A Misperception regarding jobs and the humanities?

A recent piece in the Atlantic notes the decline of degrees granted in the humanities, especially at the elite colleges, but makes the point that “students aren’t fleeing degrees with poor job prospects. They’re fleeing humanities and related fields specifically because they THINK [emphasized by author] they have poor job prospects.”

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

Statistics are produced to show that employability and income only marginally favor graduates in STEM and related fields over those in the humanities - not so significantly as to warrant anyone making a decision of major on that basis. Yet students are being driven ever more strongly by this misperception into fields they may not be suited for. Some of the causation for this can be found in the change of attitudes toward education in students themselves. In 1970 seventy percent of all students thought it was “important or essential” to get from a college education “a meaningful philosophy of life”. Only forty percent put a priority on using their educations to “make more money”. Those stats reversed themselves sometime in the eighties and have not gotten better since then.

I would be interested in hearing from U of C (or peer school) students of any era (including especially current, prospective or recent ones) as to what you think the breakdown is or was or should be between going to college in order to (a) come out with a job and (b) come out with a “meaningful philosophy of life”. And if there is presently a prominence of (a) over (b) - whether or not based on a misperception - is that the underlying reason for the decline of the humanities, or are other factors in play here?

Three of my favorite studies:

I would say a philosophy of life fits squarely in the “experience” bucket - since it shapes how we view, think about, and experience just about anything. So even if STEM jobs paid significantly better, they wouldn’t make a lot of sense for people who don’t like the field.

And since having a college degree matters a lot more than whether that degree is in STEM or the humanities, the point is mostly moot.

Eight hours a day for fifty years is a long time to be doing stuff you don’t like, and remodeling the kitchen or buying a new car isn’t going to produce much lasting happiness. I am very much on the side of seeking meaning and a good working environment over a high income. Though the nice thing about a UChicago degree is that it’s entirely possible to have both.

On the other hand, there are ways to arrive at a philosophy of life without spending $300,000 over four years. For that kind of investment, it’s entirely reasonable to expect some marketable credentials/skills.

A portion of the disparity in answers is going to be based on who is paying for the college degree and how much they are paying.

In the 1970s it was still quite possible for a student to put him/herself through college with little to no debt incurred. That is no longer possible. The price different people pay for college varies by hundreds of thousands of dollars and that difference is often based on the amount the parents are able to pay, which may or may not relate to how much said parents are willing to pay. Now that a college degree costs some people more than the amount required to buy a house, it’s understandable they are using different criteria to evaluate what a degree is for and worth.

Shouldn’t A and B dovetail? And why not? Someone who can articulate what is meaningful and live the example of it should be employable, IMHO. In my day we’d call those kids “bright”.

Ideally one would do both in college. But the more I think about it, the more these seem like different purposes of college, much as extracurriculars, “adulting,” and socializing - while they may overlap with one’s major or career at times - are different lanes of the college experience.

Not all philosophies of life are equally marketable. But we all look for jobs in the same market. And it’s virtually impossible for a single job to touch every part of someone’s philosophy of life, so students’ choice of and preparation for a career presumably comes down to other factors (personal enjoyment, ability, marketability, etc.).

Most careers, even the prestigious white-collar ones, call for skills too mechanical (analyzing a supply chain, polling an electorate, getting computer code to work just right…) or situational (writing articles, marketing a brand, creating a finance plan for a nonprofit…) to have much bearing on someone’s theory of meaning, the world, etc. And most preparation for these careers involves either technical training (STEM, professional schools, etc.) or learning by doing. Most of it focused on technical details of the field, best practices, and the like.

I think there are very few jobs that, when you reach a certain level of single-minded focus on the mechanics of the field, to the exclusion of anything else, wouldn’t lead you to miss the forest for the trees. This is just as true of a scientist who spends 12 hours a day in the lab as it is of a biographer lost in their research or a financial analyst who stays at the office till midnight.

Even the jobs one presumably enters because of some grand theory of life, the universe, and everything don’t necessarily involve much interaction with that theory. Take politicians: they might be drawn into the arena by moral, ethical, and political principles (with plenty of ego on the side), but much of their day will be spent calling donors, reviewing briefings or press releases, knocking on voters’ doors, speaking at events, touching base with staff, networking with their colleagues…you get the idea. None of which has any bearing on a grand theory of life or justice or good - it’s just how the mechanical aspect of politics works.

On further reflection, I seriously doubt someone’s major or their career is the be-all or end-all. I don’t think you need a particular major - or even a college degree, for that matter - to develop a philosophy of life. I think anyone who regularly finds time for reflection on the worlds outside and within - maybe, but not necessarily, spurred by something in their work - will eventually derive some philosophy of existence that they find satisfactory. And I think anyone who’s always too busy for self-reflection will have trouble doing so.

Since reflecting on such things is the point of some classes or majors (philosophy, by its very definition, involves some of this), there are some fields that encourage reflection and self-reflection. But I don’t think STEM is a special culprit in explaining people’s attention (or neglect) to these questions.

Hence the concept of a work-life balance. Because there should be way more to life, including our inner lives, than work.

/end ramble

“And since having a college degree matters a lot more than whether that degree is in STEM or the humanities, the point is mostly moot.”

But that’s not how most kids or their parents think. For some reason they believe that you need to learn some practical information in college (often in combination with a subsequent professional qualification) in order to get a good job. Hence kids study CS, pre-med, pre-law or business. But I can safely say I’ve used precisely none of the information I learned in college in my subsequent career. What I did use were the skills I learned about how to analyze information and write coherently. Those are pretty much independent of the subject I studied. And the remaining (and largest) value of my degree was in the “prestige” of signaling that I was smart. But I don’t think gaining a “philosophy of life” was anywhere on my agenda.

“Meaningful philosophy of life” might appropriately be thought of as a catchall phrase for wisdom and perspective and maturity gained through the rigors of a college (specifically in this case, a liberal arts) education. Not sure the STEM kids are any less or more reflective at UChicago than the hum kids. These intangible might not be so obvious on a day to day basis to everyone you work with (ie no one at your work place is likely to be impressed if you wax philosophical instead of giving specific feedback or a clear report on what’s going on with the supply line) but they probably do impact your ability to grasp some higher-level stuff when needed. Don’t employers seek those who can enter the job with some level of mechanical and/or situational proficiency (assuming some level of preparation or training) but who are also good thinkers and can take on additional responsibility over time? Those who rise in their professions probably spend relatively more time thinking (of new products, of new methods, of new markets, of new angles of business, of new areas of research . . . ) than their “doing-oriented” colleagues.

Another angle of thought: is college a source for learning critical thought, or a signal to employers that you are a critical thinker to begin with? EDIT: Ha - @Twoin18 beat me to it!

Actually, these kids are thinking correctly. Plain old liberal arts not spiced up by something else does not pay big bucks. With the possible exception of Sales, salaries for purely humanities type of work much lower than work that involves analysis or biz/product development. Even marketing is analytical these days. Case in point, Google and Apple now openly hire a STEM kid halfway through college, or even before college. There is no comparable opportunity for an English, history or philosophy major. (STEM kids with a liberal arts background or double major have a competitive advantage.)

I’m not sure what “purely humanities type of work” actually is but often the ability to research, analyze and write is more important for many high level jobs than the ability to program a computer (take strategy consulting as one example).

However, I’d agree there is no comparably remunerative opportunity for an “English, history or philosophy major” that can’t add up and doesn’t know how to put together a spreadsheet. But there’s no need to major in STEM to learn that stuff (where is Excel in the CS curriculum?). The problem is that too many college graduates simply aren’t competent with fairly basic (not college level) math. Doing a STEM degree signals that you’re not one of them.

Much good sense in the foregoing thoughts of all concerned. “Meaningful philosophy of life” is a sappy expression. It must have been interpreted by those college kids of 1970 as implying a non-utilitarian attitude to education - of trying to figure out the meaning of things, how one should live, what constitutes wisdom - in contradistinction to learning instrumental things necessary to get jobs. It must tell us something that the kids of later years declined so significantly to call those goals “important or essential”. During those same years they were also declining in ever greater numbers to major in the humanities. On the face of it there seems to be some connection between those trends.

Of course this is not to say that these more tenuous educational aspirations can’t be accompanied by harder-headed ones, or that harder-headed kids don’t sometimes take a course that isn’t purely utilitarian. One of the interesting points made in the article is that the decline in numbers taking more basic humanities courses hasn’t been nearly as great as that of those taking the more advanced courses appropriate to a major. Since most schools (though obviously not Chicago) offer relatively unconstrained choices of electives not required to fulfil a major, this would be consistent with STEM kids maintaining a healthy “side-interest” in the humanities.

Could it be, however, that there’s some deeper disconnection between the humanities and the culture of the present North American world? If the author of the article is right, it isn’t merely that STEM majors fare significantly better in material terms than non-STEM ones (pace @FStratford ), and this must be even more the case for graduates of elite schools like Chicago. The “Aims of Education” talk by Andrew Abbott some years ago cited similar statistics. The author of the Atlantic article thinks that it’s just a misunderstanding of this reality that is causing kids to avoid majoring in the humanities. I think there’s more to it than that.

Here is my thesis, or call it simply a hunch: Most of the humanities have a backward-looking orientation. Self-evidently that is so for the study of history. And the world’s literature and philosophy were created in the past and reflect the life, the culture, the problems and the religious and political convictions of the people of the past. Study of these subjects inevitably directs a student to traditional wisdom and to old ways of thinking - famously, it is a study of “the best that has been thought and said”. If you believe that the past has little to show us, then you will have little interest in it. In school you might take the odd course of that sort - it will be like going to a museum on a Sunday afternoon. The past will be a place filled with curios and anomalies, if not monstrosities, not a place where anything of real importance might be learned. Today’s humanities courses often treat their ostensible subject matters precisely in that way. Why, then, would a serious person spend the precious college years dawdling inconsequentially in these useless corridors that lead nowhere?

It is that attitude and change in our culture, I suggest, which has been the true cause of the decimation - well, much more than merely the loss of one in ten - of humanities majors. Kids are deserting the study of these things because (a) they no longer see the point of acquiring a “meaningful philosophy of life” and (b) the subjects they might once have turned to for this are being taught in a way that undermines any such aspiration.

@marlowe1 I disagree. I believe it is the rejection of the past and not the embrace of it that has hurt the humanities. Had Einstein been a Nobel-winning poet instead of physicist he may well now be branded as a “dead white male” and consigned to the dust bin to make room for more trendy and contemporary literary stars. The humanities and even some social sciences tend to be quite fashionable that way - embracing “what’s happening now” instead of relying on more established and tried-and-true methods of scholarship. In some respects, STEM and Econ. are a bit more “conservative” in their problem-solving. It takes a long time for a methodology to change and the change tends to be long-lasting. Therefore, employers know what they’re getting in hiring these majors. There is an established sequence of courses - typically increasing in difficulty - that the student undertook in order to graduate with that major. Not so with majors that are more “topics”- based or that embrace current social or political trends with gusto. Employers might even perceive that there’s more “feeling” than “thought” going into some of these. Unfortunately, “feelings” aren’t assigned a very high value in the workplace.

“One of the interesting points made in the article is that the decline in numbers taking more basic humanities courses hasn’t been nearly as great as that of those taking the more advanced courses appropriate to a major. Since most schools (though obviously not Chicago) offer relatively unconstrained choices of electives not required to fulfil a major, this would be consistent with STEM kids maintaining a healthy “side-interest” in the humanities.”

Or it’s consistent with the fact that students “have” to take those basic courses in order to satisfy the university’s gen. ed. requirement.

I am proudly sending my son to college to spend four years immersing himself in “the life of the mind” and gain skills of thinking, analyzing, listening, speaking, arguing and writing that will serve him well in whichever career he chooses. He is likely to major in history or poli sci, and to study the liberal arts broadly, taking lots of courses in subjects like English and philosophy, including a few STEM courses in the mix (math and science are also “liberal arts”).

I hope he will have great discussions not only in class but also in his dorm and dining hall, with peers who will go on not only to be big-deal investment bankers and lawyers, but also stars in lower paying fields, such as philosophy professors, art historians, abstract mathematicians and physicists, historians, biographers, news reporters, poets, teachers, community activists, etc., etc. There are many ways to earn a reasonable salary and “do good” for the world in the broadest and most important sense— acting for the benefit of other people and contributing to the world’s knowledge and understandings.

There is a great graphic on his college’s website showing how any major can lead to a wide variety of careers. For example, English majors become physicians (as long as they also take a handful of courses required for medical school), lawyers, investment bankers, journalists, etc., etc. His college does not have majors that prepare one only for a narrow path in life or a particular field. It provides an education that prepares one to succeed in any field, even ones that have not yet been invented but may come to exist during one’s lifetime.

College may be the only time in life entirely devoted to exploring the wealth of human knowledge and learning. It is a time not to be missed or rushed past, focusing on the “next steps” in life.

I have never doubted that he will find a good career and earn enough to sustain himself. That has to do with his own drive and personality, not in which subject he majors. His well-regarded college degree will enhance his resume for graduate schools and certain fields, but largely it will be he who determines what and how he does. Is that not true of everyone in the final analysis, regardless of their college or major?

@TheGreyKing , I applaud and agree with you and your son. Yours is an attitude that may, however, be becoming an endangered one. That doesn’t make it wrong. Keep the flame burning!

@DunBoyer and @Twoin18 , I might paraphrase your points just a bit and say that for me the object of education lies less in coming up with a philosophy of life than in discovering and using whatever intellectual powers one can find in oneself. If you do that, the other things take care of themselves. Aristotle concurs.

@JBStillFlying , my cri de coeur above was more emotional than clearly enunciated. I would definitely agree with your statement that “it is the rejection of the past and not the embrace of it that has hurt the humanities”. That is very much my critique of the teaching of the humanities. However, kids are also turning away from the humanities because they, like these trendy profs, are too present-minded. The pity is that the diminishing number of them who actually long to encounter the life and thought of the past are being thwarted in that aspiration by the very educational fads that I believe both you and I deplore. I hope I’m exaggerating my concerns, but a reading of course descriptions in English makes me doubt that I am.

@Marlowe1 we can’t discount how much the course descriptions are what they are in large part due to faculty preferences. True - there’s a good amount of schlock included (the history of Pop Goes the Weasel . . That’s an exaggeration but not much), and some of THAT might be to make the subject “FUN” and attract students, even if not very rigorous. Easy A’s would help as well, of course. But the humanities turned away from working on relevant humanistic themes awhile ago, and that only accelerated what was likely to be some exodus for more sexy things like engineering, medicine and international relations.

But I agree with you that the scientific method has definitely helped to wound the humanities - as, perhaps, has the decline in conventional religious belief. There’s no doubt that science or economic theory has done much to improve the condition of humankind throughout the world. Used to be that it was the humanist thinkers, artists and writers who raised the public conscience about things like human suffering or plight; now it seems that every would-be doctor, hyrdologist, and structural engineer does a semester abroad to take care of the problem. And in the fast-paced lifestyle of today, technology is preferred to Tolstoy; everyone has a blog, is a pundit, and uses CNN/MSNBC/Fox News to keep current on the human condition. Who has time to read great books? This is how the humanities get pushed aside and deemed “non-relevant”. But there is doubtless a place for a rigorous program of study in this area, perhaps providing a “step back” and examination of how all this rapid change can be uplifting or deadening to the human spirit. No doubt someone has produced such research already. But I suspect that exposure to the thinkers of the ages might help give them context. Nothing is more enlightening than discovering that some “unique” contemporary challenge turns out to be a repeat of something that happened 800 years ago!

@TheGreyKing - we truly hope to be providing a similar post on some college forum this time next year for our own son. Sounds like he might have a lot in common with yours, and not just in prospective choice of majors. Good luck to yours and may he find his UChicago experience deeply satisfying. Long live the Liberal Arts!

“His well-regarded college degree will enhance his resume for graduate schools and certain fields…”

I agree. There are a number of Universities in every country where philosophy majors are recruited to be investment bankers, because of the brand of the school, the rigor of the educational experience, and the reputation of the students as smart and able to learn anything that they have interest in. This is, in part, is what separates great universities from good universities. UChicago is one of those.

Personally, I believe that my liberal arts education (I majored in Computer Science and Chemistry, just to mix it all up) did not give me a great ROI in the beginning, but it became more and more valuable to me 5+ years down the road once I started managing direct reports, client relationships, and investors.

Most US college students are pursuing terminal BAs at less selective colleges (i.e. the VAST majority of colleges in the US - not the ones talked about here) at a huge financial cost, even with FA (FA for less selective colleges is poor, and college is so much more expensive EVERYWHERE than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago). While I believe that students majoring in English or History at the top schools discussed on the site will do equally well as non-Humanities students with terminal BAs, that is simply not the case as you go down the selectivity list. Therefore, most kids (with so much internet info and likely good advice from advisors) or choosing more “employable” majors. Plus, as tech entrepreneurs become more and more popular (how many high school students don’t know about Elon Musk, Mark Z, etc… ) kids are being inspired to go for the non humanities majors.

For “regular kids” at “regular colleges”, it’s not a misperception that humanities degrees are less favored for entry level jobs in industry. Can we agree on that?

I enjoyed the article. The statistics detailed in the article are from the Dept of Education and compiled from many many colleges, not just the top schools.

Bringing this back to Chicago, I’d be interested to see the stats for the same time periods there.

“For “regular kids” at “regular colleges”, it’s not a misperception that humanities degrees are less favored for entry level jobs in industry. Can we agree on that?”

Yes but I think that’s because vast numbers of kids are graduating from college who aren’t particularly numerate (being able to put together an Excel spreadsheet and analyze/manipulate the results is a good example of what this is needed for in a typical job context), and having a STEM degree (or even a major in something like economics) is an easy way for employers to verify that isn’t the case.

I’m interested that numeracy tests seem to be disfavored in my (limited) experience of US recruitment processes, except perhaps in very intensive processes like consulting or investment banking. In contrast they are ubiquitous in UK graduate recruitment (and well beyond that time, even for very senior positions). That means it doesn’t matter as much what your degree subject was in the UK, because your numerical ability is tested separately. And UK students choose their subject out of interest, and what they will do best in, not least because their A level choice is made at 16, two years before they even apply to college (and good A level grades are what get you in to a top college). As a result their ultimate degree result (first or 2:1 vs 2:2 or third) is usually much more important to employers (outside of professional qualifications like medicine or engineering) than the subject itself.

“As a result their ultimate degree result (first or 2:1 vs 2:2 or third) is usually much more important to employers.”

^Also because degrees in the UK (and most countries) are almost 100% major specific. They aren’t taking English or History in college unless they are English or History majors. Are they less capable of critical thinking than our grads? Do they not have a meaningful philosophy of life since they take almost no courses outside their majors? Perhaps they have a much stronger high school system where they go in-depth on core academic studies like History, English etc.

I’ve always wondered which system is more effective at producing capable grads who want a terminal BA (future PHDs is a different thing).

“Perhaps they have a much stronger high school system where they go in-depth on core academic studies like History, English etc.”

The UK is a deeper high school curriculum (and one extra year in school in total since they start at 4 not 5), but you only study 3-4 subjects at A level so it is definitely not broader. So you choose arts or science at 16 (some have a mix by doing A level math plus 2-3 arts subjects) and if you do sciences you will never write another esssy, if you choose arts you will never do another science problem.

The depth achieved in a UK degree is usually greater than in the US despite it taking 3 years not 4. So all of it requires thinking, but arts graduates are very good at writing and analyzing, while science/math graduate are very numerate. The combination of those skills is rare, since it isn’t part of the formal education system, except in a very few subjects (Oxford PPE being the classic all-around course which is said to “run the country”). Though if you take most good Oxbridge graduates you will find they are pretty capable, regardless of their subject, just like UChicago graduates.