Is a college degree a lost cause?

Should people be discouraged ffrom pursuing degrees in the humanities? Is it the purpose of higher education to train prospective employees for American industry?

Is a college degree a lost cause these days?

 

If I had to advise a young person, I would definitely tell that person not to earn a degree in the humanities. These days kids are better off learning a trade or going to college to train for a specific occupation. The days of a general education in the humanities cutting it in the job market are over.

 

I hate when people use liberal arts and humanities interchangeably. I also hate when people lump the social sciences with the humanities. It only causes confusion and leads to misconceptions. For example, because people have been misled to believe that the sciences aren't liberal arts just because they are STEM, many of them think that a bachelor's degree in biology is a guarantee to a high-paying job. The truth is that, for many of the social sciences and natural sciences, it can be difficult to get a high-paying job without several years of experience and/or a graduate degree. The original purpose of college was not for job training. None of the liberal arts are meant to be job training programs; that includes the science and mathematics parts of STEM. I actually came across a couple of articles written by people in science fields who advocated for removing the "S" from STEM because of the low starting salaries.

Liberal Arts: natural science, mathematics, social science, and humanities
Humanities: English/literature, philosophy, religion, foreign languages, etc.
Social Sciences: economics, political science, psychology, sociology, etc.

 

A lot of B&M universities don't provide experience for their students. The coursework seems to revolve a lot more around theory than application. Students often have to apply for experience through the university (if it's even offered), or through a specific agency. Some fields are better than others, but we don't have a college system where apprenticeship/assistantships/field experience is commonplace. I mean, some nursing students have to set up their own training with preceptors. That is just ridiculous.

I will concede there are some fields where the transition into application is easy by nature, but this is also more than a degree choice issue in my opinion. That being said, some humanities fields don't have a system in place for application. A person may get a teaching assistantship, but there aren't a lot of opportunities.

 

It all comes down to goals.

Wanna be a veterinarian? Go for it. Are you OK with racking up a significant amount of money in student loan debt to make an average of $65k? Well, if you really want to be a vet then yeah, you probably are OK with that. And I would support anyone who pursued that path because I believe we should find a modicum of happiness in our work. Plus, we do need vets.

The problem is that the majority of people don't have that single passion driving them their entire childhood. Sure, they exist. I went to school with a guy who, from the time of the third grade, decided he wanted to be a doctor like his father. He was focused. He was the kid who would stay inside and study on a beautiful day because "Otherwise, I won't achieve me goal." Thing is, he was the exception more than the rule. The majority of people I went to high school with chose their majors based upon perceived respect and average salary. Most of them switched majors before their sophomore year, however, to what they actually were interested in.

So a whole class full of students of nursing, pharmacy, physician assistant studies, engineering, computer science suddenly became students of English, journalism, theater, philosophy and political science.

Some people like to blame the university. Maybe if the university didn't offer those pesky humanities than students would force themselves to focus on the real subjects that land you a job. But those humanities are there looming like a (gender of your choosing) in seductive clothing just begging you to throw your dreams away for a four year fling of reading poetry and overusing (and misusing) the word "ironic."

Sorry, but I don't buy it.

When I was in high school I had very little guidance about what career path I might pursue. According to my guidance counselor there were really only five professions in the world. Then there was the crap that went into supporting those five professions where a person may be able to gather together a living wage. In his world, pharmacists were flunkies who couldn't get into medical school and guidance counselors were psychologist wannabes who couldn't get into a decent doctoral program (think he was projecting a bit?). But no part of high school made any attempt to help me tease out hobbies from potential career paths. My high school was very clear about their role. They weren't preparing me for the real world. They were preparing me for college. I was expected to study and learn so that I could go on to study and learn some more. For what? I dunno, figure it out when you get to college!

Funny aside, I knew this girl in high school. And she disappeared sophomore year because she got herself a spot in a foreign exchange program with a student from Mexico. When she arrived in Mexico they asked her about her career aspirations. She said she wanted to be a doctor. So, they put her into a program for that. She said the first thing they did with this group of teenage physician hopefuls was they took them all to the city morgue to observe an autopsy. Oh, feeling queasy? Find a new career path. It may sound harsh. It may sound unjust. It almost certainly would result in a litany of lawsuits if attempted in this country (the U.S.). But, for her it was a wake-up to the reality that medicine isn't always pretty and as a doctor she would have to deal with yucky stuff at least occasionally throughout the training process. She moved on and ended up becoming a CPA instead.

Compare to another young woman I went to HS with. We bumped into one another just before I shipped out to the Navy (roughly) two years post-graduation. She was in a nursing program at Wilkes University. She told me she intended to stay in school after earning her BSN so she could earn her MSN. Ambitious, right? Nah, she wanted the Masters because she wanted to become an administrator following graduation because in her words "I have no intention of ever touching blood or poop." She eventually dropped the idea, switched to marketing and (when last I checked) tends bar someplace without having taken a degree.

For years we've treated college as the place where you go to figure it all out. The problem is that college isn't free. So, we spend the free educational period (high school) preparing for the high priced educational period (college) and, once we're committed to spending tens of thousands of dollars, that's when we should start really giving our futures a good think. That sounds backwards to me.

By the time my father graduated high school he had a pretty solid idea of what he wanted to do. He had learned to fix cars in auto shop. Wasn't for him. He had learned to build stuff in wood shop. He didn't want to go the Bob Vila route. When he expressed an interest in becoming a cop they rounded him up with a group of similarly interested young men (it was a different time) and sent them on ride alongs. By his junior year he had a pretty good idea of what he wanted to do and had significant input on the best ways to do it. When he went to John Jay he chose his coursework based upon recommendations from NYPD officers. These were courses that would help his application along and that would look good in his service record once he got on the job. He didn't putter around studying "stuff." Compare to my high school experience where we didn't have "shop" classes. The only option was dual-enrollment at the vocational center which required guidance counselor approval. I asked about it once, out of curiosity, and I was told "We don't approve students to go to the Vo-Tech if they appear to have the aptitude and ability to complete college level coursework." So, yeah.

But a lot of people don't have goals. So they go to college and study "whatever" until someone hands them a degree. Then they walk out into the working world and say "Hey! I thought this was supposed to help me get a job!" If you want to study philosophy, then I say go for it. But no one is going to pay you to sit on a stump and think. So consider whether you plan on earning a doctorate and teaching philosophy. If you don't, you need to start considering what you do want to do for a living. There's no shame in being a well-read truck driver or a plumber who really digs political science.

But our high schools are failing because they are selling college as something that colleges never intended to be; vocational training programs. High school is where I should get the opportunity to try my hand at a few different career paths to see what awaits me in the future. Had I seen applied mathematics in action at the age of 16 I would have finally had an answer to that often asked question "When am I ever going to use this?" and that maybe would have changed my entire attitude towards those subjects. Instead, I was told that it was better to go off and study "stuff" so that I could graduate and get a job doing "something" at a place to be determined. Not cool.

I spewed this rant because I see a lot of people blaming universities for something that I think high schools have actually created. High schools, in part, perpetuate the myth that the people who build our homes should be drawn from the people with low GPAs. This is false. Skilled trades are not for "stupid" people. And I cannot imagine anyone wanting to live in a house built by a total moron. But somewhere along the lines many high schools decided that they should be pre-College instead of a place where young people decide a next step that may very well not be college. It worked great at creating a college bubble, of sorts, but it didn't actually make our society "smarter" it just resulted in it being overeducated and underskilled.

 

I believe this might be the truest statement ever made on DegreeInfo, ever.

 

My wife (BA in Humanities) and my sister (three bachelor's degrees in Asian Studies, Japanese and Comparative Literature) are both humanities majors and have made out just fine. Both went on to grad school (Forensic Science and Library Science) and decent jobs.

Different strokes, different folks...

 

Well, their humanities degrees don't appear to be the source of their success. It's like propping up a high paid lawyer, who happens to have a BA in Women's studies, and saying "See, you can do just fine with a Women's Studies degree." It's technically true but it is a bit misleading.

While comparative literature is a humanity, Library Science is not. And Library Science is what gets you the job in a library (or allied research role).

Likewise, I can have a degree in biology and become a cardiologist. My success wouldn't really be representative of the plight of many people who stop their education with the B.S. in Biology.