"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." - John Adams[1]
I've wrestled with this since I graduated in '08 with an English degree from a shit school and far, far too much debt. Still, you can't put a price on what I learned. My thinking changed fundamentally. The world opened up. It's a rich field, connected to history, politics, philosophy, and more. I had wonderful professors and the epiphanies I had in their classes I will cherish forever. Life without art is not really life.
After I graduated, I was in so much debt I became suicidally depressed. I thought my future was over. (I ended up learning to program and got a job doing that, instead.) The outlook that reduces education in the abstract to its ROI is bleak; the refusal to descend into the real world and consider the economics of education is naive and useless.
I've given a lot of thought about what I'll advise my son to do, assuming he listens to me. It's true that he could always read any books in his free time, but that would leave out the discussion, writing, and instruction, which are indispensable. I do NOT want him going into a horrible amount of debt for it, or miss out on a career that will actually support him. But I want so much for him to have something like the mental and cultural enrichment I got to have, whose effects are hard to even explain because they've touched every part of my life. I don't have an answer yet.
I'd like to add my experience. I did a year of English in university, then switched to a software engineering major after internalizing all the "an English degree is useless" rhetoric.
While I am glad I didn't spend the ~$32,000 CAD it would have cost to get an English degree, I do wish I'd enrolled in a CS/English double major to get the benefits of technical studies and a humanities education. I have realized that, while I like software, a corporate job is just a means to an end to what I really enjoy: shared experience and art.
On another note, I did make the mistake of paying $15,000 CAD/year for a software engineering degree compared to $8,000/year for a CS degree. Now, in my final year, I'm taking many of the same classes CS students take. I would warn anyone in the same position in Canada (or the US) to seriously compare the two curricula when making a decision.
This is about where I'm at. I was an art major and spent my time working in contemporary art until switching careers to programming via a bootcamp in my 30s.
If I could go back and do it all again, I don't think I would a CS major instead, even when taking the massively increased earning potential I would have had I entered the field straight out of college. My humanities classes gave me so much historical perspective on the world that shapes my outlook today, and I simply can't imagine living without that.
I also credit my humanities education with teaching me how to do research and "how to learn". I think it gave me a lot of the skills I used to teach myself coding and switch careers. I'm not certain it would have been as easy to do it the other way around -- learn CS in college and teach myself humanities later.
I went to a well-regarded state school, thus graduated with less debt, but I'm in the same boat -- graduated with an English degree in 2008, having decided after a year of computer science classes that it wasn't for me. I started university a self-important ass, and the English program forced me outside my comfort zone repeatedly, leaving me a very different, much more open-minded person than I started as.
I somehow found my way back into tech, and have spent a decade across several well-regarded tech giants and now a hedge fund. Throughout that journey, I've received consistent praise for my soft skills, which have generally surpassed those of my peers, and have allowed me to excel beyond where I would ever have gotten on raw technical talent. Those soft skills would likely never have developed without majoring in the humanities.
It's terribly sad to see the slow death of the humanities. Perhaps if more people read some Jonathan Swift, we'd be in a different world and the humanities would still thrive.
In terms of ROI, a person with an English degree is in a much better position than a person who dropped out without completing the final year or semester. The important thing is that your child completes.
I know all about ROI and balance sheets and database normalization and boolean logic.
However, I also read all kinds of things on my own, like Thucydides, Seutonius, Virgil, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Joyce; I study art history; I play guitar and piano; I'm learning Spanish; I'm a damn fine cook; I'm super into clothing and know fine clothing - a clothing connoisseur: I've been involved in politics. And a lot more.
The reality is reality - university is just too fucking expensive to fuck around with. Back in the day, in California, tuition was free, and when they increased it, it was still affordable. So anyone could take any type of major that they wished. But now is not then. No amount of wishing will change it.
However, at least in California, you can still get any degree you wish. Going to community college for 2 years is free if your family makes less than about $40K per year, and about $2,000 tuition if more. California State Universities is $5,742 tuition per year. So you can get undergrad courses out of the way for either $0 or $4,000 for 2 years, and $11,484 for California State University. For a total of $11,484 or $15,484 for a 4 year degree. This is only tuition, but you can zero out books and fees and room and board because they are going to be the approximately the same anywhere, unless if you go to high cost of living place like SF metro area, LA metro area, or San Diego metro area. But there's a lot of places like Bakersfield, Fresno, Chico, Humbolt that are a lot lower cost of living. Get a share rental apartment or house, get a part-time job and Bob's your uncle. But with $11K or $15K, you can pretty much get any degree you want. Any kind - English, sociology, whatever, it doesn't matter. You should be able to work part-time to pay for Cal State University tuition, and you can get a loan to help out with food and housing, but you can find a shared housing for $400-500 per month, so that's fucking cheap and might be able to have that part time job pay for that as well and graduate with very little debt.
I'd say if you do one thing for your son, teach him how to comparison shop on everything. As you said, you went to "a shit school and far, far too much debt."
My first school was a private university, and was $4,500 per year, and that included tuition, room and board - 3 meals a day. That same school is now $60K per year for the same thing. So many private universities charge this much and it's fucked up. I went to school a long time ago. But I only went to that private university for one year before moving to California and going to community college and California State University to graduate for almost nothing - no outstanding debt.
Going to most private university is fucked. See what your public university costs, because, well, the public subsidizes it. I think small states like Vermont are fucked because they have a small population base that can't afford it, but not sure. If your public universities are too expensive, see what the requirements for becoming a California resident are, and move her for a year or two and work full time, then get a university degree with all the $$$ that you earned and saved. Or whatever other state you want to go to. Look at all the public school prices and residency requirements.
I don't know if this is correct or updated, but here's a list of public universities in all 50 states, you want to look at in-state tuition, because you have to move there and work for the amount of time before you get residency. As I suspected, Vermont is the highest. Fuck Vermont, if you live there, move. California is the least expensive. Move here, I live here, it's wonderful despite all you hear. Just go to a low cost of living area - California is huge and more than the large population centers.
But again, teach your kid to comparison shop on everything. Don't rush into purchases, any purchases, any money spent, including university.
> Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened?
It costs too much and the jobs you get out of college (if you get one) are paying way too low. English has been one of the most popular majors in the last decade, but unfortunately the economy cannot meaningfully employ as many English majors. So people end up in careers that are completely unrelated. On the better side, sales and marketing jobs hire them, on the worse, a receptionist or barista. You can actually go to a trade school and come out better off on the other side.
>“The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.”
Are the standards to get into university that low?
Based on my experience in a liberal arts program in a state school, yes.
Professors can't assume the students learned anything in high school, so it takes a few semesters just to get the students to a college level. A lot of students graduated with nothing more than a passing knowledge of their subject because they took so long just to catch up.
Many students in the US are working full-time while seeking their degree, so they don't have a ton of time to study or write papers. Most professors understand this and assign a less-demanding load.
Another factor that I strongly suspect but can't prove: You have to have a college degree for most jobs, so professors feel like they're hurting a student's future prospects when they give a bad grade.
Keep in mind I'm talking about state schools - I would expect Harvard to be better!
For context, the Scarlet Letter is pretty annoying. Halfway through each of these sentences I feel myself losing patience
A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
When I graduated university, it was very clear to me that my peers couldn't communicate adequately at that time. A lot of essays are effectively cheated on and the students are taught mostly to pad as opposed to have serious consideration and thought on the literature. None of this contributes to mastering structure or craft in any way. There's a lot of pressure to graduate students by parents/the board/local government, especially in highschool, especially when English is continually marginalized as a field of study. Where do you, an English teacher at highschool, get off failing a rising star athlete, young mathematician, engineering passionate, or any number of categories that is "worth more" than the capacity to read and write intelligently?
My father taught at a local state university, nowhere near state flagship level but still a "university" in name, and he occasionally had kids in class who were close to functionally illiterate. His reading for the semester was very light (something you would get through in a competitive university in a week) but from helping kids who came to his office he could tell it would have been a hundred hours of reading for some of them, even if they skipped all the words they didn't know.
I think I approve of letting every kid take a crack at college. If they graduate high school, there should be a school somewhere that gives them a chance. The problem is that if they aren't ready, there's no place they can go. They can't go back to their old high school and demand to be taught what the teachers pretended to teach them. The best they can do is take remedial reading classes at the university, borrowing money to learn what their local schools were supposed to teach them for free.
Most (maybe all?) of the kids like this that my dad encountered came from rural schools where you have a similar range of preparedness and home situations that you see in an urban setting, but you only have enough kids the same age to fill one or two classrooms. A teacher can't personalize the curriculum for every single student, so a kid who falls significantly behind will, after a certain point, no longer receive a meaningful amount of instruction, because the curriculum that's appropriate for the bulk of the class is beyond what they can engage with. Schools that recognize the unfairness of failing a kid that they're not even teaching tend to pass these kids along from grade to grade and then graduate them, and it's hard to fault them for it. If you think of instructional level as a spectrum from remedial to advanced, rural schools only have the resources to cover the middle part of that spectrum where 90-95% of their students are. All they can do for the rest is give them an apology and a diploma.
Yes. I'm guessing it's because nearly every American needs to go to college nowadays (sure, there are other options, but college is the most practical) and as a result they had to lower standards. I mean, I've heard that some universities don't even require SAT/ACT scores anymore. That doesn't mean that "prestigious" universities don't exist, but generally speaking they've really dumbed-down things a lot.
A lot of pre-20th century writing is absolutely awful. Long, pretentious, rambling run-on sentences and authors seemingly in love with the sound of their own voice.
My biggest complaint with old books is I want them to STFU and get to the point!
Based on my son's freshman year at a big university, all the 101 and 102 classes assume no prior knowledge, of almost anything. Grammar, the desktop/filesystem metaphor (which, I'm told, a whole lot of students still didn't understand even after spend a couple of classes on these basics), what a cell is, and in physics classes... what a proton is. Just to name a few examples.
"The Scarlet Latter" was an 11th grade book for me. I remember it being a typical difficulty level as other pre-20th century literature - reading and understanding it was work, but not unusually so.
Important context - that quote is attributed thus: "Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor".
Harvard's admission standards are seldom criticized for being too low. Though one might ask whether the struggling students were ones admitted on the basis of academic merit, vs. family connections...
>Are the standards to get into university that low?
Universities aren't what they used to be.
In the modern world everyone has access to college, no one is denied, and it has become a necessity to get a degree. Something as simple as running a daycare requires several degrees or credentials in order to be competitive. [1]
In short, today you must pay an exorbitant sum of time and money for credentials simply to have access to the labor market. [2]
Yes they are. Kids in lower schools are generally not taught how to read or write well at all. When they do read books, the books are either distilled into key ideas in class (so you don't really have to read them aside from the occasional quiz) or very easy reading material. When they write, it's usually a "5-paragraph" essay that is more about regurgitating the distilled points than any form of original thought. That is, if they don't cheat on the essay.
I recently did an MBA program (yes, pile on the hate) where the average student I worked with had a very hard time reading complex documents or stringing together sentences to form a coherent argument. They even struggled to read reports from consulting companies, which are full of pictures and written in very plain grammar, so I doubt most could tackle "Ulysses," "The Wasteland," or "The Scarlet Letter."
By the way, I think this is why the PG writing style is popular - it's very easy to understand the words and sentences, so you can convey an idea to a lot of people, albeit in a not-very-nuanced way. It also makes it fairly easy to write an argument - there is no flowery language around to distract you from the fact that you are saying nothing.
A lot of people attribute this to the fact that there are a lot of people who have English as a second language or speak a different dialect of English (Indian English is very common), but I'm not so sure. I have often found that many non-native speakers actually have larger vocabularies and a better understanding of grammar than typical native speakers.
My Philosphy 101 was me having a conversation with the grad student lecturer over Plato's dialogues. After class one day, this STEM student, likely taking the course for the easy credit as I don't believe anyone failed the course, asked me "How do you read this stuff?" in what I interpreted as a mixed tone of condescension ("why would you read this stuff") and surprise ("how do you read this stuff").
Luckily for me I competed in high school policy debate where I learned (the hard way, by losing a lot) how to assess text within the framework of constraints it implies, as well as how to challenge those specific constraints.
Lotta people can't do that and end either up being that person in a philosophy course going on a long, idiosyncratic rant that's based on word associations they're making, or just remain silent and merely endure the course for the credit.
>"having trouble identifying the subject and the verb"
In my experience English class was primarily about reading literature with the goal of teaching morals and values. There was very little information about the structure of the English language. I actually learned far more about grammar, syntax, articles, etc. through learning Spanish.
The impression that I get from my brother, who teaches as an adjunct at a couple of state schools in the Midwest, is that yes the standards are that low.
English majors (and other liberal arts majors) do not build "critical thinking" any better than science majors. That skillset comes down to your natural intelligence and curiosity.
I know my wife majored in English in the 90’s, when she graduated the job prospects were very weak. She got a job in book publishing that was barely above minimum wage.
She hated it so much that she went back to school to become a physical therapist, and she had been happily doing that for decades.
So it begs the question - can you live on an English degree, and be happy in the real world?
A lot of popular youtube content creators have english or literature degrees actually. It's almost like being really good at writing for a given audience, and being able to write stuff that will be interpreted as genuine and good is a useful tool that we really should be using more.
Any technical degree that doesn't include some sort of technical writing class is deficient IMO, and degree programs that get closer to needing to work with other people more than math should have stronger writing classes as well. So many adult americans can't read at a highschool level. It's an essential skill, and has been since society first developed written language.
My mother and my sisters all have degrees in English. My mother had a good career as a high school English teacher and one of my sisters is doing the same. My other sister works as an editor for an educational publishing company.
Outside of education, there is a need for clear and well structured communication across every field. Copy writing/editing for marketing and sales campaigns, internal and external corporate communications, technical writing. These are all areas I've worked on with English majors.
I once spoke with a law professor who said that English majors often make the best lawyers. Their undergrad experience prepared them for the volume of reading, analysis and writing that is required to successfully complete a law degree.
Can you thrive in a job that requires an English degree (Writing, teaching English, publishing or the like)? Yes, but struggle is likely.
Can you, with (just a tiny bit of) creativity, find a job where the skills trained by an English degree (reading critically and writing effectively and effortlessly) are valuable? Absolutely. PR, marketing, law and many parts of the management world would suit anyone with those skills.
The engineering and science world has made everyone think that the only jobs for a degree have to closely match the degree from a subject perspective; they've forgotten that the goal of a liberal arts education is to train generalists with a set of skills that can be applied to a wide range of tasks.
It depends on the individual; your college degree gets you your first job after college. After that, it's experience and relationships/contacts.
I know of English and Liberal Arts majors that are doing very well in tech fields doing work other than development: program management, developer relations, customer success, sales, marketing. Some in development too, just not as many.
The difference with those folks is that all of them kept a broad understanding of where they wanted their career to go, and allowed themselves to take on broader responsibilities and deeper challenges as time went on.
> So it begs the question - can you live on an English degree, and be happy in the real world?
I have two friends who did English at university. One (who started doing Geography and switched after a year) is an editor of a major (niche) national magazine. The other is a senior journalist at a national broadcaster.
How much their English degree is needed for those jobs is rather meaningless really, I suspect their tenures on the university newspaper (former) and radio station (latter) were more relevant, but they are happy.
I don't think you get an English degree with the idea that you'll use it to go into a particular career, but then degrees shouldn't be like that anyway in most subjects.
Stands to reason. Most of the working population is borderline illiterate in English anyway, why would anyone want to major in it?
One thing some of the STEM-is-the-only-way-to-keep-the-wolves-from-the-door advocates might not realize is that generally at top schools humanities majors have to write a lot, which is good preparation for, well, anything that involves writing, ranging from writing for the hell of it to law and business consulting. Not a bad life if you can wrangle it.
Considering the PR for most humanities majors being paraded around is that you can become a full time activist and work for a government institution or non profit it's no surprise as people in general are becoming increasingly annoyed with the non-stop pearl-clutching activist caricature being portrayed in all aspects of society, that people aren't lining up to make less money and be around people that the general populous abhors.
I wouldn't blame STEM. English departments did this to themselves when they bought into post-structuralism and postmodernism and so on, and in so doing tacitly assented to the proposition that they themselves could have nothing valuable to teach, because there wasn't any concrete truth to be had. After that, English just became a centrifuge where the core ideas lost cohesion, and everything flew outward to more and more distant, disconnected edges. There is no discipline of English to study at this point.
When I enrolled in 2000, I thought "well, I already know how to program, I can always get a job in software. Let's see what a liberal arts education can teach me," but even back then it was all about problematizing, casuistry, and twisted little factions of hateful goblins ruling over their tiny kingdoms. Nobody was teaching how to really read and comprehend a text, other than a couple of ancient Associate Professors who would never, ever make tenure. Nowadays, I'm sure that breed is nearly extinct, and I can't even imagine what's left. It could have just been my university, but nothing I've seen (including this article) makes me think that was an isolated case.
For the record, English has a ton of value in the software industry. Programming is easy enough, you can just learn that on your own. On the other hand, reading comprehension and critical thinking are incredibly rare in our industry, and they are differentiators. The problem for English departments is that they don't teach these very well anymore, and you'd be better off just learning them yourself as well.
The sad truth is that if you want to make big bucks with a humanities degree alone, you should go to a prestigious / top school, get your degree, and then join the workforce doing something completely different.
When college, medical and housing are as expensive as they are in the US, is it a surprise that people want to do everything in their power to avoid becoming destitute? There is no obvious path to middle class prosperity with a degree in English, but you'd almost have to try to not reach a comfortable living as a programmer.
At some point your aspirations of being a well-rounded well-read cosmopolite have to take a back seat to not being one mistake away from medical bankruptcy, to not spending half of your life paying off your school loans, and to being able to afford a home and a family without 14 hour Uber shifts.
We crank out something like 25,000 history majors every year in the US. At the same time there are (don't quote me on this) only 1000 jobs in the whole country that require a history degree. Everybody else will have to end up doing something entirely unrelated to history.
As a former graduate student in the humanities, this part really struck me:
> Today, the academic profession of the humanities is a notoriously haywire career track, with Ph.D. programs enrolling more students than there are jobs, using them for teaching, and then, years later, sending them off with doctoral gowns and no future in the discipline.
> of fifteen people who began Princeton’s English Ph.D. program in 2012, only two have landed on a tenure track
Of course, not everyone who majors in the humanities as an undergrad needs to go on to a career in academia, but it was a hope, a dream for many. Now there's seemingly no hope, and thus no reason for academically-inclined people to pursue it, when only the very lucky few survive. The students who would be most enthusiastic about the humanities are scared away by the hopelessness and lack of investment. Humanities are becoming a dead end not only in terms of getting a job in industry but also in terms of getting a job in academia. Indeed, ironically, a humanities degree may end up being more useful now for industry than for academia.
An English degree from Harvard is nearly adjacent to the trajectory of Conan O'Brien. One should be so proud. This person could have written for the Lampoon.
Are we possibly becoming a post-English society in the same sense that we became post-Latin? Latin was once the language you needed to know to access knowledge and learning. Now it is of little use to most outside of the Classics. In the future it will be possible to conduct science without full literacy.
With the rise of large language models, apps, APIs, handheld computation, video content, and finger gestures, it seems that our daily interface with the world is moving from logocentrism. Furthermore, with the coming abundance of generated junk text from generative models, the relative value of language (English) looks to continue to diminish.
I've encountered people who gleefully celebrate this ("why would you study something so 'useless'?") -- but surely a genuinely affluent society should allow people to pursue their interests, instead of funneling them into the same roles? Isn't this a failure of political economics?
If the future of AI is LLMs like ChatGPT, which are trained on literature and other things that people create, you're going to need humanities scholars like you need computer scientists to understand the AI. Microsoft gave their chatbot, which has probably almost every published work of science fiction in its training set, a human name and then were surprised that it imitated the fictional poorly-behaved named AIs that it was exposed to in its training.
The issue is that humanities majors should be priced differently than other classes. The fact that "pre-professional" path classes cost the same as "frivolous" classes didn't matter much when college didn't cost THAT much.
Now? It's a stark decision of cost-benefit analysis.
I almost think that humanities need to be like hermit satellite institutions attached to the universities. You know, like universities were back in the day. Reduced expectations of funding and costs for attending those. The university gets the prestige, but doesn't have to shoulder as much cost. Or, they are separately endowed.
Humanities don't need the management that college administration uses to justify its explosive expansion. It doesn't have grants and all that. It just needs classrooms, some offices, and libraries. The dorms can be old-school if you want, part of the "academic experience".
The rest of the university, with its sport facilities, lavish living quarters, frats, grant-seeking labs, etc, whatever. Go exist. Over there. Grade inflation, cheatable classes, over there.
So there's two university experiences: the one where people go to get the job rubberstamp, and much cheaper but traditional (as in millenia old) experience of actual academic interest. Those can have separate admissions criteria.
I guess this is like what graduate students go through, which is what "real college" is kind of like, but why not provide a track that bypasses the crappy undergrad phase for those students (and they do exist) that demonstrate the academic interest? The key difference is that grad students have a massive undergrad debt, but then in grad school pay nothing or get paid subsistence wages.
Let's get rid of the massive undergrad debt for those that actually demonstrate academic interest. And let's be real, even in places like Harvard, that is probably a small minority of people going there.
[+] [-] apodolny|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L178005...
[+] [-] overthemoon|3 years ago|reply
After I graduated, I was in so much debt I became suicidally depressed. I thought my future was over. (I ended up learning to program and got a job doing that, instead.) The outlook that reduces education in the abstract to its ROI is bleak; the refusal to descend into the real world and consider the economics of education is naive and useless.
I've given a lot of thought about what I'll advise my son to do, assuming he listens to me. It's true that he could always read any books in his free time, but that would leave out the discussion, writing, and instruction, which are indispensable. I do NOT want him going into a horrible amount of debt for it, or miss out on a career that will actually support him. But I want so much for him to have something like the mental and cultural enrichment I got to have, whose effects are hard to even explain because they've touched every part of my life. I don't have an answer yet.
[+] [-] owlglass|3 years ago|reply
While I am glad I didn't spend the ~$32,000 CAD it would have cost to get an English degree, I do wish I'd enrolled in a CS/English double major to get the benefits of technical studies and a humanities education. I have realized that, while I like software, a corporate job is just a means to an end to what I really enjoy: shared experience and art.
On another note, I did make the mistake of paying $15,000 CAD/year for a software engineering degree compared to $8,000/year for a CS degree. Now, in my final year, I'm taking many of the same classes CS students take. I would warn anyone in the same position in Canada (or the US) to seriously compare the two curricula when making a decision.
[+] [-] dml2135|3 years ago|reply
If I could go back and do it all again, I don't think I would a CS major instead, even when taking the massively increased earning potential I would have had I entered the field straight out of college. My humanities classes gave me so much historical perspective on the world that shapes my outlook today, and I simply can't imagine living without that.
I also credit my humanities education with teaching me how to do research and "how to learn". I think it gave me a lot of the skills I used to teach myself coding and switch careers. I'm not certain it would have been as easy to do it the other way around -- learn CS in college and teach myself humanities later.
[+] [-] jwestbury|3 years ago|reply
I somehow found my way back into tech, and have spent a decade across several well-regarded tech giants and now a hedge fund. Throughout that journey, I've received consistent praise for my soft skills, which have generally surpassed those of my peers, and have allowed me to excel beyond where I would ever have gotten on raw technical talent. Those soft skills would likely never have developed without majoring in the humanities.
It's terribly sad to see the slow death of the humanities. Perhaps if more people read some Jonathan Swift, we'd be in a different world and the humanities would still thrive.
[+] [-] roncesvalles|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymouskimmer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FrontierPsych|3 years ago|reply
I have a degree in CS/Business.
I know all about ROI and balance sheets and database normalization and boolean logic.
However, I also read all kinds of things on my own, like Thucydides, Seutonius, Virgil, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Joyce; I study art history; I play guitar and piano; I'm learning Spanish; I'm a damn fine cook; I'm super into clothing and know fine clothing - a clothing connoisseur: I've been involved in politics. And a lot more.
The reality is reality - university is just too fucking expensive to fuck around with. Back in the day, in California, tuition was free, and when they increased it, it was still affordable. So anyone could take any type of major that they wished. But now is not then. No amount of wishing will change it.
However, at least in California, you can still get any degree you wish. Going to community college for 2 years is free if your family makes less than about $40K per year, and about $2,000 tuition if more. California State Universities is $5,742 tuition per year. So you can get undergrad courses out of the way for either $0 or $4,000 for 2 years, and $11,484 for California State University. For a total of $11,484 or $15,484 for a 4 year degree. This is only tuition, but you can zero out books and fees and room and board because they are going to be the approximately the same anywhere, unless if you go to high cost of living place like SF metro area, LA metro area, or San Diego metro area. But there's a lot of places like Bakersfield, Fresno, Chico, Humbolt that are a lot lower cost of living. Get a share rental apartment or house, get a part-time job and Bob's your uncle. But with $11K or $15K, you can pretty much get any degree you want. Any kind - English, sociology, whatever, it doesn't matter. You should be able to work part-time to pay for Cal State University tuition, and you can get a loan to help out with food and housing, but you can find a shared housing for $400-500 per month, so that's fucking cheap and might be able to have that part time job pay for that as well and graduate with very little debt.
$400/month in Chico - https://chico.craigslist.org/roo/d/chico-room-in-58-in-nord-...
$460 in Bakersfield - https://bakersfield.craigslist.org/roo/d/bakersfield-furnish...
$500 in Humboldt - https://humboldt.craigslist.org/roo/d/arcata-room-for-rent/7...
I'd say if you do one thing for your son, teach him how to comparison shop on everything. As you said, you went to "a shit school and far, far too much debt."
My first school was a private university, and was $4,500 per year, and that included tuition, room and board - 3 meals a day. That same school is now $60K per year for the same thing. So many private universities charge this much and it's fucked up. I went to school a long time ago. But I only went to that private university for one year before moving to California and going to community college and California State University to graduate for almost nothing - no outstanding debt.
Going to most private university is fucked. See what your public university costs, because, well, the public subsidizes it. I think small states like Vermont are fucked because they have a small population base that can't afford it, but not sure. If your public universities are too expensive, see what the requirements for becoming a California resident are, and move her for a year or two and work full time, then get a university degree with all the $$$ that you earned and saved. Or whatever other state you want to go to. Look at all the public school prices and residency requirements.
I don't know if this is correct or updated, but here's a list of public universities in all 50 states, you want to look at in-state tuition, because you have to move there and work for the amount of time before you get residency. As I suspected, Vermont is the highest. Fuck Vermont, if you live there, move. California is the least expensive. Move here, I live here, it's wonderful despite all you hear. Just go to a low cost of living area - California is huge and more than the large population centers.
But again, teach your kid to comparison shop on everything. Don't rush into purchases, any purchases, any money spent, including university.
[+] [-] darth_avocado|3 years ago|reply
It costs too much and the jobs you get out of college (if you get one) are paying way too low. English has been one of the most popular majors in the last decade, but unfortunately the economy cannot meaningfully employ as many English majors. So people end up in careers that are completely unrelated. On the better side, sales and marketing jobs hire them, on the worse, a receptionist or barista. You can actually go to a trade school and come out better off on the other side.
[+] [-] Ambolia|3 years ago|reply
Are the standards to get into university that low?
[+] [-] SL61|3 years ago|reply
Professors can't assume the students learned anything in high school, so it takes a few semesters just to get the students to a college level. A lot of students graduated with nothing more than a passing knowledge of their subject because they took so long just to catch up.
Many students in the US are working full-time while seeking their degree, so they don't have a ton of time to study or write papers. Most professors understand this and assign a less-demanding load.
Another factor that I strongly suspect but can't prove: You have to have a college degree for most jobs, so professors feel like they're hurting a student's future prospects when they give a bad grade.
Keep in mind I'm talking about state schools - I would expect Harvard to be better!
[+] [-] codeulike|3 years ago|reply
A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
[+] [-] PuppyTailWags|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkarl|3 years ago|reply
I think I approve of letting every kid take a crack at college. If they graduate high school, there should be a school somewhere that gives them a chance. The problem is that if they aren't ready, there's no place they can go. They can't go back to their old high school and demand to be taught what the teachers pretended to teach them. The best they can do is take remedial reading classes at the university, borrowing money to learn what their local schools were supposed to teach them for free.
Most (maybe all?) of the kids like this that my dad encountered came from rural schools where you have a similar range of preparedness and home situations that you see in an urban setting, but you only have enough kids the same age to fill one or two classrooms. A teacher can't personalize the curriculum for every single student, so a kid who falls significantly behind will, after a certain point, no longer receive a meaningful amount of instruction, because the curriculum that's appropriate for the bulk of the class is beyond what they can engage with. Schools that recognize the unfairness of failing a kid that they're not even teaching tend to pass these kids along from grade to grade and then graduate them, and it's hard to fault them for it. If you think of instructional level as a spectrum from remedial to advanced, rural schools only have the resources to cover the middle part of that spectrum where 90-95% of their students are. All they can do for the rest is give them an apology and a diploma.
[+] [-] xenon7|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdntspa|3 years ago|reply
My biggest complaint with old books is I want them to STFU and get to the point!
[+] [-] browningstreet|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alistairSH|3 years ago|reply
"The Scarlet Latter" was an 11th grade book for me. I remember it being a typical difficulty level as other pre-20th century literature - reading and understanding it was work, but not unusually so.
[+] [-] bell-cot|3 years ago|reply
Harvard's admission standards are seldom criticized for being too low. Though one might ask whether the struggling students were ones admitted on the basis of academic merit, vs. family connections...
[+] [-] disambiguation|3 years ago|reply
Universities aren't what they used to be.
In the modern world everyone has access to college, no one is denied, and it has become a necessity to get a degree. Something as simple as running a daycare requires several degrees or credentials in order to be competitive. [1]
In short, today you must pay an exorbitant sum of time and money for credentials simply to have access to the labor market. [2]
[1] https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/certifica...
[2] https://www.thoughtco.com/indulgences-their-role-in-the-refo...
[+] [-] pclmulqdq|3 years ago|reply
I recently did an MBA program (yes, pile on the hate) where the average student I worked with had a very hard time reading complex documents or stringing together sentences to form a coherent argument. They even struggled to read reports from consulting companies, which are full of pictures and written in very plain grammar, so I doubt most could tackle "Ulysses," "The Wasteland," or "The Scarlet Letter."
By the way, I think this is why the PG writing style is popular - it's very easy to understand the words and sentences, so you can convey an idea to a lot of people, albeit in a not-very-nuanced way. It also makes it fairly easy to write an argument - there is no flowery language around to distract you from the fact that you are saying nothing.
A lot of people attribute this to the fact that there are a lot of people who have English as a second language or speak a different dialect of English (Indian English is very common), but I'm not so sure. I have often found that many non-native speakers actually have larger vocabularies and a better understanding of grammar than typical native speakers.
[+] [-] imbnwa|3 years ago|reply
Luckily for me I competed in high school policy debate where I learned (the hard way, by losing a lot) how to assess text within the framework of constraints it implies, as well as how to challenge those specific constraints.
Lotta people can't do that and end either up being that person in a philosophy course going on a long, idiosyncratic rant that's based on word associations they're making, or just remain silent and merely endure the course for the credit.
[+] [-] BitwiseFool|3 years ago|reply
In my experience English class was primarily about reading literature with the goal of teaching morals and values. There was very little information about the structure of the English language. I actually learned far more about grammar, syntax, articles, etc. through learning Spanish.
[+] [-] cafard|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cm2012|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scubabear68|3 years ago|reply
She hated it so much that she went back to school to become a physical therapist, and she had been happily doing that for decades.
So it begs the question - can you live on an English degree, and be happy in the real world?
[+] [-] mrguyorama|3 years ago|reply
Any technical degree that doesn't include some sort of technical writing class is deficient IMO, and degree programs that get closer to needing to work with other people more than math should have stronger writing classes as well. So many adult americans can't read at a highschool level. It's an essential skill, and has been since society first developed written language.
[+] [-] akamia|3 years ago|reply
Outside of education, there is a need for clear and well structured communication across every field. Copy writing/editing for marketing and sales campaigns, internal and external corporate communications, technical writing. These are all areas I've worked on with English majors.
I once spoke with a law professor who said that English majors often make the best lawyers. Their undergrad experience prepared them for the volume of reading, analysis and writing that is required to successfully complete a law degree.
[+] [-] newsclues|3 years ago|reply
Yes, publishing and communications professions can be perfect for English majors.
But how many jobs vs how many applicants is the problem.
[+] [-] vitaflo|3 years ago|reply
Of course the joke always was that he was majoring in English to teach future majors in English.
[+] [-] ryandrake|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InitialLastName|3 years ago|reply
Can you thrive in a job that requires an English degree (Writing, teaching English, publishing or the like)? Yes, but struggle is likely.
Can you, with (just a tiny bit of) creativity, find a job where the skills trained by an English degree (reading critically and writing effectively and effortlessly) are valuable? Absolutely. PR, marketing, law and many parts of the management world would suit anyone with those skills.
The engineering and science world has made everyone think that the only jobs for a degree have to closely match the degree from a subject perspective; they've forgotten that the goal of a liberal arts education is to train generalists with a set of skills that can be applied to a wide range of tasks.
[+] [-] 98codes|3 years ago|reply
I know of English and Liberal Arts majors that are doing very well in tech fields doing work other than development: program management, developer relations, customer success, sales, marketing. Some in development too, just not as many.
The difference with those folks is that all of them kept a broad understanding of where they wanted their career to go, and allowed themselves to take on broader responsibilities and deeper challenges as time went on.
[+] [-] ta1243|3 years ago|reply
I have two friends who did English at university. One (who started doing Geography and switched after a year) is an editor of a major (niche) national magazine. The other is a senior journalist at a national broadcaster.
How much their English degree is needed for those jobs is rather meaningless really, I suspect their tenures on the university newspaper (former) and radio station (latter) were more relevant, but they are happy.
I don't think you get an English degree with the idea that you'll use it to go into a particular career, but then degrees shouldn't be like that anyway in most subjects.
[+] [-] throwawayacc5|3 years ago|reply
I welcome this change. The less grievance studies majors there are, the better off society will be.
[+] [-] buescher|3 years ago|reply
One thing some of the STEM-is-the-only-way-to-keep-the-wolves-from-the-door advocates might not realize is that generally at top schools humanities majors have to write a lot, which is good preparation for, well, anything that involves writing, ranging from writing for the hell of it to law and business consulting. Not a bad life if you can wrangle it.
[+] [-] boredumb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 65|3 years ago|reply
This is the most annoying sentence I've ever read.
[+] [-] karaterobot|3 years ago|reply
When I enrolled in 2000, I thought "well, I already know how to program, I can always get a job in software. Let's see what a liberal arts education can teach me," but even back then it was all about problematizing, casuistry, and twisted little factions of hateful goblins ruling over their tiny kingdoms. Nobody was teaching how to really read and comprehend a text, other than a couple of ancient Associate Professors who would never, ever make tenure. Nowadays, I'm sure that breed is nearly extinct, and I can't even imagine what's left. It could have just been my university, but nothing I've seen (including this article) makes me think that was an isolated case.
For the record, English has a ton of value in the software industry. Programming is easy enough, you can just learn that on your own. On the other hand, reading comprehension and critical thinking are incredibly rare in our industry, and they are differentiators. The problem for English departments is that they don't teach these very well anymore, and you'd be better off just learning them yourself as well.
[+] [-] TrackerFF|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blakesterz|3 years ago|reply
The End of the English Major? Not So Fast (April 13, 2015)
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/end-engli...
[+] [-] 8f2ab37a-ed6c|3 years ago|reply
At some point your aspirations of being a well-rounded well-read cosmopolite have to take a back seat to not being one mistake away from medical bankruptcy, to not spending half of your life paying off your school loans, and to being able to afford a home and a family without 14 hour Uber shifts.
We crank out something like 25,000 history majors every year in the US. At the same time there are (don't quote me on this) only 1000 jobs in the whole country that require a history degree. Everybody else will have to end up doing something entirely unrelated to history.
[+] [-] lapcat|3 years ago|reply
> Today, the academic profession of the humanities is a notoriously haywire career track, with Ph.D. programs enrolling more students than there are jobs, using them for teaching, and then, years later, sending them off with doctoral gowns and no future in the discipline.
> of fifteen people who began Princeton’s English Ph.D. program in 2012, only two have landed on a tenure track
Of course, not everyone who majors in the humanities as an undergrad needs to go on to a career in academia, but it was a hope, a dream for many. Now there's seemingly no hope, and thus no reason for academically-inclined people to pursue it, when only the very lucky few survive. The students who would be most enthusiastic about the humanities are scared away by the hopelessness and lack of investment. Humanities are becoming a dead end not only in terms of getting a job in industry but also in terms of getting a job in academia. Indeed, ironically, a humanities degree may end up being more useful now for industry than for academia.
[+] [-] koops|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Apocryphon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] modernpink|3 years ago|reply
With the rise of large language models, apps, APIs, handheld computation, video content, and finger gestures, it seems that our daily interface with the world is moving from logocentrism. Furthermore, with the coming abundance of generated junk text from generative models, the relative value of language (English) looks to continue to diminish.
[+] [-] lordleft|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephenboyd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|3 years ago|reply
Now? It's a stark decision of cost-benefit analysis.
I almost think that humanities need to be like hermit satellite institutions attached to the universities. You know, like universities were back in the day. Reduced expectations of funding and costs for attending those. The university gets the prestige, but doesn't have to shoulder as much cost. Or, they are separately endowed.
Humanities don't need the management that college administration uses to justify its explosive expansion. It doesn't have grants and all that. It just needs classrooms, some offices, and libraries. The dorms can be old-school if you want, part of the "academic experience".
The rest of the university, with its sport facilities, lavish living quarters, frats, grant-seeking labs, etc, whatever. Go exist. Over there. Grade inflation, cheatable classes, over there.
So there's two university experiences: the one where people go to get the job rubberstamp, and much cheaper but traditional (as in millenia old) experience of actual academic interest. Those can have separate admissions criteria.
I guess this is like what graduate students go through, which is what "real college" is kind of like, but why not provide a track that bypasses the crappy undergrad phase for those students (and they do exist) that demonstrate the academic interest? The key difference is that grad students have a massive undergrad debt, but then in grad school pay nothing or get paid subsistence wages.
Let's get rid of the massive undergrad debt for those that actually demonstrate academic interest. And let's be real, even in places like Harvard, that is probably a small minority of people going there.