> The humanities PhD is still a vocational degree to prepare students for a career teaching in academia, and there are no jobs. Do not get a PhD in history.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/96yf9h/monda...
I left the degree program long enough ago that some of the people who started with me have finished their PhDs, although many of them still have not, after nearly a decade. Of the ones with PhDs, the only ones with decent jobs are the ones who work outside of academia. The others are adjuncts, and some of them qualify for food stamps.
The thing about getting a PhD is that you defer all of the income and career opportunities many people have in their 20s. By the time you graduate, other people your age have already paid their dues in entry level jobs, got promoted, bought cars and homes, been able to afford travel, and saved money for retirement. When you graduate you will be a decade behind everyone else in that aspect of life.
The only reason any rational-thinking person would make such a sacrifice is if the payoff at the end could make up for it.
A STEM PhD opens doors to a lot of jobs in the private sector. The only door opened by a humanities PhD is a chance to compete in one of the worst job markets in the world: academia, where there are several times as many new PhD graduates as jobs every year.
I think we need to create two tiers of higher-education: one where people focus purely on vocational/career skills while another where you can focus on non-vocational subjects. Let students decide what their general education will consist of instead of making it some top-down approach. People don't like authoritarianism.
I say talk, and not 'think', because I don't think STEM people are bad at thinking about problems critically. I just think a lot of humanities is about developing a common set of reference points, a common vocabulary, so you can work on social problems together.
If you don't have that, you can't really stop malicious actors from drowning out their opposition, who are isolated by the fact they don't share a common conceptual toolset. And if that happens for long enough, you end up with a society that's basically a bunch of amazingly powerful machines operated by Fox News.
And while I was very successful in those courses, I fail to see how they prepared me to be a better citizen, or to think critically about the direction society is going towards. For my daily life, I would probably have been better off taking a course in plumbing than literary analysis.
It's also not that Shakespeare's going to make anybody a better thinker. It's more that stuff like this sets the tone for the culture in general. If you don't really teach hard, interesting culture, then all the people who might have been interested just get the feeling that culture is kinda garbage and go on to engage with hard interesting ideas in other fields. Which leads to a public culture that's not in any way healthy - one that's really just people passing the time, that doesn't really push us or make us grow.
History shows this kind of thing is just incredibly dangerous. If everybody likes culture that's enjoyable and easy, easy, self-satisfied thinking predominates. Then suddenly everybody is marching waving big flags and wearing funny hats, because it's a lot of fun, and makes you feel great to be part of something.
Please provide a reference for this. It sounds too much like a just-so story for me to take that at face value.
While knowledge and culture may seem boring or useless in itself (the fine details of long dead Roman politics) it is possible that there are hidden great applications to it in the right situation. Just for two surprising relevance examples Roman gladiatorial archetypes experiencing political correctness after annexing former foes, gladiatorial endorsements, and after the extended war had resulted in consolidation of farms in the hand of slave holding elites past legal limits the idea of land reform or enforcing the existing laws being called 'unRoman'.
Science alone has a history of finding bizarre peripheral finds that nobody would have expected. Take an incident that resulted in cattle bleeding to death after routine mild procedures - the source was eventually traced back to fungus affecting their feed. Useful in itself but good only for agronomy. Said fungus was used to produce the first bloodthinner on the market.
I think you're conflating enjoyment, in the sense you enjoy an apple, and enjoyment in the sense you enjoy a painting. It's a really common conflation, mainly because in our society, the dominant culture is enjoyable in the sense an apple is enjoyable. That, for me, is part of the problem. Nobody ever got inspired by eating an apple. Nobody ever learned new forms of empathy, or developed, through appetitive enjoyment.
Theoretically appreciative enjoyment could be empathic in a "rags to riches" sense but that could arguably be making the bitterness more palatable while undermining fundamental aspects say the sense of helplessness - even if it shows both ends and cycle of grudges and oppression. I guess it is like Shakespearean "write to please both the groundlings and the noble patrons" - hard to do, let alone properly but if done right offers the potential to create masterpieces.
Anyway I can see some point to the arguement personally even if I would phrase it radically differently - and it may not be entirely what you wanted.
To add some more unrigorous, allusive examples to the mix: the typical Al-Qaeda member is not a imam, but rather an engineer. Technical capability by no means implies ethical capability- so if you imagine a whole society of highly developed technical abilities, and highly under-developed critical capacities, it's a scary thought. And you don't really have to look far into history to find lots of examples.
Consider the V2 rocket, for instance. One of the most amazing technical innovations of the century, but equally, utterly pointless on every other level, even the military one. That's the kind of thing that nations with deeply stupid official cultures tied to deeply brilliant technical cultures make.
It sounds like you prioritized maxing your GPA per unit of effort instead of engaging with the material in the way that's most beneficial to you.
Why on earth would you ever write an essay that's just meaningless jargon to you? What on earth were you expecting to learn?
The same thing happens in STEM courses. Three examples:
1. Projects. If your project incorporates the professor's research priorities/interests you can get away with way less work, but will also get less out of the course.
2. Programming assignments in CS. Professors rarely assign open problems; they're almost always assigning variants of important solved problems. Students will often look up the paper or wiki article where the original solution was described and then copy the algorithm and/or proof. This often results in high marks for low levels of effort.
3. There's an even better analogy in Mathematics, where students sometimes learn how to parrot the structure/rhetoric in proofs instead of actually learning the mathematics. Professors often don't do a careful enough job grading and give these proofs high marks because they sound correct and are mostly correct. However, it's clear from a second glance that the student has no idea wtf they're saying.
Students prioritizing low-effort parroting instead of seriously engaging with the material is pervasive in CS and Mathematics.
Some of that blame lies with the professor, and when students never learn that parroting/memorization is bad, I guess that's a huge failure of the entire education system (K-12 through higher ed). But IMO students who know that's the game they are playing (e.g., writing jargon-laden essays instead of writing in a way that is true to their own voice) don't have a lot of room to then complain that all they learned was how to play the "max GPA for min effort" game...
It depends on what you seek from university. Unfortunately at the undergraduate level, its role has largely shifted from a place of learning into a provider of credentials that act as a signal to employers. With the high cost of tuition (especially in the USA), you want a good return on your investment, not waste your time engaging with the material at the detriment of your chances of success.
It seems a far better strategy to maximize your GPA while spending the least possible amount of time on the assigned material, in order to have time to pursue your own interests and be able to more effectively learn the things you want to learn.
You got nothing out of your humanities courses. The fault was not in your courses but in yourself. You certainly could have chosen to improve your prose, refine your theses, and strengthen the presentation of your arguments. Instead, you chose to GPA hack.
One of the great things about university is that you get what you put into it. Students who choose to invest in credentialism get credentials. Students who choose to invest in an education get an education. You got what you very explicitly chose to get!
The sad irony, by the way, is that your perceived downsides are rare and GPA hacking backfires. I have never heard of a faculty member refusing to write a letter for an engaged student just because they received a B or even a C; however, I've heard plenty of stories about faculty writing lackluster letters or even refusing to write letters for students who were very clearly GPA hacking.
Perhaps most importantly, your original post was written as an indict of humanities courses. In my post, I pointed out that GPA hacking is also possible in STEM fields. Your latest post justifies GPA hacking by appealing to the credential-granting role of higher education. Your argument justifies GPA hacking not only in the humanities but also in STEM fields.
A common saying in education is that cheaters mostly rob from themselves. IMO the same is true for GPA hackers.
One final tangential note about this excerpt from your post:
> With the high cost of tuition (especially in the USA), you want a good return on your investment, not waste your time engaging with the material at the detriment of your chances of success... It seems a far better strategy to maximize your GPA while spending the least possible amount of time on the assigned material, in order to have time to pursue your own interests and be able to more effectively learn the things you want to learn.
Doesn't this place you in a bit of a double bind? If you know better than the faculty, then GPA hacking isn't required because you already know the material. If you don't know better than the faculty, then it's very likely that you are frittering away your time on fads instead of focusing on fundamentals.
As I've already stated,
>> The sad irony, by the way, is that your perceived downsides are rare and GPA hacking backfires
Choosing to learn employable skills is important, but there's no upside to viewing education as "simply a method of acquiring the credentials necessary to get hired".
You seem to have missed the fundamental point of my last two posts: your view of how to approach education is self-defeating even if you view education purely as a way of increasing lifetime earnings!
I majored in Math and CS and took a smattering of other courses (one course away from a minor in each of Religion, Philosophy, and Economics).
The CS courses were by far the most useless. Perhaps 50% of the material I had taught myself before started undergraduate: everything up to and including data-structures as well as the pragmatic aspects of databases, OOP, and Networking courses. Another 40% I could've taught myself without much guidance (non-theoretical PL, non-optimizing compilers, and a non-proof-based algorithms course). The other 10% was project-based or independent study where the forcing function to work with people who were both above and below my skill level was the most valuable aspect of the coursework. (pre-college internships and freelancing gave me lots of experience working with others, but almost all of them were far above my skill level or else were completely non-technical).
The Mathematics coursework was by far the most useful. The lower-level content courses (Calculus and Linear Algebra) are essential for accessing most of the interesting parts of the software industry (self-driving, robotics, research software engineer, etc.). Also, the proof-based coursework is full of useful thought patterns. Most of the difficult/economically important problems I've solved in my life were all relatively trivial extensions of proof techniques or theorems from my undergraduate Analysis, Algebra, and Logic coursework.
The humanities courses sit right in-between CS and Mathematics in terms of usefulness. The value of regular practice writing and communicating, with a professional feedback mechanism, was extremely valuable. I don't often use the content knowledge at work, but the writing skills are extremely useful. Learning to write well without regular professional feedback is difficult.
The content knowledge from my humanities courses was not immediately useful in an economic sense. However, that well-roundedness did get me an amazing spouse and extremely interesting friend group, though. I'm not sure how to put a dollar value on either of those things.
So economically, Math > humanities > CS. CS is more economically valuable but the CS education isn't more valuable because the core content knowledge that's necessary to get a well-paying job doesn't require formal course-work. Basic programming, SQL, and web frameworks are definitely accessible to passionate middle schoolers.
In career dimensions beyond net worth (i.e., interesting work), Math > CS > humanities.
In non-career dimensions, humanities >= Math > CS. My marriage and friends are mostly a product of the humanities aspect of my education and are each easily worth the $20k I paid for undergraduate.
YMMV.
> I think we need to create two tiers of higher-education
FWIW there are at least 4 tiers:
1. Vocational: Community College and most for-profit universities/educational programs (including bootcamps)
2. Advanced Vocational BA/BS: "industry-tracked" degrees at traditional universities. E.g., many universities have both a CS degree and an SE degree. The physics/engineering split is comparable. Theoretical technical courses are replaced with pragmatic technical courses and the more pure humanities courses are replaced with business/econ/industry-specific communications coursework.
3. Traditional BA/BS
4. Traditional BA/BS at elite academic institutions (e.g., top 10 CS programs tend to have bachelors degrees that are different in kind from small branch campuses of most state university systems)