Charlotte Allen over at “Minding the Campus” has a review of Aaron Clarey’s book Worthless: The Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major :
Clarey does touch on one reason for the decline of the liberal-arts degree: the insistence that everyone, even the academically untalented, go to college. “[T]oday’s college degree is the equivalent of the 1950′s high school diploma,” Clarey writes–and grade inflation hasn’t helped. But he doesn’t touch on the other reason: the contents of the majors themselves. It’s not just that there’s a “women’s studies” major (and even a doctoral program at some universities); it’s that entire academic fields have turned into sub-sectors of women’s studies–that is, predictably politicized. To major in English at many institutions these days, you’re no longer required to take a course in Shakespeare, but a course in “post-colonial feminist film” is practically mandatory. It’s no wonder that employers write off English majors as airheads and look for resumes where the initials “B.S.” indicate that the degree’s bearer has learned something that might be useful on the job. It’s too bad that learning a vocational “trade” or “skill”–as Clarey points out–seems to be the only valid reason for going to college nowadays, but the humanities have only themselves to blame.
That quibble of mine aside, young people thinking about college will do themselves a favor–and also have a few belly-laughs–by reading this book. Some of them, as Clarey hopes, may even decide to bypass college altogether and go directly into learning a trade. (Plumbers and skilled mechanics earn a lot more than substitute teachers.) Or, as Clarey suggests, join the military, where “they will be more than happy to give you serious work.” And serious work is better training for the world of work than any pile of degrees.
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Update: On a related topic, a commenter brought up this terrific essay on the flight of men from college campuses. It’s worth a read.
Seems like the attempt by government to give people more educational options has actually restricted their options. Educational grants used to be for people who were intellectually “promising” but who couldn’t afford college. Then we got the GI Bill, which enabled millions of former servicemen to enter college who, before the war, would never have been able to. And of course America’s postwar prosperity allowed more middle- and working-class families to put their kids through college. I’m thinking maybe this new “democratization” of college education is what made the degree practically mandatory in today’s economy. The only reason not to go to college is seen to be stupidity, laziness, lack of ambition, or some other character defect. It’s one thing to offer people an opportunity; it’s another to regard them as second-class citizens if they decline it.
And is there any evidence that the postwar, highly-educated citizenry are any better at making political, economic, social, and personal decisions than their less-educated grandparents were? Judging from the state of the world today, I’d say shit keeps happening no matter how “smart” people are and their diplomas aren’t really helping them deal with it.
A college degree carries with it some cachet of upper class, as opposed to a blue-collar (labourer, lower-class) occupation. That helps explain the proliferation of social studies in college — liberals are far more focused on class distinction. This would include the entitled whinging of the “99%” of the Occupy movement (“I have an MA in Sociology, but those rich bastards won’t give me a high-paying job!”)
Disclaimer: I have a BA in Political Science from many years ago (when it made more sense), but I put it to work with a career in the military. At the same time, I obtained a Master’s degree while serving, but academics consider it false because it was from the Naval Postgraduate School. This goes along with most civilian occupations — military training (though I have found it to be a no-frills, waste-no-time full understanding that you can sink your teeth into), is regarded as highly suspect at best. Practically any fully-qualified veteran seeking like employment in the civilian world has to be re-trained in civilian schools that are essentially a waste of time. This serves a dual purpose — one establishes the low regard held for the military (my recent experience is on the Pacific Left Coast), & it is a money-maker for the civilian education establishment.
During the early part of my career – say from 1965 to 1985 – many of the men I reported to had WWII service in their past. These men seemed to know what to do whenever something unexpected cropped up. As they grew old and began to retire, they were replaced by younger counterparts, those who had got their initial training from 1950 to 1970. This new crop of managers seemed much less unflappable, and in fact tended to make bad decisions as often as they made good ones.
In the last ten years of my career, I got to see the golden boys who had developed their careers in the seventies and eighties. It was a constant fight to get them to see common sense.
I attribute the decline in leadership to the decline in the amount of old school military training. But that’s just my opinion
Selling personal or professional validation is big business. It has corrupted every major, including STEM degrees that are not typically rooted in victim politics. Not that surgeons shouldn’t have *some* training before being hired, but it’s fair to say that much of education is a scam.
Yeah, well, in 1966, my first and last semester for that decade, I called college high school with ashtrays. So I joined up and went to Vietnam with the rest of the adults.
So…Is it any wonder that we are seeing so much gender dysphoric disorder in young boys? Or that it is being treated as just an alternative identity choice for little boys to decide they want to be little girls and to be blithely obliged in that choice? Women are now the deciders in western civilization — with the force of law behind that status — their emotional-first approach to most of those decisions(and votes are just one of several forms that “deciding” takes place on both macro and micro levels) is recognized early by the next generation and many then choose to be in the sex wielding the power. We have been “feminized” and there simply is no reset button for such a direction. Complete meltdown has already begun…
The difference between today’s degree holder, and the 50s high school grad is the grasp of morality. The 50s grad would have gotten married, before having sex or children. They would have had a work ethic. The media in that day took truth seriously, and reported on both sides. Having been taught both sides of issues, he would have critical thinking skills, informed by morality. Has low self esteem, because he has been taught not to brag.
Today’s college grad, has had multiple sex partners, thinks marriage is great, only if you marry someone of your same sex. He thinks he is owed a great income, for minimal effort. Truth is relative. Having been taught only leftist thought, has no critical thinking skills. Has wonderful self esteem, shown by the ability to talk when he should be listening. Brags a lot. Pompous !
Come on, really. People didn’t engage in premarital sex in the 1950′s? What may have changed society is the access to cheap birth control and the lack of shame in society. But if you believe that people waited to have sex until marriage because of morality you are insane. Sex is not an inherrently immoral or evil act. That is nonsense to even suggest it.
I went to college in the 50s and had more than one girl tell me , “if I could be absolutely sure I wouldn’t get pregnant. I’d have sex with you.” That was the way it was. I finally found one who would and married her.
A college degree was the equivalent of a high school diploma in the Fifties? If only.
My father was born in 1924 in a tiny fishing village — an island in the Chesapeake Bay, actually, remote and isolated from mainland life — and there were maybe 12 graduating seniors in 1942. But Pop was not among them. He quit high school at the age of 16 because he simply could not get a passing grade in English. He served in WWII (survived the entire Battle of the Bulge) and earned a two-year business degree on the GI Bill. But he was so sensitive about what he considered to be his poor grammar, Mom did all of his writing assignments. Pop was good at math, just couldn’t write worth a darn. Or so he thought. He was a cost accountant for most of his working days and always felt inferior to the college grads who were paid more and promoted more often.
So I took it on faith that Pop was a dullard when it came to writing.
My parents went through a horrible divorce in ’72, and went their separate ways. I received a one letter from him when I was a college sophomore, read it, and promptly forgot about it. Pop died in ’76, still a relatively young man.
Then, one day when my wife and I were preparing for a move (this must have been around 1984), I found the letter he had written. And re-read it. And I wondered, who was this man? It was a very well-written letter, in his own bold cursive writing style. By this time, I had been reading National Review for almost twenty years, and had thoroughly digested the writings of William Buckley, Hugh Kenner, James Burnham, Joe Sobran, and the rest of that talented bullpen. I could not kid myself: this was not the writing of a poor writer. This is the writing a thoughtful, sensitive man whose anguish at the mistakes he had made was palpable. It was easily better than typical college-student writing, and technically more correct than my own from a grammatical perspective.
Let me repeat: this was from a high-school dropout.
It seems to me that many of us paid thousands of dollars for a college degree and for the most part received a license to feel entitled.
I think Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest” should be required reading for college seniors.
SB
i went in the military and then went to college. i highly recommend this path to all.
less debt, better motivation.
When I taught at the university I taught a fair number of students who were veterans. They brought with them more maturity (as you would expect from older students), but what I noticed in general was that they were by far the most determined to learn the material and this made the biggest difference in students who didn’t have the instinctive understanding of the subject. And this was in the case whether I was teaching them Physics or Electrical Engineering. It was the drive and self-discipline that they learned in the services that made the biggest difference in their learning style and ability to get through a complicated course when something didn’t come naturally. And frankly, it impressed me that they could do so much better than their peers of equal innate ability.
i got my bs in mechanical engineering in 4 years. i wasn’t even close to being the smartest in the class, but i was able to outwork most of my classmates.
the downside was watching smart, talented kids throw it away due to lack of focus.
While this isn’t a viable path for everyone for a variety of reasons*, it worked well for me. By the time I was able to take classes full time, I was a serious student ready to get on with my life. I had fun in college but that wasn’t why I was there. I’d outgrown the partying stage years before attending college.
I completed a BS in Math in 3 1/2 years, even allowing for taking some time off to earn money for tuition. VA benfits only paid part of my tuition so I worked at various jobs to make ends meet. For tuition purposes, “full time” was considered from 12-18 hours per term. I never took less than 18 hours and usually took over 20. Since I was paying for much of my tuition, I didn’t skip classes. Why cheat myself?
I met and married my wife (a foreign exchange student who was also considered a “non-traditional student”) at college. We supported each other through our educations.
*Several million teenagers graduate high school each year. The US military isn’t large enough to take them all even if they wanted to join. There are a lot of willing volunteers who can’t join for a variety of reasons. One of my coworkers had a son rejected for the military because he had been prescribed antidepressants for a short period following his mother’s death. That was years before he tried to join but they still rejected his application. I’m told having an ADHD diagnosis (a diagnosis of not being born a girl) can be grounds for rejection as well.
Larry, I have heard differently on the ADHD thing. I had heard that if the recruit has not been on meds for awhile (not sure how long) then they are accepted. It is a funny thing given that people with ADHD are typically great soldiers!
Everyone I worked with who walked point in the two most recent wars had ADHD. It only makes sense, ADHD is a neurological bais for novel/interesting stimuli. I can imagine nothing more interesting than people trying to kill me, or no other task where I would more want someone who is neurologically biased to notice novel stimuli than walking point through hostile territory.
So there is the official armed services policy, then there is they way things are. And the way things are, the services are loaded with successful people with ADHD.
Trey
My step got into the Marines and he was ADHD. Not sure if he was still taking meds, but he’d even been incarcerated, yet they took him.
It could be that they’re using various criteria to exclude applicants now because of budget cuts.
Good for you. ADHD. What is it? A “medical” disorder? Why then so often “diagnosed” by teachers without formal medical training even to nurse status.
As you point out – statistics – a disorder of boys, consistent with the generally propagated notion that “there is something wrong with being male”. Boys who do not sit still, pay attention, etc. Some girls, but essentially a control for active, over-active? boys who disturb the classroom and are difficult to discipline. One method to quiet is of course to drug them. Young males drugged without longitudinal evidence to devine what, if any, effects such drugs might have on their neurological development.
Maybe ADHD exists as a neurological in contrast to behavioural, phenomenon but that is yet to be proved. Consensus without reliable evidence is inadequate as we have learned to our cost in the Climate Change crusade.
Maybe its’ medicalisation of behaviours unwanted by the “compassionate” powers that be. Maybe it’s “deviancy” and treated by disciplinary drugs as modelled in Lubyanka of that society so admired by many ango-saxon “elite”, as long as they don’t live there and it doesn’t apply to their children…
It’s not the ADHD that stops a recruit; it is the meds they use and the unknown side effects on the user under the type of stressful stutations that are routine in military culture and life.
Universities have also expanded general education requirements. To get there, they reduced the number of credit hours required for your actual degree program. Many colleges of Engineering have to request wavers of some GE requirements so that students can get the proper courses in Engineering.
One reason for the change is the most condescending; those in authority don’t trust the choices of those below them and so force the “masses” to make the choices the elites want. This is the theme of the 1980s to present. It’s an increasing soft-fascism that both the left and right embrace, simply disagreeing on how to exercise their power.
Incidentally, this is why many local/community colleges and universities are actually superior–to accommodate a student body which is more interested in financial advancement, they have a wider variety of programs, many with goals of licensing, not degrees. However, it’s still annoying how much nonsense is being purchased even in the name of licensing.
One reason for the change is the most condescending; those in authority don’t trust the choices of those below them and so force the “masses” to make the choices the elites want.
Perhaps, but I think they’re expanding the general education classes in large part to force students to take classes that no one in their right mind would otherwise take, thus preserving and expanding those departments. How many men would willingly take a Women’s Study class if they weren’t forced to? The Leftists can rationalize all they want but it comes down to “Eat your vegetables because it’s good for us.” More students means more funding which means more power. Always follow the money.
I have an MD but no BA or BS because I was an engineering major who switched to premed (LIke a lot of engineers I knew in the 50s). I couldn’t get a BA because I didn’t have a language (required for BA but not for Mech Eng BS). Its 50 years but my lack of a BA hasn’t affected me yet.
Actually, I think that the comparison is grossly unfair to high school seniors of the 1950s. I teach at a major school in the CUNY (City University of New York) system and many students at this school have (English) literacy levels that would not pass muster at a good junior high school. In all fairness, many of these students are non-native English speakers (either immigrants or foreign students), but the fact that you can get a degree without being able to construct a coherent and correct paragraph in English is shocking. I have told my students that the university has the following priorities:
(1) To make certain that the administrators get paid well.
(2) To upkeep the physical plant.
(3) To make certain that people with graduate degrees (many of which are useless) are employed.
(4) To allow students to get an education (or credential).
I am not certain if I am missing something between (3) and (4); if you want to argue about the order of (2) and (3), I can understand that.
I’ve also been an adjunct at a community college; the level of education there (in lower level courses, at least) is simply shocking.
How much of this is due to people attempting college who in decades past would never have graduated high school?
There is this peculiar notion at work nowadays which says everyone is college material. Meanwhile 50% of the population is of below-average intelligence. Used to be, a college degree indicated an above average intellect. Now, unless you have a real degree in a real subject (STEM), it means you were more willing to sit in a classroom.
Primary and secondary education has devolved into glorified babysitting in that everyone graduates. But there is still the opportunity to learn for students who are willing and able to do so. They’ll leave school with the same worthless diploma as everyone else, but they’ll actually know something when they do.
There’s no way to teach dumb kids to be smart. As long as colleges admit dumb kids, you’ll continue to see people in your classes who can’t read and write.
Not, I think you left out something: the lobbying and propaganda-producing activities that the school has to do in order to stay on the good side of the education establishment — state boards, accreditation bodies, education unions, and, ultimately, legislators. If you fail to spend the proper amount of money on producing and supporting left-wing projects, you lose your funding or your accreditation. On your list, this probably ranks #2.
I took some computer science courses at a local junior college. They were excellent; the instructors also teach at UC, Irvine. By the end of the semester there were usually two of us left in the class. The other one was a 50 year old woman applying to UCLA Library Science.
Back in the 60s, I took (and thoroughly enjoyed) high school classes in shop, mechanical drawing, music, and others while still getting a solid education on science and math…even to include introductory calculus. My subsequent college degrees in math/physics and EE were relatively easy thanks to my demanding Catholic and public high school education. And the “trade” experience has proved rewarding as well.
It’s sad that our high schools managed to do a good many things well back then, but apparently have lost that ability in modern times.
I have begun to suspect that the gusher of “federal aid to higher education” has a purpose entirely divorced from encouraging young people to learn. Note that undergraduate tuitions have risen faster than inflation for many years now. The torrent of federal money bring poured on colleges and universities has risen in near-perfect correlation. Which is the cart and which is the horse?
If increases in federal aid are the true driving factor, which seems ever more likely, then who is aware of this in the federal educracy? Might those persons, whoever they are, be drowning academia in money as a form of redistribution? After all, both the colleges and the federal educracy are predominantly left-liberal in their convictions.
Food for thought.
I feel this way also. I would say that you don’t have to go all the way back to the 1950′s to find a time when a high school graduate had a better education than the average college student with a bachelor’s degree. What is even worse is the fact that there is so little emphasis on industrial art, shop class.
Now a days not only is there pressure for a kid to go to college there are very few opportunities for them to discover the other options available. I have many friends from high school who didn’t go to college but instead started their own business, e.g., concrete sawing/coring, construction, motorcycle building, and tattooing. They are doing just as well as friends who went to college even during these tough times.
I have been saying this very thing for years. My parents were convinced that I’d be set for life once I graduated from college. It was impossible for me to get them to understand that, in this day and age, a college degree isn’t the status or intellectual symbol it once was. Even entry-level administrative positions these days require at least an Associate’s degree, if not a Bachelor’s. And as more and more people who are less and less fit for the academic rigors of postsecondary education seek a college diploma, the quality and value of that diploma becomes more and more diluted. When any significant percentage of college freshmen have to take remedial writing, reading or math courses — students who are NOT ESL — then you know the system is broken.
The world could support experts in Russian Poetry or Interpretive Dance back when it was only a select few who could devote themselves to those subjects and whose insights were a valuable addition to the academic appreciation of such things. But today, when the drumbeat cry from every guidance office is “you can be anything you want to be” and “follow your heart,” you have students pursuing Russian Poetry degrees just because they love Russian poetry; not because they have anything valuable or intellectually deep to contribute to the field or any career path in mind. Instead of simply going to the library and reading their fill of Russian poetry and its associated critical essays, they choose to rack up mountains of debt just so they can say they have a degree in the field of Russian poetry.
Great. That’s not going to help you get a job at Ace Hardware, let alone a mortgage.
I think young people today are figuring this out, and I think their parents — a generation younger than my own parents — are figuring it out, too. The problem is that the employment structure has already changed to the point that large employers may simply discard an application from anyone who doesn’t immediately meet the education requirements. If young people don’t see the value of pursuing a costly degree, and they can’t get a job in an industry in which they can excel and prosper without one, what are they going to do? Technical schools help, but they aren’t for everybody or every profession. Certifications are fine, but they only get you so far. Except for small businesses where it’s possible to meet the proprietor face to face, the odds of impressing anyone in a management position of a company or corporation is slim to none without first getting your foot squarely in the door through an application and review process. So where are these young workers supposed to turn?
That’s the problem I see for young people going forward. The culture has become so rooted in the idea that everyone should get a college education that anyone who DOESN’T get one is considered suspect. That’s hogwash in a lot of cases, but how can businesses sort the wheat from the chaff? How can they find the genuine diamonds who are hidden among the rough heaps of illiterate, innumerate, lazy, selfish young people?
And there are a lot of illiterate, innumerate, lazy, selfish young people.
Especially in today’s economy, businesses just can’t afford to take the risk on making a mistake. If you have a college degree, it at least means you were able to handle the pressures and workload of college well enough to graduate. You might have barely passed, but you passed. You exhibited enough of a work ethic for a postsecondary institution to hand you a piece of paper with your name on it and tell you, “Well done, you made it.”
We have to change business culture AND youth culture. “I don’t have a college degree” should not automatically equate in an employer’s mind to, “I’m too stupid or lazy to get a college degree.” But it took a long time for it to get to this point, and it’ll take an equally long time to reverse the trend.
Too bad the employers can’t just give IQ or aptitude tests, like they used to. Then they could hire the most trainable, sans degree & debt.
The ban on IQ or equivalent tests is the reason why employers are forced to rely to college degrees.
Every generation of adults says this.
I heard this back in the 1960s.
And it has in large measure been true. Just as endlessly expanding the franchise has made more and more idiots able to make idiotic choices at the ballot box, endlessly expanding educational “opportunity” has made it more or more possible for complete idiots to have a diploma. At the turn of the 19th-20th Centuries you had to be pretty smart to get a HS Diploma, really smart to get into college and both smart and disciplined to get a college Diploma. By the mid-20th Century, any idiot that could stay out of juvy could get a HS Diploma, and the idiot that went to juvy could get a GED there. By the late 20th Century anyone who could fog a mirror got a HS Diploma if they could show up to pick it up; never mind whether they could read it. Anyone who could fog a mirror could get into college and if you could find someway to pay to be there and showed up now and then you could get a college degree.
For that you can thank the Progressives. Universal Higher Education! Yay! Now everyone will be Smart!
Going to college doesn’t make you smart. Only smart people belong in college. The rest of us just need to make a living.
Why can’t we just get back to trade schools. In the future, you’ll still need mechanics, carpenters, masonaries, tile and marble setters, and air conditioning people. There are many places where a great deal of knowledge is necessary that you can’t get at the local college or state university.
Dude “masonary”? Are you avoiding “mason” for ideological reasons?
Better bring a fine winnowing fork when you wade into this dispute. Until late mid-career, I still regularly encountered stout-hearted bureaucrats, whose bottoms had perfectly formed to their desk chairs, who held it against me that I had completed a degree. It was pretty obvious that they merely felt threatened by someone who had worked all the way through a state college, which was then seen as the acme of ambition and determination. Their ranks have grown thin with age; never forget the influence they wielded.
No, we don’t want to see a generation of reverse discrimination to make up for it. But be careful how you state your case. Those were the original Good Old Boys. Do you want to be one of them?
Here is where the trade unions could make a real contribution. A nephew of mine got his BS after a spell in the Marine Corps. Then he did an elevator repair/installation apprenticeship sponsored by the union. He is getting promoted and his only problem is that he would like to live in a warm climate. Warm climates and elevators don’t go together.
I did very poorly in high school, joined the Navy, received electronic technician training, and after being discharged I struggled through the first year of junior college, and then fell in love with learning. I then received a BA and MA in Social Science/Teaching. Teaching did not work out, so got a job and went to school at night to get an accounting degree. I think college should have a two year vocational degree and then the graduate can go into the working world, and if he or she wants the general education course, they can take them at night, weekends, and/or on-line to fulfill the 4 year course. If their vocation choice does not work out for them, they could return for another 2 years of another vocation choice.
t
Jerry, I can appreciate the path you took. In some degree I think that learning a skill is extremely important and would be productive for society. However, I don’t think that making the path to education a convoluted journey for a potential doctor or engineer would improve the system.
You learned a trade in the Navy, then you got out and pursued a degree in teaching, which you found to be not what you wanted and then became an accountant. That is a unique path and not very economical or realistic for most people to take.
I’m pretty much with Jerry on this. I think you should be “allowed” to major in anything you like and can pay for, but no one should get into the last two years of an undergraduate program without having learned a marketable skill.
For those of us without loans, grants, or a fortune, that was a given. Absent a lively economy (and the draft!), that chapter is missing from a couple of generations of American lives today. The hole is mostly filled with sports.
WRT the title of this post: I believe you’ll find it was predicted in The Peter Principle, back in 1969. Sorry I can’t give you the exact chapter.
We Republicans/conservatives control the government of over half the States; we can do a lot about this, yet it is the kind of nuts and bolts government that most on our side of the ditch have no interest in. The first refuge of the “Studies” graduate is a government job or in a non-profit funded by or doing something for government. A degree, any degree in any subject, will get you pretty much any government job and for the non-profits the “Studies” degrees assures them that you have the correct ideological bent. If you’re the governor of the state, you can do something about the over-credentialling of government jobs and you can also do something about the penchant for many agencies to set credentials for ideological rather than practical reasons. You can also do something about government contracts to non-profits that are nothing more than Democrat fronts designed to employ Democrat apparatchiks and launder government money to the Democrats. I know that contracting to the private sector is a Republican sacred cow, but we won the battle and lost the war. Back in the Reagan Era when privatization was all the rage, Republicans won the right to contract out even in unionized environments. The Democrats, no fools when it comes to making government work for them, just went out and started the private companies that Republican governments were contracting with. If you’re paying a contractor to train either government employees or to perform one of the “outreach” or “re-employment” programs, you’re probably employing an activist Democrat often a former union official and some significant portion of your Republican government’s money is going straight to the Democrats. This is one of the ways that the unions bulked up so much politically in the Clinton and Bush years even though their private sector membership was falling and their public sector membership was relatively stagnant.
There is a side issue here that extends also to the private sector; discrimination suits have pretty much eliminated testing or even any subjective determination of relative rank of employees, so the universally accepted “degree” has become the minimum qualification for all sorts of jobs, public and private, for which “a degree” has no relevance. Interestingly, if some guy wanted to sue, the fact that so many more women than men are getting degrees these days poses an artificial barrier to employment of men and is, itself, discriminatory.
In many of those states we control who gets appointed to state boards of education and boards of regents; we really ought to pay more attention to who we appoint and use our muscle to make sure legislature confirm our appointments. Where we control legislatures or have a line item veto, we have the educational system by their most vulnerable part; when you have them by the wallet, their hearts and minds follow. Yet, all the Educrats have to do is whine that it is “for the children,” and even Republican legislatures wilt. I think it has become abundantly clear to anyone who hires or supervises people that young applicants, even those with degrees, come to work with zero work ethic, minimal skills, and VERY high expectations. In the last decade of my career, I changed the minimum qualification of my journey-level labor relations specialists to include graduation from law school. This job was once done quite effectively by HS graduates with a few years working your way up in the system and some OJT and a modicum of employer provided professional training. People with that background were effectively representing my State’s government in collective bargaining, labor arbitrations, and State labor board hearings, often with Ivy League attornies accross the table from them. By the ’90s, I was having to hire law school grads to get the ability to write an English paragraph and think at all logically, to even comprehend that “I feel strongly” is not a compelling argument. I could still find the ocassional gem who’d started as a clerk and worked his/her, usually her, way up with only a HS Diploma or GED, but they had become exceedingly rare and most were topping out at the point where they had to begin to provide written analyses of issues and develop policies or programs based on that analysis; they just couldn’t do either the thinking or the writing and ended their career as, at most, a line level supervisor or journey-level technician.
The first refuge of the “Studies” graduate is a government job or in a non-profit funded by or doing something for government.
No doubt. But it’s also worth noting that these “gut” majors are very useful for those wanting to get into a highly rated law school. I’ve read that in their ratings, US News and World Report uses two metrics for admitted students, a student’s LSAT score and their GPA. So it really doesn’t matter what their major is, or the courses they took, as long as they got very good grades.
In either case, though, it’s credentialism, not necessarily real achievement.
“Worthless” is an interesting read. However, it fails to also point out that this country doesn’t also need everyone to be a math or an engineering major. The fallacy that presents itself is that it doesn’t address the question of, “What happens to the job market if everyone were a math and/or an engineering major?”
Yes, there is a fair amount of demand for these skills but part of the reason why these folks are so employable is that there is a lack of supply in these skill sets. As the author points out in other sections, education and the corresponding human resources are subject to the laws of supply and demand like every other commodity. As we all know from Econ 101, when supply increases and demand stays the same, prices fall.
The difficulty of entrepenuership in this country is what is setting back our economic growth. Small businesses are smothered by an overbearing tax and regulatory system that seeks to control greater shares of the economy.
English majors, people with “B.A” degrees, and all the other “worthless” degrees could be a lot more productive if running a small business were less difficult. Sounds like an opportunity for all you business majors to create a new business model, something along the lines of Small Enterprise Agents or Information Management Consultants who manage all the back end business functions and have proprietors/owners calling the shots and executing business plans.
The CEO of Chrysler has a degree in philosophy. Ditto Watson of IBM. “Arts” majors used to build some pretty decent businesses before they were replaced by MBA’s.
There was an oversupply of engineers in business in my youth. It reduced the pay and prestige of real practicing engineers, and up-kicked engineers did a lot of damage as managers. That’s not our situation right now, but if we keep on with the STEM caterwauling, it soon will be again.
The joke in the Fifties was, “Who will dig the ditches”? Back when a million was quite a bit, my dad made a million digging ditches. Lived to tell about it too, and guess who the ditch-diggers made fun of? Engineers. It’s a cycle, guys.
One should also remember that in a lot of engineering fields your career as a normal, salaried full-time employee ends between age 35-40; companies prefer cheaper labor and due to the constant drumbeat of “not enough STEM graduates!” (stated by the NSF in the ’80s when they apparently decided they were paying too much for grad student and post-doc labor) plus the abuses of the H-1B, L-1 etc. visa systems there’s something of a surplus in these fields, especially programming. The sciences have their own problems with many fields producing way more graduate students than there are terminal positions for them (again, fallout from the NSF et. al. stuffing the pipeline; a lot of these end up being programmers…).
On the other hand there’s never enough who are really good, but the job market is so inefficient at matching these to companies that need them … well, if you go down this path you need to manage your career very carefully and make sure you are one of those “very best”.
I strongly disagree. Engineering is one field where it’s quite common to find men, and some women, working into their 50s and 60s.
The recruiter who got me my last job has since moved into a highly specialized area of engineering and is constantly finding and placing such people in six figure jobs.
What you may be observing is that incompetent engineers have trouble finding work in their 40s and later. After all, why pay someone 90k a year to do worse work than a part time intern could do for minimum wage?
– fortune, but not worth spit. Get a graduate degree, but skip law schools as they are full.
Hog farm might be profitable.
Back in the Stone Age, the 50’s, at Purdue they told us freshman engineers that as a State school they had to accept us if we qualified, but that did not mean that they had to keep us. We were warned that only one in three would graduate…and that’s the way it worked out. So the first semester started with the shock of 21 credit hours with 45 hours a week in the classroom (including Saturday Labs). No time to Occupy anyplace.
It was a hard grind, particularly the advanced math classes, but later I realized that what really was being taught there was one thing…to persevere. The few Social Study and Psychology classes were a joke and only required looking at the book the night before a test.
On graduating, a stint in the Air Force gave me a clue of how to manage people and then various jobs in Engineering and Engineering Sales eventually led to Vice President positions. And now having retired, I am still working as an Engineering Consultant out of habit. My impression of young graduates starting their careers is that they are bright enough, but they will have to work under a handicap. The old system of assigning these new individuals to work in a group of older, more experienced ‘mentors’ seems to be breaking down. Now they are more likely to be handed an assignment and may have to repeat mistakes that were already made in the past.
It’s even tougher for the non-technical graduates in these austere times. When the economy is booming, there is enough slack in an organization to absorb these individuals and then to retrain them on the job. Not now. Any new employee is expected to ‘hit the ground running’. My gratuitous advice to any new student is to learn to write a decent report, get a lot of training in public speaking and to always, always keep trying.
One can’t deny that college is the modern form of indentured servitude, where the banking system essentially gets a risk-free investment in the form of a federally subsidized loan, earns an above average return compared to the alternative “risk-free” instrument (government bonds), while the students themselves wind up on the hook for $20-100K for the next 10 years. The specter of debt looming in the background is enough to compel an individual of honorable intent (inasmuch as they believe in paying back what they borrowed) to seek out sub-optimal employment options just so they can get that monkey off their back as opposed to doing something valuable to society as a whole. Basically, it’s the company store paradigm updated for the information age.
One can’t deny that college is the modern form of indentured servitude, where the banking system….
Has been completely cut out of the picture by a measure in Obamacare.
“Indentured servitude”, very possibly (although some schools like MIT have addressed this problem; MIT by using scholarships above a relatively small threshold), but now to the Federal government….
After taking about all the math and science the high school offered, I joined the US Army after graduation and working a summer. Why not college right after high school? I REALLY wanted to be in the US Army at the time. After a tour in both Germany and Viet Nam, I returned home determined to finally go to college and did on the GI Bill. Four and half years later, I graduated with a BS in Chemical Engineering and immediate got a job with a major oil and gas company. I remember a high school friend telling me that I had a hard row to hoe with that major when I was just starting college. Our class started with about thirty kids and ended up with four finally graduating with a ChE degree.
After a rewarding career working with natural gas production and processing, I’ve retired. With a home in Wyoming and a winter home (I’m writing this comment there) on the Big Island plus a good pension, I have to say my decision to to college was the correct one for me.
BUT, college is not for everyone. A lot of the people that work and teach at the colleges and universities will say that college is nothing more than adult daycare for a lot of the students that, if truth be known, don’t want to be there and more than likely it is a giant waste of money for them to be there.
If the economy ever takes off again, there undoubtably will be a shortage of people in the trades which will hold back the economy. We NEED good welders, electricians, carpenters, etc. I know. Nothing I designed would have been built without them.
Don, the beauty of our system is that people are free to choose their own path. If the marketplace signals demand for these skills, we should also see a rise in wages which will attract more people to these fields. I agree and also believe that there is a shortage of tradesmen in our country. From my own observation, the indigenious population under the age of 40 are woefully incapable of building much of anything.
However, I am worried that our immigration policies will dampen those demand signals and keep Americans out of these fields. I am no xenophobe, my wife is an immigrant, but there should be some concern for our nation’s youth and the quality of life we are setting up for future generations. Without viable middle class career choices, we will have a larger demographic of takers than we have of makers in this country. When that happens, we will have a completed the transformation into a socialist country.
Frankly, the liberal arts are good for women who want to earn the Mrs. degree. They don’t really have to think a whole lot, but they are in the mix at the university and can talk to men majoring in medicine, law or engineering.
And that woman who bags a man in one of those areas may well get much richer than … you. So liberal arts definitely does not mean poor, it just usually means poor if you are a man majoring in that politically correct, brain-dead crap.