"It's time to prioritize what students want and need over what we want to teach"

[Wahoo Redux]

Since we're being personal, I have a fabulously cool job using my degree that I would recommend to anyone. My child attends a public school that makes national lists of good schools. I have a very nice house filled with books and enough free time to enjoy them.  As soon as I stopped working in academia and let people pay me for my skills, I more than doubled my salary by moving back to the part of the country in which I want to live.

Please, tell me again, how I really should have gone to an Nth rate regional comprehensive for my undergrad to check a bunch of minimal liberal-arts-like boxes instead of an excellent engineering school from which I graduated with zero debt and that let me do a variety of interesting things with my adult life, even if some of them didn't pay all at well at during the time.  Tell me again how my education is inferior despite currently working in a building filled with graduates from MIT, Caltech, Stanford, and other elite schools where we all have the same job here in middle age.

How's life going for you with those fabulous box-checking gen eds?  Any strong recommendations for having all 18 year olds follow your life path?  Remember how long we've known each other and the full back story.

Go ahead and wave away all those first-person narratives by adjuncts who are in very hard situations working long hours for minimal pay because I'm arrogant in wanting people to have my very good life  even when money was tight instead of one of those lives.

I will tell you none of that stuff. 

I told you none of that stuff. 

You went whole-hog straw(wo)man on me there. 

Having nothing to actually say, you simply made stuff up you wish I'd posted.

You told me stuff that, at best, only has a tangential relationship to the question of gen eds----carefully avoiding your own gen ed background. 

If you are happy, I am happy for you.

But if you are making stuff up in a panic instead of responding to actual commentary you have lost that particular argument.

I will tell you that, for a scientist, you sure rely on personal anecdotal evidence to make your case instead of finding me a legitimate institution of higher learning which elides the liberal arts or admitting that this "box-checking" business has a legitimate function...or admitting your STEMy arrogance. 

But since we are being personal, I will tell you about my cousin the environmental engineer who studied A Midsummer Night's Dream in his box-checking intro to lit as an undergrad and then wanted to discuss it with me because, hey, he actually found it interesting.  He knew something about the world which he otherwise wouldn't have.  He had a broader, more interesting, better trained mind that he would have had he simply studied civil and environmental engineering.  His world was more interesting, and he was smarter, no matter how minutely, than he would have been otherwise.

And I will again tell you that "Geology 101" changed my life.  It is impossible to know how I would view the world had I not been forced to take that class (at that point in my life I simply wanted to graduate and had no pretensions to an intellectual lifestyle) but I can tell you that I have been profoundly grateful to the University of Wahoo for making me take it.  I always found science interesting, and (having a number of scientists in my family) I probably would have had a depth of respect for the sciences---but there is no replacing first person experience, and that field-trip to look at a strike-slip boundary is one of the clearest memories I have of my education.

Oh yeah, and it's amazingly ironic and un-self-aware for you to post "wave away all those first-person narratives by adjuncts who are in very hard situations" after many of things we have posted to each other.

Give the adjuncts full time jobs.  The gen eds are too important not to.

[marshwiggle]

Give the adjuncts full time jobs.  The gen eds are too important not to.

So would this be by consolidating several adjunct positions into a few full-time ones, putting many out of work entirely, or by requiring vastly more "required" courses for everyone to make work for those now-full-time former adjuncts?

[Caracal]

Interesting.

It's also interesting that the assertion is how few people go to graduate school at a time when about a third of the US adult population has a bachelor's degree with about a third of them also having a graduate degree (e.g., a significant fraction of people who have a college degree also have a graduate degree). 

When I look at English and remember the statistic that about 50% of those who go to grad school drop out without the desired degree: 1.4k PhDs and 9k MAs awarded as an average for recent years(https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_ref.asp) when the BA awards have been slightly above 50k for decades (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/14/study-shows-87-decline-humanities-bachelors-degrees-2-years) looks an awful lot like about half of BA graduates going on to graduate school in recent years.

What? None of this follows. A graduate degree includes JDs, MDs, MBAs and a million other things that aren't doctorates in the humanities.

Then the numbers for English make no sense at all. First off, you're hopelessly muddling things by throwing Doctoral and Masters Degrees together. That 50 percent number is for doctoral degrees, I couldn't find anything with a number for masters degrees, but I'd be pretty shocked it it isn't lower. You're also double counting. About 1.5k of those MAs are going to people who are going to get a PHD. Some unknown number are also going to people who started a doctoral program, but ended up just getting an MA. There also are a fair number of people who do an MA program one place and then enter a doctoral program somewhere else. You actually are triple counting these people. I don't really know what the number of people who start a grad program in English is but it is nowhere near 25k when you take out all the double counting and spurious multiplying. At the absolute highest it could be 15k, but I bet it is lower.

But this is still silly because we are talking about really different degrees. An MA in most humanities fields isn't usually a great idea, but a lot of the people getting it are doing it because they think it will help them in a field they are already in. Mostly secondary teaching, but other stuff too. The point is that most of these people are not going to end up as adjunct instructors nor is their goal to teach at the college level. Those people are the 3k or so who enter doctoral programs and might be about 6 percent of English graduates.

I'd also point out that these numbers are probably higher for English than other fields because more people usually go from History or Political Science to law school, but whatever.

[Wahoo Redux]

You know, we are kind of piling onto poor Polly here after her little temper tantrum, but on edit I missed this one...

How's life going for you with those fabulous box-checking gen eds?  Any strong recommendations for having all 18 year olds follow your life path?  Remember how long we've known each other and the full back story.

...and felt I had to respond.

Life right now is going pretty well, Polly.  I worked very hard and stayed the course and it has paid off----not in lottery dollars, but in good enough dollars to make it worthwhile.  You most certainly DON'T know my backstory, dearie. 

I worked for a number of corporations after college which would be target national companies, the kind of places my business students aim for----positions attained with my lousy humanities bachelors.  That's right, my friend, I was making it just fine as a corporate monkey with a liberal arts degree in my back pocket, no problem.  I could easily have stayed.  I could easily be in the $100K a year or more club by now.  I would probably would have gone home one evening, fed the dog, closed my bedroom door, and blown my brains out. 

Ya'want money?  Ya'want security?  Ya'want success?  Be my guest.  Take my career.  Please.

I traded that security for a roll of the academic dice, and while it has been a bumpy road, I have yet to regret it. 

I try to dissuade talented young people from getting their PhDs entirely because of the job market with the caveat, "Do it only if there is nothing else in your life you can see yourself being happy doing," and so far everyone I have talked to has likewise rolled the dice.  They know the odds, they simply don't want a soulless, boring, existential existence.  I don't blame these kids----I blame people like you.

So my life with those fabulous box-checking gen eds is going fine, thank you. 

[mamselle]

Could people please strain out the hooks and bites before posting? This bitter sarcasm is hard to read.

It may feel good to type it, but maybe just save that text to some file you keep for forum stuff, and re-write or edit, aiming for a gentler tone?

For starters, the little "dearies" and "my friends" are neither endearing nor friendly....it would be nice not to have to wade through the zingers to get to the content...

Thanks.

M.

[spork]

positions attained with my lousy humanities bachelors.  That's right, my friend, I was making it just fine as a corporate monkey with a liberal arts degree in my back pocket

[. . .]

But a bachelor's degree in a humanities field is the opposite of being forced to take a random assortment of one-off courses in different disciplines, often delivered by contingent low-paid labor, from a prescribed menu of gen ed requirements. There is no in-depth study leading to a bachelor's degree in any of those disciplines.

People are assuming their own experiences are representative of the majority of undergraduates. They're not. As a college student, I changed my major from engineering to a social science in my junior year. But I had the characteristics of a person who was likely to succeed regardless of major. That's probably true for nearly everyone who reads a discussion board about academia.

Like it or not, the vast majority of undergraduate students are pursuing bachelor's degrees for very transactional reasons. If they can easily opt-out of being forced to pay large amounts of money for something they see as non-relevant to their short- or long-term objectives, they'll do so -- hence the growth of AP, dual enrollment, and community college transfer credit that wipes out a large portion of general education requirements of traditional bachelor's degree programs at far lower cost.

[polly_mer]

But a bachelor's degree in a humanities field is the opposite of being forced to take a random assortment of one-off courses in different disciplines, often delivered by contingent low-paid labor, from a prescribed menu of gen ed requirements. There is no in-depth study leading to a bachelor's degree in any of those disciplines.

This is a good chunk of my point.

Someone who had a good K-12 science education would not be gaining much of anything by taking Geology 101.  A good K-12 science education covers variants of the scientific method and would have included labs along the way.  Taking non-math-focused science in college doesn't add much to anyone's education.  Life-changing by taking one distribution class is then acquiring a major, a minor, or a few years working in the field doing something interesting.  Otherwise, it's much like bragging about how much one watches The History Channel and therefore loves history.

Someone who takes an interesting class may indeed wish to talk about it.  However, let's step back again.  Why do all those politicians think the humanities and certain other fields aren't valuable?  One reason is being force-marched through one-off classes that are clearly more about checking a box than learning something worth knowing.  80 adjuncts from who knows where teaching at a regional comprehensive to ensure students can check the box is not setting the stage for a fabulous experience.

For those who can't do math, 15k on 45k is a non-negligible fraction of people going on to graduate degrees.  Surveys of college students indicate that about half of them plan to continue on for a graduate degree and that fraction has increased over the years.  You may not like the details from a back-of-the-envelope, but the fact remains that many people are going for graduate degrees in fields where the primary market for that graduate degree is academic jobs.

[Hibush]

Taking non-math-focused science in college doesn't add much to anyone's education. 

Counterpoint: A field-trip heavy course in ecology, botany or entomology for non-majors adds quite a bit. Not a bit of math, but scientific knowledge that often lasts a lifetime.

[marshwiggle]

The question still remains: how much true liberal-arts education do people really get out of being marched through a box-checking process at the college level when those people aren't actually college ready and have hordes of faculty doing the minimum to keep their crummy academic jobs without the support the faculty need to give those struggling students the necessary support to succeed as students?

I was marched through a "box checking process" in basic science for my humanities degree.  I didn't want to take geology 101, but it was the only thing available. 

Did it change my life?  Yes.  It is a small change overall, but it was also profound for my understanding of the world and my appreciation for science.

The question is not whether some students will find some benefit in courses they didn't want to take; it's how much value breadth has relative to depth. With an undergraduate degree involving about 40 single term courses, if there are more than 40 disciplines in the university then it isn't even possible for a student to have a single course in every discipline, even though undoubtedly there are people who benefited from an introduction to any conceivable subject.

I would argue against requiring students at university to take courses in any discipline I teach. While a few who are forced into it will benefit, and realize the fact, many if not most will not, and some will create hassles for faculty, staff, TAs, and other students by their attitudes and actions along the way.

High school should, by definition, encompass the body of knowledge that "everyone" in society needs to have; that's why it's free and compulsory. What choices people make after that should be based on their own goals, whether it is preparing for a career or pursuing personal enrichment.

[tuxthepenguin]

If humanities graduates have similar employment rates and satisfaction to other graduates

I'm not aware of the source of that assertion, but remember that the unemployment rate being low doesn't imply that the employment rate is high. Someone getting additional education, staying at home to take care of children, or otherwise not actively seeking employment is not unemployed. You can be working fewer hours or for less money, but you're still employed. Job satisfaction also does not necessarily tell us anything about the quality of the job. You might be doing charity work for low pay (which you can afford to do because you're married to someone with a job that pays the bills) and have very high job satisfaction. A philosophy major that needed to take a real job because they're single might hate that job because they have to do things they hate.

I'm not taking a position because I don't know about the source of the data, but it seems implausible that humanities degrees are just as good for the job market, on the basis of many conversations with humanities majors and faculty that think the job market is terrible.

Illumination on these issues is a simple Google search away.  Most of what Tux is talking about is, indeed, perception.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/02/07/study-finds-humanities-majors-land-jobs-and-are-happy-them

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-11-13-as-tech-companies-hire-more-liberal-arts-majors-more-students-are-choosing-stem-degrees

https://blogs.yu.edu/news/are-there-jobs-for-humanities-majors/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/08/the-humanities-face-a-crisisof-confidence/567565/

I only looked at the first of these (too many other competing uses of my time) but it seems to confirm everything I said. Humanities grads make a little over 60% of what STEM grads make. Only 30% work in a job related to their degree, with more than that working in jobs that have no relationship to their degree. The numbers reported only apply to those in the labor force, not those going on to grad school, taking care of kids, or choosing not to work.

[ciao_yall]

If humanities graduates have similar employment rates and satisfaction to other graduates

I'm not aware of the source of that assertion, but remember that the unemployment rate being low doesn't imply that the employment rate is high. Someone getting additional education, staying at home to take care of children, or otherwise not actively seeking employment is not unemployed. You can be working fewer hours or for less money, but you're still employed. Job satisfaction also does not necessarily tell us anything about the quality of the job. You might be doing charity work for low pay (which you can afford to do because you're married to someone with a job that pays the bills) and have very high job satisfaction. A philosophy major that needed to take a real job because they're single might hate that job because they have to do things they hate.

I'm not taking a position because I don't know about the source of the data, but it seems implausible that humanities degrees are just as good for the job market, on the basis of many conversations with humanities majors and faculty that think the job market is terrible.

Illumination on these issues is a simple Google search away.  Most of what Tux is talking about is, indeed, perception.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/02/07/study-finds-humanities-majors-land-jobs-and-are-happy-them

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-11-13-as-tech-companies-hire-more-liberal-arts-majors-more-students-are-choosing-stem-degrees

https://blogs.yu.edu/news/are-there-jobs-for-humanities-majors/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/08/the-humanities-face-a-crisisof-confidence/567565/

I only looked at the first of these (too many other competing uses of my time) but it seems to confirm everything I said. Humanities grads make a little over 60% of what STEM grads make. Only 30% work in a job related to their degree, with more than that working in jobs that have no relationship to their degree. The numbers reported only apply to those in the labor force, not those going on to grad school, taking care of kids, or choosing not to work.

I'm assuming that 60% is still a middle-class wage. And that the jobs they hold do require a college degree.

So... humanities degrees sound pretty beneficial to me, considering the alternative.

[Caracal]

For those who can't do math, 15k on 45k is a non-negligible fraction of people going on to graduate degrees.  Surveys of college students indicate that about half of them plan to continue on for a graduate degree and that fraction has increased over the years.  You may not like the details from a back-of-the-envelope, but the fact remains that many people are going for graduate degrees in fields where the primary market for that graduate degree is academic jobs.

Ok, this is longer than it should be, but it bugs me when stats are misused this way, and then you keep moving the goalposts. The thing is there is obviously an agenda here. Clearly you would like us to believe that "many" people who get a B.A in the humanities end up end in the academic job market or intend to. I have no idea what "many" means, but first you threw M.As and PHDs in one bucket, double and even triple counted a lot of people, made a bunch of speculative assumptions allowing you to double this incorrect number,  and then told us that it was about half.

It isn't anywhere near half. If you combine PHDs and MAs, which you shouldn't, it might be around 25 percent, but even that is probably high. Whatever, though 25 percent, 50 percent, all the same I guess?

But, you're more wrong than that, because you are making assumptions about what people are planning to do with MA degrees that have no real basis. This sent me into a look at a study of MA programs in history that was actually kind of interesting, but actually there isn't good data on much of this and the problem is that MA programs in history vary enormously in purpose and concentration. I assume the same is true in English, but I don't know. But lots of the people getting an MA in history are secondary teachers or intend to become one, or are in Public History or are trying to go into it. There are also some who want to go on to a PHD program or would like to teach at a 2 year college. There doesn't seem to be any real data on the numbers here, but I strongly suspect that of people pursuing a terminal MA, fewer than half are planning to get an academic job in higher education. I'm avoiding the temptation to do numbers, because they are all so speculative and I'm trying to get out of this rabbit hole. The point is that you wanted to claim that almost half of majors in English go on to grad school planning to teach in higher education and that number is way, way, way off, and probably somewhere more in the range of 8-20 percent.

And then you keep saying things like "surveys of college students indicate that about half of them plan to continue on for a graduate degree and that fraction has increased over the years." How is that relevant? That doesn't have anything to do with whether English majors go to PHD programs. Lots of English majors probably get MBAs, or go to Law School, or get some other degree, but that isn't what we are talking about. If this discussion is going to have any point, you have to argue in good faith.

[marshwiggle]

I only looked at the first of these (too many other competing uses of my time) but it seems to confirm everything I said. Humanities grads make a little over 60% of what STEM grads make. Only 30% work in a job related to their degree, with more than that working in jobs that have no relationship to their degree. The numbers reported only apply to those in the labor force, not those going on to grad school, taking care of kids, or choosing not to work.

I'm assuming that 60% is still a middle-class wage. And that the jobs they hold do require a college degree.

So... humanities degrees sound pretty beneficial to me, considering the alternative.

Most drivers who talk on their phones do not get into accidents.
HOWEVER
A high percentage of drivers who get into accidents were talking on their phones.

Similarly,
Most humanities graduates may be happy with their employment.
HOWEVER
A disproportionate percentage of graduates who are unemployed, under-employed, or who feel under-payed are from the humanities.

So blaming educational institutions or the whole "system" for graduate unemployment is like blaming car manufacturers for accidents; there is a correlation between the bad outcomes of some people and the choices they have made which must be acknowledged.

Preparing for a job is only one reason to pursue a post-secondary education. However, if people are going to assume that a post-secondary education will do that, then they need to be aware of the ramifications of their choices so that they can choose appropriately.

[apl68]

Ok, but how old is she?  Let her fold jeans for a few years and she'll either seek a mgmt promotion or move on,  she probably will have figured out by then that her humanities BA, like it or not, just won't buy the same sort of career her parents, and certainly her grandparents, could easily have gotten with one.

If you look at actual salaries, humanities groups right in the middle. History (even Art History), English and Philosophy are in the same pack as some noted for a strong demand like Nursing, Accounting, Construction, Information Technology.  The mean for al lSTEM vs all Humanities is difference, but a low salary is not fate but feflects the low end of the people choosing the major. That is, those who end up finding too much satisfaction in the jeans-folding industry choose STEM or finance/business majors less often than they choose humanities majors.

That is because 99% of those who major in History, Art History, English, and Philosophy don't end up working in museums, as writers or philosophers. They use their visual and communications skills to become managers in the jeans-folding industry.

Many of these studies also lump together everyone who earned a specific degree so that the benefits at mid-career tend to also include that MPA, MBA, or law degree earned by the BA holder who decided that jean-folding was only fun for a year or two. 

The people who go to elite colleges tend to do well because they don't spend too many years folding jeans and instead start climbing some career ladder with a middle-class-or-higher income.

I fully expect that some of the results for humanities BA holders is more the result of who gets those degrees (generally people with something on the ball who had enough stability to not drop out) and less the value of the degree itself.  The Grinnell graduate who did good networking and is willing to move to any of the metropolitan areas in the US is far better off in terms of a high-paying job than the Compass Point State graduate in history who wants to go back home to the town of 2500 people and have a bill-paying job.

Actually I know several people who did pretty well for themselves going to no-name schools and then finding a bill-paying job in small towns.  The small towns do need SOME educated professionals.  They're "bill-paying" rather than "high-paying" jobs, but that's okay for some of us.

That said, I do generally agree with you that stronger K-12 schools are what this country most urgently needs in terms of education right now.  But improvement in that area depends more on cultural changes than on putting in more resources, useful though that would be.  And culture in general just seems to be moving very much in the wrong direction.

[ciao_yall]

Ok, but how old is she?  Let her fold jeans for a few years and she'll either seek a mgmt promotion or move on,  she probably will have figured out by then that her humanities BA, like it or not, just won't buy the same sort of career her parents, and certainly her grandparents, could easily have gotten with one.

If you look at actual salaries, humanities groups right in the middle. History (even Art History), English and Philosophy are in the same pack as some noted for a strong demand like Nursing, Accounting, Construction, Information Technology.  The mean for al lSTEM vs all Humanities is difference, but a low salary is not fate but feflects the low end of the people choosing the major. That is, those who end up finding too much satisfaction in the jeans-folding industry choose STEM or finance/business majors less often than they choose humanities majors.

That is because 99% of those who major in History, Art History, English, and Philosophy don't end up working in museums, as writers or philosophers. They use their visual and communications skills to become managers in the jeans-folding industry.

Many of these studies also lump together everyone who earned a specific degree so that the benefits at mid-career tend to also include that MPA, MBA, or law degree earned by the BA holder who decided that jean-folding was only fun for a year or two. 

The people who go to elite colleges tend to do well because they don't spend too many years folding jeans and instead start climbing some career ladder with a middle-class-or-higher income.

I fully expect that some of the results for humanities BA holders is more the result of who gets those degrees (generally people with something on the ball who had enough stability to not drop out) and less the value of the degree itself.  The Grinnell graduate who did good networking and is willing to move to any of the metropolitan areas in the US is far better off in terms of a high-paying job than the Compass Point State graduate in history who wants to go back home to the town of 2500 people and have a bill-paying job.

Actually I know several people who did pretty well for themselves going to no-name schools and then finding a bill-paying job in small towns.  The small towns do need SOME educated professionals.  They're "bill-paying" rather than "high-paying" jobs, but that's okay for some of us.

That said, I do generally agree with you that stronger K-12 schools are what this country most urgently needs in terms of education right now.  But improvement in that area depends more on cultural changes than on putting in more resources, useful though that would be.  And culture in general just seems to be moving very much in the wrong direction.

If resources went to (1) Paying teachers a living wage so the profession was attractive, (2) Making classes small enough to be manageable, (3) Getting rid of the testing drill-and-kill...

... I can assure you nobody would have any complaints about "the culture."