rap lyrics can be classified as poetry, I doubt poetry has ever been more popular than it is today.
History podcasts like Dan Carlin's Hardcore History and Stuff You Missed in History Class are among the most popular podcasts in the medium. Popular historians like Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough regularly make the best-seller charts.
Historical re-enactment is such a common hobby that it's possible to find a Civil War re-enactment or Renaissance Fair almost anywhere in the US.
There are 300 million people using Duolingo to learn a foreign language. Duolingo claims it has more users than the US public school system (which is in part because schools have cut language learning, but still...).
Arts such as photography and graphic design are now popular hobbies, probably more popular than ever before. They have become so popular that amateur participation has actually affected the labor market for professionals.
Does this sound like a country that has lost interest in the humanities to you?
Perhaps, instead, the problem is something with the way university humanities classes are taught. There are plenty of hypotheses there, from plain boredom to exclusion to politicization, many of which seem more plausible than "welp, I guess the kids like science now" or "welp, kids only care about money". Perhaps we humanists could start using our vaunted critical thinking skills to explore that...
posted by kevinbelt at 7:44 AM on August 24, 2018 [30 favorites]
I don't think that a lot of freshman would have the tools to really evaluate those numbers. Most older adults probably don't. What does it mean for me if there is a $5,000-$10,000 difference in median earnings between these two majors? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The Inside HigherEd article focuses on what students did with salary information, but the study also presented them with data on unemployment and perceived job security. Honestly, I expected that this would have more of an effect - that students would be more concerned with having a job than with salary numbers. But then, the most secure field (healthcare) is one that requires a lot of additional schooling and is clearly not for everyone. Remove the top performer and the differences between the remaining fields isn't as stark.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 7:44 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
The Inside HigherEd article focuses on what students did with salary information, but the study also presented them with data on unemployment and perceived job security. Honestly, I expected that this would have more of an effect - that students would be more concerned with having a job than with salary numbers. But then, the most secure field (healthcare) is one that requires a lot of additional schooling and is clearly not for everyone. Remove the top performer and the differences between the remaining fields isn't as stark.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 7:44 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
I guess I'm one of the people being complained about
I don't think anyone's complaining in the thread, and I only read the linked piece as an argument that the economic case for picking STEM is not as strong as it is perceived to be, rather than a complaint about people (i.e. basically everyone) who (allegedly) overestimate the strength of that case.
posted by howfar at 7:53 AM on August 24, 2018
I don't think anyone's complaining in the thread, and I only read the linked piece as an argument that the economic case for picking STEM is not as strong as it is perceived to be, rather than a complaint about people (i.e. basically everyone) who (allegedly) overestimate the strength of that case.
posted by howfar at 7:53 AM on August 24, 2018
The thing I kept wondering while reading was: has a decrease in the numbers of college humanities majors actually resulted in decreased humanities-related intellectual abilities in the post-college-aged-population?
This is where the current societal-level inability to evaluate propaganda, ideology, and political events/maneuvering comes in. Critical thinking is important, and it's fundamentally what humanities majors are taught how to do. Yes, of course you can learn it elsewhere, too -- but critical thinking development is the fundamental point of education in the humanities.
In economics terms, critical thinking ability (and willingness) on a societal scale is a positive externality. It is essential for the functioning of [a self-governing] society that we have many people who can evaluate propaganda, ideology, political and social events, etc, but those skills are unlikely to be profitable enough for any one particular company for them to be "sold" at their real/total value on the market. In a functional economic system, that means that critical thinking development needs to be subsidized by the government (just like all positive externalities -- clean air, clean water, etc). Which is the basic reason why the government subsidizes education...Except that nowadays, the government does less and less and less of that and people do things like take out loans instead.
You can probably see where this is going politically. Critical thinking skills are essential to the ability to self-govern, but if there is a critical mass of people who don't actually want the populace to self-govern, then you're going to see that critical mass of people commit to a massive undermining of critical skill development in the population. And that is something happening now in the US. It's not all a top-down phenomenon, of course -- there are many who perceive themselves as aligned with the power structure who therefore want to undermine "subversive" activities like critical thinking development/education. It's threatening to many people to have huge segments of the population specifically trained not to just buy into whatever lies or ideology is most convenient to those in power. But that corrosive anti-intellectualism is something that's being driven by financial choices made by the US government (like the lack of subsidizing for higher education and specifically humanities subjects) as well being a more abstract social/cultural problem.
My point is that it is a real financial burden on an individual level to take on a humanities degree, but it's important on a societal level that many people do, so therefore we (the taxpayers) should be subsidizing it more. That we would be looking to individual teenagers to essentially finance a societal-wide positive externality that we need to function is fucking ludicrous.
posted by rue72 at 7:57 AM on August 24, 2018 [26 favorites]
This is where the current societal-level inability to evaluate propaganda, ideology, and political events/maneuvering comes in. Critical thinking is important, and it's fundamentally what humanities majors are taught how to do. Yes, of course you can learn it elsewhere, too -- but critical thinking development is the fundamental point of education in the humanities.
In economics terms, critical thinking ability (and willingness) on a societal scale is a positive externality. It is essential for the functioning of [a self-governing] society that we have many people who can evaluate propaganda, ideology, political and social events, etc, but those skills are unlikely to be profitable enough for any one particular company for them to be "sold" at their real/total value on the market. In a functional economic system, that means that critical thinking development needs to be subsidized by the government (just like all positive externalities -- clean air, clean water, etc). Which is the basic reason why the government subsidizes education...Except that nowadays, the government does less and less and less of that and people do things like take out loans instead.
You can probably see where this is going politically. Critical thinking skills are essential to the ability to self-govern, but if there is a critical mass of people who don't actually want the populace to self-govern, then you're going to see that critical mass of people commit to a massive undermining of critical skill development in the population. And that is something happening now in the US. It's not all a top-down phenomenon, of course -- there are many who perceive themselves as aligned with the power structure who therefore want to undermine "subversive" activities like critical thinking development/education. It's threatening to many people to have huge segments of the population specifically trained not to just buy into whatever lies or ideology is most convenient to those in power. But that corrosive anti-intellectualism is something that's being driven by financial choices made by the US government (like the lack of subsidizing for higher education and specifically humanities subjects) as well being a more abstract social/cultural problem.
My point is that it is a real financial burden on an individual level to take on a humanities degree, but it's important on a societal level that many people do, so therefore we (the taxpayers) should be subsidizing it more. That we would be looking to individual teenagers to essentially finance a societal-wide positive externality that we need to function is fucking ludicrous.
posted by rue72 at 7:57 AM on August 24, 2018 [26 favorites]
I hope everyone remembers all these “actually, a CompSci degree means you’ll be poor” anecdotes the text time we complain about 1BR apartments in The Mission being $5k+ a month.
posted by sideshow at 8:01 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by sideshow at 8:01 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
What does it mean for me if there is a $5,000-$10,000 difference in median earnings between these two majors?
The thing is, as someone pointed out above, it's not a 5K-10K difference in median earnings between those two majors, it's a difference between those majors and the unadjusted median. So per the article itself, electrical engineers have a median of 74K - fairly comfortable - while the fine arts and social sciences have a median of 36K, which is a 38K difference - meaning that the difference between the two salaries is itself enough to be a separate, larger, salary. "Liberal arts and humanities" is at 40K, which is 20K less than STEM medians. That's actually an enormous difference both in numbers and quality of living , even before you account for unemployment rates, or where people are living. One is at the 50th percentile of US income, the other is at the 70th-80th.
In short, the article is right about humanities majors dropping, but absolutely wrong to suggest that humanity majors don't make less overall.
posted by corb at 8:06 AM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
The thing is, as someone pointed out above, it's not a 5K-10K difference in median earnings between those two majors, it's a difference between those majors and the unadjusted median. So per the article itself, electrical engineers have a median of 74K - fairly comfortable - while the fine arts and social sciences have a median of 36K, which is a 38K difference - meaning that the difference between the two salaries is itself enough to be a separate, larger, salary. "Liberal arts and humanities" is at 40K, which is 20K less than STEM medians. That's actually an enormous difference both in numbers and quality of living , even before you account for unemployment rates, or where people are living. One is at the 50th percentile of US income, the other is at the 70th-80th.
In short, the article is right about humanities majors dropping, but absolutely wrong to suggest that humanity majors don't make less overall.
posted by corb at 8:06 AM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
I guess I'm one of the people being complained about
Literally nobody is complaining about you taking a STEM major.
The most people are saying is that your decision, when you were 18 or thereabouts, might not have been as empirically well-founded as you thought at the time, which should not be shocking about any decisions made by very young adults, and that you probably would have been fine if you'd majored in something else.
You would almost certainly not have a job that directly requires your specific major in the way than an engineering or nursing degree does. But you would probably be fine working in HR somewhere, or doing marketing, or doing one of the vast array of business to business jobs that seem nigh-impossible to explain to outsiders, or in any of a vast array of jobs with a government and eventually gotten an MPP or MPA, or having started in management and eventually gotten an MBA.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 8:12 AM on August 24, 2018
Literally nobody is complaining about you taking a STEM major.
The most people are saying is that your decision, when you were 18 or thereabouts, might not have been as empirically well-founded as you thought at the time, which should not be shocking about any decisions made by very young adults, and that you probably would have been fine if you'd majored in something else.
You would almost certainly not have a job that directly requires your specific major in the way than an engineering or nursing degree does. But you would probably be fine working in HR somewhere, or doing marketing, or doing one of the vast array of business to business jobs that seem nigh-impossible to explain to outsiders, or in any of a vast array of jobs with a government and eventually gotten an MPP or MPA, or having started in management and eventually gotten an MBA.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 8:12 AM on August 24, 2018
Do you want Jordan Petersons? Because that's how you get Jordan Petersons.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:12 AM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
posted by octobersurprise at 8:12 AM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
I just paid five bucks to jump into this fray.
I have a CS degree. The long way around... CS major, then dropped out, then returned and completed, then grad school, then dropped out again. I've been working in tech full time for about a decade. This means I'm a little older than my peers, and have a, um, somewhat broader set of life experiences typically.
Yes, you need to know some math. Maybe. But much of core CS is closer to psychology, philosophy or linguistics (hello Noam Chomsky) than to pure math. I've never had to write a program to solve a set of partial differential equations for money, but I have had to parse a hell of a lot of text.
The humanities should be required for CS. Familiarity with the humanities is how you avoid accidentally shepherding in a new era of fascism.
'Why build it this way?' is a question that cannot be solely answered through complexity theory.
Or, on preview, what rue72 said.
posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 8:14 AM on August 24, 2018 [38 favorites]
I have a CS degree. The long way around... CS major, then dropped out, then returned and completed, then grad school, then dropped out again. I've been working in tech full time for about a decade. This means I'm a little older than my peers, and have a, um, somewhat broader set of life experiences typically.
Yes, you need to know some math. Maybe. But much of core CS is closer to psychology, philosophy or linguistics (hello Noam Chomsky) than to pure math. I've never had to write a program to solve a set of partial differential equations for money, but I have had to parse a hell of a lot of text.
The humanities should be required for CS. Familiarity with the humanities is how you avoid accidentally shepherding in a new era of fascism.
'Why build it this way?' is a question that cannot be solely answered through complexity theory.
Or, on preview, what rue72 said.
posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 8:14 AM on August 24, 2018 [38 favorites]
I would have loved to have taken a less vocational major than CS myself but I had a kid to raise and a mortgage to pay. Getting a degree in something like the humanities is a luxury most of us can't afford.
But this is the POINT of the article. CS aside, many STEM degrees don't earn more than humanities, and some - like psychology or the life sciences - can be less advantageous on the job market.
The students choosing 'vocational' degrees are not getting good information on what degrees are ACTUALLY going to open doors.
What I've always thought about is how a 4.0 in a Humanities will take you further than a 2.1 in anything else - at the very least, you can get a full-ride to graduate school. This is how I got my masters degree, and I work in a different field, but one which I would not be able to work in without my graduate accreditation and research experience.
So that's what I would tell the kid who was getting As in a humanities subject, but struggling and getting Cs in what they perceive as the 'marketable' subject: grades do matter, and you're better off going with your strengths.
Also, do internships, if you can. They suck and are classist and horrible - but there are paid ones, and they really do make a difference in your connections in the job market. I didn't do any (didn't know they existed), but fell by luck into a part-time research job that led directly to my current career.
posted by jb at 8:20 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
But this is the POINT of the article. CS aside, many STEM degrees don't earn more than humanities, and some - like psychology or the life sciences - can be less advantageous on the job market.
The students choosing 'vocational' degrees are not getting good information on what degrees are ACTUALLY going to open doors.
What I've always thought about is how a 4.0 in a Humanities will take you further than a 2.1 in anything else - at the very least, you can get a full-ride to graduate school. This is how I got my masters degree, and I work in a different field, but one which I would not be able to work in without my graduate accreditation and research experience.
So that's what I would tell the kid who was getting As in a humanities subject, but struggling and getting Cs in what they perceive as the 'marketable' subject: grades do matter, and you're better off going with your strengths.
Also, do internships, if you can. They suck and are classist and horrible - but there are paid ones, and they really do make a difference in your connections in the job market. I didn't do any (didn't know they existed), but fell by luck into a part-time research job that led directly to my current career.
posted by jb at 8:20 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Yesterday in Boston I heard a presentation by someone running a technology group at Harvard. She spoke about changing the way we hire in a couple of ways.
First, make sure your Requirements (CS degree, ability to juggle, whatever) correspond directly with the specific Job Responsibilities (writing C++, street corner juggling, whatever). While you're at it, adjust the actual language of the items to make it non-gende-specific.
Second, go back through what you just wrote, and compare it to who's doing well in your group already in a similar role. Got a poet who writes nice embedded RTOS stuff? Maybe drop the formal degree requirement, and ask for work samples instead. (STEM degrees were specifically mentioned, then humanities degrees, then any degree at all!) Just make sure that you know what you're actually looking for!
After that, she said, their hiring was faster and resulted in better matches: they went from almost 500 days to fill a position under the old system, to like a month the next time, then even less the time after that. Other groups are asking to use their system as a model.
And as a side effect, she said, gender imbalances (which are suuuper bad in that specialty) are evening out, the workspace is more welcoming and inclusive. They're getting people who are better-suited for the work, who will thus be happier and more productive.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:24 AM on August 24, 2018 [16 favorites]
First, make sure your Requirements (CS degree, ability to juggle, whatever) correspond directly with the specific Job Responsibilities (writing C++, street corner juggling, whatever). While you're at it, adjust the actual language of the items to make it non-gende-specific.
Second, go back through what you just wrote, and compare it to who's doing well in your group already in a similar role. Got a poet who writes nice embedded RTOS stuff? Maybe drop the formal degree requirement, and ask for work samples instead. (STEM degrees were specifically mentioned, then humanities degrees, then any degree at all!) Just make sure that you know what you're actually looking for!
After that, she said, their hiring was faster and resulted in better matches: they went from almost 500 days to fill a position under the old system, to like a month the next time, then even less the time after that. Other groups are asking to use their system as a model.
And as a side effect, she said, gender imbalances (which are suuuper bad in that specialty) are evening out, the workspace is more welcoming and inclusive. They're getting people who are better-suited for the work, who will thus be happier and more productive.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:24 AM on August 24, 2018 [16 favorites]
This Twitter thread points out another important aspect of this that's oddly missing from the Atlantic piece: the influence of parents.
Purely anecdotally...I'm a young person with an English BA, who now works with technology in the context of humanitarian aid and disaster response. I feel like I'm surrounded by successful undergraduate humanities-majors who eventually ended up working in technology or medicine.
None of us are technically working in the same field as our degrees, but insofar as I'm everywhere, we're very happy about the direction our career has taken us. I didn't get an English BA expecting to be a Professional Literature Analyst (and I would have hated that anyway.) I did expect to get solid training in writing and thinking, and those are the skills that helped me get into my current career.
posted by faineg at 8:34 AM on August 24, 2018 [11 favorites]
Purely anecdotally...I'm a young person with an English BA, who now works with technology in the context of humanitarian aid and disaster response. I feel like I'm surrounded by successful undergraduate humanities-majors who eventually ended up working in technology or medicine.
None of us are technically working in the same field as our degrees, but insofar as I'm everywhere, we're very happy about the direction our career has taken us. I didn't get an English BA expecting to be a Professional Literature Analyst (and I would have hated that anyway.) I did expect to get solid training in writing and thinking, and those are the skills that helped me get into my current career.
posted by faineg at 8:34 AM on August 24, 2018 [11 favorites]
First, make sure your Requirements (CS degree, ability to juggle, whatever) correspond directly with the specific Job Responsibilities (writing C++, street corner juggling, whatever).
People doing hiring (which I am on occasion): for the love of god, this.
I have 100% been intimidated out of applying for a job because the requirements were so daunting, despite the fact that I have personally hired quite a lot of people and crafted job postings with recruiters and know full well that at least half the time those jobs don't need those skills, and the person writing it is just trying to ... I don't even know. Weed out the truly incapable?
(But of course, the truly incapable often have no filter and will apply for it anyways, while the competent tell themselves this isn't for them and move on).
posted by tocts at 8:35 AM on August 24, 2018 [7 favorites]
People doing hiring (which I am on occasion): for the love of god, this.
I have 100% been intimidated out of applying for a job because the requirements were so daunting, despite the fact that I have personally hired quite a lot of people and crafted job postings with recruiters and know full well that at least half the time those jobs don't need those skills, and the person writing it is just trying to ... I don't even know. Weed out the truly incapable?
(But of course, the truly incapable often have no filter and will apply for it anyways, while the competent tell themselves this isn't for them and move on).
posted by tocts at 8:35 AM on August 24, 2018 [7 favorites]
Outside of professional programs, very few people have jobs that "use" their major in any significant degree. Relatively few bio grads have jobs where their boss runs up and demands that they use some particular skill or knowledge that's closely related to their major.
This is 100% absolutely borne out by both the employment stats that are available and my own anecdotes about what my Chemistry classmates and friends have ended doing in their careers. Most of the S and the M parts of the STEM thing, do not end up in careers directly doing science/math. They may end up in technical jobs or technically-related jobs, but for most the STEM degree is really only useful as a way in the door for graduates. Many end up in sales or marketing, a good chunk do stuff a business degree would be more appropriate for, a lot end up in middle manager positions. The vast majority of these jobs could equally be done by anyone with a university degree, and that useful only as a credential. To that extent the degree itself is useful, and, personally, I think the discipline and the modes of thought a university education implies are all good, but the specific knowledge gained? Not so important careerwise. STEM graduates are not exceptional in this regard, though they are often held to be. It's one of the Big Lies about the education system.
Students tie themselves into knots about major choice and this program or that. Ten years on, the majority of those choices don't matter. Program choice certainly can affect outcomes and career paths, but most aren't that material on what jobs people eventually choose for themselves.
posted by bonehead at 8:38 AM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
This is 100% absolutely borne out by both the employment stats that are available and my own anecdotes about what my Chemistry classmates and friends have ended doing in their careers. Most of the S and the M parts of the STEM thing, do not end up in careers directly doing science/math. They may end up in technical jobs or technically-related jobs, but for most the STEM degree is really only useful as a way in the door for graduates. Many end up in sales or marketing, a good chunk do stuff a business degree would be more appropriate for, a lot end up in middle manager positions. The vast majority of these jobs could equally be done by anyone with a university degree, and that useful only as a credential. To that extent the degree itself is useful, and, personally, I think the discipline and the modes of thought a university education implies are all good, but the specific knowledge gained? Not so important careerwise. STEM graduates are not exceptional in this regard, though they are often held to be. It's one of the Big Lies about the education system.
Students tie themselves into knots about major choice and this program or that. Ten years on, the majority of those choices don't matter. Program choice certainly can affect outcomes and career paths, but most aren't that material on what jobs people eventually choose for themselves.
posted by bonehead at 8:38 AM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
Insofar as I'm AWARE, not "everywhere" - guess that English degree didn't do me much good after all.
posted by faineg at 8:40 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by faineg at 8:40 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Common question at university/college is, "What's your major?"
Common response by STEM majors to Humanities majors is, "Do you want fries with that?"
posted by CrowGoat at 8:40 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Common response by STEM majors to Humanities majors is, "Do you want fries with that?"
posted by CrowGoat at 8:40 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
ha ha ha, it's funny because some people who optimistically decided to study humanities when they were 18 are poor now
comedy gold i tells ya
posted by faineg at 8:45 AM on August 24, 2018 [12 favorites]
comedy gold i tells ya
posted by faineg at 8:45 AM on August 24, 2018 [12 favorites]
CrowGoat: I don't understand what you think that ill-informed joke is contributing to this discussion.
Everyone who is discussing employees using STEM skills in non-STEM jobs: This relates strongly to a paper I remember being presented an education conference a few years ago where the author was making that exact point and recommending that we (a) abandon or modify the "leaky pipeline" metaphor about STEM recruitment and retention and (b) expand our ideas about "success in STEM" to go beyond just counting employment in traditional STEM jobs. He was describing qualitative work that he and his colleagues had done - a whole lot of interviews with students and graduates, if I remember correctly - and many of the participants described intentionally learning some STEM skills - programming, mathematical analysis or modelling, etc. - but with the intention of applying them in other fields and careers.
posted by ElKevbo at 8:49 AM on August 24, 2018 [9 favorites]
Everyone who is discussing employees using STEM skills in non-STEM jobs: This relates strongly to a paper I remember being presented an education conference a few years ago where the author was making that exact point and recommending that we (a) abandon or modify the "leaky pipeline" metaphor about STEM recruitment and retention and (b) expand our ideas about "success in STEM" to go beyond just counting employment in traditional STEM jobs. He was describing qualitative work that he and his colleagues had done - a whole lot of interviews with students and graduates, if I remember correctly - and many of the participants described intentionally learning some STEM skills - programming, mathematical analysis or modelling, etc. - but with the intention of applying them in other fields and careers.
posted by ElKevbo at 8:49 AM on August 24, 2018 [9 favorites]
One can also make the argument that “the ability to write well” is actually very practical in Today’s Economy.
Speaking as a self-taught programmer holding 2 humanities degrees and no STEM degrees I can attest to the ways in which not being able read/write well affects productivity in non-humanities settings. I'm dealing with a client right now that has a team of 6 people, none of whom can write a decent sentence, meaning that all of their functional requirements are vague and end up requiring several rounds of conversation before we can actually built the thing they want. I'm fairly certain that not being able to write out what they want means not knowing what they want in any specific way so they do a lot of stuff like asking for two new features that contradict each other and/or cancel each other out. Writing is partly a technology for communicating and party a heuristic for a certain way of thinking - not being able to write complex sentences that clearly convey logical content means one is much more likely to not be able to think logically about the content.
posted by eustacescrubb at 9:01 AM on August 24, 2018 [10 favorites]
Speaking as a self-taught programmer holding 2 humanities degrees and no STEM degrees I can attest to the ways in which not being able read/write well affects productivity in non-humanities settings. I'm dealing with a client right now that has a team of 6 people, none of whom can write a decent sentence, meaning that all of their functional requirements are vague and end up requiring several rounds of conversation before we can actually built the thing they want. I'm fairly certain that not being able to write out what they want means not knowing what they want in any specific way so they do a lot of stuff like asking for two new features that contradict each other and/or cancel each other out. Writing is partly a technology for communicating and party a heuristic for a certain way of thinking - not being able to write complex sentences that clearly convey logical content means one is much more likely to not be able to think logically about the content.
posted by eustacescrubb at 9:01 AM on August 24, 2018 [10 favorites]
"One who doesn't have the huge network of connections and simply must select a major that they think will have the biggest ROI."
That type of person is... a first generation college student! One who doesn't have the huge network of connections and simply must select a major that they think will have the biggest ROI.
There was a massive surge in first-gen enrolment in the 70s as well though.
As far as I know, it's a great choice now career-wise. The availability heuristic may be skewing my perception here because I'm currently trying to hire a programmer.
No. It's a great choice now, to have made a few years ago. An even better choice would have been to get a PhD with a deep learning focus which finished four-six years ago and to have done some post-doc and additional research work right in time to catch the rising edge of the boom two-four years ago. Who on earth could have predicted that though? Getting a PhD in CS?? In AI?? Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. That is what everyone would have told you if you'd started it in 2007.
Everyone's a winner when they can go back in time.
Aerospace was a guaranteed lifetime job, a chance to join the upper-middle class as management in the defence sector for decades... until the Cold War ended.
Pharma has been cutting research on small chemical drugs for decades. That's not been great for chemists.
The only people I know who were never able to get a job in their field, 5-10 years later, were arts/humanity students (history, english, music...).
What does a job in "their field" even look like though? I have a physics degree and like other academic (vs vocational) degrees the "field" is staying in academia, if you have a "field" it's a vocational or pre-professional degree. I work in a quantitative role but that's really not the same. If I had a literature degree what would "my field" be? You could argue literary agent or publishing but do those actually use many of the skills learned in a lit degree?
posted by atrazine at 9:07 AM on August 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
That type of person is... a first generation college student! One who doesn't have the huge network of connections and simply must select a major that they think will have the biggest ROI.
There was a massive surge in first-gen enrolment in the 70s as well though.
As far as I know, it's a great choice now career-wise. The availability heuristic may be skewing my perception here because I'm currently trying to hire a programmer.
No. It's a great choice now, to have made a few years ago. An even better choice would have been to get a PhD with a deep learning focus which finished four-six years ago and to have done some post-doc and additional research work right in time to catch the rising edge of the boom two-four years ago. Who on earth could have predicted that though? Getting a PhD in CS?? In AI?? Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. That is what everyone would have told you if you'd started it in 2007.
Everyone's a winner when they can go back in time.
Aerospace was a guaranteed lifetime job, a chance to join the upper-middle class as management in the defence sector for decades... until the Cold War ended.
Pharma has been cutting research on small chemical drugs for decades. That's not been great for chemists.
The only people I know who were never able to get a job in their field, 5-10 years later, were arts/humanity students (history, english, music...).
What does a job in "their field" even look like though? I have a physics degree and like other academic (vs vocational) degrees the "field" is staying in academia, if you have a "field" it's a vocational or pre-professional degree. I work in a quantitative role but that's really not the same. If I had a literature degree what would "my field" be? You could argue literary agent or publishing but do those actually use many of the skills learned in a lit degree?
posted by atrazine at 9:07 AM on August 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
Ahhhh man where do I begin here.
I knew after a semester at college that despite my initial, genuine interest in computer science, I hated the field. I enjoyed the theoretical aspects of it, but I hated the tedium and frustration of dealing with actual computers, didn't think it was possible to use CS to do anything of actual value in the world, and most importantly absolutely hated the culture that surrounded it - the arrogance, the sexism and racism, the close-mindedness.
But I didn't switch to a humanities major, despite the fact that I was that kid reading Dostoevsky and Foreign Affairs for fun at fourteen. All the careers or fields I wanted to do- teaching, journalism, design, etc- were, I knew, low-paying, and usually high-risk on top of that, and usually would require an extremely expensive graduate degree on top of that. The 'high paying humanities careers' people keep alluding to are things like marketing and consulting and banking- infamous for their long hours and lack of social value.
I don't think programming has much social value, but it was the only field I could find that (1) does not require an expensive grad degree (and any analysis of earnings in a field should take into consideration the cost of student loan repayment) and (2) where you can actually find classic 9-to-5 jobs, on-call notwithstanding.
I do agree that there's a difference between TE and SM despite efforts to collapse them together. I don't think I know a single bio/chem/biochem major who wasn't planning on going to med school afterwards, though (although I did know a great many who were deluded about their chances).
I'm also going to note that my analysis of 'what major do I pick' was strictly backwards-looking. I decided what career track seemed best suited to my particular set of requirements, and chose a major that fit. I'm kind of astounded that anyone has the audacity to tell anyone, in 2018!, that they should take anything other than pure economics as a factor in their decisionmaking. Maybe if you're the child of someone wealthy.
It was especially easy for me to decide to treat college as strictly a job-training program because frankly, the only thing college offers that I can't get elsewhere, better, is a credential. A class at my relatively cheap state school is $1,000 a semester. My late fees at the various libraries I check out books from average around $100 a semester. But it's the library that has given me by far the better education. I learned more about life from watching Tokyo Story, more about ethics from reading Tolstoy, and, heck, more about CS from reading Code than a dozen classes could have taught me.
Classroom discussions? I was lucky if the professor could coax a single comment out of the class. On my own, I can read or watch something and immediately find thoughtful, deep essays about it online. Professor feedback? I averaged about a sentence of useful, actionable feedback per paper. I don't blame my professors and TAs for that; they were clearly overburdened with students. Still. Hardly worth one thousand dollars.
But I'll throw in another positive thing about colleges besides the credentials. The databases. My god, the databases. I'm going to miss having instant, free access to any paper in the world so much when I graduate. I honestly would pay a thousand dollars a year for that.
posted by perplexion at 9:08 AM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
I knew after a semester at college that despite my initial, genuine interest in computer science, I hated the field. I enjoyed the theoretical aspects of it, but I hated the tedium and frustration of dealing with actual computers, didn't think it was possible to use CS to do anything of actual value in the world, and most importantly absolutely hated the culture that surrounded it - the arrogance, the sexism and racism, the close-mindedness.
But I didn't switch to a humanities major, despite the fact that I was that kid reading Dostoevsky and Foreign Affairs for fun at fourteen. All the careers or fields I wanted to do- teaching, journalism, design, etc- were, I knew, low-paying, and usually high-risk on top of that, and usually would require an extremely expensive graduate degree on top of that. The 'high paying humanities careers' people keep alluding to are things like marketing and consulting and banking- infamous for their long hours and lack of social value.
I don't think programming has much social value, but it was the only field I could find that (1) does not require an expensive grad degree (and any analysis of earnings in a field should take into consideration the cost of student loan repayment) and (2) where you can actually find classic 9-to-5 jobs, on-call notwithstanding.
I do agree that there's a difference between TE and SM despite efforts to collapse them together. I don't think I know a single bio/chem/biochem major who wasn't planning on going to med school afterwards, though (although I did know a great many who were deluded about their chances).
I'm also going to note that my analysis of 'what major do I pick' was strictly backwards-looking. I decided what career track seemed best suited to my particular set of requirements, and chose a major that fit. I'm kind of astounded that anyone has the audacity to tell anyone, in 2018!, that they should take anything other than pure economics as a factor in their decisionmaking. Maybe if you're the child of someone wealthy.
It was especially easy for me to decide to treat college as strictly a job-training program because frankly, the only thing college offers that I can't get elsewhere, better, is a credential. A class at my relatively cheap state school is $1,000 a semester. My late fees at the various libraries I check out books from average around $100 a semester. But it's the library that has given me by far the better education. I learned more about life from watching Tokyo Story, more about ethics from reading Tolstoy, and, heck, more about CS from reading Code than a dozen classes could have taught me.
Classroom discussions? I was lucky if the professor could coax a single comment out of the class. On my own, I can read or watch something and immediately find thoughtful, deep essays about it online. Professor feedback? I averaged about a sentence of useful, actionable feedback per paper. I don't blame my professors and TAs for that; they were clearly overburdened with students. Still. Hardly worth one thousand dollars.
But I'll throw in another positive thing about colleges besides the credentials. The databases. My god, the databases. I'm going to miss having instant, free access to any paper in the world so much when I graduate. I honestly would pay a thousand dollars a year for that.
posted by perplexion at 9:08 AM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
Here’s a plug for Prof Cottom’s book Lower Ed on the rise of for profit education and credentialism.
One of Prof Cottom’s arguments is that we have a religious-like fever for the idea that more education = more employment opportunities. But reality doesn’t bear that out. Throughout the book she makes it clear that students are not “dupes” being tricked by for profit institutions, but smart folks who are doing their best with the info they have. It’s a really good and important read, I think.
My own experience has been that higher education is almost entirely about networking. The more expensive school you can go to, the more rich people you’ll be able to network with. I think this is why your degree might not matter but it still matters which school you go to. I wonder tho if the data bears it out that a degree from an Ivy is still worth more than a degree from a state school.
posted by CMcG at 9:12 AM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
One of Prof Cottom’s arguments is that we have a religious-like fever for the idea that more education = more employment opportunities. But reality doesn’t bear that out. Throughout the book she makes it clear that students are not “dupes” being tricked by for profit institutions, but smart folks who are doing their best with the info they have. It’s a really good and important read, I think.
My own experience has been that higher education is almost entirely about networking. The more expensive school you can go to, the more rich people you’ll be able to network with. I think this is why your degree might not matter but it still matters which school you go to. I wonder tho if the data bears it out that a degree from an Ivy is still worth more than a degree from a state school.
posted by CMcG at 9:12 AM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
I'm currently at this crossroads in life. I have a bachelor's in history, and am, because of personal interest and whispers that it offers more job opportunities (including outside of the field) eyeing a master's degree in history. There's a specific program I'm looking at that would cater very well to my narrow interests in historical study, however, at [late] 26, I'm starting to feel this terror that I'm essentially already on the far/old end of finding a career. Without connections, it seems to me that you have to start quite early in any career track in order to succeed.
Were I to discover at 28/29 that a master's in history does not offer any forward momentum to my job prospects and general well-being, my concern would be that I would be too old to re-qualify in something rigorous, intense, and difficult for a non-maths oriented person like myself. I'm already looking around and seeing that the majority of my STEM-grad friends took decent jobs upon graduation that paid 60k+ (CAD) right out of the gate. Here I am, at the cusp of 27, and I'm still making just above minimum wage, shopping for grants/bursaries/scholarships that would buoy another sojourn into "dead-end" academics.
It feels like I've lost, and many of my STEM-grad peers are eager to emphasize that.
posted by constantinescharity at 9:15 AM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
Were I to discover at 28/29 that a master's in history does not offer any forward momentum to my job prospects and general well-being, my concern would be that I would be too old to re-qualify in something rigorous, intense, and difficult for a non-maths oriented person like myself. I'm already looking around and seeing that the majority of my STEM-grad friends took decent jobs upon graduation that paid 60k+ (CAD) right out of the gate. Here I am, at the cusp of 27, and I'm still making just above minimum wage, shopping for grants/bursaries/scholarships that would buoy another sojourn into "dead-end" academics.
It feels like I've lost, and many of my STEM-grad peers are eager to emphasize that.
posted by constantinescharity at 9:15 AM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
This is where the current societal-level inability to evaluate propaganda, ideology, and political events/maneuvering comes in. Critical thinking is important, and it's fundamentally what humanities majors are taught how to do. Yes, of course you can learn it elsewhere, too -- but critical thinking development is the fundamental point of education in the humanities.
Is that why all those middle class, middle-aged, white people with college degrees voted for Trump?
posted by atrazine at 9:16 AM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
Is that why all those middle class, middle-aged, white people with college degrees voted for Trump?
posted by atrazine at 9:16 AM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
Yeah. The thing about majoring in humanities is that it teaches you how to think around corners, how to think about situations outside your own lived experience, and how to communicate. The way this translates into the workplace is if you have the skills to do the job you're trying to get. If you want to be in a technical field where you get paid for technical skills, do you actually need a STEM degree to get those skills? In my experience, you don’t. Jobs want a degree and they want experience, but they are typically willing to prioritize experience over degree coursework such that you can major in English and minor in CS (or be self-taught) and have the skills to get the technical job.
Also, where do majors like business or marketing fall in this? Project management? Those obviously aren’t STEM but they don’t strictly fall into humanities either, but they obviously are promoted as being lucrative degree programs, even though “business” is as generic as “liberal arts” in terms of the broadness of the curriculum.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:16 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
Also, where do majors like business or marketing fall in this? Project management? Those obviously aren’t STEM but they don’t strictly fall into humanities either, but they obviously are promoted as being lucrative degree programs, even though “business” is as generic as “liberal arts” in terms of the broadness of the curriculum.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:16 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
Getting a degree in something like the humanities is a luxury most of us can't afford.
I work for a company that provides pretty good pay and benefits. When it's time for our team to hire anyone, the Human Resources department provides us with a stack of applications for people who have business degrees and irrelevant technical or customer service experience that happens to be in the same industry. We send them back and say, do you have anyone with an English or history or some kind of liberal arts degree?
Because what we do all day is research and interpret , write things, and craft arguments. The actual industry we're in doesn't really matter. Unfortunately most people hiring for these types of jobs don't understand what they need, and most people with the education we want have never heard of what we do, or don't know that it could be an interesting and well-paying job.
posted by frobozz at 9:19 AM on August 24, 2018 [9 favorites]
I work for a company that provides pretty good pay and benefits. When it's time for our team to hire anyone, the Human Resources department provides us with a stack of applications for people who have business degrees and irrelevant technical or customer service experience that happens to be in the same industry. We send them back and say, do you have anyone with an English or history or some kind of liberal arts degree?
Because what we do all day is research and interpret , write things, and craft arguments. The actual industry we're in doesn't really matter. Unfortunately most people hiring for these types of jobs don't understand what they need, and most people with the education we want have never heard of what we do, or don't know that it could be an interesting and well-paying job.
posted by frobozz at 9:19 AM on August 24, 2018 [9 favorites]
Is that why all those middle class, middle-aged, white people with college degrees voted for Trump?
College degrees in what, though? Did they actually engage in their liberal arts general requirements, or did they do what tons of people do and focus on a “lucrative major” at the expense of their philosophy and ethics credits?
If the argument is that there has been a focused trend toward abandoning liberal arts classes and majors as having no value, and there is a correlation of people with college degrees who do not possess critical thinking skills, then that would only justify the article’s argument, not negate it.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:20 AM on August 24, 2018 [7 favorites]
College degrees in what, though? Did they actually engage in their liberal arts general requirements, or did they do what tons of people do and focus on a “lucrative major” at the expense of their philosophy and ethics credits?
If the argument is that there has been a focused trend toward abandoning liberal arts classes and majors as having no value, and there is a correlation of people with college degrees who do not possess critical thinking skills, then that would only justify the article’s argument, not negate it.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:20 AM on August 24, 2018 [7 favorites]
If I'm not mistaken, isn't Wall Street mostly composed of humanities majors from renowned universities? Not sure I buy the "more humanities majors would mean a better society" argument. How many famous philosophers were fascists, again?
posted by perplexion at 9:27 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by perplexion at 9:27 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
I'd love to see a broader analysis of things like how often internships are paid for in STEM versus humanities fields. My experience is that every internship I had in physics was paid and paid enough to afford to do nothing but that for the duration. Also, the only reason graduate education was a possibility for me was because I knew my tuition would be covered and I would be paid to do research or to be a TA.
posted by runcibleshaw at 9:34 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by runcibleshaw at 9:34 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
I'm currently at this crossroads in life. I have a bachelor's in history, and am, because of personal interest and whispers that it offers more job opportunities (including outside of the field) eyeing a master's degree in history.
Don’t embark on a master’s degree unless you can say with assurance exactly what you’re going to do with it. If you have your eye on a specific field and a career path in that field, and it requires a master’s in history, then you go for the master’s in history. You do not go for the master’s and then hope you can figure out a career path.
Part of the issue with any job and any major is that you still have to figure out how you’re going to pay your bills. Jobs are interests + skills and always have been. One problem in our culture is that parents do not engage their children in viable career paths until they’re practically about to graduate college, let alone when they’re going to graduate HS. They focus on the status of the school, and on majors that may or may not provide job security and lucrative job positions upon graduation, and as most of us have learned the hard way at some point, that is not guaranteed for any field because of the economy.
If a person is 25 years old and they still haven’t decided on a career path, then they need to do that work first and with great priority. If the work and study is such a drag that it would make one miserable to do it for their career, that’s the time to figure that out. But in any case, a student needs to take a detailed look at the first 10 years of a career path and exactly what requirements those jobs look for. There’s a solid chance that even if you get a degree in XYZ subject, you still need SKILLS in communication or psychology or project management or design. Therefore a minor, or a double major, or even just a lot of self-directed learning in those SKILLS can help you start on that career path, even if your major isn’t in that field. It also helps a lot when you switch fields but your SKILLS are applicable in more than one field.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:35 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
Don’t embark on a master’s degree unless you can say with assurance exactly what you’re going to do with it. If you have your eye on a specific field and a career path in that field, and it requires a master’s in history, then you go for the master’s in history. You do not go for the master’s and then hope you can figure out a career path.
Part of the issue with any job and any major is that you still have to figure out how you’re going to pay your bills. Jobs are interests + skills and always have been. One problem in our culture is that parents do not engage their children in viable career paths until they’re practically about to graduate college, let alone when they’re going to graduate HS. They focus on the status of the school, and on majors that may or may not provide job security and lucrative job positions upon graduation, and as most of us have learned the hard way at some point, that is not guaranteed for any field because of the economy.
If a person is 25 years old and they still haven’t decided on a career path, then they need to do that work first and with great priority. If the work and study is such a drag that it would make one miserable to do it for their career, that’s the time to figure that out. But in any case, a student needs to take a detailed look at the first 10 years of a career path and exactly what requirements those jobs look for. There’s a solid chance that even if you get a degree in XYZ subject, you still need SKILLS in communication or psychology or project management or design. Therefore a minor, or a double major, or even just a lot of self-directed learning in those SKILLS can help you start on that career path, even if your major isn’t in that field. It also helps a lot when you switch fields but your SKILLS are applicable in more than one field.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:35 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
The problem, Autumnheart, is that I'm an uncharismatic, mathematically-challenged loser. The very nature of whatever limited intellect I have is inimical to financial security. History research has been the only activity I've ever excelled at, and I'm still not convinced I didn't pull some incidental, unintentional con in getting those grades. There really isn't any path forward for me but to hope that I can maybe snag a career in academia. Otherwise, I'm flipping burgers for the rest of my life.
The problem with lots of folks is that they assume everyone is equally inherently talented with the primary mental faculties employed in STEM fields. Unfortunately, such is not the case. I'm dead in the water right now for this very reason. There is truly nothing of value to our economy between my ears.
posted by constantinescharity at 9:40 AM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
The problem with lots of folks is that they assume everyone is equally inherently talented with the primary mental faculties employed in STEM fields. Unfortunately, such is not the case. I'm dead in the water right now for this very reason. There is truly nothing of value to our economy between my ears.
posted by constantinescharity at 9:40 AM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
Throughout the book she makes it clear that students are not “dupes” being tricked by for profit institutions, but smart folks who are doing their best with the info they have.
This is the part of the book where her ideology (she has a very understandable desire not to see these downtrodden folks as helpless victims) really undermines the empirical analysis. "The info they have" is bad in significant part because the for-profit institutions have been very explicitly and materially lying to them about outcomes (there are a whole passel of legal settlements to this effect), and also engaging in high-pressure recruitment tactics. You don't have to be unsophisticated or stupid to be misled by the highly evolved deception and exploitation tactics of late capitalism in dealing with vulnerable populations. And many people you interview are not going to tell you that they were misled--they don't want to admit it to you, or they can't even admit it to themselves, or they still don't even know. This is really very very well-established psychology of the con.
(I mean, she explicitly refuses to consider institutional intent and then declares that she couldn't find any fraud. Since intent to deceive is an element of most forms of fraud, this is equivalent to refusing to consider the circumstances under which a person was killed and then declaring that you can't find any murder, just a bunch of homicides.)
This context is helpful in considering who has what stake in promoting what narrative about college study. The emotional energy that goes into the "STEM is economically best" narrative is quite striking. Just look how many people have turned out to defend that position here without even bothering to engage with the article's explicitly called-out position that this isn't true. (I'm not saying it's empirically unassailable, that position; I'm saying there are a lot of knee-jerk comments here that don't even acknowledge that that was one of the article's points, though you didn't even need to RTFA to know that.) Who has a vested interest in telling you that the reason you don't have a job is that you were just lazy and self-indulgent and studied the wrong thing in college? Who benefits from disparaging fields increasing populated by women and minorities in favor of fields which are often still predominantly white and male? Who doesn't ever ask you to think about how many people in the NYC offices of well-paid lawyers and finance people have STEM degrees, and how many of them just have good connections and social capital?
posted by praemunire at 9:42 AM on August 24, 2018 [18 favorites]
This is the part of the book where her ideology (she has a very understandable desire not to see these downtrodden folks as helpless victims) really undermines the empirical analysis. "The info they have" is bad in significant part because the for-profit institutions have been very explicitly and materially lying to them about outcomes (there are a whole passel of legal settlements to this effect), and also engaging in high-pressure recruitment tactics. You don't have to be unsophisticated or stupid to be misled by the highly evolved deception and exploitation tactics of late capitalism in dealing with vulnerable populations. And many people you interview are not going to tell you that they were misled--they don't want to admit it to you, or they can't even admit it to themselves, or they still don't even know. This is really very very well-established psychology of the con.
(I mean, she explicitly refuses to consider institutional intent and then declares that she couldn't find any fraud. Since intent to deceive is an element of most forms of fraud, this is equivalent to refusing to consider the circumstances under which a person was killed and then declaring that you can't find any murder, just a bunch of homicides.)
This context is helpful in considering who has what stake in promoting what narrative about college study. The emotional energy that goes into the "STEM is economically best" narrative is quite striking. Just look how many people have turned out to defend that position here without even bothering to engage with the article's explicitly called-out position that this isn't true. (I'm not saying it's empirically unassailable, that position; I'm saying there are a lot of knee-jerk comments here that don't even acknowledge that that was one of the article's points, though you didn't even need to RTFA to know that.) Who has a vested interest in telling you that the reason you don't have a job is that you were just lazy and self-indulgent and studied the wrong thing in college? Who benefits from disparaging fields increasing populated by women and minorities in favor of fields which are often still predominantly white and male? Who doesn't ever ask you to think about how many people in the NYC offices of well-paid lawyers and finance people have STEM degrees, and how many of them just have good connections and social capital?
posted by praemunire at 9:42 AM on August 24, 2018 [18 favorites]
Don’t embark on a master’s degree unless you can say with assurance exactly what you’re going to do with it...
...But in any case, a student needs to take a detailed look at the first 10 years of a career path and exactly what requirements those jobs look for.
Is this advice just for a history degree or meant to be general? I ask because this has not been my personal experience in the realms of career and higher education.
posted by runcibleshaw at 9:44 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
...But in any case, a student needs to take a detailed look at the first 10 years of a career path and exactly what requirements those jobs look for.
Is this advice just for a history degree or meant to be general? I ask because this has not been my personal experience in the realms of career and higher education.
posted by runcibleshaw at 9:44 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
FWIW, at least SOME dip into the humanities *is* required in any decent CS degree program. I did a bunch of music history and economics, personally. In fact, I feel like my experience in CS gave me an interesting perspective in my arts classes - I ended up doing a presentation on chord patterns in Western music across history, represented by combinatoric necklaces. A friend of mine in another class made his own "theremin" with a hacked Wii remote and performed a piece on it. These are math and technology heavy, sure, but I think they are also both valid explorations or expressions of art. I feel my education was decently well-rounded.
I have many friends who are saddled quite deeply in student debt, all of them in the humanities. They have work that I am sure they are using their degree for indirectly, in some way, but I find it hard to believe that my friend whose passion lies in archival studies and library science is just as satisfied as a receptionist as he would be as an archivist. Or my friend with a Master's in History is happy as a night security guard. They both make peanuts.
I may not be satisfied by the details of my job either - one could even argue I don't "use" my math-focused degree much at all - but I make enough money to not have to worry about paying my bills or even losing my job. I can give my cats a good life.
Would I have been poor if I had pursued my passion instead of something that I knew would make me money? I honestly think so - at the very least, I'd be making less than half of what I'm making now, if I'm going by averages alone, provided I *got* the exact job I wanted at all. Would I have regretted it? Hard to say. Many people do.
The archival studies friend of mine is going back to college for a programming vocational course and mentioned that he was directly moved to do so by my financial success and stability. He wants to be able to support a family and have a child, that's important to him. He has many friends in the industry who support him and companies here are desperate for anyone they can get, and a new office will finish being built just as he graduates. So I think as long as he can get through the course, he'll be able to find something. I guess there's something a bit sad about it, but I hope it works out for him.
posted by one of these days at 9:46 AM on August 24, 2018
I have many friends who are saddled quite deeply in student debt, all of them in the humanities. They have work that I am sure they are using their degree for indirectly, in some way, but I find it hard to believe that my friend whose passion lies in archival studies and library science is just as satisfied as a receptionist as he would be as an archivist. Or my friend with a Master's in History is happy as a night security guard. They both make peanuts.
I may not be satisfied by the details of my job either - one could even argue I don't "use" my math-focused degree much at all - but I make enough money to not have to worry about paying my bills or even losing my job. I can give my cats a good life.
Would I have been poor if I had pursued my passion instead of something that I knew would make me money? I honestly think so - at the very least, I'd be making less than half of what I'm making now, if I'm going by averages alone, provided I *got* the exact job I wanted at all. Would I have regretted it? Hard to say. Many people do.
The archival studies friend of mine is going back to college for a programming vocational course and mentioned that he was directly moved to do so by my financial success and stability. He wants to be able to support a family and have a child, that's important to him. He has many friends in the industry who support him and companies here are desperate for anyone they can get, and a new office will finish being built just as he graduates. So I think as long as he can get through the course, he'll be able to find something. I guess there's something a bit sad about it, but I hope it works out for him.
posted by one of these days at 9:46 AM on August 24, 2018
Not sure I buy the "more humanities majors would mean a better society" argument. How many famous philosophers were fascists, again?
Well, obviously not! I mean, after all, it was Germany, a nation renowned for its contribution to the arts and humanities that went fascist in the last century. A liberal arts education won't necessarily make anyone a better person.
That said, one of the skills a liberal arts education is supposed to teach is how to spot bullshit, how people have spotted bullshit in the past, how to produce bullshit of your own—basically how to be on intimate terms with bullshit. And among other things, an education in the humanities is supposed to provide opportunities to examine what it means to be human and opportunities to watch behavior, social cues, emotions, relationships modeled over the stretch of human history and learn to reflect critically on them.
posted by octobersurprise at 9:56 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Well, obviously not! I mean, after all, it was Germany, a nation renowned for its contribution to the arts and humanities that went fascist in the last century. A liberal arts education won't necessarily make anyone a better person.
That said, one of the skills a liberal arts education is supposed to teach is how to spot bullshit, how people have spotted bullshit in the past, how to produce bullshit of your own—basically how to be on intimate terms with bullshit. And among other things, an education in the humanities is supposed to provide opportunities to examine what it means to be human and opportunities to watch behavior, social cues, emotions, relationships modeled over the stretch of human history and learn to reflect critically on them.
posted by octobersurprise at 9:56 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
I have a masters degree in one of the most joked-about tracks - art history. Due to blind luck and a good work study that got me a mentor and practical skills, I'm one of the few who landed a stable job in the museum field. My job is interesting, the benefits are decent, my coworkers are great, and most of the time I enjoy my work. Except I have been in the field for about 17 years now and make about what I made when I started, in the mid 30s. If I hadn't relocated to a midwest town, where there were very cheap houses (we bought through a program that gave us 20K in grants and loans to buy an 84K house) and my partner wasn't on disability, which adds a bit of money to the household pot, things would be dire - as it is they're just bad. I should be trying to figure out how to switch jobs, but I don't know what I'm qualified to do (project management? Sort of? Records management?) because my job is simultaneously broad and specific. I'm in my early 40s and I'm terrified of going somewhere and maybe getting a higher salary but discovering that medical benefits are terrible or my partner can't find a good meds manager and therapist. Or the job turns out to be layoff heavy and I would always be panicking about being about to lose my job.
I lucked into my career, and wouldn't have survived one that required high level math or chemistry. Despite all that luck, I'm kind of in a bind now because of my own personal anxiety and insecurities, my partner's health issues, and a sort of pair of golden handcuffs that mean I'm mostly happy except for one Very Important Thing - salary.
posted by PussKillian at 9:58 AM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
I lucked into my career, and wouldn't have survived one that required high level math or chemistry. Despite all that luck, I'm kind of in a bind now because of my own personal anxiety and insecurities, my partner's health issues, and a sort of pair of golden handcuffs that mean I'm mostly happy except for one Very Important Thing - salary.
posted by PussKillian at 9:58 AM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
The problem, Autumnheart, is that I'm an uncharismatic, mathematically-challenged loser. The very nature of whatever limited intellect I have is inimical to financial security. History research has been the only activity I've ever excelled at, and I'm still not convinced I didn't pull some incidental, unintentional con in getting those grades. There really isn't any path forward for me but to hope that I can maybe snag a career in academia. Otherwise, I'm flipping burgers for the rest of my life.
Okay, well, then my advice applies to people who have a little imagination and can do some thinking about how the skills involved in research could apply to other fields. By the way, a Burger King GM makes $40K a year and an adjunct professor makes $25K a year, so maybe reconsider burger-flipping as being the worst of the choices you’ve set up for yourself.
Is this advice just for a history degree or meant to be general? I ask because this has not been my personal experience in the realms of career and higher education.
It specifically applies to the person who wants to get a history master’s in hopes that a job opens up at the end of it, but it applies in general. Unless you know how a master’s in a given subject would benefit your career path, why would you pay to get one? That makes no sense and is not a good decision. A person should absolutely be researching their proposed career path and the job market in the area(s) in which they would like to live before they decide whether grad school is worth the investment. It would be tremendously irresponsible not to do that legwork.
posted by Autumnheart at 10:00 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
Okay, well, then my advice applies to people who have a little imagination and can do some thinking about how the skills involved in research could apply to other fields. By the way, a Burger King GM makes $40K a year and an adjunct professor makes $25K a year, so maybe reconsider burger-flipping as being the worst of the choices you’ve set up for yourself.
Is this advice just for a history degree or meant to be general? I ask because this has not been my personal experience in the realms of career and higher education.
It specifically applies to the person who wants to get a history master’s in hopes that a job opens up at the end of it, but it applies in general. Unless you know how a master’s in a given subject would benefit your career path, why would you pay to get one? That makes no sense and is not a good decision. A person should absolutely be researching their proposed career path and the job market in the area(s) in which they would like to live before they decide whether grad school is worth the investment. It would be tremendously irresponsible not to do that legwork.
posted by Autumnheart at 10:00 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
The other thing people seem to have a lot of trouble getting their brain around is what the job market would look like if suddenly it was flooded with graduates in the relevant fields. And I mean even the thriving parts of the job market. You all can't even get your employers not to build mechanisms that allow people to advertise directly to Jew-haters, or to give you a place to sit to work that's not a converted lunchroom table; what do you think would happen if the supply of labor dramatically increased? Does IT think it's the one field in the world immune from the general phenomenon of wages being depressed, and the work overall being devalued, in a field when more women and minorities start moving into it?
posted by praemunire at 10:05 AM on August 24, 2018 [16 favorites]
posted by praemunire at 10:05 AM on August 24, 2018 [16 favorites]
Not sure I buy the "more humanities majors would mean a better society" argument. How many famous philosophers were fascists, again?
Every time this comes up I think of O'Brien from 1984, who, just based on his tastes and habits, would fit in nicely in any liberal elite. He's well-read, a lover of the arts, with great taste.
posted by eustacescrubb at 10:05 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
Every time this comes up I think of O'Brien from 1984, who, just based on his tastes and habits, would fit in nicely in any liberal elite. He's well-read, a lover of the arts, with great taste.
posted by eustacescrubb at 10:05 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
Well, I mean, the Nazi or Prussian aesthete is a very very old trope. Studying the humanities certainly doesn't immunize you from evil, or even the ordinary blindspots and moral failings of your society.
posted by praemunire at 10:11 AM on August 24, 2018
posted by praemunire at 10:11 AM on August 24, 2018
Autumnheart, I think we have some fundamentally different ideas about the point of education and we'll just have to disagree on all that.
posted by runcibleshaw at 10:12 AM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by runcibleshaw at 10:12 AM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
That’s fine. If you’re getting what you want out of your education and career, it ain’t broke and you don’t need to fix it.
posted by Autumnheart at 10:14 AM on August 24, 2018
posted by Autumnheart at 10:14 AM on August 24, 2018
I lucked into my career, and wouldn't have survived one that required high level math or chemistry. Despite all that luck, I'm kind of in a bind now because of my own personal anxiety and insecurities, my partner's health issues, and a sort of pair of golden handcuffs that mean I'm mostly happy except for one Very Important Thing - salary.
This is almost exactly my story. I was a ridiculously artsy, ridiculously privileged 18 year old who entered college with no higher aspirations than to do clever, beautiful things and it was probably only good fortune that kept me in a professional career, not spending my life working at a record store. If I regret anything at this point in my life, it's probably that my choices were as pragmatic as they were. Otherwise, like Charles Kane, I think did pretty well under the circumstances.
posted by octobersurprise at 10:15 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
This is almost exactly my story. I was a ridiculously artsy, ridiculously privileged 18 year old who entered college with no higher aspirations than to do clever, beautiful things and it was probably only good fortune that kept me in a professional career, not spending my life working at a record store. If I regret anything at this point in my life, it's probably that my choices were as pragmatic as they were. Otherwise, like Charles Kane, I think did pretty well under the circumstances.
posted by octobersurprise at 10:15 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
By the way, a Burger King GM makes $40K a year and an adjunct professor makes $25K a year, so maybe reconsider burger-flipping as being the worst of the choices you’ve set up for yourself
Anyone who has not spent significant time standing behind one of those counters should not be commenting on the desirability of doing so as a long-term career.
posted by praemunire at 10:17 AM on August 24, 2018 [18 favorites]
Anyone who has not spent significant time standing behind one of those counters should not be commenting on the desirability of doing so as a long-term career.
posted by praemunire at 10:17 AM on August 24, 2018 [18 favorites]
Yeah, I tend to think being well educated in liberalism through humanities is no guaranteed barrier to fascism. That said, I don't advocate the humanities so people become liberals, I advocate them because an education in the humanities might teach you that liberalism is just one ideology, albeit dominant, and there are others. Hell, I'm not sure you get taught what an ideology is, and that we all have one, outside of humanities.
Also, it's necessary for the people who're learning what fascism is to not desire it. That's a great reason to not leave humanities to the rich, but instead open them up to all kinds of working-class people. I don't know how many people on Wall Street have a humanities education - I tend to think business, law, marketing, media and communications etc are a lot more common, and maybe others consider them humanities degrees, but I'm not sure I do.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 10:18 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
Also, it's necessary for the people who're learning what fascism is to not desire it. That's a great reason to not leave humanities to the rich, but instead open them up to all kinds of working-class people. I don't know how many people on Wall Street have a humanities education - I tend to think business, law, marketing, media and communications etc are a lot more common, and maybe others consider them humanities degrees, but I'm not sure I do.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 10:18 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
By the way, a Burger King GM makes $40K a year and an adjunct professor makes $25K a year, so maybe reconsider burger-flipping as being the worst of the choices you’ve set up for yourself.
having worked both as an adjunct and in food service, I will say that unequivocally that food service is definitely worse. yes, i made more in food service, but my hours were much worse (not that they were great as an adjunct, but at least they were fixed, semester-to-semester, and i was often able to choose my days or timeslots; in food service they weren't just longer, but entirely unpredictable, outside of my control, and subject to change). and i dealt with much more verbal abuse and harassment, with far less protection. and that was just as regular hourly staff. GMs make 40K a year, but they're salaried; my managers often worked 50 or 60 hour weeks for that 40K (for them it was closer to 36K, and that was pre-tax). many have to travel between locations or do scheduling and training on their own time, on top of their regular working hours and on top of filling in for staff shortages -- and since they have little control over hiring, there are always staff shortages.
posted by halation at 10:19 AM on August 24, 2018 [10 favorites]
having worked both as an adjunct and in food service, I will say that unequivocally that food service is definitely worse. yes, i made more in food service, but my hours were much worse (not that they were great as an adjunct, but at least they were fixed, semester-to-semester, and i was often able to choose my days or timeslots; in food service they weren't just longer, but entirely unpredictable, outside of my control, and subject to change). and i dealt with much more verbal abuse and harassment, with far less protection. and that was just as regular hourly staff. GMs make 40K a year, but they're salaried; my managers often worked 50 or 60 hour weeks for that 40K (for them it was closer to 36K, and that was pre-tax). many have to travel between locations or do scheduling and training on their own time, on top of their regular working hours and on top of filling in for staff shortages -- and since they have little control over hiring, there are always staff shortages.
posted by halation at 10:19 AM on August 24, 2018 [10 favorites]
(the larger point here is that neither adjuncts nor food service workers should be treated as they are, it should be said, but our economy is broken and getting more broken and choice of undergraduate major offers less and less protection against that broken economy)
posted by halation at 10:21 AM on August 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
posted by halation at 10:21 AM on August 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
So much of this discussion has made me very sad.
Despite coming from a blue collar family and having to go deeply into debt to pay off my student loans, I don't for a minute regret studying something I loved and was good at regardless of the job prospects. It *did* eventually help me out at different jobs in some very unexpected ways (my most valuable tool for my infrastructure project management job turned out to be my literature degree), but it took a long time to get there, and it's nothing I would have been able to foresee as a kid. (One thing I did learn about the process, though: there will always be blindspots you don't even know you have, and having an instructor show them to you is of inestimable value.)
Most of the people I work with right now are folks who are in "tech" (although it's edtech), and the number of times we have to yank hard on the ethics rope to pull them up short is astonishing to me. Like, it's not even that they don't remember to consider ethics in their passion for building stuff, it's just that it never even occurs to them that ethics is a domain even remotely relevant to what they do or that it's worth their time to consider. You see, learning ethics wasn't required for them to get a job in tech.
posted by Fish Sauce at 10:22 AM on August 24, 2018 [14 favorites]
It was especially easy for me to decide to treat college as strictly a job-training program because frankly, the only thing college offers that I can't get elsewhere, better, is a credential. A class at my relatively cheap state school is $1,000 a semester. My late fees at the various libraries I check out books from average around $100 a semester. But it's the library that has given me by far the better education. I learned more about life from watching Tokyo Story, more about ethics from reading Tolstoy, and, heck, more about CS from reading Code than a dozen classes could have taught me.This is a really good description of a really bad school. It's also completely the opposite of my experience. I went to what is considered a very good school here in Canada for my undergraduate degree, and what is considered a very bad school for my master's, and found the level and quality of engagement with professors to be astonishingly helpful at both - the major difference was the students. The admission standards at the first school were pretty strict, and once we were out of first year my classes were populated almost entirely by people who were interested in the subject and wanted to be there to learn about it. The discussions in class and out of it, with both my peers and instructors, were electrifying. I never felt like the smartest person in the room, and it was amazing. In the second school my professors were just as good, but it had much lower admission standards and almost everyone was there to get a credential for a job, and took courses designed to make that path as easy as possible. I got a lot out of talking with my professors, but only a handful of students were engaged with the subject matter beyond the minimum required to get the grade, because the area of study wasn't what they were there for. I always felt like the smartest person in the room, and it was fucking awful. I wasn't sitting in a class with people interested in learning, I was sitting in a class with a bunch of fucking zombies who had decided they already knew best and weren't really interested in expanding on that.
Classroom discussions? I was lucky if the professor could coax a single comment out of the class. On my own, I can read or watch something and immediately find thoughtful, deep essays about it online. Professor feedback? I averaged about a sentence of useful, actionable feedback per paper. I don't blame my professors and TAs for that; they were clearly overburdened with students. Still. Hardly worth one thousand dollars.
Despite coming from a blue collar family and having to go deeply into debt to pay off my student loans, I don't for a minute regret studying something I loved and was good at regardless of the job prospects. It *did* eventually help me out at different jobs in some very unexpected ways (my most valuable tool for my infrastructure project management job turned out to be my literature degree), but it took a long time to get there, and it's nothing I would have been able to foresee as a kid. (One thing I did learn about the process, though: there will always be blindspots you don't even know you have, and having an instructor show them to you is of inestimable value.)
Most of the people I work with right now are folks who are in "tech" (although it's edtech), and the number of times we have to yank hard on the ethics rope to pull them up short is astonishing to me. Like, it's not even that they don't remember to consider ethics in their passion for building stuff, it's just that it never even occurs to them that ethics is a domain even remotely relevant to what they do or that it's worth their time to consider. You see, learning ethics wasn't required for them to get a job in tech.
posted by Fish Sauce at 10:22 AM on August 24, 2018 [14 favorites]
The fact that people go to computer school to computer better and graduate to go computer somewhere means that we are doing something fundamentally wrong. We don't send people to camera school to camera better. We teach filmmakers and photographers to tell stories.
CS is very much a field with out a goal of it's own. Sprinkle computing on something else to make it (hopefully) better. Sprinkle computing on a library, and you get a magic card catalogue. Alone, it is without form and void. Sometimes null.
We need to teach computing so people can sprinkle it on whatever they love to do. That doesn't work if they have to trade what they love to learn CS. Pitting humanities against CS or STEM is an artificial divide. They complement each other.
posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 10:22 AM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
CS is very much a field with out a goal of it's own. Sprinkle computing on something else to make it (hopefully) better. Sprinkle computing on a library, and you get a magic card catalogue. Alone, it is without form and void. Sometimes null.
We need to teach computing so people can sprinkle it on whatever they love to do. That doesn't work if they have to trade what they love to learn CS. Pitting humanities against CS or STEM is an artificial divide. They complement each other.
posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 10:22 AM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
Every time this comes up I think of O'Brien from 1984
The Koch family gives a decent amount of money to the arts and humanities (admittedly with a conservative focus). They collect fine art and are, apparently, deeply invested in wine.
posted by bonehead at 10:22 AM on August 24, 2018
The Koch family gives a decent amount of money to the arts and humanities (admittedly with a conservative focus). They collect fine art and are, apparently, deeply invested in wine.
posted by bonehead at 10:22 AM on August 24, 2018
As opposed to the kick-back-and-relax experience of being an adjunct?
That you are unable to imagine the distinctive burdens of working at a low-status job that requires you to be on your feet in a hot, noisy, crowded environment doing manual labor under specific time pressure for 8 hours at a stretch (if you're lucky and the place is busy so you don't just get abruptly clocked out and not paid further) vis-a-vis a job that may have equally poor pay and benefits and doesn't have great social status but at least is essentially a desk job says something. I recommend a few more humanities classes.
posted by praemunire at 10:23 AM on August 24, 2018 [12 favorites]
That you are unable to imagine the distinctive burdens of working at a low-status job that requires you to be on your feet in a hot, noisy, crowded environment doing manual labor under specific time pressure for 8 hours at a stretch (if you're lucky and the place is busy so you don't just get abruptly clocked out and not paid further) vis-a-vis a job that may have equally poor pay and benefits and doesn't have great social status but at least is essentially a desk job says something. I recommend a few more humanities classes.
posted by praemunire at 10:23 AM on August 24, 2018 [12 favorites]
... so clearly the only solution here is that we all should have gone to school for Time Travel Engineering, because if that doesn’t pan out... well crap.
posted by q*ben at 10:24 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by q*ben at 10:24 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Unfortunately most people hiring for these types of jobs don't understand what they need,
I once worked for a market research company who insisted on hiring survey designers and analysts who had STEM degrees, on the grounds that they could do quantitative analysis.
They could - but they couldn't design a survey worth beans, and their quant skills weren't as strong as psych or sociology majors (who all do lots of statistics appropriate to survey analysis). I now work for someone who teaches survey design - she's a psychologist by training.
posted by jb at 10:25 AM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
I once worked for a market research company who insisted on hiring survey designers and analysts who had STEM degrees, on the grounds that they could do quantitative analysis.
They could - but they couldn't design a survey worth beans, and their quant skills weren't as strong as psych or sociology majors (who all do lots of statistics appropriate to survey analysis). I now work for someone who teaches survey design - she's a psychologist by training.
posted by jb at 10:25 AM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
not to pile on, but i'm still kinda mad, so let me just say: as an adjunct, i have never:
- had to stand outdoors in direct sun and 90-degree-heat, without shade or water, in longsleeves and an apron, for several hours at a time
- burned or cut myself while working
- had people throw things at me, hit me, or touch me without my permission or against my will
- had people verbally abuse me
- had to clean up other people's bodily fluids with insufficient personal protective equipment
- received a needle-stick injury while emptying the trash and then had to do the calculus of going to the ER for evaluation while underinsured and with no clear answer regarding how workman's comp would handle it
all of these things happened while i was working in food service. some of them happened more than once weekly.
posted by halation at 10:30 AM on August 24, 2018 [23 favorites]
- had to stand outdoors in direct sun and 90-degree-heat, without shade or water, in longsleeves and an apron, for several hours at a time
- burned or cut myself while working
- had people throw things at me, hit me, or touch me without my permission or against my will
- had people verbally abuse me
- had to clean up other people's bodily fluids with insufficient personal protective equipment
- received a needle-stick injury while emptying the trash and then had to do the calculus of going to the ER for evaluation while underinsured and with no clear answer regarding how workman's comp would handle it
all of these things happened while i was working in food service. some of them happened more than once weekly.
posted by halation at 10:30 AM on August 24, 2018 [23 favorites]
But management experience is a skill that can transfer all over the place. In my anecdotal experience, it’s difficult in many industries to break into management without previous experience. Even if you don’t stay in food service (and I agree that it’s a tough environment), it does definitely provide opportunities to get skills-related experience that can be brought into a professional career path.
If someone already knows that they want to be a project manager, for example, so they major in business and take an internship at Wherever Inc. and work on getting project hours for their PMP, then they have their path pretty clearly laid out. But if someone is floundering and throwing metaphorical darts at the metaphorical job board and thinking, “Maybe grad school will get my resume responses where a bachelor’s thus far has not,” that really isn’t a responsible way to go about it. Not today, when it involves incurring tens of thousands of debt that, as someone pointed out, cannot be disbursed in bankruptcy. It’s totally different if a person is like, “I have a passion for Blahblah and all the jobs I see want a master’s, so grad school, here I come.”
It costs nothing to spend some hours looking up job postings and career boards, and getting an idea of what skills and education levels are needed for a given job, and what those jobs pay. That is a necessary step before incurring more educational debt and/or further delaying entry into the job market.
posted by Autumnheart at 10:31 AM on August 24, 2018
If someone already knows that they want to be a project manager, for example, so they major in business and take an internship at Wherever Inc. and work on getting project hours for their PMP, then they have their path pretty clearly laid out. But if someone is floundering and throwing metaphorical darts at the metaphorical job board and thinking, “Maybe grad school will get my resume responses where a bachelor’s thus far has not,” that really isn’t a responsible way to go about it. Not today, when it involves incurring tens of thousands of debt that, as someone pointed out, cannot be disbursed in bankruptcy. It’s totally different if a person is like, “I have a passion for Blahblah and all the jobs I see want a master’s, so grad school, here I come.”
It costs nothing to spend some hours looking up job postings and career boards, and getting an idea of what skills and education levels are needed for a given job, and what those jobs pay. That is a necessary step before incurring more educational debt and/or further delaying entry into the job market.
posted by Autumnheart at 10:31 AM on August 24, 2018
I don't know how many people on Wall Street have a humanities education - I tend to think business, law, marketing, media and communications etc are a lot more common, and maybe others consider them humanities degrees, but I'm not sure I do.
On Wall Street specifically, in the jobs that actually involve making the decisions that move the money around? You're more likely to see either humanities or, at least in certain areas, STEM (there is certainly demand for people with advanced degrees in math and science to be quants) than you are to see undergrad degrees in business, law, marketing, media, or communications. Most of the schools that feed into the top jobs there don't even offer majors in most of those, though of course many people make a stopover in a grad school at some point that may involve business or law especially. And of course the population isn't 100% homogeneous.
That's a different cohort from "large American businesses generally," though, and I can't speak to that group.
posted by praemunire at 10:32 AM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
On Wall Street specifically, in the jobs that actually involve making the decisions that move the money around? You're more likely to see either humanities or, at least in certain areas, STEM (there is certainly demand for people with advanced degrees in math and science to be quants) than you are to see undergrad degrees in business, law, marketing, media, or communications. Most of the schools that feed into the top jobs there don't even offer majors in most of those, though of course many people make a stopover in a grad school at some point that may involve business or law especially. And of course the population isn't 100% homogeneous.
That's a different cohort from "large American businesses generally," though, and I can't speak to that group.
posted by praemunire at 10:32 AM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
By the way, a Burger King GM makes $40K a year and an adjunct professor makes $25K a year, so maybe reconsider burger-flipping as being the worst of the choices you’ve set up for yourself
By the way, a Burger King GM is not the one flipping burgers, and besides a Burger King line crew is more like $17K a year, so maybe reconsider the validity of your analogies before you make them
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:32 AM on August 24, 2018 [13 favorites]
By the way, a Burger King GM is not the one flipping burgers, and besides a Burger King line crew is more like $17K a year, so maybe reconsider the validity of your analogies before you make them
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:32 AM on August 24, 2018 [13 favorites]
It costs nothing to spend some hours looking up job postings and career boards, and getting an idea of what skills and education levels are needed for a given job, and what those jobs pay. That is a necessary step before incurring more educational debt and/or further delaying entry into the job market.
Not to pile on, either, but...spoken like someone born into the middle class or better, who was instructed from day one where to look, how to evaluate what information is true, and how to implement their plan. THESE ARE NOT INBORN SKILLS, AND YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE DUMB OR IRRESPONSIBLE NOT TO HAVE THEM.
posted by praemunire at 10:34 AM on August 24, 2018 [15 favorites]
Not to pile on, either, but...spoken like someone born into the middle class or better, who was instructed from day one where to look, how to evaluate what information is true, and how to implement their plan. THESE ARE NOT INBORN SKILLS, AND YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE DUMB OR IRRESPONSIBLE NOT TO HAVE THEM.
posted by praemunire at 10:34 AM on August 24, 2018 [15 favorites]
I obviously left out the step of, “Start out as line crew and work your way up” but frankly, I’m not the one setting up burger-flipping against academia, as if academia is such a superior work environment with better pay. Whatever, I’m not trying to argue a 26-year-old out of their imposter syndrome and I don’t give a shit if anyone flips burgers or not. It’s not my problem if they self-select out of the market and indenture themselves to a lifetime of educational debt that never pays for itself. If somebody wants to make that choice, go nuts. More job security for me.
posted by Autumnheart at 10:38 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Autumnheart at 10:38 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Otherwise, I'm flipping burgers for the rest of my life.
My brother-in-law started as a fry cook at McDonalds in the late 80's with a new Green Card and a 0% grasp of the English language, and now he owns 14 stores and spends lots of time thinking about inter-generational wealth.
The "Otherwise, I'm flipping burgers for the rest of my life." way of thinking is why the entire management structure of McD is naturalized American citizens. I've met 20-30 McDonalds "big shots" (corporate directors, franchise owner/operators, etc) over my lifetime, and absolutely 0% of them were born in the US, with the exception of a few that might be 1st generation Americans, but are 2nd generation McDonalds operators.
"Immigrants do the jobs that natural born citizens won't" is definitely true, all the way up to the jobs that lead to being extremely wealthy.
posted by sideshow at 10:38 AM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
My brother-in-law started as a fry cook at McDonalds in the late 80's with a new Green Card and a 0% grasp of the English language, and now he owns 14 stores and spends lots of time thinking about inter-generational wealth.
The "Otherwise, I'm flipping burgers for the rest of my life." way of thinking is why the entire management structure of McD is naturalized American citizens. I've met 20-30 McDonalds "big shots" (corporate directors, franchise owner/operators, etc) over my lifetime, and absolutely 0% of them were born in the US, with the exception of a few that might be 1st generation Americans, but are 2nd generation McDonalds operators.
"Immigrants do the jobs that natural born citizens won't" is definitely true, all the way up to the jobs that lead to being extremely wealthy.
posted by sideshow at 10:38 AM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
Not to pile on, either, but...spoken like someone born into the middle class or better, who was instructed from day one where to look, how to evaluate what information is true, and how to implement their plan. THESE ARE NOT INBORN SKILLS, AND YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE DUMB OR IRRESPONSIBLE NOT TO HAVE THEM.
I’m not one of those people. I was never instructed where to look, I learned how to evaluate information in college, and I learned those skills on my own, and am passing on the benefit of my learnings by saying that if you want to get a good ROI on your hypothetical advanced education, then it pays to google your field and the jobs in it first, which is about as free and low-effort as it gets. And I say that as someone who grew up before the Internet was a thing and actually had to chase that shit down on foot.
Aside from that, we’re talking about people who are either in college or are have received a college education. They have access to those skills and that expertise, even if THEY do not possess it yet themselves.
posted by Autumnheart at 10:43 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Does IT think it's the one field in the world immune from the general phenomenon of wages being depressed, and the work overall being devalued, in a field when more women and minorities start moving into it?
Yeah, I absolutely agree with this for the record. Talk about individual choices in major obscures the larger fact that there just aren't enough well-paying, with benefits, stable jobs for everyone. Just in general, we spend far too much time talking about individual responsibility when we should talk about the general structural factors that prevent advancement.
What rankles me personally is when articles like this imply that I didn't choose a humanities major because I don't 'value the humanities.' I would have liked nothing more than to choose a humanities major, but I couldn't justify it given the absolutely insane and rising cost of college, combined with the poor quality of instruction I was getting in liberal arts classes, especially relative to what I could get for free.
The article doesn't 'debunk' the idea that humanities majors get inferior jobs. It just points out that the gap is less severe than generally perceived. Yay? And, as I said, it doesn't take into consideration things like: the necessity of a grad degree, number of working hours, et cetera, that were all things I took into consideration when I tried to decide which path was 'better.'
As for those suggesting that I was in the wrong school: I went to the best state school in my state, which in turn is one of the best state schools in the US (and the world). For me to go to a better (read: private) school, I would have had to pay something like 5x the tuition I was paying. I doubt there is any professor in the world whose insight is so valuable that it is worth paying them something like $1,300 per paper to gain it.
posted by perplexion at 10:46 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Yeah, I absolutely agree with this for the record. Talk about individual choices in major obscures the larger fact that there just aren't enough well-paying, with benefits, stable jobs for everyone. Just in general, we spend far too much time talking about individual responsibility when we should talk about the general structural factors that prevent advancement.
What rankles me personally is when articles like this imply that I didn't choose a humanities major because I don't 'value the humanities.' I would have liked nothing more than to choose a humanities major, but I couldn't justify it given the absolutely insane and rising cost of college, combined with the poor quality of instruction I was getting in liberal arts classes, especially relative to what I could get for free.
The article doesn't 'debunk' the idea that humanities majors get inferior jobs. It just points out that the gap is less severe than generally perceived. Yay? And, as I said, it doesn't take into consideration things like: the necessity of a grad degree, number of working hours, et cetera, that were all things I took into consideration when I tried to decide which path was 'better.'
As for those suggesting that I was in the wrong school: I went to the best state school in my state, which in turn is one of the best state schools in the US (and the world). For me to go to a better (read: private) school, I would have had to pay something like 5x the tuition I was paying. I doubt there is any professor in the world whose insight is so valuable that it is worth paying them something like $1,300 per paper to gain it.
posted by perplexion at 10:46 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Mod note: Folks this is getting a little "one person vs. the thread" and I suggest we take a step back from that
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:47 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:47 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
I mean these articles can say what they want but the employment statistics for my university are in the 80s and 90s for Engineering, math, and compsci and somewhere around “lol” for the liberal arts.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 10:49 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 10:49 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
The fact that people go to computer school to computer better and graduate to go computer somewhere means that we are doing something fundamentally wrong. We don't send people to camera school to camera better. We teach filmmakers and photographers to tell stories.
I went to computer school to get a BS degree, anything that I learned along the way was a bonus. I'm pretty sure that I learned more in the first six months of my first job than I did during my entire university career but I couldn't get the job without the degree so ...
posted by octothorpe at 10:58 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
I went to computer school to get a BS degree, anything that I learned along the way was a bonus. I'm pretty sure that I learned more in the first six months of my first job than I did during my entire university career but I couldn't get the job without the degree so ...
posted by octothorpe at 10:58 AM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
It costs nothing to spend some hours looking up job postings and career boards, and getting an idea of what skills and education levels are needed for a given job, and what those jobs pay. That is a necessary step before incurring more educational debt and/or further delaying entry into the job market.
I did all of these things. I had plum internships as an undergraduate and graduate student, and thanks to some especially caring, candid supervisors and the fact that many of the salaries in my field are paid by institutions that have to disclose them publicly, I had a pretty clear idea of what kind of salary I could expect after pursuing a graduate degree and how that might play out differently with employers of various sizes or in different regions. Having done all of that research was absolutely no help when institutions dramatically decreased those salaries post-2008, eliminated entry-level and junior positions (or transferred those responsibilities to interns or fellows with no job security, lower wages, and no benefits) and started nudging senior staff into retirement or emeritus or "consultative" roles that haven't been filled since.
This thread is breaking my head and my heart right now. (PussKillian, constantinescharity, I feel both of your comments so hard.)
posted by Anita Bath at 11:04 AM on August 24, 2018 [11 favorites]
I did all of these things. I had plum internships as an undergraduate and graduate student, and thanks to some especially caring, candid supervisors and the fact that many of the salaries in my field are paid by institutions that have to disclose them publicly, I had a pretty clear idea of what kind of salary I could expect after pursuing a graduate degree and how that might play out differently with employers of various sizes or in different regions. Having done all of that research was absolutely no help when institutions dramatically decreased those salaries post-2008, eliminated entry-level and junior positions (or transferred those responsibilities to interns or fellows with no job security, lower wages, and no benefits) and started nudging senior staff into retirement or emeritus or "consultative" roles that haven't been filled since.
This thread is breaking my head and my heart right now. (PussKillian, constantinescharity, I feel both of your comments so hard.)
posted by Anita Bath at 11:04 AM on August 24, 2018 [11 favorites]
Does IT think it's the one field in the world immune from the general phenomenon of wages being depressed, and the work overall being devalued, in a field when more women and minorities start moving into it?
So I think there's actually two major things going on here, and praemunire really touches on one of them. There are not enough good jobs for everyone who goes to college to have one. There are not enough jobs for even half of everyone who goes to college to have one. There are just not enough good jobs in this country anymore. I don't think it's about women and minorities entering it, though that is also a true thing that happens - I think it's more about computerized 'efficiency' breaking as many workers as they can into essentially cheaper robots. Your job doesn't have to be replaced for all of the downtime in it to be sucked out, or for wages to be depressed.
And unfortunately, any job that is cool enough to make people want to do it is dealing with a labor glut in part because outsourcing to overseas is a thing but also in part because so many jobs are getting so shitty that people are fleeing en masse to the jobs that they think aren't going to treat them like disposable workers. (Right now, it's tech). But even those jobs are also slowly eroding not just the benefits packages they once used to recruit, but also the dignity of their workers as they see the abundance of labor coming their way.
People are not wrong when they say that for an individual worker, the smartest thing they can do if they are trying to claw their way to the top of that shifting, shambling heap, is to find out what highly technical jobs can't be easily replaced by robots but are super uncool, and take that job. Right now, I think it's boiler operator, probably, or something similar. But that will change, as people find out about it. Remember 'never take a stock tip from your cabbie'? As information flows outwards more broadly, it can no longer bear the weight of people flooding to it. Remember the 'just go to law school' advice? How well did that work out for folks?
At the same time, people are also not wrong when they say that climbing and clawing your way to the top of a shifting, shambling heap is a dangerous, stressful, and unstable position for them to be in, and in many cases, the need for degrees is just bullshit gatekeeping to see if you're the kind of person who had the funds and creditworthiness to go through college.
tl;dr just join a fucking union because this crash is going to hit all of us hard otherwise
posted by corb at 11:06 AM on August 24, 2018 [18 favorites]
So I think there's actually two major things going on here, and praemunire really touches on one of them. There are not enough good jobs for everyone who goes to college to have one. There are not enough jobs for even half of everyone who goes to college to have one. There are just not enough good jobs in this country anymore. I don't think it's about women and minorities entering it, though that is also a true thing that happens - I think it's more about computerized 'efficiency' breaking as many workers as they can into essentially cheaper robots. Your job doesn't have to be replaced for all of the downtime in it to be sucked out, or for wages to be depressed.
And unfortunately, any job that is cool enough to make people want to do it is dealing with a labor glut in part because outsourcing to overseas is a thing but also in part because so many jobs are getting so shitty that people are fleeing en masse to the jobs that they think aren't going to treat them like disposable workers. (Right now, it's tech). But even those jobs are also slowly eroding not just the benefits packages they once used to recruit, but also the dignity of their workers as they see the abundance of labor coming their way.
People are not wrong when they say that for an individual worker, the smartest thing they can do if they are trying to claw their way to the top of that shifting, shambling heap, is to find out what highly technical jobs can't be easily replaced by robots but are super uncool, and take that job. Right now, I think it's boiler operator, probably, or something similar. But that will change, as people find out about it. Remember 'never take a stock tip from your cabbie'? As information flows outwards more broadly, it can no longer bear the weight of people flooding to it. Remember the 'just go to law school' advice? How well did that work out for folks?
At the same time, people are also not wrong when they say that climbing and clawing your way to the top of a shifting, shambling heap is a dangerous, stressful, and unstable position for them to be in, and in many cases, the need for degrees is just bullshit gatekeeping to see if you're the kind of person who had the funds and creditworthiness to go through college.
tl;dr just join a fucking union because this crash is going to hit all of us hard otherwise
posted by corb at 11:06 AM on August 24, 2018 [18 favorites]
But we do send artists to art school, where they learn fundamentals and theory before branching into their chosen medium. More than that, art schools have full four-year curriculums as opposed to a two-year major; it is extremely difficult to find an art school that doesn’t have four years of requirements. And art schools are really fucking expensive.
Disclaimer: The above is my anecdotal experience in trying to finish a degree in design from a good quality art program. If someone knows of a well-regarded university that offers a 4-year BFA degree where you don’t have to start as a freshman and/or doesn’t cost $40K+ a year, I’d love to hear it because I couldn’t find one.
posted by Autumnheart at 11:10 AM on August 24, 2018
Disclaimer: The above is my anecdotal experience in trying to finish a degree in design from a good quality art program. If someone knows of a well-regarded university that offers a 4-year BFA degree where you don’t have to start as a freshman and/or doesn’t cost $40K+ a year, I’d love to hear it because I couldn’t find one.
posted by Autumnheart at 11:10 AM on August 24, 2018
The Atlantic article appears to be factually incorrect. The heart of the article, in my opinion, is this statement:
Much of that evidence does indicate that humanities majors are probably slightly worse off than average—maybe as much as one more point of unemployment and $5,000 to $10,000 a year in income.
To support this statement, the author links to a study that contains much greater disparities than he claims. For example, according to the study, the median income of 25-29 year-old STEM graduates in 2016 was $60,100. The median income of all college graduates of the same age in 2016 was $48,270. That's almost a $12,000 per annum difference. The difference between STEM and the "Liberal Arts and Humanities" category is greater than $20,000 per annum.
Likewise, the author understates the disparity in unemployment rates. In 2016, the unemployment rate for 25-29 year old "Liberal Arts and Humanities" graduates was 5.6%. The unemployment rate for STEM grads was 3.0%. The difference between the two rates of unemployment is over 60%. To my mind, that's a huge differential .
I, along with my parents, my wife, and most of my friends were humanities majors, so I don't like the results of this study. But the author's own evidence shows that the choice of major has profound effects at least at the start of careers. College students are not self-deluded or misinformed. They appear to be making good choices about their futures, even if I and most of my peers don't like the direction the future is heading.
posted by ferdydurke at 11:17 AM on August 24, 2018 [10 favorites]
Much of that evidence does indicate that humanities majors are probably slightly worse off than average—maybe as much as one more point of unemployment and $5,000 to $10,000 a year in income.
To support this statement, the author links to a study that contains much greater disparities than he claims. For example, according to the study, the median income of 25-29 year-old STEM graduates in 2016 was $60,100. The median income of all college graduates of the same age in 2016 was $48,270. That's almost a $12,000 per annum difference. The difference between STEM and the "Liberal Arts and Humanities" category is greater than $20,000 per annum.
Likewise, the author understates the disparity in unemployment rates. In 2016, the unemployment rate for 25-29 year old "Liberal Arts and Humanities" graduates was 5.6%. The unemployment rate for STEM grads was 3.0%. The difference between the two rates of unemployment is over 60%. To my mind, that's a huge differential .
I, along with my parents, my wife, and most of my friends were humanities majors, so I don't like the results of this study. But the author's own evidence shows that the choice of major has profound effects at least at the start of careers. College students are not self-deluded or misinformed. They appear to be making good choices about their futures, even if I and most of my peers don't like the direction the future is heading.
posted by ferdydurke at 11:17 AM on August 24, 2018 [10 favorites]
So some thoughts on these higher education threads in general (perhaps this should go in MeTa? I don't know).
Some common themes I've noticed:
- People not understanding that not everyone is an autodidact. Usually starts comment with "I taught myself..." or possibly includes "you can learn all this on the internet".
- Placing emphasis on the costs of pursuing higher education, especially graduate degrees, while ignoring the costs of *not* pursuing those degrees and maintaining the status quo. For instance, the emotional and physical toll of working in a job or field that you hate for years.
- Pointing out all the problems and difficulties in academia while ignoring those in non-academic jobs.
- Emphasizing career outcomes versus educational outcomes (and this article makes the case that the career outcomes aren't as stark as we might believe). The accepted wisdom being that the point of education is to improve your job prospects rather than learning being an end in and of itself. Yes, I know capitalism and our system of higher education makes going to school merely to learn sound frivolous, but that's a problem with the system, not with the urge to learn.
- Pitting humanities/liberal arts against STEM as if engineers don't take classes on literature or history and english majors don't take math. It's a false dichotomy. I'm an artist and an engineer and the two things inform rather than oppose one another. I have another colleague who got a dual degree in physics and art.
posted by runcibleshaw at 11:24 AM on August 24, 2018 [23 favorites]
Some common themes I've noticed:
- People not understanding that not everyone is an autodidact. Usually starts comment with "I taught myself..." or possibly includes "you can learn all this on the internet".
- Placing emphasis on the costs of pursuing higher education, especially graduate degrees, while ignoring the costs of *not* pursuing those degrees and maintaining the status quo. For instance, the emotional and physical toll of working in a job or field that you hate for years.
- Pointing out all the problems and difficulties in academia while ignoring those in non-academic jobs.
- Emphasizing career outcomes versus educational outcomes (and this article makes the case that the career outcomes aren't as stark as we might believe). The accepted wisdom being that the point of education is to improve your job prospects rather than learning being an end in and of itself. Yes, I know capitalism and our system of higher education makes going to school merely to learn sound frivolous, but that's a problem with the system, not with the urge to learn.
- Pitting humanities/liberal arts against STEM as if engineers don't take classes on literature or history and english majors don't take math. It's a false dichotomy. I'm an artist and an engineer and the two things inform rather than oppose one another. I have another colleague who got a dual degree in physics and art.
posted by runcibleshaw at 11:24 AM on August 24, 2018 [23 favorites]
People not understanding that not everyone is an autodidact. Usually starts comment with "I taught myself..." or possibly includes "you can learn all this on the internet".
I disagree with this item, because college curriculums today make a point of teaching students how to perform internet research and to vet sources as a basic requirement. Much of the day-to-day coursework occurs on web-based mediums. It would perhaps be appropriate to make this distinction for students in K-12 where resources vary so greatly, or for the college experience outside the US (which I can’t personally speak to). It is not accurate to say that a college student isn’t expected to learn how to do these things or given the tools to do so.
posted by Autumnheart at 11:32 AM on August 24, 2018
Learning about careers isn't easy. I took a whole course on career exploration.
One of the things I learned in doing so is that in Canada, the government actually puts out a database of labour market information which includes both current average salaries, but also predicted supply & demand, broken down by region.
Labour Market Information (yes, it has a 'u') - put in a specific job or career, and you can see a bunch of data and predictions. For example, I just learned that the demand for secondary school teachers in biology is expected to remain steady, but in Ontario it's really low already (not surprised - education is a terrible prospect here right now).
posted by jb at 11:33 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
One of the things I learned in doing so is that in Canada, the government actually puts out a database of labour market information which includes both current average salaries, but also predicted supply & demand, broken down by region.
Labour Market Information (yes, it has a 'u') - put in a specific job or career, and you can see a bunch of data and predictions. For example, I just learned that the demand for secondary school teachers in biology is expected to remain steady, but in Ontario it's really low already (not surprised - education is a terrible prospect here right now).
posted by jb at 11:33 AM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
I disagree with this item, because college curriculums today make a point of teaching students how to perform internet research and to vet sources as a basic requirement.
You said "A person should absolutely be researching their proposed career path and the job market in the area(s) in which they would like to live before they decide whether grad school is worth the investment. It would be tremendously irresponsible not to do that legwork." as if that's a thing everyone knows how to do. And it's not.
I'm a librarian. There's a wide variety of research skills and abilities students get in undergraduate education nowadays. I taught a CS class at a community college and we did not go to the library once (I tried, the library said no!). I have a humanities degree and we basically lived at the library. It's super duper variable and presuming there's a one-size-fits-all optimal way to be a student is fallacious. I appreciate that you have strong feelings about this topic, but you seem to be coming at this from a very specific perspective and maybe not leaving enough room for other perspectives that also fit the data.
posted by jessamyn at 11:40 AM on August 24, 2018 [23 favorites]
You said "A person should absolutely be researching their proposed career path and the job market in the area(s) in which they would like to live before they decide whether grad school is worth the investment. It would be tremendously irresponsible not to do that legwork." as if that's a thing everyone knows how to do. And it's not.
I'm a librarian. There's a wide variety of research skills and abilities students get in undergraduate education nowadays. I taught a CS class at a community college and we did not go to the library once (I tried, the library said no!). I have a humanities degree and we basically lived at the library. It's super duper variable and presuming there's a one-size-fits-all optimal way to be a student is fallacious. I appreciate that you have strong feelings about this topic, but you seem to be coming at this from a very specific perspective and maybe not leaving enough room for other perspectives that also fit the data.
posted by jessamyn at 11:40 AM on August 24, 2018 [23 favorites]
There are 300 million people using Duolingo to learn a foreign language. Duolingo claims it has more users than the US public school system (which is in part because schools have cut language learning, but still...).
Even trusting that Duolingo's numbers are not inflated to promote it's own program, that 300 million number refers to the entire world. In addition, remember that the Duolingo app also has courses that teach English as a foreign language (Duolingo's top course is English for Spanish speakers). I'm not a foreign language teacher, but I think in general there's been a decline in enrollments and interest in foreign languages in the US. And that does limit how Americans communicate with people from other countries.
posted by FJT at 11:58 AM on August 24, 2018
Even trusting that Duolingo's numbers are not inflated to promote it's own program, that 300 million number refers to the entire world. In addition, remember that the Duolingo app also has courses that teach English as a foreign language (Duolingo's top course is English for Spanish speakers). I'm not a foreign language teacher, but I think in general there's been a decline in enrollments and interest in foreign languages in the US. And that does limit how Americans communicate with people from other countries.
posted by FJT at 11:58 AM on August 24, 2018
all the way up to the jobs that lead to being extremely wealthy
Is this really how we're going to characterize being a fast-food worker now? If so, I want out.
posted by praemunire at 12:08 PM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
Is this really how we're going to characterize being a fast-food worker now? If so, I want out.
posted by praemunire at 12:08 PM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
Also, being eighteen was already terrible and hard enough (I could not go to the schools I wanted to be around the people I wanted and I was depressed and lonely), I think maybe reading literature and doing art and hanging out around other people who were into that sort of thing were literally the only things that kept my mortal coil solidly unshuffled. Do I wish now, twenty-odd years later, that I'd made better choices about my future? Maybe. But most of those fall solidly under the aegis of "you probably didn't need that many records by The Fall" and not "you really should have gone into Accounting."
posted by thivaia at 12:10 PM on August 24, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by thivaia at 12:10 PM on August 24, 2018 [4 favorites]
So some thoughts on these higher education threads in general [...]
Higher education institutions are informed by the social class structure around them, at the time they were founded. Some date back a thousand years and not very many are newer than the civil rights era. In a lot of ways, requiring a bachelors degree is a credit check.
Not too long ago you had to be wealthy or very very good to attend university at all. In either case, career planning didn't feed too much into choosing a degree program.
It's all tied into social class in ugly, sensitive ways.
posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 12:36 PM on August 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
Higher education institutions are informed by the social class structure around them, at the time they were founded. Some date back a thousand years and not very many are newer than the civil rights era. In a lot of ways, requiring a bachelors degree is a credit check.
Not too long ago you had to be wealthy or very very good to attend university at all. In either case, career planning didn't feed too much into choosing a degree program.
It's all tied into social class in ugly, sensitive ways.
posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 12:36 PM on August 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
I appreciate that you have strong feelings about this topic, but you seem to be coming at this from a very specific perspective and maybe not leaving enough room for other perspectives that also fit the data.
I’m coming at this from the perspective that people know what Google is, and I find it frankly bizarre that some comments are arguing that Googling things isn’t a thing.
posted by Autumnheart at 12:55 PM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
The thread focusing on working fast food vs adjunct teaching touches on a point that I think deserves greater consideration - namely, the status of certain careers in our society.
Tech moguls of various types are increasingly treated like celebrities and role-models. Computer games and online engagements (reddit, github, metafilter, etc.) have gained on music, film, and literature as ways for us to signal our values and interests. As always, when people choose their career paths, they will make the choices that are visible to them, and that are valorized by the culture they are in.
As was mentioned above, working at McD's might be a viable career path, but not one that people born and raised in the US will choose for this reason. The burger-flipping joke, which is in terrible taste, bot reflects and actively enforces the low-status of both the humanities and service jobs. (I also wonder if is a way for STEM students to deal with their own insecurities.)
All of the discussion of ROI also seems to me like another way to signal status in different ways. Some want to validate their own life decisions, others seem to argue that those who are financially struggling are responsible for their own poor decisions, while many people who chose "safe" careers are frustrated and angry because they are struggling too.
As always, because metafilter, I'm glad to see that there is an awareness that we are all subject to economic forces beyond our control (including chronic and increasing income inequality), and that there is no one path to success (anecdata != data) - and a recognition of and sympathy for all of us who are struggling to find economic security and stability.
posted by ianhattwick at 12:57 PM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
Tech moguls of various types are increasingly treated like celebrities and role-models. Computer games and online engagements (reddit, github, metafilter, etc.) have gained on music, film, and literature as ways for us to signal our values and interests. As always, when people choose their career paths, they will make the choices that are visible to them, and that are valorized by the culture they are in.
As was mentioned above, working at McD's might be a viable career path, but not one that people born and raised in the US will choose for this reason. The burger-flipping joke, which is in terrible taste, bot reflects and actively enforces the low-status of both the humanities and service jobs. (I also wonder if is a way for STEM students to deal with their own insecurities.)
All of the discussion of ROI also seems to me like another way to signal status in different ways. Some want to validate their own life decisions, others seem to argue that those who are financially struggling are responsible for their own poor decisions, while many people who chose "safe" careers are frustrated and angry because they are struggling too.
As always, because metafilter, I'm glad to see that there is an awareness that we are all subject to economic forces beyond our control (including chronic and increasing income inequality), and that there is no one path to success (anecdata != data) - and a recognition of and sympathy for all of us who are struggling to find economic security and stability.
posted by ianhattwick at 12:57 PM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
corb in getting it exactly right upthread
Do I wish now, twenty-odd years later, that I'd made better choices about my future? Maybe. But most of those fall solidly under the aegis of "you probably didn't need that many records by The Fall" and not "you really should have gone into Accounting."
*solidarity fist*
posted by octobersurprise at 1:02 PM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
Do I wish now, twenty-odd years later, that I'd made better choices about my future? Maybe. But most of those fall solidly under the aegis of "you probably didn't need that many records by The Fall" and not "you really should have gone into Accounting."
*solidarity fist*
posted by octobersurprise at 1:02 PM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
I’m coming at this from the perspective that people know what Google is, and I find it frankly bizarre that some comments are arguing that Googling things isn’t a thing.
So, about four years ago, I sat down at a computer and Googled "student loan default."
Google returned me page after page of debt relief scams. I mean from the first search result down for pages, and certainly in the privileged space that advertisers occupy on the page. These sites promised that they worked with the Department of Education. Many of them had nice seals on their sites, or claimed to be "as seen on" the major television networks. Just call, and they can help you out!
(Just call, and lose thousands of dollars to scammers, and maybe end up defaulting unknowingly on your student loans, because the scammers would gain access to your records and change your address to theirs to prevent your figuring out what was going on. Googling can lead you to a world of hurt. So can YouTube...heard what their algorithms will serve up to you these days if you let autoplay run?)
In this day and age, determining what information is reliable and relevant is at least as challenging as determining how to access information generally. Maybe more so. It is astonishing to me that you have so little insight into your own approach to information that you don't recognize how people have to deploy skills to find and make use of it. For example, I know that the top results on a Google search page at that time were there because an advertiser paid to place them there, not because they were the most popular, reliable, or relevant. That is not intuitively obvious, and indeed it was to Google's advantage to make that as nonobvious as they could possibly get away with.
posted by praemunire at 1:39 PM on August 24, 2018 [16 favorites]
So, about four years ago, I sat down at a computer and Googled "student loan default."
Google returned me page after page of debt relief scams. I mean from the first search result down for pages, and certainly in the privileged space that advertisers occupy on the page. These sites promised that they worked with the Department of Education. Many of them had nice seals on their sites, or claimed to be "as seen on" the major television networks. Just call, and they can help you out!
(Just call, and lose thousands of dollars to scammers, and maybe end up defaulting unknowingly on your student loans, because the scammers would gain access to your records and change your address to theirs to prevent your figuring out what was going on. Googling can lead you to a world of hurt. So can YouTube...heard what their algorithms will serve up to you these days if you let autoplay run?)
In this day and age, determining what information is reliable and relevant is at least as challenging as determining how to access information generally. Maybe more so. It is astonishing to me that you have so little insight into your own approach to information that you don't recognize how people have to deploy skills to find and make use of it. For example, I know that the top results on a Google search page at that time were there because an advertiser paid to place them there, not because they were the most popular, reliable, or relevant. That is not intuitively obvious, and indeed it was to Google's advantage to make that as nonobvious as they could possibly get away with.
posted by praemunire at 1:39 PM on August 24, 2018 [16 favorites]
In this day and age, determining what information is reliable and relevant is at least as challenging as determining how to access information generally.
And this is, in fact, one of skills a humanistic education should try to teach students. It always has been, it's just that now there's so much more information so quickly and easily available. If anything, that's the challenge that the humanities face.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:47 PM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
And this is, in fact, one of skills a humanistic education should try to teach students. It always has been, it's just that now there's so much more information so quickly and easily available. If anything, that's the challenge that the humanities face.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:47 PM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
In my college curriculum 3 years ago, we literally covered vetting sources in class. It was also in my textbooks. It was in the rubric of every written assignment, and it was in the syllabus of every class.
posted by Autumnheart at 1:49 PM on August 24, 2018
posted by Autumnheart at 1:49 PM on August 24, 2018
The chart I found most compelling was the percent of humanities degrees by university type. HBCUs have always had the fewest and elite private schools the most. It seems just blindingly true that the fall of humanities degrees correlate with the collapse of the middle class, rising income inequality, and astronomical prices for school. Poor people can't afford the humanities. The more precarious we all are, the less humanities we'll take.
The article is dismissive of the difference in earning potential based on degree but almost everyone I know has humanities degrees, low paying education, social service or non-profit jobs and educational debt.
I want my kid to study humanities but it seems bonkers to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to send her to school for that at this moment in history.
She's leaning toward the trades which I think is the smartest angle at this point.
posted by latkes at 1:52 PM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
The article is dismissive of the difference in earning potential based on degree but almost everyone I know has humanities degrees, low paying education, social service or non-profit jobs and educational debt.
I want my kid to study humanities but it seems bonkers to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to send her to school for that at this moment in history.
She's leaning toward the trades which I think is the smartest angle at this point.
posted by latkes at 1:52 PM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Just for clarity’s sake, since my comments are going to seem contradictory if I don’t spell out the timeline—I originally matriculated in 1991 at 18 and dropped out as a junior in 1995. I’d studied art and English literature (the latter at my parents’ insistence, long story). I entered my field in 1996. I took a few classes at community college in 2004, then returned to a 4-year university in 2013 to complete my degree in Information Technology, which is very relevant to my work although, if money had not been an object, I would have preferred a BFA since I am in fact a designer. I graduated in 2016.
So my background threads a lot of needles. Humanities major who wound up in the tech industry, and someone who clearly remembers what it was like to do coursework back in the day and who also had to do it recently.
I think it might be an advantage for me personally to have essentially spent my entire adult life working with the technology as it matured—but I question the assertion that I have more of an advantage over a younger person (I’m 45) who has been using this technology since childhood. I don’t think I do, at all, and I don’t think my level of google-fu is unusually high either. And certainly, having recently experienced the current-day university experience, I know for a fact that an accredited institution expects students to demonstrate a certain level of skill in using the Internet as a tool. I do not accept the argument that students don’t learn this in college. Whether or not they retain the information is one thing, but they are expected to learn it and use it in the execution of their coursework.
posted by Autumnheart at 2:07 PM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
So my background threads a lot of needles. Humanities major who wound up in the tech industry, and someone who clearly remembers what it was like to do coursework back in the day and who also had to do it recently.
I think it might be an advantage for me personally to have essentially spent my entire adult life working with the technology as it matured—but I question the assertion that I have more of an advantage over a younger person (I’m 45) who has been using this technology since childhood. I don’t think I do, at all, and I don’t think my level of google-fu is unusually high either. And certainly, having recently experienced the current-day university experience, I know for a fact that an accredited institution expects students to demonstrate a certain level of skill in using the Internet as a tool. I do not accept the argument that students don’t learn this in college. Whether or not they retain the information is one thing, but they are expected to learn it and use it in the execution of their coursework.
posted by Autumnheart at 2:07 PM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
I do not accept the argument that students don’t learn this in college.
Colleges do not have a standardised curriculum for this sort of thing. Perhaps they should! But they do not. I have attended many and taught at many. Each has been wildly different in terms of what they expected students to know at entry, what they expected instructors to teach, the resources and time instructors were given to instil and test for the uptake of this knowledge, what they expected or permitted instructors to do when students failed to demonstrate these skills, and what students retained at the end of it all.
At larger universities, the curriculum varies wildly within schools and between departments. At one larger university where I taught, students with certain STEM majors were automatically exempted from the coursework which provided this kind of training, and when those majors ended up in my non-STEM classes, even as seniors, they often struggled with these and related skills. (Plenty of students who were required to take the coursework struggled, too.)
I have taught coursework that includes units on media literacy, and have noticed a marked difference in my students just in the span of a few years, when it comes to skills I'd consider basic for a young adult. Those who have used the internet since childhood trust it far more than you might expect -- far more than they should, for their own good, frankly. Ten years ago, I was shocked by how trusting 18 and 19 year olds could be when it came to TV ads. The 18 and 19 year olds I teach now are savvier about that medium, but shock me at a similar level, when it comes to their trust in social media platforms.
posted by halation at 2:26 PM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
Colleges do not have a standardised curriculum for this sort of thing. Perhaps they should! But they do not. I have attended many and taught at many. Each has been wildly different in terms of what they expected students to know at entry, what they expected instructors to teach, the resources and time instructors were given to instil and test for the uptake of this knowledge, what they expected or permitted instructors to do when students failed to demonstrate these skills, and what students retained at the end of it all.
At larger universities, the curriculum varies wildly within schools and between departments. At one larger university where I taught, students with certain STEM majors were automatically exempted from the coursework which provided this kind of training, and when those majors ended up in my non-STEM classes, even as seniors, they often struggled with these and related skills. (Plenty of students who were required to take the coursework struggled, too.)
I have taught coursework that includes units on media literacy, and have noticed a marked difference in my students just in the span of a few years, when it comes to skills I'd consider basic for a young adult. Those who have used the internet since childhood trust it far more than you might expect -- far more than they should, for their own good, frankly. Ten years ago, I was shocked by how trusting 18 and 19 year olds could be when it came to TV ads. The 18 and 19 year olds I teach now are savvier about that medium, but shock me at a similar level, when it comes to their trust in social media platforms.
posted by halation at 2:26 PM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
Colleges and universities don’t have a standardized curriculum, but they do have to meet a standard as part of their ongoing accreditation process with the state in which they operate.
posted by Autumnheart at 2:28 PM on August 24, 2018
posted by Autumnheart at 2:28 PM on August 24, 2018
No accreditation process I've been part of addressed the skills you're talking about.
posted by halation at 2:30 PM on August 24, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by halation at 2:30 PM on August 24, 2018 [4 favorites]
Maybe they should.
When I attended the introductory discussion for my capstone, a significant portion of the evening was devoted to the expectations we were to meet, and how the university used our capstone projects to demonstrate that they were meeting accreditation standards. Clearly someone is thinking about it.
posted by Autumnheart at 2:37 PM on August 24, 2018
When I attended the introductory discussion for my capstone, a significant portion of the evening was devoted to the expectations we were to meet, and how the university used our capstone projects to demonstrate that they were meeting accreditation standards. Clearly someone is thinking about it.
posted by Autumnheart at 2:37 PM on August 24, 2018
, I know for a fact that an accredited institution expects students to demonstrate a certain level of skill in using the Internet as a tool.
Are you talking about the same people who believe in and propagate stories like Pizzagate, and how Sandy Hook was faked, right?
Maybe consider that your experience is not anywhere near universal.
posted by rtha at 2:39 PM on August 24, 2018
Are you talking about the same people who believe in and propagate stories like Pizzagate, and how Sandy Hook was faked, right?
Maybe consider that your experience is not anywhere near universal.
posted by rtha at 2:39 PM on August 24, 2018
Mod note: Autumnheart, this thread is turning into a referendum on your opinion on this topic and maybe it's time to let the thread breathe a little? Thank you.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 2:43 PM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 2:43 PM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
Maybe they should.
...which I said myself in my previous comment, yes.
But they did not.
As people have repeatedly said: your experience is not universal.
posted by halation at 2:44 PM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
...which I said myself in my previous comment, yes.
But they did not.
As people have repeatedly said: your experience is not universal.
posted by halation at 2:44 PM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
There’s a difference, too, I think, between knowing how to use the internet as a tool and some deeper grasp of cultural & rhetorical literacy that enables a student to place the information they find in a broader context: to understand sources, the history of themes, arguments, and the people who’ve made them, etc. IME, your average undergrad is pretty good at the first and at the latter ranges somewhere between fairly knowledgeable and entirely ignorant. (Which is, of course, due to the fact that your average undergrad hasn’t thought of that much. That’s why they’re a student.)
posted by octobersurprise at 2:52 PM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by octobersurprise at 2:52 PM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
(And most of my fellow students were single parents and immigrants from Africa, so we don’t need to try to argue that the educational environment consisted of privileged people born with silver iPads in their mouth either.)
posted by Autumnheart at 2:54 PM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Autumnheart at 2:54 PM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Hey, I’m not the one trying to argue that it’s perfectly reasonable for someone who’s attended college since the year 2000 to somehow never have learned how to google. But sure.
posted by Autumnheart at 3:07 PM on August 24, 2018
posted by Autumnheart at 3:07 PM on August 24, 2018
One of the stupidest and worst ways that relatively young adults get trapped in an unnecessary garbage future is by retaining the adolescent paranoia that if you ask questions, everyone will sneer at you for not already knowing the answers and will tell you you're the only one too stupid to figure it out on your own.
Because this paranoia lingers into young adulthood, college professors often have to spend a lot of time and patience re-acculturating freshman to an understanding that an honest "I don't know" is always preferable to putting on a show of superficial sophistication and bullshitting one's way through complicated questions. Really knowing is best; admitting ignorance is second best; pretending to know is dead last. I will even say that learning and internalizing this order is more important than any other basic skill, such as using search engines efficiently. Of course you want students to actively learn and think autonomously, spurred on by curiosity as much as by your prodding, to at least try to figure out an answer through reading and reasoning before asking for help. But you can't even suggest that, you can't ask leading questions to stimulate thought, you can't help them at all unless they are able to inform you that they don't know something.
so it is very distressing and really counterproductive to see someone repeatedly haranguing a much younger person for letting slip that they don't know something. never mind whether the something is actually true; 'you should already know it, and you should have known you needed to know it long before you actually did know you needed to know it' is, like I say, the nightmare paranoiac's idea of what other adults will say when you reveal ignorance. it's not supposed to really be the response you get.
posted by queenofbithynia at 3:11 PM on August 24, 2018 [19 favorites]
Because this paranoia lingers into young adulthood, college professors often have to spend a lot of time and patience re-acculturating freshman to an understanding that an honest "I don't know" is always preferable to putting on a show of superficial sophistication and bullshitting one's way through complicated questions. Really knowing is best; admitting ignorance is second best; pretending to know is dead last. I will even say that learning and internalizing this order is more important than any other basic skill, such as using search engines efficiently. Of course you want students to actively learn and think autonomously, spurred on by curiosity as much as by your prodding, to at least try to figure out an answer through reading and reasoning before asking for help. But you can't even suggest that, you can't ask leading questions to stimulate thought, you can't help them at all unless they are able to inform you that they don't know something.
so it is very distressing and really counterproductive to see someone repeatedly haranguing a much younger person for letting slip that they don't know something. never mind whether the something is actually true; 'you should already know it, and you should have known you needed to know it long before you actually did know you needed to know it' is, like I say, the nightmare paranoiac's idea of what other adults will say when you reveal ignorance. it's not supposed to really be the response you get.
posted by queenofbithynia at 3:11 PM on August 24, 2018 [19 favorites]
Dude, no one is arguing it’s reasonable. Just not that it’s as widespread as you keep insisting
posted by rtha at 3:12 PM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by rtha at 3:12 PM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
You said "A person should absolutely be researching their proposed career path and the job market in the area(s) in which they would like to live before they decide whether grad school is worth the investment. It would be tremendously irresponsible not to do that legwork." as if that's a thing everyone knows how to do. And it's not.
This is an unfair characterization of Autumnheart's original point. They were speaking to the situation of someone contemplating graduate school - that is, someone who (at a minimum) has completed a four-year degree, with a grade of B or higher.
And given that the specific graduate degree in question was in history, someone without the research skills to find out about labour markets should not be contemplating a masters in history, since one of the most basic prerequisites is "knowing how to find information". It's what 80% of undergraduate history is in North America.
I have a good friend who went back to school in his 30s for an applied course that turned out to have many fewer jobs and pay about 1/2 as much as people had told him. I know that people can get bad advice. I wish I had known before he started that program, as I had just discovered the Labour market database I linked above and could have looked up the information and shown him what he learned the hard way after graduating.
What Autumnheart was giving was very good advice to a fellow mefite: if you are going to do a degree for a job, research the labour market first. If you don't know how to research the labour market, ask around until you find someone who does know. I heard there is this great site where you can post questions, and strangers on the internet answer them!
I know people are going, 'but you are just showing off your privilege' - NO. I was the first person in my house growing up to graduate high school, let alone go to university. Saying that people who didn't grow up middle class cannot LEARN how to do things like research labour markets is the classist thing, not being the person to talk about the importance of doing so.
I am tired of people ignoring inequality, in the name of equality. Yes, under-privileged people lack a lot of knowledge and resources that privileged people have - g-d knows, I did. But don't just pat us on the head and say, it's okay, you didn't know better. This is defeatist.
Though: interesting point about my friend and me. He grew up in the upper-middle class,went to private schools, but (due to family issues) didn't finish university and ended up in the service sector. I grew up with a single parent on social assistance, and went to grad school because I didn't know what else to do. We've been friends since we were 19; 15 years later, we were both at career crossroads - I'd taken up the same service sector job he'd had for 10 years.
But it was me who took the free career workshop and learned about the labour market database. I had the 'privilege' of being a woman (it's offered by an organization which only helps women), and having the luck of someone recommending it to me. He had bad, bad career advice from friends and family who themselves were in the top 1%, and now he's paying for it.
posted by jb at 3:25 PM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
This is an unfair characterization of Autumnheart's original point. They were speaking to the situation of someone contemplating graduate school - that is, someone who (at a minimum) has completed a four-year degree, with a grade of B or higher.
And given that the specific graduate degree in question was in history, someone without the research skills to find out about labour markets should not be contemplating a masters in history, since one of the most basic prerequisites is "knowing how to find information". It's what 80% of undergraduate history is in North America.
I have a good friend who went back to school in his 30s for an applied course that turned out to have many fewer jobs and pay about 1/2 as much as people had told him. I know that people can get bad advice. I wish I had known before he started that program, as I had just discovered the Labour market database I linked above and could have looked up the information and shown him what he learned the hard way after graduating.
What Autumnheart was giving was very good advice to a fellow mefite: if you are going to do a degree for a job, research the labour market first. If you don't know how to research the labour market, ask around until you find someone who does know. I heard there is this great site where you can post questions, and strangers on the internet answer them!
I know people are going, 'but you are just showing off your privilege' - NO. I was the first person in my house growing up to graduate high school, let alone go to university. Saying that people who didn't grow up middle class cannot LEARN how to do things like research labour markets is the classist thing, not being the person to talk about the importance of doing so.
I am tired of people ignoring inequality, in the name of equality. Yes, under-privileged people lack a lot of knowledge and resources that privileged people have - g-d knows, I did. But don't just pat us on the head and say, it's okay, you didn't know better. This is defeatist.
Though: interesting point about my friend and me. He grew up in the upper-middle class,went to private schools, but (due to family issues) didn't finish university and ended up in the service sector. I grew up with a single parent on social assistance, and went to grad school because I didn't know what else to do. We've been friends since we were 19; 15 years later, we were both at career crossroads - I'd taken up the same service sector job he'd had for 10 years.
But it was me who took the free career workshop and learned about the labour market database. I had the 'privilege' of being a woman (it's offered by an organization which only helps women), and having the luck of someone recommending it to me. He had bad, bad career advice from friends and family who themselves were in the top 1%, and now he's paying for it.
posted by jb at 3:25 PM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
A lot of it comes down to the fact that STEM degrees are way, way more challenging than humanities degrees, so the signaling value of a humanities degree is pretty negative. If you see "BA in English" on a resume, the first thing you wonder is why they couldn't major in something harder. Of course there are plenty of students who work incredibly hard to master humanities subjects, but the degree doesn't signal that.
If there were humanities degrees with similar rigor and intensity as engineering degrees, I think employers would eat that up. Imagine 50 hours a week of learning, year round, with truly challenging classes culminating in a professional degree like a JD or MA in international studies. Many companies would actively seek out those kinds of graduates. But as far as I know, that isn't a thing that exists.
posted by miyabo at 4:40 PM on August 24, 2018
If there were humanities degrees with similar rigor and intensity as engineering degrees, I think employers would eat that up. Imagine 50 hours a week of learning, year round, with truly challenging classes culminating in a professional degree like a JD or MA in international studies. Many companies would actively seek out those kinds of graduates. But as far as I know, that isn't a thing that exists.
posted by miyabo at 4:40 PM on August 24, 2018
A lot of it comes down to the fact that STEM degrees are way, way more challenging than humanities degrees,
I took an 8:30 am class in Classical Greek.
posted by octobersurprise at 5:05 PM on August 24, 2018 [16 favorites]
I took an 8:30 am class in Classical Greek.
posted by octobersurprise at 5:05 PM on August 24, 2018 [16 favorites]
As a multiple STEM degree holder and a liberal arts degree attempter, I'm going to have to disagree.
posted by runcibleshaw at 5:06 PM on August 24, 2018 [9 favorites]
posted by runcibleshaw at 5:06 PM on August 24, 2018 [9 favorites]
Sorry, to finish my thought, different people find different things difficult. I found physics to be difficult, but not as hard as an art history class or an actual art class. I'm also not very good at math and I'd still rather do physics work than write a paper, because in a lot of ways you can turn off large chunks of your brain and just apply a few very specific rules to do the work. For other people STEM degrees may be harder. The idea that a liberal arts degree isn't rigorous is going to need some backing up because I don't know that to be true.
posted by runcibleshaw at 5:12 PM on August 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
posted by runcibleshaw at 5:12 PM on August 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
What is complicated is that the grade distributions don't look the same. (I've graded in humanities, discussed grades at length with people of many disciplines).
In courses with quantitative assessment, you tend to get a wider bell curve than courses with qualitative assessment, where the curve is tall and narrow. To illustrate: yoy can have a situation where work that might get a D in a STEM course gets a C in a humanities course, but work that would get an A in a STEM course only gets an A- or B+ in a humanities course. And these can be the same 2 courses.
Overall, I have never heard that the humanities has more 4.0 grades, which is what would happen if grades were simply higher. They are not higher, they are different. Easier to be mediocre, just as hard (or harder) to excel.
posted by jb at 5:24 PM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
In courses with quantitative assessment, you tend to get a wider bell curve than courses with qualitative assessment, where the curve is tall and narrow. To illustrate: yoy can have a situation where work that might get a D in a STEM course gets a C in a humanities course, but work that would get an A in a STEM course only gets an A- or B+ in a humanities course. And these can be the same 2 courses.
Overall, I have never heard that the humanities has more 4.0 grades, which is what would happen if grades were simply higher. They are not higher, they are different. Easier to be mediocre, just as hard (or harder) to excel.
posted by jb at 5:24 PM on August 24, 2018 [1 favorite]
Overall, I have never heard that the humanities has more 4.0 grades, which is what would happen if grades were simply higher. They are not higher, they are different.Nope, they are higher - by around 0.3 points on average (See fig. 3).
posted by kickingtheground at 5:41 PM on August 24, 2018
Many companies would actively seek out those kinds of graduates.
What an odd assertion, as if English majors and history majors and so on aren’t being hired by “many companies” every day, in a variety of roles. And of course many of them go on to law and medical school and so on.
posted by rtha at 5:57 PM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
What an odd assertion, as if English majors and history majors and so on aren’t being hired by “many companies” every day, in a variety of roles. And of course many of them go on to law and medical school and so on.
posted by rtha at 5:57 PM on August 24, 2018 [2 favorites]
If you see "BA in English" on a resume, the first thing you wonder is why they couldn't major in something harder.
Depends on which school of critical theory you apply to your Joyce seminar midterm.
posted by thivaia at 6:21 PM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
Depends on which school of critical theory you apply to your Joyce seminar midterm.
posted by thivaia at 6:21 PM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
Nope, they are higher - by around 0.3 points on average (See fig. 3).
To be sure, there are real ways in which engineering schools in particular are harder than a liberal arts degree, like time management to deal with the 18+ hours/semester that are pretty common. But lower gpa doesn't mean that. Lower average gpa just means lower grades, not harder subjects. This reflects the different "business models" between engineering and natural sciences versus humanities.
Even in research universities, humanities departments to a first approximation run on putting butts in seats in undergraduate courses, with probably some emphasis on grad students depending on the funding model. While the amount of grant money isn't zero, it's also not enough for profs to be funding themselves and several other people. So, duh, humanities departments run relatively gentle introductory courses with the idea of getting undergraduates interested in the field, and run mid-level courses for nonmajors to try to get them interested and maybe switch, and so on.
Outside liberal arts colleges, engineering and natural sciences to a first approximation run on grants and grad students, and at least in the short term don't really need undergraduates for anything. So they run introductory courses for people who might want to major that are weed-outs designed to eliminate everyone but the most intrinsically interested and to give even students doing easily acceptable work quite low grades, and more generally throw their undergrads to the wolves in a variety of ways, and offer only a limited set of courses for nonmajors.
tl;dr: engineering and natural science programs are legitimately harder in some ways, but the lower gpa is probably more a function of them not having to give a shit about driving undergrads away.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:30 PM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
To be sure, there are real ways in which engineering schools in particular are harder than a liberal arts degree, like time management to deal with the 18+ hours/semester that are pretty common. But lower gpa doesn't mean that. Lower average gpa just means lower grades, not harder subjects. This reflects the different "business models" between engineering and natural sciences versus humanities.
Even in research universities, humanities departments to a first approximation run on putting butts in seats in undergraduate courses, with probably some emphasis on grad students depending on the funding model. While the amount of grant money isn't zero, it's also not enough for profs to be funding themselves and several other people. So, duh, humanities departments run relatively gentle introductory courses with the idea of getting undergraduates interested in the field, and run mid-level courses for nonmajors to try to get them interested and maybe switch, and so on.
Outside liberal arts colleges, engineering and natural sciences to a first approximation run on grants and grad students, and at least in the short term don't really need undergraduates for anything. So they run introductory courses for people who might want to major that are weed-outs designed to eliminate everyone but the most intrinsically interested and to give even students doing easily acceptable work quite low grades, and more generally throw their undergrads to the wolves in a variety of ways, and offer only a limited set of courses for nonmajors.
tl;dr: engineering and natural science programs are legitimately harder in some ways, but the lower gpa is probably more a function of them not having to give a shit about driving undergrads away.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:30 PM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
Maybe we can all just assume that whatever *we* did is super rigorous and hardcore and real, and the other team sucks, and move on from there?
Oh wait, there's nowhere to move on to from there.
As you were.
posted by uosuaq at 7:01 PM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
Oh wait, there's nowhere to move on to from there.
As you were.
posted by uosuaq at 7:01 PM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
I get that there's something fun and comforting about having a familiar argument where you can rehash the same talking points you've been using for years if not decades, but this is really not about whether STEM is better than humanities, because many of the newly popular majors are neither. Students are not just abandoning English and History for Computer Science and Engineering. They're abandoning English and History for Criminal Justice and Sports Management. The most popular college major in the US is business, not anything in either the humanities or STEM.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:06 PM on August 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:06 PM on August 24, 2018 [8 favorites]
STEM degrees are way, way more challenging than humanities degrees
I mean doesn't this depend completely on the aptitudes of the student in question? Also, "harder" according to what data?
posted by eustacescrubb at 7:06 PM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
I mean doesn't this depend completely on the aptitudes of the student in question? Also, "harder" according to what data?
posted by eustacescrubb at 7:06 PM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
If you see "BA in English" on a resume, the first thing you wonder is why they couldn't major in something harder.
y i k e s
this is a bad take, my friend, and a very bad way to go about hiring people to do... pretty much anything
So, duh, humanities departments run relatively gentle introductory courses with the idea of getting undergraduates interested in the field, and run mid-level courses for nonmajors to try to get them interested and maybe switch, and so on.
They also do a shit-ton of heavy lifting for STEM, Business, and all those other so-much-harder-and-more-important-and-practical majors -- teaching the gen-ed courses that the majors in all those far-more-profitable departments need to take in order to graduate. Since they're not major-required courses, students blow them off in order to concentrate on their 'real' coursework, and then panic when they do poorly or fail because they didn't do the readings, or when they 'forget' to take their first-year required courses until the semester before they're due to graduate, when registration is already over and the classes are already full and require overrides and special permissions and extra desks to be crammed into already-overcrowded rooms and extra uncompensated work from the professors who now have to teach an over-enrolled class.
And then the students and/or their parents and/or various chairs and deans and provosts yell at the humanities instructors for tanking the GPAs (and therefore the job prospects) of the engineering majors, or preventing the pre-meds from applying to more-competitive med schools because of their having failed GenEd 101 or whatever. Those without tenure are especially vulnerable to this pressure, and because industry doesn't like to hire people with humanities PhDs, and therefore they can be had cheaply, a lot of this teaching is done by adjuncts. So, yeah, grade inflation is a thing, but it's not because the humanities are somehow inherently too easy.
There was once a professor I knew who got pissed at the 'humanities are easy' rep and decided to run the annual giant GenEd 101 required freshman humanities survey course the way people run first-year wash-out courses in Bio or Chem. The prof went hard -- although, honestly, could have gone harder. But still, it was... poorly received, shall we say. People in the department were Very Sternly Informed they were not to do that ever again. Next year every section was back to soft-and-squishy multiple-choice-quiz style coursework.
posted by halation at 7:11 PM on August 24, 2018 [14 favorites]
y i k e s
this is a bad take, my friend, and a very bad way to go about hiring people to do... pretty much anything
So, duh, humanities departments run relatively gentle introductory courses with the idea of getting undergraduates interested in the field, and run mid-level courses for nonmajors to try to get them interested and maybe switch, and so on.
They also do a shit-ton of heavy lifting for STEM, Business, and all those other so-much-harder-and-more-important-and-practical majors -- teaching the gen-ed courses that the majors in all those far-more-profitable departments need to take in order to graduate. Since they're not major-required courses, students blow them off in order to concentrate on their 'real' coursework, and then panic when they do poorly or fail because they didn't do the readings, or when they 'forget' to take their first-year required courses until the semester before they're due to graduate, when registration is already over and the classes are already full and require overrides and special permissions and extra desks to be crammed into already-overcrowded rooms and extra uncompensated work from the professors who now have to teach an over-enrolled class.
And then the students and/or their parents and/or various chairs and deans and provosts yell at the humanities instructors for tanking the GPAs (and therefore the job prospects) of the engineering majors, or preventing the pre-meds from applying to more-competitive med schools because of their having failed GenEd 101 or whatever. Those without tenure are especially vulnerable to this pressure, and because industry doesn't like to hire people with humanities PhDs, and therefore they can be had cheaply, a lot of this teaching is done by adjuncts. So, yeah, grade inflation is a thing, but it's not because the humanities are somehow inherently too easy.
There was once a professor I knew who got pissed at the 'humanities are easy' rep and decided to run the annual giant GenEd 101 required freshman humanities survey course the way people run first-year wash-out courses in Bio or Chem. The prof went hard -- although, honestly, could have gone harder. But still, it was... poorly received, shall we say. People in the department were Very Sternly Informed they were not to do that ever again. Next year every section was back to soft-and-squishy multiple-choice-quiz style coursework.
posted by halation at 7:11 PM on August 24, 2018 [14 favorites]
I found this quote in the book I was reading (Heroine Worship by Sarah Kuhn) right after I first posted in this thread:
"When you were younger, we were only trying to encourage you. To do better. The things you were good at--they didn't seem to have a clear path to success. Success leads to happiness, and we want you to be happy."
That just kind of summed it up to me. Clear path to success vs...no path, no success, I guess.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:28 PM on August 24, 2018
"When you were younger, we were only trying to encourage you. To do better. The things you were good at--they didn't seem to have a clear path to success. Success leads to happiness, and we want you to be happy."
That just kind of summed it up to me. Clear path to success vs...no path, no success, I guess.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:28 PM on August 24, 2018
I got a STEM degree at a liberal arts college & I personally feel that the route I took was a pretty ideal balance between humanities & STEM. The divide is very frustrating to me. Were my STEM classes harder than my humanities classes? A lot of the time, yes, but I've also had to do things like drop a course because I couldn't identify literally thousands of years of notable art on sight & memorize all the details & the historical significance of each piece. Some of my English classes were honestly really easy to slide by in (you get what you put in), but with a liberal arts education, it's not like the skills of critical thinking & writing weren't integrated into other areas of my studies. That said, I feel I went to a quality institution where professors were not as distracted by their research & neglectful of undergrads, because it was only undergrads. Overall, the liberal arts bent to my education has made me much more informed about the world & its complexities, which I feel can only serve to benefit me in my STEM career.
One thing I have noticed about younger STEM college students when I have interacted with them at career fairs via my job is that there doesn't seem to be much emphasis on how their degrees will be applied to real-world jobs. Everyone would love to go to school for computer science & graduate & get a job that more or less fits the cookie cutter title "computer scientist" but that's not really reality, especially with only a bachelor's. I think there was definitely a part of me that thought the same thing early on in college & was still a bit in denial about the job market for a STEM job with just a bachelor's, even after working my ass off & being a research assistant for much of undergrad. However, I use skills developed from my humanities courses literally all the time & while my current job isn't exactly on-the-dot in the "purist" form of my field, exercising other skills really helps with adaptability (& I dunno, the people skills that can be harder to exercise in pure STEM positions). The conflict between diversifying skill-set & specializing is also pretty real though & something I'm feeling as I ponder graduate school & specializing further. There's so many angles to it though, as a lot of agency STEM positions get condensed down into one position due to budget constraints & a lack of public investment, so it almost seems better to diversify rather than specialize. It's a mess.
Another aspect that worries me about all this echoes a lot of what corb said above. The inherent nature of our job market is so unpredictable, so susceptible to automation & outsourcing, & the recommended "immune" career paths can easily be flooded with people going into them that it exceeds the demand for them. I see this with trades...I'm very pro people going into the trades instead of a four-year degree, but there's also only so many people who can be plumbers or welders. Meanwhile, there's literally so much work around us that can be done to better society as a whole, but no investment of money into it. Basically, we're all left fighting for the pie, we can parse out who in what field has the upper-hand in all it, but honestly a lot of it ends up feeling like marginal advantages because we're all just getting utterly screwed as a whole.
posted by giizhik at 8:53 PM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
One thing I have noticed about younger STEM college students when I have interacted with them at career fairs via my job is that there doesn't seem to be much emphasis on how their degrees will be applied to real-world jobs. Everyone would love to go to school for computer science & graduate & get a job that more or less fits the cookie cutter title "computer scientist" but that's not really reality, especially with only a bachelor's. I think there was definitely a part of me that thought the same thing early on in college & was still a bit in denial about the job market for a STEM job with just a bachelor's, even after working my ass off & being a research assistant for much of undergrad. However, I use skills developed from my humanities courses literally all the time & while my current job isn't exactly on-the-dot in the "purist" form of my field, exercising other skills really helps with adaptability (& I dunno, the people skills that can be harder to exercise in pure STEM positions). The conflict between diversifying skill-set & specializing is also pretty real though & something I'm feeling as I ponder graduate school & specializing further. There's so many angles to it though, as a lot of agency STEM positions get condensed down into one position due to budget constraints & a lack of public investment, so it almost seems better to diversify rather than specialize. It's a mess.
Another aspect that worries me about all this echoes a lot of what corb said above. The inherent nature of our job market is so unpredictable, so susceptible to automation & outsourcing, & the recommended "immune" career paths can easily be flooded with people going into them that it exceeds the demand for them. I see this with trades...I'm very pro people going into the trades instead of a four-year degree, but there's also only so many people who can be plumbers or welders. Meanwhile, there's literally so much work around us that can be done to better society as a whole, but no investment of money into it. Basically, we're all left fighting for the pie, we can parse out who in what field has the upper-hand in all it, but honestly a lot of it ends up feeling like marginal advantages because we're all just getting utterly screwed as a whole.
posted by giizhik at 8:53 PM on August 24, 2018 [6 favorites]
This is from a way up-thread but is bugging me so:
Upward mobility is no longer a reality in the US. It is no longer true that flipping burgers would lead someday to being a GM, it now means that you spend the rest of your life flipping burgers.
One category of exception to this includes some immigrants who are flipping burgers who have degrees/skills from their home countries but don't have the language skills. They learn the language then can actually put their skills they have because of their relatively privileged upbringing and/or degrees to use.
They are willing to do jobs people in the US with their same educational background aren't willing to. (out of necessity, and with the hope for a different future?)
Many less educated immigrants fall into the category of career burger flippers, or farm workers, or janitors, or ... also lacking an opportunity for upward mobility because upward mobility is no longer a reality in the US.
(there are, of course, exceptions, and our economy is broken)
posted by lab.beetle at 9:21 PM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
Upward mobility is no longer a reality in the US. It is no longer true that flipping burgers would lead someday to being a GM, it now means that you spend the rest of your life flipping burgers.
One category of exception to this includes some immigrants who are flipping burgers who have degrees/skills from their home countries but don't have the language skills. They learn the language then can actually put their skills they have because of their relatively privileged upbringing and/or degrees to use.
They are willing to do jobs people in the US with their same educational background aren't willing to. (out of necessity, and with the hope for a different future?)
Many less educated immigrants fall into the category of career burger flippers, or farm workers, or janitors, or ... also lacking an opportunity for upward mobility because upward mobility is no longer a reality in the US.
(there are, of course, exceptions, and our economy is broken)
posted by lab.beetle at 9:21 PM on August 24, 2018 [5 favorites]
On a perhaps more positive note I see the trend in successful software engineering to be ever more focused on the art over the science. Impact in the tech world now seems to be based on architecture decisions, frameworks (ugh), deployment, scalability, etc. Instead of, idk, building the next fastest sorting algorithm, encoding, the low level engineering stuff. Being an effective leader in at least the T part of STEM seems to very much involve the more humanistic skills. Visualizing a whole system as a bundle of components, seeing trends as they are developing, thinking about a tech decision's impact organization-wise, and so on.
I think as the actual engineering of tech gets more and more abstracted we'll appreciate how the humanities can fill that gap. I guess to put it more broadly, STEM is a spear and humanities are the rod. Where Math is just Applied Logic + Philosophy, Physics just Applied Critical Thinking + Observation. In a period in history with such radical growth in tech/science I guess the inertia has swung us in favor of the STEM (read: practical) disciplines because there is so much new shit to practice and so little time to take a step back and reason.
posted by hexaflexagon at 11:56 PM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
I think as the actual engineering of tech gets more and more abstracted we'll appreciate how the humanities can fill that gap. I guess to put it more broadly, STEM is a spear and humanities are the rod. Where Math is just Applied Logic + Philosophy, Physics just Applied Critical Thinking + Observation. In a period in history with such radical growth in tech/science I guess the inertia has swung us in favor of the STEM (read: practical) disciplines because there is so much new shit to practice and so little time to take a step back and reason.
posted by hexaflexagon at 11:56 PM on August 24, 2018 [3 favorites]
“You Can Handle The Truth”, BBC's The Documentary podcast episode from a couple of months ago; describes projects in Uganda and California attempting to teach middle schoolers and high schoolers critical thinking skills
posted by XMLicious at 3:59 AM on August 25, 2018
posted by XMLicious at 3:59 AM on August 25, 2018
I don't know how many people on Wall Street have a humanities education - I tend to think business, law, marketing, media and communications etc are a lot more common, and maybe others consider them humanities degrees, but I'm not sure I do.
You tend to think? Why comment if you don't have a clue? Wall Street may have plenty of people with post-grad business and law degrees but not at an undergraduate level (undergraduate business degrees are unspeakably vulgar). Many banks recruit from colleges that don't even offer those things. Marketing, media and communications? Maybe if you wanted a job working as a receptionist at Goldman.
posted by atrazine at 5:17 AM on August 25, 2018 [2 favorites]
You tend to think? Why comment if you don't have a clue? Wall Street may have plenty of people with post-grad business and law degrees but not at an undergraduate level (undergraduate business degrees are unspeakably vulgar). Many banks recruit from colleges that don't even offer those things. Marketing, media and communications? Maybe if you wanted a job working as a receptionist at Goldman.
posted by atrazine at 5:17 AM on August 25, 2018 [2 favorites]
I based it off my experiences at my uni, where the law etc students are the ones talked about, and written up in the paper as on a direct path to a cushy job at their uncle's firm, walk around in suits and fancy pointed shoes at 19. You can even check their course when they run for student elections on grounds of "depoliticising" the uni. Law and business feature heavily.
Like, the look of the people at the campus conservative club is that of the stereotypical law or business student. The cafe in the law building is known as the most expensive.
Not all law+ students ofc, I've comrades who study law, but it definitely seems like if I wanted to find a future CEO, I wouldn't choose a unit on the history of neoliberalism or public protests over a unit on the finer points of corporate tax law or evading safety regulations.
I guess I didn't know how "vulgar" it is to do a degree in the field you're heading for, and with their advantages, it's usually a pretty clear path, not a case of wherever they end up getting hired.
I guess I have said before on MeFi though, if I was a rich conservative, I'd keep my mouth shut in tutorials if I didn't want to be shredded. So the rich might well be beside me, but they're not advertising it.
Maybe it's a difference in the environment here, maybe I'm just straight up wrong. By posting what I understood, I've learned more by reading the replies of others.
Also, the idea of a college not offering those things at all is alien to me. Always more differences to learn about.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 7:12 AM on August 25, 2018
Like, the look of the people at the campus conservative club is that of the stereotypical law or business student. The cafe in the law building is known as the most expensive.
Not all law+ students ofc, I've comrades who study law, but it definitely seems like if I wanted to find a future CEO, I wouldn't choose a unit on the history of neoliberalism or public protests over a unit on the finer points of corporate tax law or evading safety regulations.
I guess I didn't know how "vulgar" it is to do a degree in the field you're heading for, and with their advantages, it's usually a pretty clear path, not a case of wherever they end up getting hired.
I guess I have said before on MeFi though, if I was a rich conservative, I'd keep my mouth shut in tutorials if I didn't want to be shredded. So the rich might well be beside me, but they're not advertising it.
Maybe it's a difference in the environment here, maybe I'm just straight up wrong. By posting what I understood, I've learned more by reading the replies of others.
Also, the idea of a college not offering those things at all is alien to me. Always more differences to learn about.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 7:12 AM on August 25, 2018
I don't know where you're located, AnhydrousLove, but in the US, Wall Street has historically hired from a very small number of super-elite universities that didn't offer undergraduate business degrees. They cared much more about where people went to school than about what they studied, because they believed that they could teach smart people anything they needed to know, and they believed that the smartest people went to the colleges that they considered to be the top schools. The typical Wall Street career path was that you majored in history or philosophy or economics at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton; you were hired after an on-campus recruiting event at your elite university; you worked for a couple of years on Wall Street; and then your employer paid for you to get an MBA. But that was irrelevant to the experience of the overwhelming majority of American college students, because if you didn't attend one of those super-elite universities, then you weren't getting a top job on Wall Street, no matter what you studied. It's not like they were hiring history or philosophy majors from State U.
Part of my job is to talk to first-year college students about their majors, and I've found that business is a really common major for students who don't have a lot of direction. They don't have a clear career path in mind, they want something practical, and business seems to be practical while keeping a lot of options open. I don't think that's a particular good reason to major in business, but that's what a lot of them are thinking.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:06 AM on August 25, 2018 [12 favorites]
Part of my job is to talk to first-year college students about their majors, and I've found that business is a really common major for students who don't have a lot of direction. They don't have a clear career path in mind, they want something practical, and business seems to be practical while keeping a lot of options open. I don't think that's a particular good reason to major in business, but that's what a lot of them are thinking.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:06 AM on August 25, 2018 [12 favorites]
Nope, they are higher - by around 0.3 points on average (See fig. 3).
Figure three doesn't show they are just higher, not different. It shows that the mean is higher. What I assume the "different" person is arguing, and what I suspect is true requires showing the full distribution of grades, not the mean. Here's what I strongly suspect: It's much easier/more common to fail a STEM course than to fail a humanities course, especially assuming actually doing the work. But it's much harder to get an A, especially a high-A, in the Humanities. If you see someone with a mean grade of 98 in their STEM classes, that is one smart and probably hard working cookie. If you see someone with a 98 average in University level English classes, that person is BRILLIANT. Like going places, and not just grad school. Like professors talk about that person and look them up years later.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 8:37 AM on August 25, 2018 [2 favorites]
Figure three doesn't show they are just higher, not different. It shows that the mean is higher. What I assume the "different" person is arguing, and what I suspect is true requires showing the full distribution of grades, not the mean. Here's what I strongly suspect: It's much easier/more common to fail a STEM course than to fail a humanities course, especially assuming actually doing the work. But it's much harder to get an A, especially a high-A, in the Humanities. If you see someone with a mean grade of 98 in their STEM classes, that is one smart and probably hard working cookie. If you see someone with a 98 average in University level English classes, that person is BRILLIANT. Like going places, and not just grad school. Like professors talk about that person and look them up years later.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 8:37 AM on August 25, 2018 [2 favorites]
I'm curious if these studies comparing salaries for humanities vs STEM grads take into account the school the student went to and their socioeconomic background, because classism is huge.
Anecdotally, you can study business in undergrad and work on Wall Street... if you're Canadian. But the snobbery against non-Ivies persist and a lot of my friends are considering getting MBAs at the usual Ivies to get around it.
In a lot of "elite" fields, it matters not what you studied, but where, and who you know and how well you fit in. This is how privilege perpetuates itself.
In that sense, tech (not sure about STEM as a whole) is much more egalitarian, because while the famous companies with the high salaries like to recruit from the usual set of schools, based on the people I've met who work in them, there are many alternative paths. And IME in day-to-day interactions no one cares which school you went to.
posted by airmail at 10:40 AM on August 25, 2018 [2 favorites]
Anecdotally, you can study business in undergrad and work on Wall Street... if you're Canadian. But the snobbery against non-Ivies persist and a lot of my friends are considering getting MBAs at the usual Ivies to get around it.
In a lot of "elite" fields, it matters not what you studied, but where, and who you know and how well you fit in. This is how privilege perpetuates itself.
In that sense, tech (not sure about STEM as a whole) is much more egalitarian, because while the famous companies with the high salaries like to recruit from the usual set of schools, based on the people I've met who work in them, there are many alternative paths. And IME in day-to-day interactions no one cares which school you went to.
posted by airmail at 10:40 AM on August 25, 2018 [2 favorites]
Why STEM Students Need Humanities Courses: The more science and technology dominate our culture, the more we need the humanities
posted by homunculus at 11:18 AM on August 25, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by homunculus at 11:18 AM on August 25, 2018 [1 favorite]
I had to take at least one humanities class as part of my bachelor's requirements along with art, literature, two social sciences, gym, health and probably something else that I've forgotten now. I thought those kind of requirements were pretty common. My actual CS classes were only 44 credits out of ~120 as I recall.
posted by octothorpe at 1:00 PM on August 25, 2018
posted by octothorpe at 1:00 PM on August 25, 2018
If you're interested in the topic of Wall Street investment banks hiring humanities students from certain colleges, the first chapter of Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis provides a good overview.
posted by kevinbelt at 5:20 PM on August 25, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by kevinbelt at 5:20 PM on August 25, 2018 [2 favorites]
Why STEM Students Need Humanities Courses: The more science and technology dominate our culture, the more we need the humanities
That piece doesn't present a very compelling argument for the necessity of humanities. I think it's okay to say that humanities aren't necessary but we should still teach them anyway. I don't think reading Moby Dick is going to make me a better or less gullible researcher. It doesn't have to. I think music, art, literature, history, and philosophy should be part of any school curriculum, regardless of whether there's any tangible real world benefit to learning them. They're worthwhile in and of themselves. I think anyone arguing for the importance of a humanities or liberal arts curriculum by subordinating them to the sciences is making a mistake. Or maybe not. I don't know.
posted by runcibleshaw at 5:59 PM on August 25, 2018
That piece doesn't present a very compelling argument for the necessity of humanities. I think it's okay to say that humanities aren't necessary but we should still teach them anyway. I don't think reading Moby Dick is going to make me a better or less gullible researcher. It doesn't have to. I think music, art, literature, history, and philosophy should be part of any school curriculum, regardless of whether there's any tangible real world benefit to learning them. They're worthwhile in and of themselves. I think anyone arguing for the importance of a humanities or liberal arts curriculum by subordinating them to the sciences is making a mistake. Or maybe not. I don't know.
posted by runcibleshaw at 5:59 PM on August 25, 2018
I have a BA (Lib Arts, small private liberal arts college), a MSc (lab medicine, major Canadian Uni), and a PhD (cellular and molecular neurophysiology, major Canadian Uni).
Of those three degrees, I think that I value my BA the most. While I triple majored in Philosophy, Biology, and Molecular Biology (yeah the last two was a bit of 'gaming the system'), I was able to choose the classes that would fulfill my Lib Arts requirements. Some of them were 3rd or 4th choices (and one was last-minute changed for me because the scheduled visiting prof couldn't) - instead of International Lit, it became Feminist African American Lit... and it was amazing.
Three things really stood out for me from my Lib Arts BA experience:
1) Survey of Western literature and thought. I get allusions. I can speak the language of people who got fancy Lib Arts degrees. I also know how over-privileged "rich kids" think and speak (fancy college degree was paid by a rich relative, so I had that privilege going for me).
My extended family is well off, but Asian. As a 1st generation (brought to Canada as a young child) immigrant who's parents had to take waitservice and custodial jobs (after being teachers to DevDisabled kids in their home country, and my dad had a short stint as a stock broker/analyst) before going into realestate and small business (Shoe and Leather repair, ended up selling the business and becoming a private Violin instructor) it gave me a leg up to be able to, if not exactly fit in at least be able to speak similar language with 'old money'/ classy North Americans/ Europeans.
2) Communication; so many of my grad school cohort couldn't write worth crap. Even compared to people who's mother (and typically sole) tongue is English.
But as an ESL kid with a love of reading, I got a head start there regardless.
But that's where Liberal Arts shine - it's the research of a thing, interpretation of that thing, and then communicating stuff about the thing. Where STEM is strong seems to be more interpretation, perhaps less research, but communicating is dead last.
3) Code Switching. This is a bit more fuzzy but my friends and acquaintances with 'pure' STEM or other technical educations tend to be silo-ized in their chosen profession in terms of methods of thought. Having exposure (and, frankly, love of) a survey of the humanities has allowed me to adapt to more situations than my 'pure' STEM peers.
Also, socioeconomic code switching. In my experience, a larger proportion of STEM people seem to be more aspirational whereas a larger proportion of Humanities people accept their backgrounds and aren't/ weren't "ashamed" of their backgrounds. This is completely my own limited observations and not a blanket generalization.
--
After undergrad, I had a couple of failed bids at Med School, during which time I spent as a molbiol tech.
I was very lucky to get an entry position as a Science Associate at a Academic spin-off making $35k in Vancouver in 2000. When politics and money screwed the lab a couple of years later, I reluctantly/ serendipitously got into a MSc (it was like $17k a year), which had the potential to turn into a PhD. It was rough, so I capped it at the MSc and joined (what I thought was an awesome) lab for my PhD ($23k a year, got a 3-year $35k-per, tax-free grant, after that ran out, lived on a generous $27k my supervisor offered).
This is all in the highest COL locations in Canada.
For various reasons I didn't pursue academia, got a (very poorly paid, $40k pre-tax) Genetic Engineer job until I couldn't stand it anymore (management, ethics, integrity issues).
Got extremely lucky with networking and, well, just luck. It was a startup with Canada's Federally regulated Cannabis industry. Survived on startup salary ($45k; at one point one of the founders forgave his salary for a bunch of months so we could have more runway) for a couple of years.
Things have gotten better, and I'm drawing a 6-figure salary now with a solid bit of equity and open ended salary increases tied to revenue.
I totally credit my communications skills and code switching for playing a successful long-game with the founders. The technical competence from my MSc and PhD were instrumental, but my BA experiences are why I'm being paid more than the CSO.
--
A BSc (or any bachelors) in a scientific field - in Canada at least - the available jobs are less than $50k. If you go into the health services as a laboratory tech, there's seniority-driven salaries that can approach $80k, perhaps decade-long sufferance of politics. Despite unionization, harassment can still drive a lot of people out (and screw their (very good) pensions).
The benefits and pension are untouchable though.
In this/ my (extremely hihg COL) city, a BSc in a life-sciences won't get you much more than $45k unless you have very specific skills (ie., certified to work with prions), luck out with a young new PI that just got tenure at one of the Unis, and the job isn't going to be stable (because grant based).
But a BSc in life sciences around here only opens up $30-40k jobs, which is a fucking shame .
posted by porpoise at 8:44 PM on August 25, 2018 [3 favorites]
Of those three degrees, I think that I value my BA the most. While I triple majored in Philosophy, Biology, and Molecular Biology (yeah the last two was a bit of 'gaming the system'), I was able to choose the classes that would fulfill my Lib Arts requirements. Some of them were 3rd or 4th choices (and one was last-minute changed for me because the scheduled visiting prof couldn't) - instead of International Lit, it became Feminist African American Lit... and it was amazing.
Three things really stood out for me from my Lib Arts BA experience:
1) Survey of Western literature and thought. I get allusions. I can speak the language of people who got fancy Lib Arts degrees. I also know how over-privileged "rich kids" think and speak (fancy college degree was paid by a rich relative, so I had that privilege going for me).
My extended family is well off, but Asian. As a 1st generation (brought to Canada as a young child) immigrant who's parents had to take waitservice and custodial jobs (after being teachers to DevDisabled kids in their home country, and my dad had a short stint as a stock broker/analyst) before going into realestate and small business (Shoe and Leather repair, ended up selling the business and becoming a private Violin instructor) it gave me a leg up to be able to, if not exactly fit in at least be able to speak similar language with 'old money'/ classy North Americans/ Europeans.
2) Communication; so many of my grad school cohort couldn't write worth crap. Even compared to people who's mother (and typically sole) tongue is English.
But as an ESL kid with a love of reading, I got a head start there regardless.
But that's where Liberal Arts shine - it's the research of a thing, interpretation of that thing, and then communicating stuff about the thing. Where STEM is strong seems to be more interpretation, perhaps less research, but communicating is dead last.
3) Code Switching. This is a bit more fuzzy but my friends and acquaintances with 'pure' STEM or other technical educations tend to be silo-ized in their chosen profession in terms of methods of thought. Having exposure (and, frankly, love of) a survey of the humanities has allowed me to adapt to more situations than my 'pure' STEM peers.
Also, socioeconomic code switching. In my experience, a larger proportion of STEM people seem to be more aspirational whereas a larger proportion of Humanities people accept their backgrounds and aren't/ weren't "ashamed" of their backgrounds. This is completely my own limited observations and not a blanket generalization.
--
After undergrad, I had a couple of failed bids at Med School, during which time I spent as a molbiol tech.
I was very lucky to get an entry position as a Science Associate at a Academic spin-off making $35k in Vancouver in 2000. When politics and money screwed the lab a couple of years later, I reluctantly/ serendipitously got into a MSc (it was like $17k a year), which had the potential to turn into a PhD. It was rough, so I capped it at the MSc and joined (what I thought was an awesome) lab for my PhD ($23k a year, got a 3-year $35k-per, tax-free grant, after that ran out, lived on a generous $27k my supervisor offered).
This is all in the highest COL locations in Canada.
For various reasons I didn't pursue academia, got a (very poorly paid, $40k pre-tax) Genetic Engineer job until I couldn't stand it anymore (management, ethics, integrity issues).
Got extremely lucky with networking and, well, just luck. It was a startup with Canada's Federally regulated Cannabis industry. Survived on startup salary ($45k; at one point one of the founders forgave his salary for a bunch of months so we could have more runway) for a couple of years.
Things have gotten better, and I'm drawing a 6-figure salary now with a solid bit of equity and open ended salary increases tied to revenue.
I totally credit my communications skills and code switching for playing a successful long-game with the founders. The technical competence from my MSc and PhD were instrumental, but my BA experiences are why I'm being paid more than the CSO.
--
A BSc (or any bachelors) in a scientific field - in Canada at least - the available jobs are less than $50k. If you go into the health services as a laboratory tech, there's seniority-driven salaries that can approach $80k, perhaps decade-long sufferance of politics. Despite unionization, harassment can still drive a lot of people out (and screw their (very good) pensions).
The benefits and pension are untouchable though.
In this/ my (extremely hihg COL) city, a BSc in a life-sciences won't get you much more than $45k unless you have very specific skills (ie., certified to work with prions), luck out with a young new PI that just got tenure at one of the Unis, and the job isn't going to be stable (because grant based).
But a BSc in life sciences around here only opens up $30-40k jobs, which is a fucking shame .
posted by porpoise at 8:44 PM on August 25, 2018 [3 favorites]
I have a BA in Liberal Arts and MS and PhD in a STEM field from among the best regarded programs in my area of expertise. Absolutely nothing I did in grad school was even close to the difficulty of my undergraduate education.
posted by hydropsyche at 8:32 AM on August 27, 2018
posted by hydropsyche at 8:32 AM on August 27, 2018
The humanities should be required for CS. Familiarity with the humanities is how you avoid accidentally shepherding in a new era of fascism. 'Why build it this way?' is a question that cannot be solely answered through complexity theory.
I was at a conference recently where Michael Mann, a climatologist, gave a talk about how he was gradually forced to learn that facts and evidence held no persuasive power without narrative.
He didn’t frame it as STEM vs. humanities, but he is one of the scientists who co-wrote the paper with the famous “hockey stick graph” about global temperatures rising. He and his co-authors felt like hey, here is incontrovertible, even staid, evidence. This settles the question.
The next two decades were spent with him learning that evidence settles nothing. Politicians have tried to subpoena his personal communications to prove it was all a scam. His family gets death threats. The narrative of climate change was hijacked by ideology, and the facts meant nothing without a coherent and persuasive narrative along with them.
I found it interesting that he had planned for his entire career to be pure STEM, but in this talk he talked openly about how little he had ever thought he would be forced to reckon with the power of narrative, and of culture, and of power itself. He thought data would be enough, and he learned that his training had failed to teach him how wrong he would end up being.
Imagine if every major science department had people working to help shape the narratives of the studies they produced— not just for promotion, but for accuracy, and persuasiveness, and framing.
Imagine if humanities departments were telling their students what their degrees would actually be good for post-graduation. Effective narratives save lives. Lack of them kills.
I am so, so, so tired of STEM and humanities being pitched against one another. They are two parts of a whole. When you work in STEM, you learn how desperate major enterprises in the field already are for graphic designers and artists, and project managers skilled in communication, and people fluent in media strategies, and people with the ability to not just show the effects of an intervention but also to explain to people why those effects matter.
The fact that our economy has been built to denigrate the dissemination of information in an effective way doesn’t mean that such a skill is a “waste”. It actually perfectly matches many of our current crises.
“What we need” and “what will pay” are not always synonymous, and while I would never fault a student for making career choices based on the latter, that still doesn’t mean that the former are somehow less essential for our ability to function, and even to stay alive. I wish more humanities departments would do a better job of making this clear, and of helping their graduates seek out employment in a variety of fields where those skills are needed.
(Also, re: all of the comments here about "lots of people have humanities degrees and still suck"-- yeah, no kidding. A lot of people pick a degree and spend a lot of time hating it and get out of college and are ready to never think about any of it again. This is one of the hazards of making the degree a mandatory requirement for basic employment. Lots of people with lots of degrees actually know very little about those subject areas. It is sad, but not a refutation of those fields of study, or of their value when taken seriously.)
posted by a fiendish thingy at 10:30 AM on August 27, 2018 [6 favorites]
I was at a conference recently where Michael Mann, a climatologist, gave a talk about how he was gradually forced to learn that facts and evidence held no persuasive power without narrative.
He didn’t frame it as STEM vs. humanities, but he is one of the scientists who co-wrote the paper with the famous “hockey stick graph” about global temperatures rising. He and his co-authors felt like hey, here is incontrovertible, even staid, evidence. This settles the question.
The next two decades were spent with him learning that evidence settles nothing. Politicians have tried to subpoena his personal communications to prove it was all a scam. His family gets death threats. The narrative of climate change was hijacked by ideology, and the facts meant nothing without a coherent and persuasive narrative along with them.
I found it interesting that he had planned for his entire career to be pure STEM, but in this talk he talked openly about how little he had ever thought he would be forced to reckon with the power of narrative, and of culture, and of power itself. He thought data would be enough, and he learned that his training had failed to teach him how wrong he would end up being.
Imagine if every major science department had people working to help shape the narratives of the studies they produced— not just for promotion, but for accuracy, and persuasiveness, and framing.
Imagine if humanities departments were telling their students what their degrees would actually be good for post-graduation. Effective narratives save lives. Lack of them kills.
I am so, so, so tired of STEM and humanities being pitched against one another. They are two parts of a whole. When you work in STEM, you learn how desperate major enterprises in the field already are for graphic designers and artists, and project managers skilled in communication, and people fluent in media strategies, and people with the ability to not just show the effects of an intervention but also to explain to people why those effects matter.
The fact that our economy has been built to denigrate the dissemination of information in an effective way doesn’t mean that such a skill is a “waste”. It actually perfectly matches many of our current crises.
“What we need” and “what will pay” are not always synonymous, and while I would never fault a student for making career choices based on the latter, that still doesn’t mean that the former are somehow less essential for our ability to function, and even to stay alive. I wish more humanities departments would do a better job of making this clear, and of helping their graduates seek out employment in a variety of fields where those skills are needed.
(Also, re: all of the comments here about "lots of people have humanities degrees and still suck"-- yeah, no kidding. A lot of people pick a degree and spend a lot of time hating it and get out of college and are ready to never think about any of it again. This is one of the hazards of making the degree a mandatory requirement for basic employment. Lots of people with lots of degrees actually know very little about those subject areas. It is sad, but not a refutation of those fields of study, or of their value when taken seriously.)
posted by a fiendish thingy at 10:30 AM on August 27, 2018 [6 favorites]
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"Being the type of person inclined to view a college major in terms of return on investment will probably make a much bigger difference in your earnings than the actual major does."
That type of person is... a first generation college student! One who doesn't have the huge network of connections and simply must select a major that they think will have the biggest ROI.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:03 AM on August 24, 2018 [35 favorites]