A lot of people like to bash on people who took stupid degrees like art, history and writing when it comes time to look for a job. There’s nothing wrong with that and there’s nothing wrong with being one of those people who gets those degrees. Having educated people from all schools of thought is vital to the development of our society. I’m not going to delve into this more; I’m sure most people reading this can think of some examples. (You should comment these examples to share with those that can’t think up any.) Economic contribution is also necessary and there’s no reason these degree receivers can’t make such contributions.
There are fields within every graduate’s field of study that can use their expertise or their interest which allows these graduates to earn a paycheck and take care of themselves, but these are not their only options. Being a literature graduate does not prevent them from becoming a doctor, a public servant, electrician, general desk laborer, or any other occupation. Only the obstacles put up by themselves and by society stand in the way of this occurring. The self-placed obstacles deal with a lack of motivation and knowledge. A young enterprising individual with a degree in classic literature can certainly become an electrician, investment banker, or politician if he chooses to pursue and prepare for such a career. There are plenty of individuals in finance roles such as investment banking that come from liberal arts backgrounds. They only need to know what opportunity exists to make ends meet and they can seek to pursue it.
Unfortunately society places obstacles upon the liberal arts graduates from succeeding in partaking in the job market. These obstacles come in two forms. First there’s the passive discrimination of these individuals in seeking employment opportunities. Hiring manager may forego to consider applicants from these backgrounds under the impression that they are not equipped with the skills or knowledge to perform particular job functions despite the applicant having the ability to do so. Second, is the lack support to promote concurrent training of trade skills alongside their educational training. College students don’t tend to have the opportunity to learn specific trade skills such as electrician training or are note encouraged and allotted time to take other skilled courses such as accounting courses.
By changing the approach to use education as labor training we can expand employment outcomes for graduates of all fields of study. A writer who is passionate about writing but also wants to an alternative form of self-employment make consider being a trade-contractor or alternatively, may consider taking accounting courses to pursue a career in business or accounting. Creating the opportunity for concurrent training alongside classical education such a scenario can exist. Whether it be by allowing centers on campus, online training portals, or establishing community schools, which benefits all not just college students, access to better economic outcomes can be established. Additionally, greater dissemination of knowledge on occupational possibilities needs to be achieved so that students find an alternative career prospect outside of the arts. This can be done by incorporating mandatory career exploration sessions.
I’ll add something else. It’s not society’s job, through the provision of higher education, to train individuals for particular jobs. While students should have the ability to learn and the technical skills, the burden of training employees should always be on the employer. While there are exceptions, the broad majority of desk jobs don’t require much more than the ability to solve problems and follow directions.
Being a literature major does impede the path to becoming a medical doctor. You have to take all the prereqs and learn the material to do well on the MCAT, which would probably be another 2 - 3 years on top of a 4 year bachelor’s degree in literature. Also, it’s important to have hospital experience and you’d have none as a literature major.
People switch careers later in life. They could do it. Most probably won't... I chose a bad example
Mostly agree although I think there’s something to be said for people with non-traditional backgrounds entering STEM. Fields medalist June Huh dropped out to write poetry before settling on mathematics relatively late in his career.
Also Ed Witten
And sure, anyone can become a doctor but who would you rather give the rare open spot to: someone who has dreamed of this their whole life and got a 4.0 pre-med or someone who got a BA in Literature and 2 months ago decided that they would like to be a doctor instead.
What OP does not understand in his post is that anyone CAN switch careers and do something else. HOWEVER, there are not an infinite amount of doctor positions in medical school or openings in an IB analyst class. The gatekeeps have to decide from literally a sea people who has both the skill and genuine interest in the field to last long-term. If you seem wishy washy on your interest, you don't get a rare slot even if you have the mental capacity to do the job.
With all respect, I completely disagree.
Edit: Just to clarify, I'm interpreting the argument as being that colleges should provide both personal interest education (your 'passion') and career training, while I'm arguing it should focus solely on the latter and students should adapt how they approach college to this view.
I'd argue that the entire role of college should be to prepare you for actual jobs. College is not high-school, it is higher education, it is education for the labor market. You spend 18 or so years developing general skills from elementary up through high school, and then as an adult at 18 you are thrown out into the world and expected to get a job and pay bills. College is just a tradeoff you make of not having a job now to get a better job later, not a continuation of this general skills prep. We don't talk about the military as being just a continuation of high school, yet it serves a similar purpose as college in training recent graduates and preparing them for various careers.
If students go to college and expect to study whatever they want and then break into even relatively competitive careers, they are taking a risk the same way you might take a risk choosing one job over another. Additionally, on the matter of who should be responsible for train individuals for particular jobs, you go to medical school to learn how to be a doctor, to law school to learn how to be a lawyer, an accounting master's program to become an accountant. Look at your local community college, and you'll see how they design entire programs to get you certified and trained for the trades. Why should this be any different for other careers?
In summary, I think the idea that students can study whatever they want and then univerisites and employers have to adapt to, in my opinion, the students' lack of preparation and planning is the opposite of how our system should function. I should add that I recognize one of the issues right now is how widespread college requirements are in job postings, which I'd argue is a reflection of people misunderstanding higher education and should be pushed back against.
I agree that people shouldn't always think about their degrees in terms of earning potential. Some people want to devote their life to their passions which is fine.
The problem is that the majority of liberal arts degrees i.e. from the bottom 70% of universities are completely worthless for getting a job. Yes you can go into law school, investment banking, consulting, journalism etc. with a liberal arts degree but this is only really liberal arts degrees from prestigious institutions. I.e. you are getting hired because your degree proves how smart you are rather than the skills you have. Whereas a STEM degree from any university won't have too much of a problem getting a job. An engineering graduate from a bad university will still be able to get an engineering job because they have learned how to be an engineer and companies need to hire people who know how to be engineers.
This becomes a problem for society because thousands of students take on a ton of debt that they can't pay off because they can't get a decent job with a liberal arts degree.
University has evolved into something far beyond what it was ever meant to be starting out. It used to be originally for liberal arts. For people who had the means to spend some years studying classic Latin literature or the history of Monet and Cézanne and their impact on French art during the late 1800's. Not just how to do team projects where you figure out the real world pain of one person doing 90% of the work and that one other douche trying to take all the credit for the group.
Speaking of art history, while studying economics as my major, I was able to take the elective of art history to learn about the era of impressionism art. But overall I was there to learn economics: game theory, accounting, corporate law, how to do regression analysis using R, behavioral economics that affect how people bet on horse racing, yada yada.
It was very much to learn career specific knowledge. Of course, there was a ton of social education that went on too. And that's something that can't be dismissed either. But there needs to be a deeper discussion between university being about purely academic pursuit, versus "it's the 13th grade of high school and is a $40k/year daycare".
At the end of the day it's individual responsibility. I'm saying we shouldn't get too caught up in the degree and to push the individual in the right direction. Additionally, I think we should encourage students in college to learn a trade along side their studies so it doesn't become an "either or." If you assigned me to reform the education system - in America - I would try to integrate access to trade skills into the education system.
I totally get it. As part of your reformation I would say definitely bring back shop classes to the curriculum. I'd rather people at least get caught up in dropping the car off at Midas for the oil change on the way in because their time is worth more at earning $70/hr working vs spending $40 and not working for at least an hour. Instead of people not understanding what a filter wrench is to start with before being able to do the rest of the oil change process.
And do you know why people get caught up in the degree?
You have 100 resumes looking at your IB analyst position. From those resumes, as a hiring manager, you gotta pick the best person and the most-interested person. One way to discern that is what they studied.
We don't live in a world where there are a 100 resumes and 50 positions to fill where you might as well give the smart art history kid a shot. We live in a world of many applicants and very few positions. In such a world, you have to do everything in your power to signal that you're the correct person for the job and part of that is not studying art history to get a job in IB.
1) There are absolutely useless degrees. The ones you listed are just an example.
2) You fundamentally misunderstand the reason these degrees are made available.
3) You fundamentally misunderstand the point of university education in the modern world.
I would say more but you have your head so far up your own ass you don't know which way is up. Also this sounds like a huge amount of cope for picking a useless degree.
Will be interesting to see what happens in the future as technology continues to disrupt the traditional education space. For most things, you could easily learn the necessary skills through online courses, certificate programs, etc. Think about how many excel courses exist for free (essentially) on Udemy and other platforms. Another form of this is learning how to fix things around the house. For me, basic fixes would require a service call / expense. I don't have the knowledge, the parts, the tools, etc. Now you can youtube just about anything and I fix my appliances frequently. The same will happen in the world of education. Google is already sponsoring certificate courses and hiring those people upon completion without a college degree. Other firms are doing the same. My guess is 20 yrs from now (it takes a generation) education will look quite different.
Good comment and great points. I have simlar questions around the rise of online ed.
Maybe Im too cynical, but I would be surprised if they (general online training and skills platforms) are able to displace the more traditional college system in the long run. The two main reasons I'd argue are that first, the universities are already sending out feelers into this space (online mbas, Harvard's and MIT's edx, etc), which leads me to believe that they'll push their resources into consolidating online education over the next few decades, and second, that it will be very difficult for online education that doesn't have a recognizable branding behind it to be widely accepted because of how much weight people put in reputation and brand names.
I think we'll definitely see the physical university and big campus life weaken, but I think the real test for these non-uni online platforms will be (as you mention Google) the acceptance of these courses by employers as a proxy.
I don't know how well this would work in practice, but a couple months ago my friend and I were drinking at a bar (so it must be a foolproof idea) and we came up with an idea in which people would have an extra day off a week or biweekly or whatever period which would be incentivized for ongoing education/professional development that would be paid for by employers/tax credit (revamping the Lifetime Learning/American Opportunity tax credits).
I'm not sure how this could look in practice, but I was thinking how having those people in those programs either do it online or in a hybrid format at their local university. A lot of people here and on the news keep saying about how universities are cesspools for liberal thinking or whatever, so I was thinking if more people attended them in this format, it's possible it would 1) normalize lifelong learning, 2) make existing students less radicalized as they see a wider part of society around them instead of just other students from the same age demographic, and 3) make universities more accessible and part of their local communities (through more inclusion with their communities instead of being closed off as they can be). Admittedly, community colleges already do this in some ways, but from my understanding they tend to be more vocational in nature.
Another reason we came up with this is because my friend who is studying psychology and I thought (I don't have any empirical data to support this but am curious) that as people age, their brain functions can deteriorate as they stop learning new things (languages, skills, etc.), so we thought this could be an interesting way of allowing people to continuously exercise their brains throughout life.
This pared with an apprenticeship program with businesses (manufacturing, tech, etc.) could be great for people who want to change careers or improve their skills, but it's probably too idealized and would be expensive. Curious thought experiment though.
I earned my undergraduate degree in creative writing and have seen this problem first hand. However, I lay the blame on my peers in liberal arts. For context, I later earned my MBA and currently lead a strategy program at a portco.
Throughout undergrad, my peers complained they would be unable to get a job in business because hiring managers didn't see value in our degrees. When we graduated, most of them had to move home, become baristas, and face the reality they may never pay off student debt. A good Liberal Arts degree (most aren't) has value - writing is a lost skill amongst most professionals, the ability to deconstruct problems to find solutions is too, but these soft skills only benefit you and a business if you develop the necessary hard skills as well.
My peers spent their summers being social justice warriors, writing essays about the "intersectionality between toxic masculinity and capitalism" without even taking a basic Econ 101 or protesting the curriculum because "the traditional western literary canon promotes the oppression of minorities" without acknowledging you cannot change western society without first understanding the ideas that built it. None of them considered how writing can be useful in marketing, how psychology can be useful in sales, or how philosophy can be useful in public affairs departments - and therefore never focused on building the required hard skills to get an entry level job in business.
I had a passion for technology, researched what SaaS is, business basics, and was able to land an internship at a no-name company writing social media posts. From there I learned how to write blogs and press releases which then led to writing whitepapers and eventually intelligence briefings at a defense contractor. This branched into content strategy which branched into marketing strategy which branched into business and corporate strategy. I took a soft skill (writing), learned a hard skill (SaaS), and found the "intersection" as my peers would say.
All my peers thought they would be the next big think in literature, but all of them forget the best stories come from living life like the rest of us. The average liberal arts major complains and critiques economies and societies they know nothing about because they think their position as a " contrarian writer" adorns them some higher level of thought. The James Bond novels were written by Ian Fleming (Intelligence Officer) and Moby Dick was written by Herman Melville (Sea Captain).
Changing the academic programs won't work until the mindsets of my peers are changed first.
I mean, this seems pretty reductive. I don't doubt you had peers who were "social justice warriors" but it stretches credulity to believe that you, or you and a small number of others, were the "rebels" who decided to do something productive with your time while everyone else wasted theirs. Just because your peers failed to land a high paying job doesn't make their degree useless or necessarily tie their lack of salary to their chosen degree.
Something like 400,000 business undergrads get a degree every year. This slightly dated LA Times article cites a total of ~51,000 total Wall Street jobs. Obviously there are many other places to go work than Wall Street with a business degree, but how many of them pay that well? Your barista friends are probably making ~15-20 bucks an hour (with tips) in NYC - so maybe 45,000/yr? A financial analyst at Metlife makes an average of $60,000, it looks like. So yeah, that's a big gap - but people on this site seem to assume that if you're not in banking, you're making poverty wages, and that if you took a STEM or business degree, you're making six figures on Wall Street or in consulting. That just isn't true, and the attitude that anyone who isn't on Wall Street is failing is absurd.
Most people don't major in Russian Literature because they want to maximize their earning potential. Someone who does and then is pissed they can't break into IB, I agree, deserves their anguish, because that is stupid. But most of those people want to engage with that subject as a career, and if they don't, then like you, they're taking steps outside their major to gain career-oriented skills.
People who work at Starbucks with 150,000 degrees are quantifiably useless. That doesn't mean they will always be useless in a time series analysis but we can difinatively say at this point in time they are a sunk cost on society.
Yes they are lol
Doesn't anyone care whose account this used to be? Is it Lloyd?
no more SEX DUNGEONS?
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