Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life
bbc.com
bbc.com
Also perhaps there’s a lesson here about the CS curriculum being too vocational at most colleges? Or not needing a 4 year college if it aims to be vocational?
I heard a claim that sounded plausible to me: CS in the US originated from electrical engineering, and so is based on a degree that is based on the ability to directly influence things and make stuff happen - pretty vocational. In Germany CS is derived from maths and places a greater emphasis on the theoretical underpinnings, and yes, the ability to do scientific work and research.
I guess the optimum lies somewhere in the middle: It's mildly shocking to me to hear of US CS bachelors who never heard of complexity (Big-O and all that), while it's also a bit mad that it's possible to obtain a CS bachelor degree in Germany with the only experience in making computers do stuff being 100 lines of Pascal (although that would require a rather arcane set of elective courses, so it probably won't happen all too often)
US colleges could absolutely drop the fourth year tomorrow if they wanted to. Many excellent European universities get it done in three and get results just as good.
The real waste of time is the US PhD - doing in seven years what could be done in two or three.
No that's not the case at all - most people do a three-years bachelors and then a three-year PhD. That's the expected route for a PhD in the UK. Doing a masters in between would look like you were starting to drag it out a bit. And the first year of your PhD is worth a masters if you chose to drop out at that point.
Often the funding dries up after three years, but the student soldiers on anyway because they're well past the point of no return, or because their advisor can employ them in some other capacity like a teaching or research assistant.
Does this depend on the field? In my experience most students do a three year bachelors, a one or two year Master's, and then a three year PhD.
I have much less knowledge of other subjects, but from the little I've heard the same seems to be true of chemistry and computer science.
In short: I agree with the parent comment, at least for mathematics (and probably for all STEM subjects).
I don't know about other fields, but applications to do a CS PhD in the UK are usually pretty informal. It's a case of finding an advisor and if they want to take you on that's usually basically the only requirement. How they judge that is up to them.
In a number of countries, the MS is 2 years, and the PhD is capped at 3 years. That's still a total of 5 years. If you don't get the PhD done in 3 years, that's fine, but the funding is capped at 3 years, so pretty much everyone gets it done in that time frame.
The reason it takes 5-7 in the US is because the advisors want it to be that way, and because of the glut in funding in some programs.
I majored in philosophy before moving to mathematics - it was phenomenally interesting, but I wouldn't be impressed by a candidate with a philosophy degree these days. A lot of people who hire humanities degrees from top schools talk about things like "diversity of thought", but I think if that was the real reason they might look for candidates outside the top schools.
Agree that I'd like to see more working class kids being ambitious and going for top schools, moving away from home etc but at least play safe and go for something with job prospects.
My next boss had a degree in English. His thought was that no matter what he did with his life, communication was always at the center. He had founded 2 different tech companies before I met him, and he's now the CTO of a large company.
One of the smartest people I've ever personally worked with went to seminary (I'm not sure if he was an atheist before or after, but talk about fun conversations over a beer). He was preoccupied with finding meaning in life, and did things like math and CS with what seemed like his spare cycles.
The point is that a persons degree really only matters for their first job, and often even then only if they want to work at a FAANG for that first job. Where people end up 5-10-15-20 years later in their career has little to do with their degree.
You can do a degree in history of art and then become a fighter jet pilot if you want.
As someone who doesn't have a CS degree, I found that FAANG companies were much more willing to take a risk on someone without a degree getting their first job than many smaller companies.
That's sad, because English, history, and philosphy could be great programs.
I remember I was struggling to get decent grades on my history papers. I was running out of patience and decided I just wanted to pass. So I just wrote what I thought the professor wanted to hear (far left BS) and started getting B's and even an A-, with little effort.
Very interesting person and I learned a lot about what's going on in that region and why it's so hard to resolve in a way consistent with our modern values.
To be fair, not all classes were quite so bad. I took a small class in ancient ME history and it was much more detached and apolitical, while still being interesting and surprisingly relevant.
In the first history class I took, the professor was harsh on perspectives that he didn't agree with. I realized it about halfway into the course, and just started trying to figure out what he wanted me to say. Grades improved.
In the second history class, the professor didn't have a particular perspective, but would highly reward positions that required well constructed arguments. If you wrote an essay that had "easy" arguments, you would do poorly. So I focused on "which position would require the most convoluted argument (within the limits of reason)" and would go with it.
That's overstated. There's plenty of good scholarship being done, in the humanities and especially in the social sciences, that is by necessity either non-political or extremely careful and overt about any political claims that they do make. But you're absolutely right that there is a growing far-left fringe, driven by Red Guard-inspired ideas from the 1960s and 1970s about "culture" and "academica" being nothing more than bourgeois privilege that one shouldn't have anything to do with. (And yes, that's especially in the Anglosphere - since by and large, other Western countries did their own Maoist thing in academia literally decades ago, and they've gotten it out of their system by now.) At the end of the day it just functions as an enabler of corruption and laziness, since the political stance is pretty clear as you say. They basically spend their time awarding "B's and A-'s" to one another, with basically no-one else caring much at all about the whole thing.
Anyway, I studied those subjects in college and had zero issues with professors pushing political agendas. I did, though, have professors push back and give me poor grades on papers where I either didn't understand the material, did a poor job thinking about the material, or had some issues with my writing style that hurt my ability to communicate my ideas. But those are fair reasons for low grades: Students should be compelled to improve those weaknesses. 'Tis the whole point.
I rationalized it as an experiment to see the intellectual value of the class I was taking. I feel like I learned a valuable lesson, but not in history.
Sure, there's supposed to be push back on any claim. But it's very much lighter if the professor/TA believes it to be true already.
I am not claiming I am an amazing historian who is right and the professor is wrong. But I expect my ideas to be evaluated on the merits: how well I defend the idea given my level of study.
If you get a CS degree from a top school just because you see what salaries are, not because that’s what you’re interested in, your career will be mediocre at best.
School shouldn’t be looked at as mandatory and burdensome, it should be a tool that helps you achieve a level of understanding about something that you’re head over heels excited about.
Passion for something will organically lead to a successful career doing what you love.
How are you supposed to know passion at 18? I do alumni interviewing for my college and most kids have no singular passion they want to pursue (and more often than not, they are hoping college will help them find that passion).
And I don't blame them. Finding a singular passion to center a degree around at a young age is not the norm. And yet we put a lot of pressure on our kids to be specialists before they're even able to vote. It's a very difficult situation to put children through.
I’ve immersed myself in literature, music, and technology since a young age—initially went to school for English and left my coursework to work. I’ve spent my entire career working in fields that interested me when I was young. My favourite part has been working to blend my interests.
Though you’re probably onto something about the pressure put on kids to fit an existing need rather than exploring possibilities. My personal experience would have me think so at least.
I also have to say, I've been on the end where we interview people and look through stacks of resumes, and I can't say I've ever actually ever cared about the "education" part unless it's really unusual (IE, very advanced degree, or a degree in a field that isn't CS but might be highly relevant to what my company is doing)
I think it's weird that vocational training is so looked down upon. Not everyone is really built to be a knowledge worker or a professor -- we still need plumbers!
Also whatever happened to apprenticeships? It seems like all we have anymore are internships, but, at least from what I've seen interns are rarely given that much mentoring; it tends to be a lot more about toy-projects or "build a thing that would be nice to have but that we're not going to dedicate a full salaried engineers time to".
The main reason is that you will be able to pick up a humanities/social science course with the skills you already have at the end of high school. What do people do in those degrees? Read text, think critically, express ideas. And you've not only practised that a fair bit in school, but also after education, where you're reading the newspaper, looking at art, and so on. Importantly you aren't going to lose the text reading skill because you'll be using it a little each day.
So you have plenty of practice in the humanities, at least to get you started doing it seriously if you need it later in life. And you have enough that you're not gonna be surprised when someone mentions there was a civil war in the US.
Math stuff seems to be use it or lose it. You can easily avoid linear algebra and big-o thinking, and you will if you aren't forced to think about it. If you do a STEM degree at least you will have heard of stuff and practiced a load of otherwise obscure topics, giving you a starting point that isn't years behind on prerequisites, and leaving you where you won't know what's interesting.
I've met plenty of STEM people who knew a thing or two about history, economics, and the arts. It's relatively rare the other way round, though you do get the occasional renaissance man from that side.
That being said, I also notice that a lot of my STEM colleagues look down on creatives and humanities, which is really unfortunate. It's not about one being better than the other, they both have very useful things to teach.
Did you do a humanities degree and a cs degree? I did a psychology degree then went back to school later to get my cs degree.
The intellectual rigor just isn't there in any humanities classes because most of the students shouldn't be in college at all. Yes, there was a small handful of really smart people in psychology but most of the students were there to party for 4-5 years while their parents paid for it.
One of the hardest but most rewarding classes I took in college was creative writing. There's not a ton of "rigor" to that; a lot of it is really subjective, and even with the widely agreed upon rules, there are certainly times when it's useful to break them. But I learned a ton from that class all the same.
> I've met plenty of STEM people who knew a thing or two about history, economics, and the arts. It's relatively rare the other way round, though you do get the occasional renaissance man from that side.
most interested people can read pop-history, pop-econ, etc. type books and sound pretty knowledgeable in casual discussions, but all they are really learning is how to parrot a couple popular authors' opinions. I think the real observation here is that humanities are much easier to "bullshit" about than something like math, where it actually has to make sense within a rigorous framework.
I would argue that the type of deep dives into original documents that you do in a humanities degree is actually quite difficult. to do this type of learning well is no easier than learning STEM topics, imo.
1. Graduates with any degree earn more money and have less unemployment. No doubt true, but how do you discount selection bias here? Given that it's on average the smarter / more diligent part of the population that goes to university a better question would be what's the value add of university (and then break down by faculty / degree)? Maybe their employment rate is higher due to the necessity of having to pay off their tuition fees :)
2. Some humanities people are successful. No doubt. Plenty of smart motivated folks take humanities subjects so it's not surprising that some of them are successful but I'd like to see some data on expected return across the board rather than cherry picked examples. Wildly successful people might be outliers anyway. Also if you're from a wealthy background you could probably do anything and still have a shot at being a CEO.
3. Most examples of jobs for humanities graduates given in the article are not really graduate jobs, e.g. after sales support for Uber (do you really need a degree for that?). Management roles perhaps, but the article doesn't delve into those jobs, presumably there was some sort of vocational experience involved before they were managers?
4. Critical thinking skills. I'm not convinced that humanities degrees do lead to better critical thinking skills. I am biased but it seems to me Maths and hard science subjects would hone your critical thinking much more (isolating variables, logic, understanding complex material) and it's not like Science grads don't read books on other subjects. The author demonstrates a complete lack of critical thinking skills IMO.
5. Understanding of statistics seems like a pretty valuable tool to bring to most occupations and it would be nice if journalists had that and I doubt you get that from Humanities.
6. Empathy? Seriously? You need a degree to develop empathy?
The classes you were "required to take" likely were intro classes with large enrollments. What you describe is how many intro science classes are taught at many universities as well. And even many second year science classes. It is generally only in the 300-400 level classes that are within your major that you start to have small sections with more intimate interaction with the professor.
My liberal arts classes required lots of writing and a hell a lot of hard thinking.
I still think it's pragmatic advice to avoid (or at least consider carefully) spending 150k on an english degree from a private school, but that's not due to any bias against english as an academic discipline - it's more about how much college costs and how debt constrains future choices.
-- John Adams (in a letter to Abigail)
It isn't surprising that a generation who successfully fought a war of revolution against a royalty of "divine" right would have a millenarian bent, but that doesn't mean that we should believe them. In fact, it might be telling that this pithy narrative is found in a private letter to his wife rather than in his more intentionally public works. In every generation, there will be those who find poetry boring and politics exciting. The rest of us must maintain constant vigilance against those scourges on humanity.
From personal observations, it seems that students are becoming more and more focused on practical skills development. I would also say this seems to be the prevalent viewpoint on HN. But it is hard to deny the enormous benefits that a liberal arts education can have.
I have a background in the hard sciences, but I would say I owe the heart of my education to the many humanities electives that I took as an undergrad. I can only hope that the pendulum swings back at some point.
When people quote Silicon Valley stars like Reid Hoffman (philosophy, Stanford and Oxford) and Benedict Evans (history, Cambridge) look at the school too.
Communicating clearly, and thinking systemically are very important. I’m just not convinced that most colleges and universities teach those anymore. The people who have it get it elsewhere.
Personally I’m a little worried about ageism, something that doesn’t even enter the mind space of any of my friends with degrees in the humanities.
So maybe there is something to it. I mean, they had much harder times finding jobs than me, and aren’t rigoursly headhunted, but every one of them found jobs.
I don't think you can draw a meaningful conclusion from this, other than the idea that it's easier to demonstrate competence in tech versus humanities.
If someone asks you to demonstrate your programming ability, you can point them to something you threw up on GitHub. If someone asks you for a critical analysis of Chaucer, Sein und Zeit or the death of Franz Ferdinand, what are you going to do? A degree is expected in the absence of any clear and demonstrable competency.
I'm not sure how you define the reverse, but Amazon's head of HR majored in electrical engineering. I would say that's a traditionally liberal arts job with someone who majored in tech.
I see a lot of posts showing anecdotes. There’s enough real data out there that we don’t have to depend on anecdotes.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/news/college-de...
One problem is that your three requests are somewhat at odds. Collaboration works against creativity and critical thinking in my experience because of pressure to conform to the group, or find ideas acceptable to the group. Being truly creative requires exploring ideas that might not pan out, or which are a bit off the beaten path. Group work also increases the cost of the work which can change the cost/benefit analysis.
When I look at my own life, arguing with people on the internet has been far better for my own critical thinking skills than the humanities lectures I attended at university were. The latter were entirely useless.
Close to 20 years later, the foundation from those business courses and learning how to write/communicate has done more for my career than any of the CS and math.
I thought I was making a mistake choosing that degree path over CS; but CS was making me miserable with the crazy workload — which ended up being a bunch of busy work that got abstracted away by new languages / frameworks by the time we all graduated (we started in a world of esoteric mainframe architectures, C++ and perl and ended in a world of java, php and python so to be fair a LOT changed). But I don’t regret the philosophy degree at all.
Didn't you have to do a load of reading/essays in the philosophy course?
I eventually learned I have ADHD, which definitely explained why I couldn't keep up with the reading and writing workload in the philosophy and literature courses.
Once you get to Nietzsche, the readings actually started to get interesting and I found myself wanting to read and discuss them.
just a quick sampling of some stuff I did in my CS major:
* wrote a Pascal compiler from scratch
* implemented a variation of FAT32 in the linux kernel
* implemented a simple pipelined MIPS arch in vhdl
* benchmarked different versions of a parallel algorithm on a HPC cluster to see how it scaled on core count
* implemented lots of data structures in c++
some of that stuff applies directly to the work I do now. I landed a good c++ gig straight out of college, and I really appreciate all the tough c++ projects we had to do in school. amusingly the Pascal compiler also turned out to be relevant, as I now help maintain a compiler for a proprietary dialect of Pascal at work. the cpu arch, HPC, and linux stuff isn't directly applicable to my work, but the linux project was a good exposure to working in a large codebase.
not everything in a CS major is going to be directly applicable to your career, but a good program will give you strong foundations for any specialty you branch into later.
It is not easy to learn the humanities without direct feedback from an expert, or robust experience with your peers.
To be good at something subjective, you need help from others.
What? Mathematics is both a STEM major and a liberal arts major now? I digress.
But few courses of study are quite as heavy on reading, writing, speaking and critical thinking as the liberal arts
There is no evidence that any particular university major produces more gains in critical thinking skills over any other. Additionally, there is no evidence that critical thinking skills gained in university persist after graduation [1].
And while there’s often an assumption that the careers humanities graduates pursue just aren’t as good as the jobs snapped up by, say, engineers or medics, that isn’t the case. In Australia, for example, three of the 10 fastest-growing occupations are sales assistants, clerks, and advertising, public relations and sales managers – all of which might look familiar as fields that humanities graduates tend to pursue.
What? A sales assistant is someone who works the floor at a retail store. Is the author really trying to say that a retail job is as good as an engineering job? Wow.
We also know that as more women move into a field, the field’s overall earnings go down. Given that, is it any wonder that English majors, seven in 10 of whom are women, tend to make less than engineers, eight in 10 of whom are men?
It took a while to get here, but we've finally arrived. There's a correlation between men leaving a field and average earnings in that field declining. Has she not considered reverse causation? Research indicates that men prioritize earnings growth more than women [2]. It seems entirely more convincing to me that men depart a field due to the decline in earnings, not that greedy employers see women and think "cheap labour."
This speaks to a broader point: the whole question of whether a student should choose Stem versus the humanities, or a vocational course versus a liberal arts degree, might be misguided to begin with. It’s not as if most of us have an equal amount of passion and aptitude for, say, accounting and art history. Plenty of people know what they love most. They just don’t know if they should pursue it. And the headlines most of us see don’t help.
A somewhat ambivalent conclusion to a troubled piece. The reality is that people really do agonize over the decision between pursuing their passion and looking for the best economic opportunity. Not everyone who completes a liberal arts degree can get a nice job blogging for the BBC. Tons and tons of them end up severely underemployed, usually in retail or low-level office positions. It's irresponsible to tell people anything other than the reality of this situation. Trying to convince them to just go for the "worthless" degree, despite these economic realities, is unfair and unhelpful.
[1] http://www.johnnietfeld.com/uploads/2/2/6/0/22606800/huber_k...
> And while there’s often an assumption that the careers humanities graduates pursue just aren’t as good as the jobs snapped up by, say, engineers or medics, that isn’t the case. In Australia, for example, three of the 10 fastest-growing occupations are sales assistants, clerks, and advertising, public relations and sales managers – all of which might look familiar as fields that humanities graduates tend to pursue.
Sales assistants and clerks are pretty dull sounding jobs. the fact that humanities people pursue them and that they're available does not mean this is good for humanities people.
This paragraph was similarly dumb
> We also know that as more women move into a field, the field’s overall earnings go down. Given that, is it any wonder that English majors, seven in 10 of whom are women, tend to make less than engineers, eight in 10 of whom are men?
Female engineers make more than male humanities on average, according to the charts they linked to. It's definitely not a gender problem.
I've never bought the arguments for liberal arts. STEM degrees require plenty of critical thinking, argument formation, and learning to work with others. That's not to say you won't learn these things in humanities, but they're not special. They're a basic part of learning almost any subject that isn't rote memorization.
The article points out that you can make a humanities degree work, but I'm not convinced this is a meaningful way to look at it. What fraction of successful humanities majors should attribute their success to the fact that their degree was in humanities? Maybe just being a reasonably intelligent person with a college degree in anything is enough to be a successful person.
The article talks about salaries too. Overall humanities majors make less, but for some jobs they make more. That's probably not a good way to think about it either. Of course people who study pre-law are, on average, going to make less doing law. The law firms fill out their lowest positions from the masses of pre-law students. Taking an alternate path into something means you're more likely to be doing something special or having connections to a good gig.
For the most part, I don't see your undergrad major driving a significant portion of your capabilities, regardless of what it is. Humanities doesn't have an obvious job market they signal baseline competence towards. That doesn't make them bad, but it also doesn't mean we need to create stories about why they compensate for this.
1) On average humanities majors do worse
2) Some proportion of humanities majors do great
Ergo, it seems unlikely that the humanities majors that do great do so because they studied humanities. There is little evidence that these assumptions of attribution make sense.
That doesn't mean they're bad, but people are typically terrible at explaining why they were successful in life and we don't need to justify these areas of study to existing market forces. It would be pragmatic to be realistic and communicate to the average person that, normalized to network effects, pre-existing wealth, and baseline prestige of the institution, humanities leads to worse economic outcomes. People studying humanities tend to be richer to begin with[1], the fact that they do economically worse on average should be surprising. They're also more likely to be underemployed[2].
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/college...
[2]https://www.statista.com/statistics/642226/underemployment-r...