The humanities are in crisis - Students are abandoning humanities majors, turning to degrees they think yield far better job prospects. But they’re wrong.
While I agree with this article's concern I think it misses the point by attempting to justify the humanities in terms of job prospects. See this post I shared from a couple weeks ago. The...
While I agree with this article's concern I think it misses the point by attempting to justify the humanities in terms of job prospects. See this post I shared from a couple weeks ago. The question people should be asking is not "how can I get a job with this degree?" but "why is my choice of study shaped by fear of future economic difficulty?".
The question people should be asking is not "how can I get a job with this degree?" but "why is my choice of study shaped by fear of future economic difficulty?".
I guess we really just do live in a time where economic anxiety is so strong for so many people that they cannot afford to think of their education along lines other then an investment in future...
I guess we really just do live in a time where economic anxiety is so strong for so many people that they cannot afford to think of their education along lines other then an investment in future economic stability
I find the conclusion reached here fairly off—this is just mindless speculation, and speculation you can wave off just as easily as waved on. The author bases their entire argument on "These...
I find the conclusion reached here fairly off—this is just mindless speculation, and speculation you can wave off just as easily as waved on.
The author bases their entire argument on "These degrees pay off more than you'd expect and people don't because they're told they don't!" He's making up their argument in lieu of them.
2008 was when cellular devices with actual net access came into affordability for the vast majority of Americans, and along with it, internet access. Millions of pieces of information available for the average American for the first time, quite literally at their fingertips.
Why get a degree in a subject that you can learn entirely from pirated books and streamed talks? That doesn't make a tonne of sense to me—anyone else? I suppose if you want to go into academia...but wait, academia is in general soul sucking if you're going to try to life it.
The average person's response would likely be more like "No thanks," than "I wish."
One could say the same thing about the STEM subjects. Of course, in both cases, you're still missing the aspect of someone teaching you: what's important, what perspective(s) to apply, how to...
Why get a degree in a subject that you can learn entirely from pirated books and streamed talks?
One could say the same thing about the STEM subjects. Of course, in both cases, you're still missing the aspect of someone teaching you: what's important, what perspective(s) to apply, how to synthesise a clutter of heterogeneous facts into useful knowledge.
I suppose if you want to go into academia...
While you're contradicting the author's argument, your response is based on exactly the same argument he's making. You're assuming that there is no reason to study the humanities except to acquire "pieces of information" which are useful only in academia - and, by implication, which are not useful in the real world. That's the same motive that the author is applying to the many college applicants who are avoiding the humanities: they believe that the knowledge gained from the humanites has no benefit to them in the real world, and they need to choose either STEM or business courses to benefit them.
STEM implies research. Research requires funding requires someone to fund it. Very few humanities require actual research. Untrue. My argument was that you can go into the vast majority of fields...
One could say the same thing about the STEM subjects. Of course, in both cases, you're still missing the aspect of someone teaching you: what's important, what perspective(s) to apply, how to synthesise a clutter of heterogeneous facts into useful knowledge.
STEM implies research. Research requires funding requires someone to fund it.
Very few humanities require actual research.
While you're contradicting the author's argument, your response is based on exactly the same argument he's making. You're assuming that there is no reason to study the humanities except to acquire "pieces of information" which are useful only in academia - and, by implication, which are not useful in the real world. That's the same motive that the author is applying to the many college applicants who are avoiding the humanities: they believe that the knowledge gained from the humanites has no benefit to them in the real world, and they need to choose either STEM or business courses to benefit them.
Untrue. My argument was that you can go into the vast majority of fields in the humanities without a degree relevant to the field. I made no comment on reasons to study the humanities; just that you can do it for free, gaining every bit of relevant knowledge in them. The implication isn't that it's not useful in the real world; it's that the humanities don't require a college degree outside of academia.
Some of the humanities are almost pure research! Historians study all sorts of artefacts, from tools to teeth, to understand how people lived in the past. Linguists get out and listen to people,...
Very few humanities require actual research.
Some of the humanities are almost pure research! Historians study all sorts of artefacts, from tools to teeth, to understand how people lived in the past. Linguists get out and listen to people, record them speak, gather documents, even investigate pictures on walls, to understand how people speak. Theologians are part researchers and part logicians. Philosophers do their research in their minds (kind of like mathematicians), figuring out how people think. Research is a pretty large part of what humanists do, with the aim of adding to the sum of human knowledge about... well... humans.
The unfortunate thing is that, in our capitalist paradigm, it's extremely hard to put an economic value on "human knowledge", so humanists find that the only institutions which will pay them are institutions which collect and distribute human knowledge: educational institutions.
Let's not forget the Archeologists and Geographers doing fieldwork for days, weeks, if not months on end. Fieldwork which makes advances possible not just in their own domain but sometimes those...
Let's not forget the Archeologists and Geographers doing fieldwork for days, weeks, if not months on end. Fieldwork which makes advances possible not just in their own domain but sometimes those of others as well.
Strictly speaking, geography is a social science or a physical science, depending on whether it's looking at human geography or physical geography. Archaeology is a grey area. Some people think...
Strictly speaking, geography is a social science or a physical science, depending on whether it's looking at human geography or physical geography.
Archaeology is a grey area. Some people think it's part of history, which makes it part of the humanities, but other people think it's part of anthropology, which is one of the social sciences.
But, that's just pedantry. Either way, they're not STEM or business subjects, and are part of the social science + humanities streams.
Plenty of domains in the Humanities require research, just not the exact same kind of research you might expect a biology or a physics student to perform. But the notion that "very few humanities...
Plenty of domains in the Humanities require research, just not the exact same kind of research you might expect a biology or a physics student to perform. But the notion that "very few humanities require research" is either just incorrect or based on a very limited definition of what does or does not constitute research.
And I think Algernon is right: many of the STEM fields people flock to don't actually produce researchers, because if you're getting a degree in order to get a job you're probably not going to eyeball the limited amount of research positions available at either a University or even a large company that can afford to have a dedicated R&D department. The market demands more programmers, engineers, and people with soft skills. All of those you can very much just learn from online courses.
I got a degree in philosophy before going back to do computer science. I often say that the philosophy course was just as, if not more useful as CompSci and people generally can't fathom why -...
Why get a degree in a subject that you can learn entirely from pirated books and streamed talks? That doesn't make a tonne of sense to me—anyone else? I suppose if you want to go into academia...but wait, academia is in general soul sucking if you're going to try to life it.
I got a degree in philosophy before going back to do computer science. I often say that the philosophy course was just as, if not more useful as CompSci and people generally can't fathom why - normally offering a response like 'lol did they teach you how to flip burgers?'. Quite devoid from the things that you individually study (some of which is important, some of which is just intellectual masturbation), what philosophy courses - or at least, good philosophy courses - will teach you is intellectual rigour and more broadly how to think and reason about things. That might sound like a hand-wavy justification, but I believe it to be true of philosophy in a way that is not the case in the vast number of other disciplines I took electives in.
As for the careers thing, I largely agree. There are some positions that require a background in philosophy (e.g. ethics committees for hospitals), but in most cases all the degree will give you is tools that may assist you with other endeavours if you choose to apply them. Eventually deciding that I didn't want to go into academia (I was seriously considering postgrad Logic for a while) was why I went back fro another degree. Some days I feel like I wasted a few years of my life as I've delayed the start of my career by the same period in return for higher government debt, but were I to go back and study CompSci from the start I really do think I'd be worse off for not having those skills I picked up in Phil.
Most of my degree is in philosophy and it's the most useful thing I've ever learned. Learning how to think is much more important that what things to think about. People who were on my course...
Most of my degree is in philosophy and it's the most useful thing I've ever learned. Learning how to think is much more important that what things to think about.
People who were on my course currently work in fields as diverse as database admins, teachers, business execs, writers, startups/entrepreneurs, management, advertising and more. I've had a number of jobs including design, programming, writing and more. My, admittedly anecdotal, experience is that philosophy grads tend to be highly adaptable and - apart from situations where specialist knowledge is required (I'm sure I read somewhere that only around 25% of jobs actually need a relevant degree, like medicine or similar) - can do just about any job.
Sort of related to that, I was on a programming team with a civil engineer, a philosopher-turned-monk, an astrophysicist and a couple of comp-sci graduates. The comp-sci guys were by far the least adaptable - it's not that they were bad at their job, but they couldn't think outside the lines they'd been taught in. The number of times someone said "oh, this is like X problem, we can do Y to solve it" where X was something to do with the shear strength of concrete or a way of measuring the mass of a star or whatever.
It made little sense when the middle class was still doing fine and makes even less sense now that we have an Internet. Very few people can make lucrative careers out of what are essentially...
Why get a degree in a subject that you can learn entirely from pirated books and streamed talks? That doesn't make a tonne of sense to me—anyone else?
It made little sense when the middle class was still doing fine and makes even less sense now that we have an Internet. Very few people can make lucrative careers out of what are essentially hobbies. Work has always been work and loving what you do for a living has always been the exception. Why people think that would be less true these days is a mystery.
Loving what you do for a living is not necessarily 'the exception', that's just way too bleak a worldview. It may ring true for things like living of Art/Media creation but plenty of people love...
Loving what you do for a living is not necessarily 'the exception', that's just way too bleak a worldview. It may ring true for things like living of Art/Media creation but plenty of people love studying law or interacting with other humans and can find gainful employment as legal advisors, social workers, or HR people.
More importantly whether or not people feel fulfilled and happy in their work is not just dependent on their choice of study but far more on the actual place they're working in. I loved being a programmer for a living, but I didn't like the last placed I worked at and decided not to stay. I can still do what I love (or maybe "like" is a better term) for a living but I'm not going to gel with every single company who will hire me.
It'd probably more accurate to state that it's common to have to do a job you don't enjoy or for which you didn't study because you need to get by.
There is a definite push for people wanting stability to go into certain fields, with STEMs being relatively high on the list. And out of that an impression that STEMs will earn more. I'm an...
There is a definite push for people wanting stability to go into certain fields, with STEMs being relatively high on the list. And out of that an impression that STEMs will earn more.
Why get a degree in a subject that you can learn entirely from pirated books and streamed talks? That doesn't make a tonne of sense to me—anyone else? I suppose if you want to go into academia...but wait, academia is in general soul sucking if you're going to try to life it.
I'm an engineer. I know other engineers, me included, that did spend a couple days trying to learn entire classes worth of material so we can drop it on our resumes when we saw them listed as job requirements, and muddle our way through an interview. It worked for a lot of us, but there's no way we can pretend that's anywhere near equivalent to having actually taken the class.
My first (failed) attempt at tertiary education was a degree in business, because that's where my parents steered me to combine my known talents with the perceived ability to earn money. My second...
My first (failed) attempt at tertiary education was a degree in business, because that's where my parents steered me to combine my known talents with the perceived ability to earn money. My second (successful) attempt at tertiary education was a post-graduate diploma in the computer science area, because that aligned with my talents and my desire to get into a certain career.
These days, if I had the opportunity, I'd go back and do a humanities-related course: whether history, or the performing arts, or literature, or philosophy, or some combination of these (and others). As I've grown older, I've learned that this is where my true interest lies. My talents might be skewed towards the mathematical, the logical, and the scientific, but my interests are skewed towards the humanistic, the historic, and the artistic. I think it's no coincidence that when I entered the IT industry, I did so as a Business Analyst: the softer, more human-focussed end of IT. This combined my analytical talents with my humanistic interests.
EDIT: Even the science fiction I like tends to be social science fiction, with a focus on the cultural effects of technology, or on advances in the social sciences. When I'm watching Star Trek, I'm focussing more on the alien cultures and the politics than the starships and the technology. I had never made this connection until just now.
Do a startup, sell it, and then do what Paul Graham did—go to art school! ...he also got a philosophy degree in there somewhere. ......in general the man's insanely productive so maybe this isn't...
Do a startup, sell it, and then do what Paul Graham did—go to art school!
...he also got a philosophy degree in there somewhere.
......in general the man's insanely productive so maybe this isn't "general" advice.
I'm far from a post-doc! Here in Australia, we have under-graduate qualifications, then post-graduate qualifications. These qualifications are: Under-graduate: Certificate (1 year of study)...
you're both CompSci post-docs
I'm far from a post-doc! Here in Australia, we have under-graduate qualifications, then post-graduate qualifications. These qualifications are:
Under-graduate:
Certificate (1 year of study)
Diploma (2 years)
Bachelor degree (3 years)
Post-graduate:
Graduate Certificate (+1 year of study, after completing a Bachelor's degree)
Graduate Diploma (+2 years)
Masters degree (+3 years)
Then you get into doctorate studies.
I have only a Graduate Diploma - one step down from a Master's degree. I don't qualify to even start a doctorate based on that.
I didn't reread, ahaha! I thought you said post-doc, it didn't seem right even then, but I didn't want to go back into the thread and out of my inbox to double check. I need to start double...
I didn't reread, ahaha! I thought you said post-doc, it didn't seem right even then, but I didn't want to go back into the thread and out of my inbox to double check. I need to start double checking, ha. Post-grads are roughly the same in NA to my knowledge.
(It's kinda late and I'm in a vaguely manic state so I'm just kind of going with the flow in terms of communication.)
I tried to wedge bits and pieces of a classic liberal-arts curriculum into an engineering degree, got laughed out of the advisor's office too many times, and switched to biochemistry instead....
I tried to wedge bits and pieces of a classic liberal-arts curriculum into an engineering degree, got laughed out of the advisor's office too many times, and switched to biochemistry instead.
While neither the humanities nor the STEM program was especially marketable in itself, there's no question that every piece of it has come in handy in some form, and that I have cross-domain knowledge which made me more employable, rather than less.
As to philosophy, anyone who's encountered Natalie Wynn ContraPoints can recognize that you need an effective analytical framework to counter bad reasoning. Having more frameworks of understanding (philosophy), precise language (English, here) and data (history, economics, anthropology, etc.) are useful in every occupation and for the purpose of being a better, more engaged citizen.
The purpose of education, even in the age of freely available information, is to counter the "you don't know what you don't know" problem. You may have the syllabus in hand and all the reading done, but it's the give-and-take with an instructor and other students which helps to expose gaps and creates the foundation for further development.
Reading the arguments of the alt-right trolls (the brighter of whom seem to be monofocused programmers), it's evident that some broader context might have immunized them against their infatuation with narrow hates.
While I agree with this article's concern I think it misses the point by attempting to justify the humanities in terms of job prospects. See this post I shared from a couple weeks ago. The question people should be asking is not "how can I get a job with this degree?" but "why is my choice of study shaped by fear of future economic difficulty?".
Excellent point!
I guess we really just do live in a time where economic anxiety is so strong for so many people that they cannot afford to think of their education along lines other then an investment in future economic stability
Lack of respect and territorialism between areas of study is toxic and prevalent in my experience.
It's a shame.
I find the conclusion reached here fairly off—this is just mindless speculation, and speculation you can wave off just as easily as waved on.
The author bases their entire argument on "These degrees pay off more than you'd expect and people don't because they're told they don't!" He's making up their argument in lieu of them.
2008 was when cellular devices with actual net access came into affordability for the vast majority of Americans, and along with it, internet access. Millions of pieces of information available for the average American for the first time, quite literally at their fingertips.
Why get a degree in a subject that you can learn entirely from pirated books and streamed talks? That doesn't make a tonne of sense to me—anyone else? I suppose if you want to go into academia...but wait, academia is in general soul sucking if you're going to try to life it.
The average person's response would likely be more like "No thanks," than "I wish."
One could say the same thing about the STEM subjects. Of course, in both cases, you're still missing the aspect of someone teaching you: what's important, what perspective(s) to apply, how to synthesise a clutter of heterogeneous facts into useful knowledge.
While you're contradicting the author's argument, your response is based on exactly the same argument he's making. You're assuming that there is no reason to study the humanities except to acquire "pieces of information" which are useful only in academia - and, by implication, which are not useful in the real world. That's the same motive that the author is applying to the many college applicants who are avoiding the humanities: they believe that the knowledge gained from the humanites has no benefit to them in the real world, and they need to choose either STEM or business courses to benefit them.
STEM implies research. Research requires funding requires someone to fund it.
Very few humanities require actual research.
Untrue. My argument was that you can go into the vast majority of fields in the humanities without a degree relevant to the field. I made no comment on reasons to study the humanities; just that you can do it for free, gaining every bit of relevant knowledge in them. The implication isn't that it's not useful in the real world; it's that the humanities don't require a college degree outside of academia.
EDIT: italics added to highlight something.
Some of the humanities are almost pure research! Historians study all sorts of artefacts, from tools to teeth, to understand how people lived in the past. Linguists get out and listen to people, record them speak, gather documents, even investigate pictures on walls, to understand how people speak. Theologians are part researchers and part logicians. Philosophers do their research in their minds (kind of like mathematicians), figuring out how people think. Research is a pretty large part of what humanists do, with the aim of adding to the sum of human knowledge about... well... humans.
The unfortunate thing is that, in our capitalist paradigm, it's extremely hard to put an economic value on "human knowledge", so humanists find that the only institutions which will pay them are institutions which collect and distribute human knowledge: educational institutions.
Let's not forget the Archeologists and Geographers doing fieldwork for days, weeks, if not months on end. Fieldwork which makes advances possible not just in their own domain but sometimes those of others as well.
Strictly speaking, geography is a social science or a physical science, depending on whether it's looking at human geography or physical geography.
Archaeology is a grey area. Some people think it's part of history, which makes it part of the humanities, but other people think it's part of anthropology, which is one of the social sciences.
But, that's just pedantry. Either way, they're not STEM or business subjects, and are part of the social science + humanities streams.
Plenty of domains in the Humanities require research, just not the exact same kind of research you might expect a biology or a physics student to perform. But the notion that "very few humanities require research" is either just incorrect or based on a very limited definition of what does or does not constitute research.
And I think Algernon is right: many of the STEM fields people flock to don't actually produce researchers, because if you're getting a degree in order to get a job you're probably not going to eyeball the limited amount of research positions available at either a University or even a large company that can afford to have a dedicated R&D department. The market demands more programmers, engineers, and people with soft skills. All of those you can very much just learn from online courses.
I got a degree in philosophy before going back to do computer science. I often say that the philosophy course was just as, if not more useful as CompSci and people generally can't fathom why - normally offering a response like 'lol did they teach you how to flip burgers?'. Quite devoid from the things that you individually study (some of which is important, some of which is just intellectual masturbation), what philosophy courses - or at least, good philosophy courses - will teach you is intellectual rigour and more broadly how to think and reason about things. That might sound like a hand-wavy justification, but I believe it to be true of philosophy in a way that is not the case in the vast number of other disciplines I took electives in.
As for the careers thing, I largely agree. There are some positions that require a background in philosophy (e.g. ethics committees for hospitals), but in most cases all the degree will give you is tools that may assist you with other endeavours if you choose to apply them. Eventually deciding that I didn't want to go into academia (I was seriously considering postgrad Logic for a while) was why I went back fro another degree. Some days I feel like I wasted a few years of my life as I've delayed the start of my career by the same period in return for higher government debt, but were I to go back and study CompSci from the start I really do think I'd be worse off for not having those skills I picked up in Phil.
Most of my degree is in philosophy and it's the most useful thing I've ever learned. Learning how to think is much more important that what things to think about.
People who were on my course currently work in fields as diverse as database admins, teachers, business execs, writers, startups/entrepreneurs, management, advertising and more. I've had a number of jobs including design, programming, writing and more. My, admittedly anecdotal, experience is that philosophy grads tend to be highly adaptable and - apart from situations where specialist knowledge is required (I'm sure I read somewhere that only around 25% of jobs actually need a relevant degree, like medicine or similar) - can do just about any job.
Sort of related to that, I was on a programming team with a civil engineer, a philosopher-turned-monk, an astrophysicist and a couple of comp-sci graduates. The comp-sci guys were by far the least adaptable - it's not that they were bad at their job, but they couldn't think outside the lines they'd been taught in. The number of times someone said "oh, this is like X problem, we can do Y to solve it" where X was something to do with the shear strength of concrete or a way of measuring the mass of a star or whatever.
It made little sense when the middle class was still doing fine and makes even less sense now that we have an Internet. Very few people can make lucrative careers out of what are essentially hobbies. Work has always been work and loving what you do for a living has always been the exception. Why people think that would be less true these days is a mystery.
Loving what you do for a living is not necessarily 'the exception', that's just way too bleak a worldview. It may ring true for things like living of Art/Media creation but plenty of people love studying law or interacting with other humans and can find gainful employment as legal advisors, social workers, or HR people.
More importantly whether or not people feel fulfilled and happy in their work is not just dependent on their choice of study but far more on the actual place they're working in. I loved being a programmer for a living, but I didn't like the last placed I worked at and decided not to stay. I can still do what I love (or maybe "like" is a better term) for a living but I'm not going to gel with every single company who will hire me.
It'd probably more accurate to state that it's common to have to do a job you don't enjoy or for which you didn't study because you need to get by.
There is a definite push for people wanting stability to go into certain fields, with STEMs being relatively high on the list. And out of that an impression that STEMs will earn more.
I'm an engineer. I know other engineers, me included, that did spend a couple days trying to learn entire classes worth of material so we can drop it on our resumes when we saw them listed as job requirements, and muddle our way through an interview. It worked for a lot of us, but there's no way we can pretend that's anywhere near equivalent to having actually taken the class.
My first (failed) attempt at tertiary education was a degree in business, because that's where my parents steered me to combine my known talents with the perceived ability to earn money. My second (successful) attempt at tertiary education was a post-graduate diploma in the computer science area, because that aligned with my talents and my desire to get into a certain career.
These days, if I had the opportunity, I'd go back and do a humanities-related course: whether history, or the performing arts, or literature, or philosophy, or some combination of these (and others). As I've grown older, I've learned that this is where my true interest lies. My talents might be skewed towards the mathematical, the logical, and the scientific, but my interests are skewed towards the humanistic, the historic, and the artistic. I think it's no coincidence that when I entered the IT industry, I did so as a Business Analyst: the softer, more human-focussed end of IT. This combined my analytical talents with my humanistic interests.
EDIT: Even the science fiction I like tends to be social science fiction, with a focus on the cultural effects of technology, or on advances in the social sciences. When I'm watching Star Trek, I'm focussing more on the alien cultures and the politics than the starships and the technology. I had never made this connection until just now.
Do a startup, sell it, and then do what Paul Graham did—go to art school!
...he also got a philosophy degree in there somewhere.
......in general the man's insanely productive so maybe this isn't "general" advice.
Real life's a bit more complicated than that! ;)
(Well, it is for me.)
I was mainly just joking around because you're both CompSci post-docs from a field other than CompSci.
I'm far from a post-doc! Here in Australia, we have under-graduate qualifications, then post-graduate qualifications. These qualifications are:
Under-graduate:
Certificate (1 year of study)
Diploma (2 years)
Bachelor degree (3 years)
Post-graduate:
Graduate Certificate (+1 year of study, after completing a Bachelor's degree)
Graduate Diploma (+2 years)
Masters degree (+3 years)
Then you get into doctorate studies.
I have only a Graduate Diploma - one step down from a Master's degree. I don't qualify to even start a doctorate based on that.
I didn't reread, ahaha! I thought you said post-doc, it didn't seem right even then, but I didn't want to go back into the thread and out of my inbox to double check. I need to start double checking, ha. Post-grads are roughly the same in NA to my knowledge.
(It's kinda late and I'm in a vaguely manic state so I'm just kind of going with the flow in terms of communication.)
I tried to wedge bits and pieces of a classic liberal-arts curriculum into an engineering degree, got laughed out of the advisor's office too many times, and switched to biochemistry instead.
While neither the humanities nor the STEM program was especially marketable in itself, there's no question that every piece of it has come in handy in some form, and that I have cross-domain knowledge which made me more employable, rather than less.
As to philosophy, anyone who's encountered Natalie Wynn ContraPoints can recognize that you need an effective analytical framework to counter bad reasoning. Having more frameworks of understanding (philosophy), precise language (English, here) and data (history, economics, anthropology, etc.) are useful in every occupation and for the purpose of being a better, more engaged citizen.
The purpose of education, even in the age of freely available information, is to counter the "you don't know what you don't know" problem. You may have the syllabus in hand and all the reading done, but it's the give-and-take with an instructor and other students which helps to expose gaps and creates the foundation for further development.
Reading the arguments of the alt-right trolls (the brighter of whom seem to be monofocused programmers), it's evident that some broader context might have immunized them against their infatuation with narrow hates.