The point being made by Cuban and others is that thinking, solving problems as they present themselves, working with others and clear communication are skills that elevate work beyond the reach of automation.
Machines can learn rules. They have learned how to answer questions from customers. They have learned how to read handwriting and file paperwork. Machines are learning to complete tax and accounting forms. Pretty soon, they will do the heavy lifting for engineering work.
The discussion here around philosophy majors is completely missing the point. Considering what people have done over the past 50 years with a degree has no relevance to what a current 17 or 18 year old will be able to do over the next 50 years to earn a living. The discussion is what skills will help students navigate the future? Cuban’s point is that a LA education provides more of the skills that students will need. I couldn’t agree more.
@EyeVeee your kids annoyance at taking more math and science in college as an English major is exactly why my kid did not apply to school with a deep core curriculum. He was not interested in more language or other subjects he was already deep in from high school (5 on AP exams). He is so pumped about his fall schedule because he using exactly what he wants in his STEM/philosophy combined major and will do well because he’s interested and taking what he likes.
@suzyQ7, is that STEM/philosophy major a formal program, or is your son going to a school where he’s able to construct his own major? I’d like to see what kinds of classes he’s going to take. San Francisco State used to have a major where they combined technology with the liberal arts, and it looked fascinating.
@EyeVeee: The rise of automation has put a higher premium on strong logic skills, not less.
Let’s look at trading, which, in the white-collar world, is farther along in being automated than most. It’s not the folks with no quant skills who have thrived there. In the blue-collar industries that have also been heavily automated, it’s also not the folks without quant skills who have thrived.
In all these cases, it’s been people who have applied quant skills in creative and novel ways who have done well. Financial advisory is being disrupted by robo-advisors as we speak. So many industries are experiencing a big data revolution as well as dealing with cyber security issues. It’s not the non-quantitative people who are thriving when this occurs.
To me philosophy doesn’t teach you how to think. People are born with the ability to think, and you don’t need to go to school to learn how to do that. What it, and fields like history and literature can do, is expose you to all kinds of different, competing ideas. You start to see the value of multiple viewpoints, and you become less close-minded about issues. Hopefully that allows one to compare and contrast ideas, and choose the best ones.
Having said that, I know someone with a Ph.D. in the field of Philosophy, and she’s one of the most radical, dogmatic people I know. She wants to overthrow capitalism and gets very upset if you disagree with her.
I wanted people to know this wasn’t a Ph.D. in something like zoology, which is why I said “Ph.D. in the field of Philosophy.” I hoped people would understand what I was trying to say. I guess not.
@simba9: People are born with muscles and born able to push objects, but that doesn’t mean everyone is born strong (enough to do push-ups or pull-ups, for instance) and that strength training has no effect.
Likewise, people are born with a brain, and sure, people are born able to think, but that doesn’t mean that education/training can not hone that brain and thinking.
@PurpleTitan, then I think it’s more accurate to say you go to school to “hone your thinking,” not to “learn how to think.” The latter phrase implies you start school with a non-functional brain.
Of course, this is all a goofy argument about rhetoric and meaning. It just kinda’ bugs me when people reflexively spout an empty slogan like, “a liberal arts degree teaches you how to think,” which suggests people who don’t have liberal arts degrees don’t know how to think.
@simba9 Oh yeah, I know that one can get a PhD in Philosophy. That’s not it. My comment wasn’t directed at you. It just occurred to me that the term PhD in Philosophy is sorta funny. The kind of thing that Andy Rooney would have noticed. (Not sure if anybody under the age of 60 remembers Andy Rooney.)
It is very easy for a school to cherry-pick the best outcomes for their graduates. Kudos to Tufts for listing the outcomes for all of their graduates who reported, not just the top 1 percent.
One does not need a $250,000 degree from Tufts to be a sales associate or a barista, and these are skills best learned in high school or during college. As shown by the following article, if you don’t know what you want to do with your life, one is better taking time off before college and figuring it out rather than spending a fortune on a degree and career path that is not well thought out.
Perhaps Miss Feng followed some of the bad advice promulgated here on CC to “follow your dreams”.
I agree, which is why when people bring up that a Philosophy degree will aid in getting into law school, they are reflecting a career path that largely crash and burned after 2008 recession. See the following US News article which shows the collapse in the market for law school graduates. The old path of being a political science or philosophy major in order to pad one’s GPA and going to law school does not work for most people anymore.
Finally a valid argument. The issue with philosophy majors is two-fold. First, it is hard to get a good job out of college unless you bring some other talent to the table. This is reflected in the low entry-level career pay. Secondly, the less selective a school is, the less likely the school will graduate many philosophy majors. That means that the field of philosophy graduates tends to be top heavy with graduates of highly selective schools. These are people who are highly intelligent who would do well in life no matter what they studied, and that fact is reflected in the higher mid-career salaries.
I would support my kids if they wanted to study philosophy, but only with the caveat that they major in a more practical field.
@Zinhead, there’s someone (Al McGuire) who said that to be really educated, one should get a college degree but also spend 6 months as a cab driver and 6 months as a bartender.
I think studies show over a lifetime on average a college degree will earn you more than not having one. But that is on average, and over a lifetime. Of course there’s all those in between times during the lifetime when you are not earning a return on investment.
Prior to competing rideshare (Uber, Lyft, etc.) services, getting into driving cabs was not always easy, due to the expense of buying or renting a taxi license which many places artificially limited the number of.
I’ve heard it said, from a philosophy professor if I remember right, that nobody should bother studying philosophy until they’re 40. That actually makes some sense. The idea was that you couldn’t put philosophy into context until you had enough life experience.
@PurpleTitan - There is some truth to that statement. At my last corporate job, the two regional heads were both bartenders during and after college, and they both credited that job with learning how to deal with people and helping them climb the corporate ladder.
While professional internships are valuable, we are insisting that our kids get some kind of service job before graduating.
A friend of my son’s is a Philosophy major at a U in Scotland. He stayed there last summer to work with a bioengineering team on which he was the only non-engineer. His role - bioethicist.
@simba9, It’s a fair point that a liberal arts education may be wasted on the young. Our brains don’t fully mature until after 30.
On the other hand, that type of exposure at a young age may be helpful. And by young, I mean HS.
So an ideal education may be liberal arts in HS, then a service job + quantitative/hard skills in college followed by trades (such as medicine/engineering/law). Then liberal arts again in middle age.