The Useless College Degree

The liberal arts education was meant to enrich the minds of wealthy people's sons and daughters so that they can become enlightened and effective leaders of the society. This tradition can be traced all the way back to Plato. Vocational training is deemed unnecesssary for the priviledge kids who are supposed to inherit the family business and get trained on-the-job.

For the common folks, the liberal arts education is a luxury. The more important concern for them is to acquire the skills necessary for them to enter the workforce upon graduation. Engineering, for example, is a ticket for most middle-class or lower-middle class kids to a well-paying, white-collar job. To some extent, film making and journalism also fall into this category. One rarely finds a well-to-do kid studying engineering (or film making, or journalism), for his/her future job function is governing the business (or community).

Current college programs tend to combine liberal arts with vocational training. However, this tends to confuse young minds as what is most important for them. Most kids do not come from a privileged background; hence for them, a vocational training is a must; while a little bit of liberal arts can enrich their minds. Hence a degree in electric engineering and a minor in literature, or psychologoy, or history, or whatever would be a sound choice. But majoring in literature without the talent of becoming a good writer seems ridiculous to me, unless the person comes from well-to-do family.

One can always acquire most liberal arts education through self study. After all, most great thinkers (and women) in history did NOT go to college. But acquisition of technical skills require practice, and hence cannot be done through merely reading books. Since most firms today use college degrees as a filter to sieve out under-motivated people, few opportunities exist for high-school grads to get into a position that allow them to practise complex technical skills at a firm today. Of course, there are exceptions. When the technology is new, one can get into the field with relatively little formal education. Consider Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison.

The American colleges provide a wealth of mind-enriching programs. If only the students know how to select! One can go a public state college and still get a decent education. I went to one here. I also went to an Ivy league school to get my doctorate (what a waste of time) and noticed that the kids there weren't that well educated as I had expected.

Finally, from my own experience, the academia in US is largely a scam. On each campus, there are a few professors who are serious and excellent. Taking a few courses with them is a great experience. But I don't see the value in spending four precious years of one's life devoting to academic pursuit. By introspection and reflection, any mature man and woman can figure out for him or herself most of the stuff that is taught today on campus. Yes, one may reach revelation five or ten years later after college. But such revelation will be from personal experience and hence real. An intelligent college student, with little experience in life, may "understand" what the professor is saying, be awed by him or her, and write a clever essay on the subject. But such understanding is not based on real life experience and hence unreal in my opinion.

College education today, and graduate education (ph.d and masters) has become more and more a self-serving system for the professors who need a large class of students to milk tuitions and a large pool of foreign graduate students to help him/her get federal grants. Most of the research coming out of universities is pure junk, permit me to say so.

The greatest time of America is the turn of 20th century, when the industrial foundation was being built by great men and industrious labourers, most of those had no college education, and yet still learned to govern well and write well. The arch example is Andrew Carnegie. I strongly recommend you to read his booklet "the Empire of Business." I wish had read it in college so that I would not have wasted five years of my life pursuing a Ph.D. degree.

My motivation for going to college was, in fact, to put off having to work full time. (I hardly had to work at all during college, since my parents paid for it.) In retrospect, I wish I had given more thought to how I was going to making a living once I got out. (Ironically, though, I wish I had majored in philosophy, despite the relative vocational uselessness of a BA in philosophy.) I was an English major and didn't have any career plans, beyond some extremely vague, and lazy, idea about going into publishing. ("We'll just send some resumes and cover letters out and see what happens.")

Anyhow, after floundering for a couple years, I decided to get an MLS and join the librarian's guild, so to speak. It was a strictly career-oriented degree. Even then, I didn't think nearly as much as I should have about what area of librarianship I wanted to go into. I almost dropped out to pursue graduate studies in philosophy, though the question of how I was going to support myself kept coming up. By the time I graduated with the MLS, I had a vague notion that I could find a job at a certain local university library and do a PhD there. I did very little research into the practical aspect of any of this (the fact, for example, that academic libraries tend to require an additional MA in a subject area). Although my MLS eventually found me a library job, I don't feel that the degree makes me very marketable. The range of positions which would be open to me seem limited.

There are many other things about legal education in the USA that piss me off, but I'd just bore everyone shitless.

I myself graduated with a degree in Art History and proceeded to work as a waiter and wine steward for two years before returning to school. I'll give you three guesses as to what I study now.

Having said that, the line between vocational and non-vocational degrees isn't exactly clear cut - sure, a BSc in Golf Course Management leads you in a certain direction, but what about Modern Languages, English Literature, History, Psychology or Philosophy? Whilst you aren't being trained to do any particular job when studying those subjects you WILL develop skills that are readily applicable to a number of 'professions'. OK, I accept that those professions range from Management Consultancy for the Oxbridge grads to Market Research and Spiritual Prostitution for everybody else, but on the other hand you might graduate to find that Golf Course Management isn't really your thing.

Re. Tad's point: Yes it is expensive to train to be a lawyer, but:-
a) any PRUDENT STUDENT will be aware of that before they apply to a law course and;
b) earning obscene amount of money must be some kind of compensation. Plus, if you're a barrister, you get to wear a wig - I mean come on! How cool is that?

I have never met an Art History student that didn't have a cocaine habit or a trust fund but don't get me wrong - I'm sure I'd be the same after 15 years in a single sex boarding school.

While I haven't used my MA degree in English lit as a career thing, the combination of teaching experience, critical knowledge and general associations gained from the activities outside of class (radio station, newspaper, etc.) meant I don't find it useless. But I will say that I was lucky enough to get a fellowship. Without it, I would sing a much different tune...

not over here, you don't. Nor are litigators called "barristers" -- just "litigator" or "trial lawyer" (if you do personal injury work).

i agree that the wigs are cool, though.

www.halfpastnine.com

blog and rant!

http://www.twentyhood.com/images/mydegree.jpg

mind = blown

I'm sitting here writing down receipt numbers and account numbers and dollar amounts from hundreds of receipts for entry fees for a juried art show, and all I keep thinking about is the relationship between artistic success and winning the lottery.

i like that being where I'm from I "wasted" four years doing a degree which hasn't been of any use to me since but I'm only £2000 pounds in debt and I pay it back at the rate of about £90 a year.

mind = blown

― fleetwood (max), Saturday, October 10, 2009 6:51 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Seriously, isn't all this sort of a given at this point. Does anyone, bachelors degree or no, find this controversial or enlightening?

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f all of u for pretending like i'm t-bombin

or challoping or whatever

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I didn't think it was a t-bomb or a challop, thought it was meant to be somewhere between a zing and a o_O post. but, ya know, done out of character.

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everyone told me while getting an english degree that it would be useless unless I was going into academia. we all thought we were going to go into academia (or, some people, law school). not many did.

I work with plenty of people who got liberal arts degrees. believe me, you can tell when people bothered to learn how to reason out an argument when they get into the workplace.

As someone who really likes school, when I look at the vast majority of my fellow undergraduates, and how little effort they put into anything other than getting their degrees over with, it's essentially: no shit your schooling was useless, you didn't bother to learn or take interest in anything. If you spend three quarters of your time skipping classes or not bothering to engage with things your interested in (which is why I personally can't fathom being forced into "useful" programs like engineering or business, in which it seems like only a small minority have an actual passion for), then when you 'don't get your money's worth' via a job, of course you're going to regret school.

hey, school was awesome, it's the working world's lack of willingness to hand out fantastic jobs to new graduates that sucks! and this is why some of us end up right back in grad school.

not to play devil's advocate, but ... what kind of fantastic job SHOULD be available to an English Lit major?!?

that said, i have known English and French Lit. majors who went to work for hedge funds and i-banks -- they also went to Ivy League (or Ivy-caliber) schools, and that's another debate altogether, but i know for a fact that it's happened.

not to play devil's advocate, but ... what kind of fantastic job SHOULD be available to an English Lit major?!?

As an English major, I assumed that since it was a major, that meant that it was preparing me for some kind of job market. People tried to warn me. People tried to warn me.

fwiw, the only "real" (non-service, non-dirtbag) job I had between college and medical school was a job that actively sought English majors. i was a copywriter for a small "creative" agency in Chicago, and, you know, writing was something i'd done a lot of as an undergrad

dunno about in this economy (thanks, grad school!), but the world needs competent writers and editors more than it needs academics. just don't expect to write about cool awesome stuff you're interested in, maybe? like, look for a job as a technical writer or as a copyeditor or whatever, and learn your craft

I'd love to see a new major that sorta between an English major and a major in another language, that would emphasize skills in translation (verbal and written). There are jobs doing this (especially in text translation), and a shortage of qualified people, and it's a nontrivial thing to do, so college-level training is a big plus. For one, it helps to understand what you're translating (though this sometimes takes more than college if you're translating something really serious). Plus the pay is pretty good, at least over here in Europe.

I'm kinda half-terrified for my daughter, who will be freshly degree'd next May. gbx, I hope you're right, because she's an excellent writer -- and beyond that, she's the go-to grammar nerd and prose mechanic for all of her friends at school who need help with their work.

be fully terrified

then encourage her to look for less glamorous prose wrenching jobs in markets that are not NYC

i dropped out of high school and didn't go to college til i was 22. i went to a pretty good school and through ridiculous katrina circumstances ended up with a BA in english and then a master's in english. i am working on a master's in library stuff. i spent a whole year after grad school #1 trying to get a grownup job with a tie and a cubicle and a water cooler and all that.

i am a bartender. i have one person in my bar right now (because the saints have a bye). i get pissed when people bitch and moan about their useless degrees because hey guess what if you paid any attention at all in college your interior life is probably way richer than it would have been otherwise.

i mean to say: learning is good for you, no one has a good job, everyone is poor, there are worse things than working in some debasing servile capacity and knowing a lot about keats--like working in some debasing servile capacity and not knowing shit about keats.

yall should be scientists

both of my degrees are ones got for the experience rather than guarantee of jobs. i don't think you can really place too much importance on the degree getting you the job if you're not doing the requisite networking and relationship building to excel in your field. in fact, i went to grad school more for the networking opportunities than the piece of paper (because no one even knows what my piece of paper means!).

yeah, kinda wish i was a physicist! though i met a guy who does rocket science and apparently the job prospects in that field aren't so hot, either. being in the pnw now, i realllly wish i had more tech experience. thinking of taking some technical writing classes on the side.

i wish i could have gotten a liberal arts degree (or linguistics or geography or something like that) in addition to or instead of my stupid math degree. i'm not using the math degree anyway. i also wish i had gotten a physics or chemistry b.s. instead of a math one. i wish i wish i wish!

btw i took technical writing and i promise you already know all there is to know about it! but it sucks because you can't just tell employers that. they wanna see you took the course.

i have no idea what to do with my math degree :(

can i be a detective who uses clever math tricks to solve mysteries

<3 mathnet!!

do the quarterback's homework

i mean to say: learning is good for you, no one has a good job, everyone is poor, there are worse things than working in some debasing servile capacity and knowing a lot about keats--like working in some debasing servile capacity and not knowing shit about keats.

i like this way of putting it! i'm really not hot on the idea of college as vocational training-- okay, in college i learnt to write clearly and quickly and to deadlines, and how to structure arguments, and some facts and a foreign language and etc, but the thing i really treasured was learning a whole new way of understanding a wholly unfamiliar kind of poetry, and even if i don't go academic places w/ it it's still something really important to me.

that said i often wish i'd done engineering instead.

Euler, the problem with translation work at the moment is that companies like to get a machine-translation done and then ask a translator to "proof-read" it, which basically means doing the translation all over again bcz guess what machine translations are shite, but they don't have to pay for a proper trans.

these aren't normal cockroaches though. they are sort of based on horseshoe crabs.

JOe's Apartment

I don't think humanities degrees are useless, but it really does seem to me that you need to be a sort of life acrobat, very outgoing and confident, in order to magic that kind of degree into a career. The sort of person who can 'network'. Or who may have kinda sorta been born into a few networks in the first place.

I say this after about 10 years of failing to get anywhere in journalism, publishing, or marketing, which was the idea when I went to university. At this point I don't have anything resembling a 'career', as such, only jobs (now and then, with rough stretches in between). Other people have got places though, with roughly the same education as me, and the education has been a key part of getting them there.

A friend of mine shared this on FB today: Four years ago she collected two degrees from UT-Austin. Two weeks ago she interviewed for a server job with four different managers at the same company/restaurant and doesn't hear back.

Even with all the grads who say they can't find work, I feel a lot more precarious as a 30-something with half a degree in fine arts and 2/3 of a degree in history.

Seriously considering starting from almost zero in accounting via a local community college's online program and then transferring. It doesn't have a lot of relevance to my immediate life but at the same time it gives me a parachute in a field that does seem to be producing subsistence level jobs at a decent rate.

Occasionally I'm not super sympathetic with grads in that situation, though - an acquaintance went back and graduated at 32 with a degree in marketing but he's driving Uber and constantly complaining that none of the music marketing jobs he applies for will hire him. Doesn't apply to anything outside of promotion/artist management/etc. jobs.. and the one time he did have a job in the industry it paid so little he was borrowing money to survive from his elderly parents.

school nightmares aren't as traumatic as service industry nightmares though

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Saturday, August 13, 2016 4:34 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

stay in school nightmares, kids

xxp that's funny, milo, i was thinking the same thing - while paging through an accounting ethics textbook i'm going to use for a business ethics class i have to teach. then i was wondering if i should conceal my educational background so my imaginary accounting professor wouldn't make fun of me and call me 'doctor'.

the question of whether or not it was worth it for me to go to college, or graduate school, doesn't really make much sense. realistically if i hadn't gone it would have meant trying to work my way into the tech industry in the 90s, following $$$$ at a moment when talent and informal knowledge were enough to get you ahead. but i had half a BS by the time i 'went to college' at 18 and two degrees and most of an MS by the time i was done five years later, and then a phd, all veering toward the most useless fields of study you could want, making me a more and more academic person along the way. it wasn't about the credentials for me, i just believed that what i should be was as educated as possible, most likely to become a professor in something. like cardamon i know lots of people in my circles who have gotten somewhere with roughly the same, or less, but aside from networking or background connections it seems like they've mostly just been fortunate to be counted useful. say from specializing in the things that are in demand, from having the experience to teach that one class, from having the attitude to fit in with a certain group. mostly just thanks to the incredible standardization/functionalization of our labor market.

i've never been entrepreneurial and i've never been any kind of joiner. unfortunately i also never really concentrated on making myself useful to others; it has happened that i was useful sometimes. mostly i pursued my education with reference to myself, and not even to what would be most useful for me. i think that in terms of 'uselessness' the trick with college is probably finding a way to make sure you're useful to others, if nothing else, because lacking those other sources of... whatever, that gets you places and keeps you going... you will remain dependent upon others finding you useful somehow, for most of your life.

very otm

Treesh, I'm sorry to hear that your college memories are so unhappy, but what you describe sounds pretty standard for me and most of my social circle: drugs, alcohol, doomed relationships, despair, self-doubt, retreat into fantasy, one or more psychological rough patches, way too much lit crit.

On some level I half-suspect that is more or less how college is supposed to go, and that going through those things was as indispensable a part of the learning process as anything I heard from a professor in a classroom. Good judgement comes from experience; experience comes from poor judgement.

My B.A.'s usefulness was limited to getting me over the minimum requirements for getting into a graduate program. My M.S. has definitely been worth actual money in the bank. And I got the company to pay for it. I've been an incredibly fortunate son of a bitch.

Not as fortunate as someone born in europe tbf

them's fightin words

thats a more localised birthright tbh

Srsly tho

Didnt get into first choice (law) by a matter of a few points, took a year off for family reasons, did a business degree at the local technical institite to enable me to stay in town, got me into the public sector and took me 8 years to get back to get an IT degree. Cant imagine having managed any of it under a debt system.

i went to college for free and was paid to work thru grad school (per usual in the states), with a bit of loan debt to make the latter more doable. i don't know what i would have chosen to do if i were paying for college, probably gotten a computer science degree. : /

xp my memories are not as bad as that makes them sound. but those years do seem kind of arbitrary in hindsight.. i think it wasn't the right time for me to be pursuing higher education. i guess everyone is different but at 18-22 i was quite young and had very little grasp of the world

i believe in the gap year. and also in pursuing humanistic learning throughout one's life rather than as an undergraduate focus.

in denmark i remember going to a party at this weird residential school that was like, in between high school and undergrad. at one point all this amazing food appeared but i didn't see any kitchen facilities or staff. they seemed to have dance parties every night at this place.

looked it up -- it was called a Folkehøjskole. i'm probably explaining it wrong, but i remember they didn't have grades and it was in the middle of the woods basically, deep in the copenhagen suburbs

or the suburbs of cph rather

pursuing humanistic learning throughout one's life rather than as an undergraduate focus.

― Treeship

iirc u either get a degree or u gain credit by sharing the correct blogs on message boards

not blogs, anecdotes

With 50 year working lives approaching soon, it wont be an issue of either/or (life-learning vs undergrad).

An undergraduate degree, or masters, in your early 20s isn't going to last 40 to 45 years, so you can get to have at least one more go at it, if not two. You might need to choose which student debts you want to pass on to your heirs.

Meet the parents who won’t let their children study literature

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/09/02/meet-the-parents-who-wont-let-their-children-study-literature/?hpid=hp_regional-hp-cards_rhp-card-posteverything%3Ahomepage%2Fcard&utm_term=.f5ebc1131368

"at George Mason University"

stopped reading there

But seriously you should look at GMU's list of the world-changing titans who studied English! I mean, Howard Cosell, Tom Clancy, Emma Watson, Clarence Thomas, AND Mark Knopfler!

Who would not wish to be among such company as they begin their career journey. I mean, the list even includes a former EPA head and numerous prominent librarians.