New data on college majors confirms old trend: technocracy is crushing humanism
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Now, college is increasingly a form of trade school where members of every class go to learn a marketable skill, in order to sell their labor. Not everybody can be a member of the ruling class, and people are realizing that. Getting a degree in the humanities is only advantageous if you have a reasonable expectation that you'll never have to know a specific trade but will simply be in the management.
College, really, was for the people who boss CEOs around: the patrons (modernly, "angel investors") of the founders who started the company; the capitalists who sit on the boards of the the mutual funds who invest in IPOed companies; etc. People who got taught how to "manage wealth" and the essentials of an MBA on their daddy's knee (with said father possibly being one of the wealthy middle-class "captains of industry"), and are now, in their teenage years, being sent off for "polishing" at college, such that they can be a good person, not just a brutally efficient one. (And, also, to enculturate them into the upper-class by immersion among upper-class children, so that a merely-wealthy family can be thus transmuted into an upper-class dynasty, with descendants worthy of noble status in countries that grant such.)
Or, to put that another way: the humanities were created to turn people like Jeff Bezos into people like Elon Musk. (Or to turn people like during-Microsoft Bill Gates into people like post-Microsoft Bill Gates.) To take people who already have a knack for "making money", but are still fundamentally human with human drives like greed and pride; and inculcate into them a perspective on wealth as being a means to a greater, humanitarian end.
Is there data showing that humanities degree-holders have lower career earnings (controlling for other factors, of course)? IIRC, engineers start faster, but generally hit a ceiling (on income and age) while humanities degree holders keep going.
Humanities deals with much more difficult and realistic problems than STEM - the problems that cannot be quantified and have no easy answers, which includes most of what we experience in reality and are the real challenges in life and in business. Algorithms are great, but most of life cannot be addressed that way. And to say only the 'ruling class' are worthy of learning such things is, I think, the true elitism.
Also, life is much more than career. We have to be family members, spouses, citizens, community members, individuals, etc. etc. STEM doesn't help much with those things.
The problems of Facebook aren't interface and back end, but what to write. The current problems of society (and Facebook) are not technical - we have wave after wave of technical innovation and look where we are - but political and social. We haven't come close to solving them all, but we've come a long way in the last few hundred years, and I hope we do more for the next generation than give them more algorithms.
I wonder how much better-informed current rising freshmen are about career prospects after seeing the fallout of the great recession. I wonder where they get their research for choosing their college majors.
This is a relatively new situation. It wasn't long ago that having a degree humanities was sufficient to get an entry level position for a good middle-class job. Now college/university is seen as a necessity, that is no longer sufficient to stand-out career-wise.
People want a roadmap to secure job. Or at least a secure field.
Without proper guidance on how to achieve this modest goal young adults lose valuable productive years of their life.
I think schools need to do a better job requiring humanities majors to take STEM classes in the same way I was required to take humanities. I have plenty of friends in humanities who took the bare minimum which was only one class (physics for poets or something similar) and a lab (which could be psych or some other soft science).
This. And incorporating more technology/computing into the humanities themselves.
This is actually pretty insightful for an NYT piece.
I hadn't thought of it like that, but upon reading this, suddenly it seems so clearly true.
There is evidence (higher suicide rates, and depression rates, although depression rates may be influenced by underlying trends in clinical technique) that all this progress doesn't make us any happier. Keeping up with the Joneses to compete for status results in a pretty shitty nash equilibrium when there are a billion people in the world.
It feels like any and all effort that the humanities put into making an actual impact on modern day life is just lashing out at power structures. This can help achieve equality in the long run, but for student's who are studying these topics, it does not provide anything actionable to their own lives. Academic Philosophy is applicable to a student's current and future life, but the way that it is studied only rarely provides a grounding foundation for a personal lifestyle philosophy.
That would be very good. I've seen more work on that topic here on HN, indeed, I've contributed more work on that topic here in HN than I personally have seen come out of academia. This is not a statement of pride in HN or myself, it is a condemnation of academia. I see a lot of judgmental discussions about whether things are good or bad or pathological or qualifying for DSM diagnoses, but very little on how to navigate the morass.
This used to be a core topic for philosophy; it's certainly a huge component of Stoicism, if not the main focus, for instance.
I will however give academia one bit of the benefit of the doubt, which is that it's been awfully hard to keep up lately. Writing about how to have the good life in 1990 would have only marginal utility in dealing with the civilizational neurotic hysteria that social media is creating, for instance.
But it would still be nice to see some more effort put in this direction. I can only imagine going to my advisor and telling them I want to focus on this. They may individually and intellectually support me, but the system will utterly reject it.
However I think this piece reflects a bit of ignorance with regards to the value one gains from a science degree versus a humanities degree. I'm speaking from the position of one who took a lot of English course work (particularly creative writing and critical theory) but dropped the second English major while keeping on with geology through a postdoc. I don't know how much this applies to an engineering degree as science shares more with the humanities than engineering does, and my experience with the engineering curriculum is limited to math/physics courses and having civil engineering students who took geology electives.
When learning a science, one generally learns about the history of the science and the process of societal knowledge-building through this lens. Though Douthat may decry a reduction of history to a 'litany of crimes and wrongthink', here we learn it as a kind of human Markov process with accumulating insight and wisdom, eureka moments and wrong turns, and how internal forces, hidden agendas and external shocks can promote and impede progress. The 'history and tradition' that Douthat feels are no longer valued in technocratic society is actually embodied in science's theory and practice--with the constraint that it is constantly tested, refined and improved (though not monotonically).
There is also a good amount of philosophy involved with working at the ragged edge of knowledge (though this may not really sink in until you get involved with research). It's tough to sift through and braid loose threads of truth, some of which may be based in logic and mathematics, observations, and insights from instrumentation and modeling that may be not yet be fully tested.
Additionally, there is a humility that accompanies the struggle to find knowledge and truth that may be unattainable, forever or at least in a lifetime. Anything that has happened on Earth over the past 4.6 billion years is within the purview of geology, but only events that have left a mark may be investigated. Given the finiteness of the Earth's surface and near surface, the vast majority of events have had all of their records erased and that bit of physical memory has been overwritten. Some questions are as unanswerable as the timeless questions of religion, though perhaps for different reasons. However it is probably less clear from the outset which scientific questions may be answered than which humanistic questions--as a practitioner you have to make the call whether to proceed and when to turn back (cue Kenny Rogers).
And furthermore, a lot of this occurs in an arena that has quite a bit less of the sort of moralistic/nationalistic/etc. status ranking that plagues the humanities currently. Jake Seliger is spot-on in his diagnosis of this in the humanities in the blog post he linked to in another thread. While there are certainly turf battles, issues with illogical attachments to discredited theories due to sunk costs and so forth, different theories of earthquake nucleation don't have the immediate implications for the status of different social groups (beyond researchers themselves) and it's not straightforward to moralize any of it. The different lenses that are applied to knowledge through different techniques (instrumentalists vs. theoreticians) are not so different than the different lenses of critical theory and modern identitarianism: What does this problem look like to a geophysicist who does seismic imaging, and what does it look like to a fault geologist, and what does it look like to a statistical seismologist? And while one group may have the upper hand in investigating a specific issue, almost everyone is working towards the same positive-sum goal (though the short-term scrabble for funding an influence is absolutely not positive-sum).
I think the society that Douthat fears is not 21st century science, but perhaps something more akin to early 20th century scientism--the technocratic philosophy that permeated Leninism, Modernist architecture and urban planning (Le Corbusier, etc.), Taylorism in management at all levels, and so forth. Inducting more college students into a discipline's quest for truth through experiment and falsification will not degrade our culture in the manner he supposes.
(And as a short personal anecdote: I decided to abandon the English major the day I went to Poetry at 10:30, in which we fruitlessly debated the word 'race' in a poem "literally" about a white girl seeing a black girl on the other side of some train tracks, after going to Petrology at 9:30 and working through the geochemical data from earth and lunar rocks that show when the moon was separated from the earth 4.5 billion years ago. Who exactly is pursuing truth and beauty?)
And a lot of the most interest research in the last ten years has come about as a result of people disregarding the stigma of looking into religious phenomena and going back to that model, e.g. the research into psychedelics and meditation.
Though, of course, that's not to say we can't incorporate STEM aspects into humanities courses as well. I'm certain there's new ways to analyze things that opens up with computers, and everyone should be scientifically literate (and mathematically literate, but that might be the math teacher coming out in me)
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/february/nussbaum-democr...
>Increasingly viewed as "useless" by politicians, humanities and arts programming is being replaced by technical training courses in sciences, engineering and technology in the name of economic gain. While technical skills are important for the future health of nations, Nussbaum said that they alone do not make for a fully educated student. Without people with a liberal arts background, she said, the world would be filled with "narrow, technically trained workers, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition and authority, and understand the significance of another person's sufferings and achievements."
>These so-called soft-skills are essential for developing a "decent world culture" and maintaining healthy democracies, she said. Study of history and culture imparts the ability to approach global issues as a citizen of the world. Study of philosophy teaches the critical thinking skills that help us reason about our choices. Participation in the creative arts fosters an empathetic capacity and, Nussbaum said, "allows us to imagine the challenges facing someone unlike ourselves."
>In closing, Nussbaum reiterated that the arts and humanities not only "shape people who are able to see other human beings as full people with thoughts and feelings" but also build "nations that are able to overcome fear and suspicion in favor of sympathetic and well-reasoned debate."
Why does it mean that they can think for themselves when in many cases the humanities slavishly follow what came before even in face of evidence that says no it really doesn't work that way (people who look at Marx for economics for instance)? Why are social skills assumed to stem from them only? Why is the ability to divine objective truths about reality and literally prove something indisputably impossible or true not count as critical thinking? There is nothing more critical than seeing and stating "and yet it moves" despite what everybody thinks. The utility of humanities is done a great disservice by these arguments
The author's very thesis is incoherent- complaining both about death of tradition and people not thinking for themselves. Complaining about advertisers while praising soft skills is a similar contradiction.
I'm surprised the reckoning has taken this long to arrive, or be noticed.
It's not because of cultural decline, it's because there's been a leveling of the playing field wherein competition has gotten a lot fiercer on two fronts: it's generally harder to get into elite colleges, and top-tier employers look at a broader range of schools than they used to. Put another way, being born into a wealthy family, attending Suburb Country Day and then spending a few years at boarding school is less of a tailwind for getting into Harvard than it used to be; and also, going to Harvard is less of a tailwind for getting a top-tier job than it used to be. So, the applicant pool to Harvard is less wealthy and more scrappy and pragmatic; and also, students once at Harvard make more practical decisions with regard to what they choose to study.
To give an example of an industry I know firsthand, as a (relatively) recent Goldman IBD alum I can tell you that there's been a profound shift in analyst recruiting over the last couple decades. 20 years ago, NESCAC alumni with humanities degrees were like half the analyst class and state school grads (other than Wharton) were an endangered species. Today the senior partner in your group might have a history degree from Williams, but few if any of the analysts do.
This is reflective of increased competition, not disenlightenment. And it's a good thing. The state school finance majors are better investment bankers and deserve the opportunity more.
Can't tell if ignorance or top-tier trolling.
U Penn is private. Penn State is public.
Fewer philosophy majors doesn't mean that people don't care about philosophy as much anymore, it means that it's no longer reasonable for 18-year-olds to expect that they can spend four years contemplating Kierkegaard and then have a skills-heavy job waiting for them once college is over (in which they'll be taught the necessary skills via OJT), so long as they start the process from a highly-enough-ranked school.
The post briefly adresses this but then goes off on how we need more inquiry into religious truths and less of the “Very Online”. Maybe I am possessed by Apollo and that has left me unable to understand how that would ever work. Any change that doesn’t directly adress the economic incentives will work only on those who have hereditary wealth and don’t need to care about those incentives at 18.
Humanities in the 70s/80s meant your degree wouldn't cost 6 digits and you could probably find a good enough job as a teacher or in the editorial market (press/publishers/etc) or in several other places.
Today those degrees costs one zero more and pays half of what it used to, and your knowledge of Latin won't be only useful for fancy coffee names, if you're lucky.
Once that shift in mindset happened, or so posited the article, the increase in the cost of education that we've seen over the past 3 decades becomes an inevitable conclusion of schools closing the gap between what they charge and what people are willing to pay. And once education becomes this expensive, the move towards STEM and away from humanities also becomes inevitable so long as both degrees are roughly the same cost. If the humanities want to survive and thrive in today's educational environment, they need to figure out how to charge significantly less for that degree. If a humanities grad can emerge into the job market with $20k in debt compared to a STEM major that comes out with 10x that, you might see more people choosing the humanities route.
Sadly, as has been pointed out, the humanities have become a monoculture of thought and encourage rote initiation into the groupthink, rather than independent research and analysis.
Of course, that won't get you most STEM jobs, but it would have a lot more practical application, and therefore economic value, for most other white collar jobs- at least compared to the current degrees.
By comparison while most jobs need basic proficiency reading and understanding a written language, that's also part of a STEM degree.
Instead, you would learn all of the things that went into compilers, databases, and then optionally pick a specialized path such as AI, fluid dynamics modelling or what have you. The strongest direct use of maths was probably algebra until you focused on some of the more specialized fields.
This is among the reasons, I think, why such a huge percentage of software programmers I met didn't even have a 4 year degree; it simply wasn't a practical requirement for baseline skill like you would expect from other careers.
Only barely at some schools. I think I only had to take two writing and rhetoric classes in my EE program. My writing skills became worse than they were in highschool.
https://revelle.ucsd.edu/academics/general-education/index.h...
This isn't unusual, many state or private university systems require this - and the humanities requirements for an engineering major are considerably more substantial than the math and science requirements for a humanities major.
I like this emphasis on breadth, though I do think it may put graduates of US based programs at a disadvantage in PhD programs, as many of the international students focus more intensely on a specialty at the undergraduate level. Breadth is helpful, but it can put you at a disadvantage for the first couple of years of graduate coursework (in programs that have 33-50% attrition rates).
There's a plausible world where everyone possessed enough "useful knowledge" to make a living and was also familiar enough with the humanities that people didn't feel the need to write articles lamenting the state of the humanities.
I agree that the author's solutions don't seem like they would fundamentally change the economics of the situation.
I think the biggest improvement could be had by convincing people that the humanities are important enough to spend time reading instead of watching TV all night every night.
If there is any discipline for which it make absolutely, utterly no sense that college today is so many multiples more expensive than it was 50 years ago, it's the humanities. Have books gotten more expensive? No. A huge chunk of the material is public domain, so it's not licensing problems. We shouldn't need more administrators, we should need massively fewer what with computers taking care of all the tedious paperwork. The teachers involved are making maybe a couple of times more than what they would have 50 years ago, inflation adjusted, and a great deal of them are making less than they did back then, as associate professors. Where is all the money going?
It's complicated? And depends on if you're talking about elite private universities, middle-tier state schools, for-profit schools, etc.
Most classes of schools have larger administrations: some are just bloat, of course, but others are managing demand for increased student services, greater requirements on compliance for federal grants, increased desire to woo wealthy private donors, etc.
Virtually all classes of universities are trying to expand their facilities and update or maintain their physical plants; this becomes an arms race when students are paying full freight--who will pay in the high five figures yearly to attend some place with run-down buildings?
Elite universities have sharply expanded financial aid as they have broadened their student bodies beyond the already wealthy.
For-profit schools charge what they can and direct the extra to shareholders, propped up by federal student loans; this has led to a wide range of abuses.
Finally, we must not forget that there has been a major effort to defund public higher education. Rather than casting a university degree as something that other citizens benefit from, it's depicted as purely a private good that students themselves should pay for. See "Unmaking the Public University" by Newfield. In this case the "higher tuition" is not new money to the university, but shifting the burden of paying for the education from society to the individual.
"Free market dogma" is the religious claim that the point where the supply and demand curve meet is always better (in some typically convoluted ideological sense) when the market in question is unregulated. I don't see that claim in the GP post.