Society has devalued those majors. Business has devalued those majors. Even academia has devalued those majors as very few colleges (even community colleges) will hire someone to teach those fields on anything other than a part-time sub-minimum-wage basis. Sadly, those are the only arbiters that count. You loved Chekov? Great. My company makes widgets and really doesn't have a paying position for someone to contemplate philosophy or write off-off-Broadway plays.
Some of us were extremely lucky. While my majors were business and engineering, I was able to make a career writing. I know I was blessed. But I don't see the same levels of opportunity anywhere for "the kids these days."
I think society has always devalued those majors. A liberal arts degree was never intended for the masses. It was part of an elite gentleman's "finishing" so he could go on to be becoming a capitalist vulture, but having interesting party conversation & cultural capital to assert his place in that lofty sphere.
Once upon a time, the humanities were deeply woven into every other degree. When I was a wee little student at Georgia Tech, the Georgia State Board of Regents discovered that too many GT grads were actually illiterate. They added a whole slate of humanities courses to the graduation requirements, and hired a raft of tenured profs to teach those courses. Thus it was that in between thermodynamics and organic chemistry I learned about Chekov and Sartre.
You'd think a society could take some pride in seeing an education once reserved for the landed gentry is now available to any son-of-a-waitress, but I guess not.
A few years back, my dept started looking into average salary info for various majors. English BA holders out-earned Business degree holders & led pretty much every other humanities degree. Sciences were ahead of course. But what we found was that English degree holders were able to find careers in a much broader array of fields. Also, what liberal arts degrees teach are skills useful anywhere: critical reading, effective argumentation, critical thinking, research skills, and historical awareness. Also, our university has a Digital Studies degree, which unites computational thinking with humanities approaches.
The neoliberal drive to degrade humanities is a concerted effort to reduce the earning power of careers needing those skills -- because people skills cannot be automated, so you can't count on technology to destroy that labor market. Also, encouraging STEM-types (no h8 towards ya) to ignore the humanities creates better opportunities for research & development to go on without its labor troubled by ethical concerns. And business degrees? Gurl... I'll leave it unsaid.
So basically fuck the Washington Post & this tired-ass recirculation of a revenant, broke-dick storyline.
I commented before reading this; was going to say I was anxious for insight from GM being there in the trench and all.
I presume, as a dotard not in the field, that there's two broad elements at play:
One is the right's general distaste for the little people being educated beyond the minimum needed to a be a compliant cog.
The other is an increased pool business-oriented workers to choose from which is to say a larger pool of better candidates to choose from. OTOH, more business majors, I tend to suspect, wouldn't resulting any sort of expansion requiring an increased number of business majors other than noted at the beginning of this paragraph. Then again, with a sociopathic leadership, it's a safe presumption the benefits of significantly more business major grads would be pretty non-existent.
"Anyway: I regret the people I’ve hurt to whom I can’t make amends. But what I studied in college? Because of money? Nah."
Word.
Myself, my regrets let's say start long before matriculating; a liberal arts major got corrected by further education so any major regrets were mooted long ago, and now more so being at an age when one, so to speak, starts running low on the fucks to give.
As for our masters' riff on going t college for a liberal arts degree is foolish, a waste, and so on and so forth, well, one wonders: What if all the kids determined to go to college major in business-oriented majors, liberal arts majors not offered. The glut of business people... well, it leads to a thought experiment that I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around. But I tend to guess that it wouldn't work out well.
Exactly, most people who get business degrees go on to populate cubicle farms, they never become business owners or executives. That's why the average salary is pretty low — and those CEOs they pant to be... have degrees in something else... more useful, let's say.
Or it could be that the CEO also has a business degree, but it's a HAAVAAD business degree, and the difference isn't in anything he learned in the classroom, but who he roomed with for the four years, and who he could call on to raise the venture capital for his start-up.
I bet no matter what the question is two out of five people regret their choices.
Blame the Black Guy is in the Constitution, isn't it?
"ornithologists of the bluebird of happiness " Talk about value! This is the third or maybe even the forth 7 dollar REBID phrase this month. And the Month
Just Started!
I'll cop to the Weed Whites and Wine part.
The day I registered to go back to college for my Hort degree Forbes magazine named Horticulture one of the 10 most worthless degrees to have. Since then, legalized weed has made my degree pretty valuable. I think there might be a moral there.
Maybe those fancy-pants librul-arts degrees are teachin' them critical thinkin' skills, which makes people more capable of reflection and regret.
Apologies to Edith Piaf, but "I regret nothing" could just mean you're too damn stupid to evaluate your life choices. A case in point, 75 million people voted for Trump, how many of them regret that?
It’s almost like there’s no sure-fire way to foresee what knowledge and skills will be needed in the future. The only constant is the desire to denigrate the humanities in favor of “useful” knowledge—i.e., technical skills that good Worker Drones need, for which companies want to outsource the training costs.
There was a judge here in NY in the late 90s who issued a decision that not everyone was entitled to more than a sixth grade education, as society needed its Epsilon Caste to do grunt work. Can't remember the details but I speculate melanin was involved.
I was about a graph and a half through Roy's article when I flashed to Alan Bloom's "The Closing Of The American Mind." Bloom was the fucker who got the animals all agitated because Higher Learning was Neglecting The Classics. We were wasting valuable credit hours on Women's Studies, Native American Pottery and Third World Novelists. Don't get me even started on Radical Tenured African Americans.
Three decades later, there's no room for Socrates and Shakespeare, because we want even more statisticians and engineers. Too bad the old bastard isn't still alive to see this.
Yeah, that was why the fuckers pushed Bloom. The Classics is like Motherhood and Thrift and Free Speech and the Wisdom of the Founders -- just an excuse for whatever fuckery they want to do. (That's also why they tolerated Bloom's homosexuality.)
The endgame was never a universal Great Books curriculum -- it was the further degradation of education. And now the time gives it proof.
The late lamented African-American writer Ralph Wiley--who started in sports journalism--used to refer to that book as "The Closing Of The European Mind In America."
Confession: the Bloom book came out in my early uni days and I read it and kind of bought into it for a while. Being a Stones fan kinda snapped me out of it (his "analysis" of Jagger? Gimme a break! Remove one brick, and the whole thing collapses. Learned that the first week of Philosophy!)
"But if you really want to learn how to paint or act or write or dance or just contemplate the Verities, unless your family is large and rich enough to approve of a cultural addition to the clan, you are destined for violent headwinds."
What applies to families could also apply to a society, that is, it could be seen as a sign of the wealth of our society that we can afford to educate large numbers of people in things that aren't tied to our immediate material needs. But Americans are trained to believe that - despite being the richest nation on earth - we are poor, poor, poor. Name anything that a wealthy, advanced society could take pride in - like universal health care, free college, etc. - and you'll hear, "Nah, can't afford it." Even some minimal action to stop the total destruction of the ecosphere is beyond our means, to hear some tell it.
I majored in history and religion at a small liberal arts college. Then I went to medical school. It was once common to do that, maybe not so much now. But I wanted to know important things that I wouldn't have learned otherwise.
I once belonged to a bookgroup of highly literate ladies in my college town. In the course of conversation, one of the women remarked, "My husband isn't very well educated." A tactful hush prevailed: was Joyce's husband a plumber? She added, "He's an oncologist."
"...the MBA track is a hot one; God knows talent and taste are no prerequisite for success there. "
I have a pet theory about the glut of MBA's and the 2008 crash: Back in the day, guidance counselors across the land asked shiftless teenagers with no clue what they wanted to do with their lives "You DO like to make money, don't you? Then maybe an MBA is for you!". Fast forward 20-30 years, they are now rich as God and as bored to tears as the dog who caught the car, they go "Hey! In what way can we totally screw up the financial sector for fun and profit?". Then they blew up the derivatives market...
The MBA concept is wrong on so many levels. Instead of learning a particular business in depth, from the inside, then capping that knowledge with some management training, they assume you can just do management training and apply it like a blunt instrument to any business. (Though to be fair, “lay off half the workers and make the remainder do all their work” *is* pretty easy to implement, if ultimately pyrrhic).
The MBA concept is like that conceit too common among lawyers, that a smart lawyer can become an expert in any field with just a few hours of study.
My sister transitioned into a business career with an English degree from Ohio State. Years into it, one of her supervisors asked her why she could write a simple, concise report but all the business majors had to do PowerPoint. The most successful vertical blur of my recent acquaintance, a C-suite dude in a successful, lusted-after-by-Bain-Capital company, was an English major at the University of Michigan, and says that his degree equips him to analyze problems in business to this day -- it's no different than analyzing a novel or poem. And he can write, too.
Thank you for this. FWIW, I was a music major and intermittent professional. No regrets here. And "...but where we’re all headed all storylines dissolve, and by the time we get there nothing we acquired, even memories, will have survived the trip except maybe a clean conscience." is a small masterpiece. Well done.
We need all those sciencey things, but economics without history seems pretty stupid. Or business without philosophy or ethics. Or journalism without history, poetry, what have you. Everyone needs English at some level because good Christ, people can’t fucking write.
The humanities are important because they help us understand humanity. They should be the basis for all of the social sciences and most of the money making majors. The STEM freaks could stand a few courses on Rimbaud too.
Economics is rapidly becoming the Science of Everything, thanks to that Freakonomics guy. Get an Econ degree, and you're qualified to write op-eds for our major papers on ANY subject, based on the shallowest of "research". A good recent example was the guy who wrote an NY Times op-ed about how school is a waste of time, because most high school graduates can't remember how many branches of government we have. Also, surveys show only a tiny percentage of Americans say they can speak a foreign language "very well", but look at how many people take a foreign language in high school! QED, can't argue with the data, etc.
Speaking of regrets, I did some paring of my online subscriptions recently and sorry, WaPo, but you didn't make the cut. On this decision, I have no regrets.
Society has devalued those majors. Business has devalued those majors. Even academia has devalued those majors as very few colleges (even community colleges) will hire someone to teach those fields on anything other than a part-time sub-minimum-wage basis. Sadly, those are the only arbiters that count. You loved Chekov? Great. My company makes widgets and really doesn't have a paying position for someone to contemplate philosophy or write off-off-Broadway plays.
Some of us were extremely lucky. While my majors were business and engineering, I was able to make a career writing. I know I was blessed. But I don't see the same levels of opportunity anywhere for "the kids these days."
I think society has always devalued those majors. A liberal arts degree was never intended for the masses. It was part of an elite gentleman's "finishing" so he could go on to be becoming a capitalist vulture, but having interesting party conversation & cultural capital to assert his place in that lofty sphere.
Once upon a time, the humanities were deeply woven into every other degree. When I was a wee little student at Georgia Tech, the Georgia State Board of Regents discovered that too many GT grads were actually illiterate. They added a whole slate of humanities courses to the graduation requirements, and hired a raft of tenured profs to teach those courses. Thus it was that in between thermodynamics and organic chemistry I learned about Chekov and Sartre.
Now, of course, illiteracy would be viewed as a feature and not a bug.
Semi-literacy, anyway, to go with the semi-fashy.
You'd think a society could take some pride in seeing an education once reserved for the landed gentry is now available to any son-of-a-waitress, but I guess not.
[Thurston Howell voice] “Good heavens! They let even the rabble study the trivium and quadrivium these days!”
Every so often a pundit or two will cry over the loss of teaching The Classics.
Followed shortly, in *some* cases, by a lament for a lost chainsaw. (Where have you gone, Victor Davis Hanson, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you?)
A few years back, my dept started looking into average salary info for various majors. English BA holders out-earned Business degree holders & led pretty much every other humanities degree. Sciences were ahead of course. But what we found was that English degree holders were able to find careers in a much broader array of fields. Also, what liberal arts degrees teach are skills useful anywhere: critical reading, effective argumentation, critical thinking, research skills, and historical awareness. Also, our university has a Digital Studies degree, which unites computational thinking with humanities approaches.
The neoliberal drive to degrade humanities is a concerted effort to reduce the earning power of careers needing those skills -- because people skills cannot be automated, so you can't count on technology to destroy that labor market. Also, encouraging STEM-types (no h8 towards ya) to ignore the humanities creates better opportunities for research & development to go on without its labor troubled by ethical concerns. And business degrees? Gurl... I'll leave it unsaid.
So basically fuck the Washington Post & this tired-ass recirculation of a revenant, broke-dick storyline.
I commented before reading this; was going to say I was anxious for insight from GM being there in the trench and all.
I presume, as a dotard not in the field, that there's two broad elements at play:
One is the right's general distaste for the little people being educated beyond the minimum needed to a be a compliant cog.
The other is an increased pool business-oriented workers to choose from which is to say a larger pool of better candidates to choose from. OTOH, more business majors, I tend to suspect, wouldn't resulting any sort of expansion requiring an increased number of business majors other than noted at the beginning of this paragraph. Then again, with a sociopathic leadership, it's a safe presumption the benefits of significantly more business major grads would be pretty non-existent.
Owner Of Washington Post, With Degrees In Electrical Engineering And Computer Science, Orders Weighted "Poll" And Gets Expected Results
Students flocking to careers in Fulfilment Center Management, new study finds.
"Anyway: I regret the people I’ve hurt to whom I can’t make amends. But what I studied in college? Because of money? Nah."
Word.
Myself, my regrets let's say start long before matriculating; a liberal arts major got corrected by further education so any major regrets were mooted long ago, and now more so being at an age when one, so to speak, starts running low on the fucks to give.
As for our masters' riff on going t college for a liberal arts degree is foolish, a waste, and so on and so forth, well, one wonders: What if all the kids determined to go to college major in business-oriented majors, liberal arts majors not offered. The glut of business people... well, it leads to a thought experiment that I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around. But I tend to guess that it wouldn't work out well.
Exactly, most people who get business degrees go on to populate cubicle farms, they never become business owners or executives. That's why the average salary is pretty low — and those CEOs they pant to be... have degrees in something else... more useful, let's say.
Or it could be that the CEO also has a business degree, but it's a HAAVAAD business degree, and the difference isn't in anything he learned in the classroom, but who he roomed with for the four years, and who he could call on to raise the venture capital for his start-up.
I bet no matter what the question is two out of five people regret their choices.
Blame the Black Guy is in the Constitution, isn't it?
"ornithologists of the bluebird of happiness " Talk about value! This is the third or maybe even the forth 7 dollar REBID phrase this month. And the Month
Just Started!
I'll cop to the Weed Whites and Wine part.
The day I registered to go back to college for my Hort degree Forbes magazine named Horticulture one of the 10 most worthless degrees to have. Since then, legalized weed has made my degree pretty valuable. I think there might be a moral there.
Maybe those fancy-pants librul-arts degrees are teachin' them critical thinkin' skills, which makes people more capable of reflection and regret.
Apologies to Edith Piaf, but "I regret nothing" could just mean you're too damn stupid to evaluate your life choices. A case in point, 75 million people voted for Trump, how many of them regret that?
Whether they regret it or not doesn't matter. These are people who refuse to admit doing anything wrong or making a mistake.
More important than reflection & regret, liberal artists are critical. Now only a misdemeanor, soon to be a felony...
It’s almost like there’s no sure-fire way to foresee what knowledge and skills will be needed in the future. The only constant is the desire to denigrate the humanities in favor of “useful” knowledge—i.e., technical skills that good Worker Drones need, for which companies want to outsource the training costs.
There was a judge here in NY in the late 90s who issued a decision that not everyone was entitled to more than a sixth grade education, as society needed its Epsilon Caste to do grunt work. Can't remember the details but I speculate melanin was involved.
We (used to) pride ourselves on our lofty principles, but our most abiding principle is our commitment to cheap labor—or free labor if you can get it.
DITTO (B.A., philosophy)
Ditto ditto (B.A., fine arts)
I was about a graph and a half through Roy's article when I flashed to Alan Bloom's "The Closing Of The American Mind." Bloom was the fucker who got the animals all agitated because Higher Learning was Neglecting The Classics. We were wasting valuable credit hours on Women's Studies, Native American Pottery and Third World Novelists. Don't get me even started on Radical Tenured African Americans.
Three decades later, there's no room for Socrates and Shakespeare, because we want even more statisticians and engineers. Too bad the old bastard isn't still alive to see this.
"Oh, you're replacing Plato with Python? Well, that's different!"
And now for something completely different!
Yeah, that was why the fuckers pushed Bloom. The Classics is like Motherhood and Thrift and Free Speech and the Wisdom of the Founders -- just an excuse for whatever fuckery they want to do. (That's also why they tolerated Bloom's homosexuality.)
The endgame was never a universal Great Books curriculum -- it was the further degradation of education. And now the time gives it proof.
Given enough time, even the charter school grifters will get rich(er).
The attacks on authors who were women or POC were their red meat, Aristotle is just the side dish of green beans they don't actually touch.
Ooops. Shoulda read further before my comment above.
The late lamented African-American writer Ralph Wiley--who started in sports journalism--used to refer to that book as "The Closing Of The European Mind In America."
Confession: the Bloom book came out in my early uni days and I read it and kind of bought into it for a while. Being a Stones fan kinda snapped me out of it (his "analysis" of Jagger? Gimme a break! Remove one brick, and the whole thing collapses. Learned that the first week of Philosophy!)
"But if you really want to learn how to paint or act or write or dance or just contemplate the Verities, unless your family is large and rich enough to approve of a cultural addition to the clan, you are destined for violent headwinds."
What applies to families could also apply to a society, that is, it could be seen as a sign of the wealth of our society that we can afford to educate large numbers of people in things that aren't tied to our immediate material needs. But Americans are trained to believe that - despite being the richest nation on earth - we are poor, poor, poor. Name anything that a wealthy, advanced society could take pride in - like universal health care, free college, etc. - and you'll hear, "Nah, can't afford it." Even some minimal action to stop the total destruction of the ecosphere is beyond our means, to hear some tell it.
Yeah. Cue my comment about this here nation awash in cash, sloshing from sea to dingy sea...
When I started college in 1979, majoring in business was looked fown upon.
We didn't even have a business major. Economics, but not business. This was 1970, of course.
I majored in history and religion at a small liberal arts college. Then I went to medical school. It was once common to do that, maybe not so much now. But I wanted to know important things that I wouldn't have learned otherwise.
I once belonged to a bookgroup of highly literate ladies in my college town. In the course of conversation, one of the women remarked, "My husband isn't very well educated." A tactful hush prevailed: was Joyce's husband a plumber? She added, "He's an oncologist."
I shared this one with my college-age daughter. She usually ignores my email email missives, but I really hopes she reads this one.
"...the MBA track is a hot one; God knows talent and taste are no prerequisite for success there. "
I have a pet theory about the glut of MBA's and the 2008 crash: Back in the day, guidance counselors across the land asked shiftless teenagers with no clue what they wanted to do with their lives "You DO like to make money, don't you? Then maybe an MBA is for you!". Fast forward 20-30 years, they are now rich as God and as bored to tears as the dog who caught the car, they go "Hey! In what way can we totally screw up the financial sector for fun and profit?". Then they blew up the derivatives market...
The MBA concept is wrong on so many levels. Instead of learning a particular business in depth, from the inside, then capping that knowledge with some management training, they assume you can just do management training and apply it like a blunt instrument to any business. (Though to be fair, “lay off half the workers and make the remainder do all their work” *is* pretty easy to implement, if ultimately pyrrhic).
The MBA concept is like that conceit too common among lawyers, that a smart lawyer can become an expert in any field with just a few hours of study.
Ditto freelance writers! Not knowin' nothin' never stopped me.
But yes, there's a massive fallacy behind the whole idea of Management as a Discipline.
Haven't thought it through, but it has to do with thinking you can replicate the success of guys like Henry Ford with a blueprint.
Blueprints won't cut it. You need Pinkertons.
Even worse: they get an MBA, and get placed into *government* (shudders). Newt's Contract Out On America had this as a feature.
Mighty Big Assholes.
My sister transitioned into a business career with an English degree from Ohio State. Years into it, one of her supervisors asked her why she could write a simple, concise report but all the business majors had to do PowerPoint. The most successful vertical blur of my recent acquaintance, a C-suite dude in a successful, lusted-after-by-Bain-Capital company, was an English major at the University of Michigan, and says that his degree equips him to analyze problems in business to this day -- it's no different than analyzing a novel or poem. And he can write, too.
"most successful vertical blur of my recent acquaintance" hah, love that!
Thank you for this. FWIW, I was a music major and intermittent professional. No regrets here. And "...but where we’re all headed all storylines dissolve, and by the time we get there nothing we acquired, even memories, will have survived the trip except maybe a clean conscience." is a small masterpiece. Well done.
Hey! I’ve been working on learning Willin’ on guitar. It’s the greatest outlaw country song written by the son of a Hollywood furrier to the stars.
C&W ain't no LIBRUL art!
We need all those sciencey things, but economics without history seems pretty stupid. Or business without philosophy or ethics. Or journalism without history, poetry, what have you. Everyone needs English at some level because good Christ, people can’t fucking write.
The humanities are important because they help us understand humanity. They should be the basis for all of the social sciences and most of the money making majors. The STEM freaks could stand a few courses on Rimbaud too.
Economics is rapidly becoming the Science of Everything, thanks to that Freakonomics guy. Get an Econ degree, and you're qualified to write op-eds for our major papers on ANY subject, based on the shallowest of "research". A good recent example was the guy who wrote an NY Times op-ed about how school is a waste of time, because most high school graduates can't remember how many branches of government we have. Also, surveys show only a tiny percentage of Americans say they can speak a foreign language "very well", but look at how many people take a foreign language in high school! QED, can't argue with the data, etc.
"people can’t fucking write" ah but what does that matter if they also can't read?
They can't SPELL, either, even with the damn word in front of them. And don't get me started on apostrophes.
I sometimes imagine hiring myself out as a roaming editor, checking menus, signs, ads, all the ephemera of daily life for errors.
"Who was that masked man?"
"I don't know, but he left this red pencil..."
'f'r'e't' n'o't'
I'm'j'u's't't'r'o'l'l'i'n'y'a'
Speaking of regrets, I did some paring of my online subscriptions recently and sorry, WaPo, but you didn't make the cut. On this decision, I have no regrets.