Higher education in impractical subjects

[_Gadianton]

Overall, I'd say the problem is like anything in the future, it's a moving target. It's no different than asset pricing. If there was a great model for producing a person to fill a certain kind of job with returns above others working in the field then it would quickly turn into a crowded trade. Trade schools and night schools for business subjects are terrible in this regard and rip students off as much if not more than real universities. To say the government should take over (I realize you aren't saying this I'm just going down the path a lot of people do) and start making education work better for the real jobs out there is no different than saying the government should take over bread production. If you think it's bad now, just wait.

As a phenomena, I've wondered if the problem with education costs today is a result of outsourcing. Even the poorest kid on the bloc these days has two bikes, an i-phone, and 65" tv in his or her bedroom. So something has to absorb the money: land prices, education, and healthcare.

Even the straightforward skill theory might be bankrupt. Technology companies make a crap-ton of money off of training students in their technologies and go as far to mandate recertification every two years to keep the money flowing in, but there are few scenarios where any of these are worth the paper they're printed on. In what might be just a matter of luck, I can say that every coworker I've ever had who came into the present company with an active professional certification has either been fired or written up and quit within a couple years.

Another example as it's presumably a super hot field judging by the number of youtube videos and internet ads is so-called "data science." There are vocational schools churning out data scientists by the tens of thousands I presume, but it doesn't appear there's actually any real jobs available. Sure, I get it, one day everything will be automated, but today isn't quite that day. A friend of mine is a working data scientist and I've learned a little bit about it by looking for positions for him in companies I've worked for and there's just nothing. Maybe if he sells his big house and rents a room in Sunnyvale. He's doing fairly well now, he's a manager, but funny enough, struggling like crazy to find people who want to work. He has one employee with two masters degrees who can't finish anything.

If I could do it over again, now that I know that a great Classics program BYU has, I'd have majored in classics. That's your consumption theory I guess. But there is also the "cross-fertilization" theory. People bring in new ideas. I have this idea that in three years of dedication to something, you can pretty much say from there, how good you'll ever be. You can spend a hundred k going to business school and get a job corporate job and move into any given number of corporate quasi-exec type positions, but you could also go work at McDonalds, become a manager, and use your manager experience and apply for low-level corporate jobs and move up from there. One isn't better than the other, maybe your parents are rich and there can be a lot of good times in college, and there's some prestige with the degree I guess.

[_Symmachus]

A complex problem. In general, it's hard to improve on Gadianton's points, but I don't know, to be honest, whether there is any point to non-vocational work in universities and colleges once we've decided that their main function is job training. If that's our guiding assumption, then there isn't even much point teaching mass literacy beyond the very basics even in elementary and secondary school except to those who can and wish to go on to something where a high degree of literacy is necessary. Most people don't read much anyway, and when they do, they're not reading literature. Perhaps, then, we should expand our horizons when we're thinking about how much to limit the educational possibilities of individuals. Perhaps we need less Mark Twain in middle school and more refrigerator repair courses (not everyone will want to code!). We should probably cap our literacy requirement with a standardized test that asks to students to order from a menu, explain the meaning of road signs like "one way" and "exit 7," explain a "warning" label on a drug, name at least two ingredients on a salad dressing bottle, and finally being able to recognize their own names. Beyond that, there really isn't much point asking them to do any reading or writing, though if they do well enough on the test, maybe we can teach them how to write an email. Come to think of it, learning to color in the lines is a pretty useless skill as well, like learning to read novels, that you can learn any time on your own, so why waste those valuable years on pointless skills? We could be offering the rudiments of refrigerator repair to young children (and of course, coding) instead of wasting their time with crayons (who uses crayons anyway?).

You raise several good points but one very bad one:

2) The theory that it's worth majoring in English or Classics because on the way you learn how to read texts and write persuasively, and these are transferable skills that will be valuable in many careers. I think this theory was shot down by a blog comment I read once, which pointed out that since these skills are transferable they could be learned just as well by reading legal texts instead of old poems and writing business memos instead of critical essays. So why sacrifice practical knowledge in favor of poetry when you can get your valuable meta-skills either way?

I don't know that there is much point to English or Classics for the career-minded educationalists of our time, but that is just not true on a practical level. That is a blog comment of someone who has not done much writing and certainly not taught it. It is simply untrue that your average business major can compete with an English or humanities major when it comes to analyzing language and producing written material (those above average and below aren't relevant to the generality, obviously). It is the sort of thing that sounds good in the abstract but doesn't hold when one thinks about what "reading texts" and "writing persuasively" (or just writing in general) actually means in practice. What texts? Persuasively in what context?

Skilled writers are primarily skilled readers, and one becomes both by doing a lot of both. Business majors or engineering students or any technical field simply cannot get nearly enough of either, and what they do read and write in their fields is by definition specialized (the other field you mention, learning to read and write legal texts, is something you can do only after you've learned to write well enough in the first place—you think reading case law is something you can just start doing one day with no previous experience in analyzing language? Good luck). Supposing they did more business-reading and more business-writing (or whatever field), the genres are only going to get more arcane, less generalized, and therefore less transferable. There just isn't much you can learn in general about writing when the goals of that writing and the texts that meet those goals are so narrowly defined. That kind of writing is about imitating templates, not analyzing texts and language. There is nothing wrong with that per se—that generic uniformity is essential within that domain, but it's not useful if you actually need to teach someone how to write more generally. Writing simply a question of transcribing your thoughts onto a page. If it were, the Book of Mormon wouldn't be as boring as it is. Humanities fields, however imperfect, are much more useful for learning how to analyze language and write because you can actually just start doing it. One may not be able to start with Chaucer, but most high schoolers can read George Orwell (whereas I doubt would be able to make sense of a document outlining the strategic plan of Dow Chemical or a patent application or a judicial opinion, or even a summons—but what would you start with instead that would be more accessible than Animal Farm?).

One should play being a fox first to be an effective hedgehog later on.

I hate to appeal to anecdote, but it's hard not to when that comment is so glaringly at odds with experience: I know this partly from years of teaching writing courses (a lot of humanities courses, yes, but also writing courses for non-humanities students at various times in a community college, a state university, and an ivy league school) but also from other work I do from time to time. Besides editing academic work in non-humanities fields (masters theses, dissertations, scientific articles published in peer-reviewed journals and textbooks), I make a nice chunk a change doing corporate work for different industries. I know absolutely nothing about these industries and don't need to, but when I get, say, an FDA application from a biotech company in my inbox, the writing done by these MBAs, PhDs, MDs, and even JDs in some cases is absolutely appalling and goes back to their inbox in far better shape.

[_Physics Guy]

Thanks to whatever power has added the earlier posts from the other thread into this one.

Gadianton's latest point seems to be not so much a defense of impractical subjects as an attack on practical ones, at least in the limit where "practical" is supposed to mean "training you to do exactly the job that will be in demand when you graduate." For every taxi driver with an English degree there are probably a dozen [made-up number] people with worthless certificates in some specialized skill, and who are about as employable as a surgeon who only knows how to clamp one particular vein.

That's certainly a good point. Perhaps the subjects commonly criticized as impractical are just the worst subjects to study except for all the others. But I think it suggests an even stronger defense, along the lines of my (5).

Subjects like medicine and engineering don't have trouble being accepted as practical, but they also don't try to focus just on the jobs of next month. They aim to build a broad base of skills, with layers of meta-skills. By definition most of their broad skill sets will be useless for any one task, but since nobody really knows what their tasks are going to morph into next, the broadly skilled people are still in demand. So if the engineers can make that case, perhaps the historians could make one like it as well.

I just don't think it will be as easy as simply asserting that history teaches broadly transferable skills as in my (2). You have to be able to show that history teaches something which is (a) broadly transferable but also (b) better learnt by studying history than by studying other things. That seems like a bit of a paradox, so it may not be trivial.

[_Symmachus]

Let me say first that I largely agree with 5). I just don't think any of the people that matter in determining educational policy really see it that way. The question is really not "what value are the humanities" but "is post secondary education only about careers." People don't want to admit it, but I think most of society sees it that way, and educationalists, whatever they claim to believe, are responding to that. I see little practical point in talking about things we can do nothing about, and the people who actually are employed in the humanities (some few of whom audaciously and stupidly call themselves "humanists"), aren't helping.

I just don't think it will be as easy as simply asserting that history teaches broadly transferable skills as in my (2). You have to be able to show that history teaches something which is (a) broadly transferable but also (b) better learnt by studying history than by studying other things. That seems like a bit of a paradox, so it may not be trivial.

Yes a) but not b). I think a) is not that hard to show, as long as we don't insist that history (or English or whatever) is the end of the line. If it were, then you'd have a point with b), but it rarely is. The degree is a starting point. Many of my students took history courses to fulfill certain requirements because they preferred them to English courses for those requirements, though their majors were in the sciences. Some of the history majors went on to MBA and JD programs. Some double-majored in sciences. In short, history (or whatever field) has to offer a set of broadly transferrable meta-skills as well as and certainly not worse than English (or whatever). Some people will prefer history to English, as some prefer Toyotas to Fords for reasons that have nothing to do with the Toyota or the Ford as such. As long as both Toyotas and Fords do what cars need to do, we don't have argue whether Toyota or Ford has to be the better car in some objective sense.

[_Physics Guy]

It is simply untrue that your average business major can compete with an English or humanities major when it comes to analyzing language and producing written material (those above average and below aren't relevant to the generality, obviously). It is the sort of thing that sounds good in the abstract but doesn't hold when one thinks about what "reading texts" and "writing persuasively" (or just writing in general) actually means in practice.

Indeed I have no experience in teaching writing, so I accept that you may be right in practice. But are you right in theory?

It's not a completely silly question, because I do think the simple theory of that blog comment I mentioned in (2) sounds reasonable. If English majors will be employed to write well about things other than Victorian poetry, how can it be that writing about Victorian poetry was the best way for them to learn to write well? Why is literary criticism an especially good training ground for good writing?

One point you raise is: sheer volume. A humanities degree normally entails reading an awful lot more pages than a degree in engineering does, and a lot more term papers. I think that's a good point, but if volume is all it takes to train writers, then one could in principle offer degrees in technical writing that involve just as many volumes and papers, but on subjects relevant to, say, the business world.

The more specialized nature of most technical writing is also an issue, that's true. A high school kid ought to be able to start learning by reading Orwell and plunking out a term paper about those pigs, and if they do that then they'll already be a decent writer by the time a business major is even ready to start writing anything intelligible about financing. But isn't this making literature into la plume de ma tante? Something nobody would ever actually want to discuss, but that happens to be simple enough for beginners.

If the advantage of literature as a learning vessel for writing is initial simplicity, then surely the solution is a set of simply written books about practical subjects. All those technical subjects do get learned by people who started as babies, after all. There are textbooks at all levels. Why not use them instead of Animal Farm?

I don't mean to challenge your experience. In practice you may well be right, at least for practice the way it is now. But I'm thinking about a sustainable system of higher education for the indefinite future. If technical writing programs that start with intro business textbooks and demand a lot of term papers can eat the English department's lunch, then I figure at some point they will do so. If English departments really want to survive, I think they have to be able to explain why studying English literature is particularly effective for learning some useful skills.

It doesn't have to be a case that convinces everyone that English is the best possible subject, any more than Toyota has to be everyone's choice over Ford or else go bankrupt. But Toyota has to make a case to be better than Ford, that case has to convince at least some people, and it's more likely to convince enough people to buy Toyota if it convinces most people that Toyota is at least in the running. That's the sense in which I meant my requirement (b).

[In 1997 I bought a German course on CD that was supposed to be from the US Foreign Service. The first phrase it tried to teach me was I'd like to have some cigars. I like to imagine that my CD set was the last incarnation of a course from the 1900s that had migrated unchanged through all the media of the twentieth century.]

[_Physics Guy]

As to higher education being only about careers: I actually think that it is and should be all about careers, because I think it should be about training people in production skills, as opposed to consumption skills. Any decent set of production skills is a good potential basis for a career, I think.

If people want to learn consumption skills, they can do so any time they want, by paying whatever the market demands, just as with any other luxury good. I don't think we need a formal system of degrees to accredit people's consumption skills.

[_Gadianton]

Gadianton's latest point seems to be not so much a defense of impractical subjects as an attack on practical ones,

You got me, but a half defense is that I opened Terrestrial and saw, cool, PG just started a new topic. I missed the rest of the conversation.

I just don't think it will be as easy as simply asserting that history teaches broadly transferable skills as in my (2)

I definitely agree with that. My degree has added little to nothing to my ability to get a job but at least I came out of school with like 2k of debt because I worked part time to pay for it. That degree with the debt it would have incurred in today's world would be totally unjustifiable in terms of "meta skills". I actually didn't learn any meta-skills, I was barely literate out of college but I've caught up a little thanks to my career as an anti-Mormon.

The point I made about "cross-fertilization" (and I really hate that term by the way) might make more sense in terms of say, doctors. My understanding was always that medical schools don't want all their students coming in as biochemistry majors. I think that's also true in the corporate world, an MBA on a resume is likely to get an eye roll as much as it produces excitement within a hiring manager. "oh look, another MBA." And lets not leave out hedge fund managers. Sure, they don't hire Egyptologists, but it's hard to pin down just what the skill set is supposed to be. They seem to like to bring in people with novel science or math backgrounds with nothing to do with fiance hoping to get a different perspective that could prove useful.

Symmachus,

my comments got spliced into this thread, I hadn't seen what was already written. The waste as a struggling classicist vs. a technology person who wasted money on certifications isn't even comparable. The stories you've told about students who are what, approaching thirties and totally broke with no career in sight is well beyond any examples I can think of, especially when factoring in raw talent.

Well, not to be a one-trick pony, but Thorstein Veblen figured this out a long time ago. A classical education is a market of status and leisure. And anyone who doubts the present relevance of this idea should go spend some time on Sic et Non where the gang over there becomes a near parody of what Veblen was talking about. Even way back then, Veblen was arguing that the whole point of learning dead languages was because it's a total waste of time, and therefore, proof that the student had the time to waste. The modern idea of separating equilibrium which comes with a little less cynicism picks it up as:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signaling_game

"To summarize: only workers with high ability are able to attain a specific level of education without it being more costly than their increase in wage. In other words, the benefits of education are only greater than the costs for workers with a high level of ability, so only workers with a high ability will get an education. "

Well, a friend of mine told me that his friend, a brilliant scientist who got a Phd from MIT, said that you can learn most of what he did anywhere. But the point is the employer isn't strictly looking for somebody who learned x, y, and z; but somebody who has a significant talent for learning things like x, y, and z. This is where tech schools, at least in the US, really lose it for a variety of reasons I won't go into. I'm sure in Germany it's a different story where trade schools are taken seriously.

[_Symmachus]

But are you right in theory?

Yes. My point was that your theory is bunk. I offered theoretical and practical reasons why. The over-arching theoretical reason is precisely that business language (or whatever technical) field is by definition limited and particular to that field and by design as far away from metalinguistic concerns as possible. Literature, by contrast, is marked off from other kinds of language precisely because it is grand concern is language as a social technology, and everything that follows from it (story, narrative, myth, culture, and so on). One can quibble about that definition, but at the very least that is its tendency. For that reason, it is also connected to many other domains of human activity and human psychology, which is why it is more accessible (that was my point about Orwell; accessibility is not the same thing as "simplicity," which which Orwell most certainly is not). There are many different kinds of writing one does in writing courses, but most of all the goal is to think about language. Business or any other technical language is the last place you go for that.

It's not a completely silly question, because I do think the simple theory of that blog comment I mentioned in (2) sounds reasonable. If English majors will be employed to write well about things other than Victorian poetry, how can it be that writing about Victorian poetry was the best way for them to learn to write well? Why is literary criticism an especially good training ground for good writing?

Why is math an especially good training ground for physics as opposed to literary criticism?

One point you raise is: sheer volume. A humanities degree normally entails reading an awful lot more pages than a degree in engineering does, and a lot more term papers. I think that's a good point, but if volume is all it takes to train writers, then one could in principle offer degrees in technical writing that involve just as many volumes and papers, but on subjects relevant to, say, the business world.

Not volume but breadth. The logic of your claim is that reading ten Shakespeare plays is roughly equivalent to reading ten issues of the Harvard Business Review. That's not the point I raised. You will make some very good business writers because they will have mastered the templates and jargon of that world, but on the average they won't be any better at thinking about language for having done so—that is the meta-skill whose transferability is at issue.

The more specialized nature of most technical writing is also an issue, that's true. A high school kid ought to be able to start learning by reading Orwell and plunking out a term paper about those pigs, and if they do that then they'll already be a decent writer by the time a business major is even ready to start writing anything intelligible about financing. But isn't this making literature into la plume de ma tante? Something nobody would ever actually want to discuss, but that happens to be simple enough for beginners.

If the advantage of literature as a learning vessel for writing is initial simplicity, then surely the solution is a set of simply written books about practical subjects. All those technical subjects do get learned by people who started as babies, after all. There are textbooks at all levels. Why not use them instead of Animal Farm?

.

See above re: simplicity vs. accessibility.

I don't mean to challenge your experience. In practice you may well be right, at least for practice the way it is now. But I'm thinking about a sustainable system of higher education for the indefinite future. If technical writing programs that start with intro business textbooks and demand a lot of term papers can eat the English department's lunch, then I figure at some point they will do so. If English departments really want to survive, I think they have to be able to explain why studying English literature is particularly effective for learning some useful skills.

And who will determine the winner here, Physics Guy, and on what terms? You have so many loaded and circular-leading assumptions here that it is hard to take this seriously. How will we know that the English department's lunch is being eaten? Who is going to communicate quickly enough to what the market wants each semester? Perhaps we should get rid of semesters. Why not just have each business train its own workforce in precisely what it needs instead of leaving it up to everyone else to guess? Who is going to communicate just how many business and technical writers the market needs anyway? Given how much education costs (which is hardly the fault of the humanities, which cost nothing), the stakes are very high indeed. The university is not structured as a market-responsive institution in any way whatsoever (and as you work in Germany, you know it's even less adaptable there than it is here). So you get this weird paradox where we think universities are about job-training but nobody really knows what jobs we need training for, and once you've made the decision about that, the market shifts. It takes years to move a university, so as a result, it's always years and years behind the markets you think it should be serving.

And if we accept your premise that the university is an economic and not a cultural institution, then there is absolutely 0 reason for doing English literature. But then again, you should explore the logical consequences a bit more, because there is also no reason for doing almost anything a university does in the way they do it if that is how we think of a university. A bachelor's degree in physics is actually pretty worthless on its own except that the financial industry can use the math skills and you can go to graduate school to get a worthless PhD in physics. A biology degree is no better, on its own, than a classics degree (20 years ago that wasn't the case, but good luck getting into those fields in private industry without a PhD). The immediate skills employers are looking for (the "market") fluctuate and hard to determine, much less form a response to. Universities still follow the rhythms of agriculture—you think they can respond to the market? What universities know, and what you're missing in all this, is that higher education is a signalling mechanism first and a financial services and real estate empire after that; research comes behind that, and "skills" come far after that and have to be learned on the job for the most part anyway.

Universities were much more transparent about their functions as a signalling mechanism in previous ages; the failure of the secondary schools together with the discovery that unlimited amounts of money are available through government-sponsored devices known as "students" have put us in this weird place. But universities do not serve markets well, and that is not because the humanities aren't offering useful skills (hardly anyone studies humanities topics anyway). I think your concern is noble on its surface but it is anachronistic.

[_Morley]

As to higher education being only about careers: I actually think that it is and should be all about careers, because I think it should be about training people in production skills, as opposed to consumption skills. Any decent set of production skills is a good potential basis for a career, I think.

If people want to learn consumption skills, they can do so any time they want, by paying whatever the market demands, just as with any other luxury good. I don't think we need a formal system of degrees to accredit people's consumption skills.

Physics Guy, let me see if I have this right.

Arguably the most important good produced in modern society is information. According to your formulation, higher education should educate in various skills involved in producing information, but the skill of consuming information should be classified as a luxury good and left to whim of the marketplace.

Under these conditions, a given set of people will learn (in the university, at taxpayer expense) to produce science, art, religion, propaganda, or the mutually agreed-upon fictions of money and justice--but consumers will lack the basic information (and critical thinking skills) to understand and wisely consume these goods, because consumption skills are a luxury good and should be left to the free market to provide.

The prevalence of this attitude may explain some of the socio-economic & political mess we’re in.

[_Morley]

One should play being a fox first to be an effective hedgehog later on.