Don't knock the economic value of majoring in the liberal arts | Hacker News Reader

Don't knock the economic value of majoring in the liberal arts

brookings.edu

15 pointsjyunwai16 comments

One thing the article fails to mention are professional certifications and industry experience. I would speculate that the majority of those that make good money with a liberal arts degree are compensated primarily based on either their professional certifications and/or industry experience in whatever industry they have gone into.

If you graduate college with say a degree in Political Science or Literature and then go out and get a PMP (Project Manager Professional) certification and then find a good paying job after the fact, the reason you found good employment is most likely the result of the certification rather than the underlying degree.

A better comparison would be to compare folks that got a Liberal Arts Degree + a professional certification versus those that just got the professional certification. I would speculate that if you mapped those two data points out they would be very close together.

A comparison like that would call into question the value of that Liberal Arts degree. Even if you were to make more with a degree + cert/experience, what is the threshold that would justify the cost of the degree. If college was still affordable like it was in the 70's, 80's, and 90's then that threshold could still be low enough to justify the cost of the degree but these days with the skyrocketing price of college I'm not sure that it would still pencil out like that.

Why is it that American society automatically considers a field “useless” if it doesn’t produce massive economic value? Have we all been entirely brainwashed to maximize profit over everything else?

In this case it's because you spend a bunch of money you need to pay back and that burden is legitimately useless when you can use the internet to educate yourself for as little as 20 dollars a month. Also our entire economic system is based off of profit motives so it follows people would find that important in their lives.

Can anything really be learned online for $20 (or whatever cheap figure you want to put here)? What about artisan crafts? The arts?

I wonder what we’re losing as a society by placing all the focus on careers that one can qualify into as cheaply as possible, and which earn the most money.

Unfortunately people need money to survive so of course there will be focus on careers which earn them money. There are also numerous free resources and even college courses online for free if you'd like to know more about a given topic.

Arts and crafts don't really pay the bills either. There are of course creators who sell their artwork or crafts on marketplaces like Etsy but that's not really the same thing as a day job where you make 50k a year. I understand where you're going with this but reality is a bitch and people are forced to adapt.

IMHO I think the internet and the price of higher ed have changed the calculus of these types of degrees. If the price of college was the same as it was in the 80's and 90's (adjusted for inflation) then yeah I totally agree that a degree in those fields would be worth it to broaden your horizons, even if it doesn't provide massive economic value.

But with the price of higher ed rising exponentially, you now need some sort of economic justification for it, especially considering that you could get roughly the same education online for free.

It’s just sad, we used to think education made us free, but now it’s become so expensive that it’s sole purpose is to turn us into wage slaves of corporate America

It’s telling that one of the top complaints about college is that it doesn’t prepare students for the work force. It sounds like something they would say in 50s Soviet society - produce more educated labor to better the state!

As great as STEM is, one thing it does not do is cultivate the mind such that the student can participate in all facets of society competently. Not every problem can or should be viewed exclusively through the lens of science, hence the philosophical predicaments faced by American society today.

you can choose a variety of minors in your degree course, right?

You can, but once again comes back to time and money. Some degrees at some unis (esp in engineering) have no time for extra classes, unless you want to spend an extra semester or two in school. Which can get very costly, especially when many scholarships only support 4 years of study.

It's more the fact that it requires a big loan that must be repaid. The cost of education has gone up so much, this calculation has (I believe) become more important now.

As a working class American from a working class family, I consider a classical or liberal arts education a luxury for the idle rich. It's a status symbol to be an expert in romantic poetry or German literature but unable to get a job in an industry that would also allow your children to get such an education.

I didn't just make up this opinion -- it's a material fact of life in America. As an 18 year old from a working class family, you can make the choice to study for the pleasure of it, but this will almost certainly bring you misery after graduation, as you see that you will never have the means to pay off your massive student debt. You might get lucky and fall into some means of supporting yourself in your field, or you might get slightly less lucky and fall into some means of supporting yourself that is outside your field (I'm a history major making a decent living in IT/Software). Far more likely, you will start your career at some gig that requires any Bachelors degree just because that's an easy way to cut down the pile of resumes. If you're unlucky, you will be competing for the same jobs as recent high school graduates, except you'll be several years older and with a pile more debt than they have.

I'd love my daughter to have a liberal arts education, but not at the expense of being able to provide for herself.

> classical or liberal arts education a luxury for the idle rich

My understanding is that this is exactly the original meaning of the term 'liberal' in liberal arts. Liberal => free => not a servant => has time for leisure. The word 'school' has its origins in the word for leisure. Ideally, liberal arts are the set of skills appropriate for a free person in a democratic system. They should help this person learn to govern themselves, and by extension, each other.

But yes, a liberal arts education is expensive.

Edit: see also "Leisure: The Basis of Culture" by Josef Pieper

This is my understanding as well. I think the attitude of "these money-grubbing Americans don't care about history or poetry" comes from people who (fortunately, I don't begrudge them this) live in wealthier societies than the US (I obviously don't mean GDP or anything like that, but real societal wealth). It's basically a "let them eat cake" attitude from somebody out of touch with how harsh life in the US really is if you're not in the top quintile of income or wealth.

> Why is it that American society automatically considers a field “useless” if it doesn’t produce massive economic value?

That’s not what “useless” stands for here. The way I understand it, it stands for “useless for the purpose of being able to financially support myself and my family [compared to almost all other alternative degree choices]”.

No one is talking about “maximizing profit”, just “having a high likelihood of being able to live comfortably and feed my family”.

> I suspect that part of the political push to eliminate the humanities, especially from off-campus sources, is connected to the myth that the price of college has skyrocketed. In fact, the real price of college attendance has been falling modestly in recent years. Consequently, the share of undergraduates taking out student loans and the loan values are also down slightly.

Disingenuous nonsense. Price going up 1000% and then down 10% doesn't make it not "skyrocket".

Worthless article.

An economist should know that correlation doesn't imply causation.

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