The End of the English Major

A nation devoted to poetry and porcelain isn’t sustainable.

And certainly he must have been aware of how cyclical history is versus a linear march towards artistic pursuits. The US since it’s inception has been involved in a significant war in nearly every decade. Post-Vietnam through the 1st Iraq war was one of the rare periods where a US citizen could have been of military age without a major hot war. Although the Cold War certainly brought it’s own level of fear.

If I could go back and do it all again, I don't think I would a CS major instead, even when taking the massively increased earning potential I would have had I entered the field straight out of college. My humanities classes gave me so much historical perspective on the world that shapes my outlook today, and I simply can't imagine living without that.

I also credit my humanities education with teaching me how to do research and "how to learn". I think it gave me a lot of the skills I used to teach myself coding and switch careers. I'm not certain it would have been as easy to do it the other way around -- learn CS in college and teach myself humanities later.

While I am glad I didn't spend the ~$32,000 CAD it would have cost to get an English degree, I do wish I'd enrolled in a CS/English double major to get the benefits of technical studies and a humanities education. I have realized that, while I like software, a corporate job is just a means to an end to what I really enjoy: shared experience and art.

On another note, I did make the mistake of paying $15,000 CAD/year for a software engineering degree compared to $8,000/year for a CS degree. Now, in my final year, I'm taking many of the same classes CS students take. I would warn anyone in the same position in Canada (or the US) to seriously compare the two curricula when making a decision.

I somehow found my way back into tech, and have spent a decade across several well-regarded tech giants and now a hedge fund. Throughout that journey, I've received consistent praise for my soft skills, which have generally surpassed those of my peers, and have allowed me to excel beyond where I would ever have gotten on raw technical talent. Those soft skills would likely never have developed without majoring in the humanities.

It's terribly sad to see the slow death of the humanities. Perhaps if more people read some Jonathan Swift, we'd be in a different world and the humanities would still thrive.

I have a degree in CS/Business.

I know all about ROI and balance sheets and database normalization and boolean logic.

However, I also read all kinds of things on my own, like Thucydides, Seutonius, Virgil, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Joyce; I study art history; I play guitar and piano; I'm learning Spanish; I'm a damn fine cook; I'm super into clothing and know fine clothing - a clothing connoisseur: I've been involved in politics. And a lot more.

The reality is reality - university is just too fucking expensive to fuck around with. Back in the day, in California, tuition was free, and when they increased it, it was still affordable. So anyone could take any type of major that they wished. But now is not then. No amount of wishing will change it.

However, at least in California, you can still get any degree you wish. Going to community college for 2 years is free if your family makes less than about $40K per year, and about $2,000 tuition if more. California State Universities is $5,742 tuition per year. So you can get undergrad courses out of the way for either $0 or $4,000 for 2 years, and $11,484 for California State University. For a total of $11,484 or $15,484 for a 4 year degree. This is only tuition, but you can zero out books and fees and room and board because they are going to be the approximately the same anywhere, unless if you go to high cost of living place like SF metro area, LA metro area, or San Diego metro area. But there's a lot of places like Bakersfield, Fresno, Chico, Humbolt that are a lot lower cost of living. Get a share rental apartment or house, get a part-time job and Bob's your uncle. But with $11K or $15K, you can pretty much get any degree you want. Any kind - English, sociology, whatever, it doesn't matter. You should be able to work part-time to pay for Cal State University tuition, and you can get a loan to help out with food and housing, but you can find a shared housing for $400-500 per month, so that's fucking cheap and might be able to have that part time job pay for that as well and graduate with very little debt.

$400/month in Chico - https://chico.craigslist.org/roo/d/chico-room-in-58-in-nord-...

$460 in Bakersfield - https://bakersfield.craigslist.org/roo/d/bakersfield-furnish...

$500 in Humboldt - https://humboldt.craigslist.org/roo/d/arcata-room-for-rent/7...

I'd say if you do one thing for your son, teach him how to comparison shop on everything. As you said, you went to "a shit school and far, far too much debt."

My first school was a private university, and was $4,500 per year, and that included tuition, room and board - 3 meals a day. That same school is now $60K per year for the same thing. So many private universities charge this much and it's fucked up. I went to school a long time ago. But I only went to that private university for one year before moving to California and going to community college and California State University to graduate for almost nothing - no outstanding debt.

Going to most private university is fucked. See what your public university costs, because, well, the public subsidizes it. I think small states like Vermont are fucked because they have a small population base that can't afford it, but not sure. If your public universities are too expensive, see what the requirements for becoming a California resident are, and move her for a year or two and work full time, then get a university degree with all the $$$ that you earned and saved. Or whatever other state you want to go to. Look at all the public school prices and residency requirements.

I don't know if this is correct or updated, but here's a list of public universities in all 50 states, you want to look at in-state tuition, because you have to move there and work for the amount of time before you get residency. As I suspected, Vermont is the highest. Fuck Vermont, if you live there, move. California is the least expensive. Move here, I live here, it's wonderful despite all you hear. Just go to a low cost of living area - California is huge and more than the large population centers.

But again, teach your kid to comparison shop on everything. Don't rush into purchases, any purchases, any money spent, including university.

Also, I had Uncles (non college) who worked selling carpets, worked in grocery stores who were able to afford a very nice life. They were able to put their children through college.

But since the early 80s, those jobs are now a race to the bottom. Now it seems you are hired only if you are pigeon holed into a specific career, and if that career path becomes obsolete, you are SOL.

In my day, a fair chunk of the English majors had it in mind to go to law school. A very few aspired to become professors, and some may actually have done so; but I don't remember any undergraduate peers who spoke of wanting an academic career.

Harvard's admission standards are seldom criticized for being too low. Though one might ask whether the struggling students were ones admitted on the basis of academic merit, vs. family connections...

"The Scarlet Latter" was an 11th grade book for me. I remember it being a typical difficulty level as other pre-20th century literature - reading and understanding it was work, but not unusually so.

A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.

My biggest complaint with old books is I want them to STFU and get to the point!

I recently did an MBA program (yes, pile on the hate) where the average student I worked with had a very hard time reading complex documents or stringing together sentences to form a coherent argument. They even struggled to read reports from consulting companies, which are full of pictures and written in very plain grammar, so I doubt most could tackle "Ulysses," "The Wasteland," or "The Scarlet Letter."

By the way, I think this is why the PG writing style is popular - it's very easy to understand the words and sentences, so you can convey an idea to a lot of people, albeit in a not-very-nuanced way. It also makes it fairly easy to write an argument - there is no flowery language around to distract you from the fact that you are saying nothing.

A lot of people attribute this to the fact that there are a lot of people who have English as a second language or speak a different dialect of English (Indian English is very common), but I'm not so sure. I have often found that many non-native speakers actually have larger vocabularies and a better understanding of grammar than typical native speakers.

Professors can't assume the students learned anything in high school, so it takes a few semesters just to get the students to a college level. A lot of students graduated with nothing more than a passing knowledge of their subject because they took so long just to catch up.

Many students in the US are working full-time while seeking their degree, so they don't have a ton of time to study or write papers. Most professors understand this and assign a less-demanding load.

Another factor that I strongly suspect but can't prove: You have to have a college degree for most jobs, so professors feel like they're hurting a student's future prospects when they give a bad grade.

Keep in mind I'm talking about state schools - I would expect Harvard to be better!

I think I approve of letting every kid take a crack at college. If they graduate high school, there should be a school somewhere that gives them a chance. The problem is that if they aren't ready, there's no place they can go. They can't go back to their old high school and demand to be taught what the teachers pretended to teach them. The best they can do is take remedial reading classes at the university, borrowing money to learn what their local schools were supposed to teach them for free.

Most (maybe all?) of the kids like this that my dad encountered came from rural schools where you have a similar range of preparedness and home situations that you see in an urban setting, but you only have enough kids the same age to fill one or two classrooms. A teacher can't personalize the curriculum for every single student, so a kid who falls significantly behind will, after a certain point, no longer receive a meaningful amount of instruction, because the curriculum that's appropriate for the bulk of the class is beyond what they can engage with. Schools that recognize the unfairness of failing a kid that they're not even teaching tend to pass these kids along from grade to grade and then graduate them, and it's hard to fault them for it. If you think of instructional level as a spectrum from remedial to advanced, rural schools only have the resources to cover the middle part of that spectrum where 90-95% of their students are. All they can do for the rest is give them an apology and a diploma.

In my experience English class was primarily about reading literature with the goal of teaching morals and values. There was very little information about the structure of the English language. I actually learned far more about grammar, syntax, articles, etc. through learning Spanish.

Luckily for me I competed in high school policy debate where I learned (the hard way, by losing a lot) how to assess text within the framework of constraints it implies, as well as how to challenge those specific constraints.

Lotta people can't do that and end either up being that person in a philosophy course going on a long, idiosyncratic rant that's based on word associations they're making, or just remain silent and merely endure the course for the credit.

Universities aren't what they used to be.

In the modern world everyone has access to college, no one is denied, and it has become a necessity to get a degree. Something as simple as running a daycare requires several degrees or credentials in order to be competitive. [1]

In short, today you must pay an exorbitant sum of time and money for credentials simply to have access to the labor market. [2]

[1] https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/certifica...

[2] https://www.thoughtco.com/indulgences-their-role-in-the-refo...

Yes, publishing and communications professions can be perfect for English majors.

But how many jobs vs how many applicants is the problem.

Of course the joke always was that he was majoring in English to teach future majors in English.

Any technical degree that doesn't include some sort of technical writing class is deficient IMO, and degree programs that get closer to needing to work with other people more than math should have stronger writing classes as well. So many adult americans can't read at a highschool level. It's an essential skill, and has been since society first developed written language.

Outside of education, there is a need for clear and well structured communication across every field. Copy writing/editing for marketing and sales campaigns, internal and external corporate communications, technical writing. These are all areas I've worked on with English majors.

I once spoke with a law professor who said that English majors often make the best lawyers. Their undergrad experience prepared them for the volume of reading, analysis and writing that is required to successfully complete a law degree.

Can you thrive in a job that requires an English degree (Writing, teaching English, publishing or the like)? Yes, but struggle is likely.

Can you, with (just a tiny bit of) creativity, find a job where the skills trained by an English degree (reading critically and writing effectively and effortlessly) are valuable? Absolutely. PR, marketing, law and many parts of the management world would suit anyone with those skills.

The engineering and science world has made everyone think that the only jobs for a degree have to closely match the degree from a subject perspective; they've forgotten that the goal of a liberal arts education is to train generalists with a set of skills that can be applied to a wide range of tasks.

I have two friends who did English at university. One (who started doing Geography and switched after a year) is an editor of a major (niche) national magazine. The other is a senior journalist at a national broadcaster.

How much their English degree is needed for those jobs is rather meaningless really, I suspect their tenures on the university newspaper (former) and radio station (latter) were more relevant, but they are happy.

I don't think you get an English degree with the idea that you'll use it to go into a particular career, but then degrees shouldn't be like that anyway in most subjects.

I know of English and Liberal Arts majors that are doing very well in tech fields doing work other than development: program management, developer relations, customer success, sales, marketing. Some in development too, just not as many.

The difference with those folks is that all of them kept a broad understanding of where they wanted their career to go, and allowed themselves to take on broader responsibilities and deeper challenges as time went on.

I think this has turned out to be an incredibly useful skill for me, much more than any algorithm I’ve learned. I learned out to read deeply and consider my words very carefully when I write. Programmers are not really engineers. What we do is applied logic, yes, but ultimately we’re writers, and we’re readers. We write code and documentation, and we read code and documentation. Most programmers don’t consider their audience when they write. They just write for the computer. But the most important audience of your code is your team, who has to read it. I wish most engineers had the English class I did. I think it would help them immensely.

That's a simple matter of fact. That's the reason these courses are plummeting in enrollment. The economy sucks.

Education for education's sake seems to have gone the way of the dodo bird. That's a sad state of affairs.

I studied business and computer science in college - that now pays the bills.

I study European History in my free time, and even with all the hundreds of books I have read and own, probably haven't spent $1000 on that 'interest'.

"You just spent 150 grand on an education you could have gotten for $1.50 in late fees at the public library." - quote from Good Will Hunting.

Marvel movies make tons of money, but do they have value as art? Do they really say anything or regurgitate quips and simple plots that could just as well come from ChatGPT?

From the opposite end, does a rogue artists self published book of avant garde poetry have much of a monetary value? Probably not, but it possibly has more original thought than the Marvel movies.

The starving artist trope has been around for a long time but the push for STEM coming from the cold war has devalued the average person's ability to make art to an all time low. We tell high schoolers that caring about literature or art will ensure they're destitute. We treat teachers and professors who continue teaching the arts like absolute trash, because its a field where the joy and personal value taken from the work allows the devaluation to continue because its still a worth while endeavor.

But hey, the stock market will go up forever so we'll never run out of Marvel slop.

Until you need a philosopher to help you solve a problem...

I'm definitely in the camp of, "All knowledge has value, no knowledge will ever go to waste if you find where it is needed".

English studies is like Philosophy in a way - it lets us turn a critical lens on ourselves, our past selves, and examine how we think and what we value. There's many applications for such knowledge.

Surely a more noble pursuit than building dark UI patterns into websites.

So I guess if we're talking about a utopia where all our food and clean drinking water and maintenance and every other essential service is perfectly automated with no need for human intervention, then sure. Pursue whatever you want. As it is, it makes more sense for people to pay for stuff that they find is generating some value. If your passion is producing something really good and people want it, they'll pay you. But that's not the case for most people.

Maybe that's what you mean by genuinely affluent society, and I'd agree one of those societies would not only allow people to pursue but reap the benefits of its populace pursuing those things.

However I don't think it's possible with the current incentives in place. While being educated and pursuing your interests are allowed and in some circles lauded, your basic needs being met far outweighs any other incentive any actor has.

Maybe we should focus on allowing building that society but I don't think that means in the current society we can even begin to pretend people are encouraged to pursue their interests at the costs of their basic needs being met.

I am not sure if everyone was pursuing their interests, certain degrees will be much more populous than others.

Many people do STEM, especially CS / SWE for money (which is fine), and affluent people do Arts degrees because they probably just want a degree.

Even if they do that and rack up the loans, they may go into the real world naively and end up not making it big. Ever.

I guess my thought is, there's something creating that desire or urgency too. As System of a Down put it, "Advertising causes need."

The real mystery is why non-credit Japanese taught by the same instructor in the same room using the same text and same syllabus on a different night of the week has a tuition of $45 but the for-credit class version of the same class is around $2K. I would guess the ivy league tuition equivalent of the same class would be $15K? The irony is the grads of all three expense levels are roughly equally skilled.