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Sep 8, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

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."

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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.

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Sep 8, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

"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.

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Sep 8, 2022·edited Sep 8, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

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.

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Sep 8, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

DITTO (B.A., philosophy)

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Sep 8, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

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.

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Sep 8, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

"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.

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Sep 8, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

When I started college in 1979, majoring in business was looked fown upon.

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Sep 8, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

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.

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Sep 8, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

I shared this one with my college-age daughter. She usually ignores my email email missives, but I really hopes she reads this one.

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Sep 8, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

"...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...

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Sep 8, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

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.

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Sep 8, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

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.

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Sep 8, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

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.

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Sep 8, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

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.

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Sep 8, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

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.

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