[1] https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L178005...
I wouldn't interpret Adams as saying that the humanities have no value until after the war is over and the nation established—I think he's saying that he doesn't have as much time to focus on them as he would like to have, and he hopes that future generations will have that time.
At the beginning of the letter he says this:
> Since my Arrival this time I have driven about Paris, more than I did before. The rural Scenes around this Town are charming. The public Walks, Gardens, &c. are extreamly beautifull. The Gardens of the Palais Royal, the Gardens of the Tuilleries, are very fine. The Place de Louis 15, the Place Vendome or Place de Louis 14, the Place victoire, the Place royal, are fine Squares, ornamented with very magnificent statues. I wish I had time to describe these objects to you in a manner, that I should have done, 25 Years ago, but my Head is too full of Schemes and my Heart of Anxiety to use Expressions borrowed from you know whom.
Note that he does say he took time to view and appreciate the things he found in Paris—what he laments is that he does not have the mental focus to study and describe them in detail to his wife.
I do think there's an interesting level, where when it's suddenly difficult to have art & culture, we value it higher, it's need is more apparent.
I do worry that the path of alienation & isolation capitalism has walked the world down has distanced us from meaning in such a way that art & culture no longer have the capacity to stand as (especially valued/positive) signifiers as much, that art & culture is both under supply side risk from a more brutal & unrelenting mechanization that makes art less accessible to make (few can afford the luxury of being an artist/cultural producer), while also slamming many arts (especially non bougouise) from the demand side - both for the same economic there-is-no-surplus-for-labor/no one-can-afford art problem, but also in the sense that we're so alienated, that we dont resonate positively or cherish art- we dislike so much of the state-of-ourselves, are so roundly enmiserated by the mainstream we are suffused in, that art/culture dont have the essential power it ought have.
We (everyone other tham Ukraine presently) forget what culture we had. Squid Games anti-culture is what we're left with.
That is amazing.
A nation devoted to poetry and porcelain isn’t sustainable.
And certainly he must have been aware of how cyclical history is versus a linear march towards artistic pursuits. The US since it’s inception has been involved in a significant war in nearly every decade. Post-Vietnam through the 1st Iraq war was one of the rare periods where a US citizen could have been of military age without a major hot war. Although the Cold War certainly brought it’s own level of fear.
There are very few examples of countries that have survived without a military.
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.
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.
I find this interesting, at least at the school I attended, there was no difference in pricing between degrees like this. Almost all of the computer related programs are just included under a BS (bachelor of science) and covered by normal tuition.
There were certainly focus differences between something like Computer Engineering vs Computational Media vs Electrical and Computer Engineering, but the prices were the same, and many of the core classes were the same.
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 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.
Given the cost of higher ed these days, I would imagine that path is not nearly as feasible now as it was in the late 80s/early 90s. (Definitely not at that university, which just discontinued its MFA program in writing.)
Worked out alright, definitely see the differences when working on the architect / manager / principle engineer -- the highly technical types only see tech.
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.
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.
Also, I had Uncles (non college) who worked selling carpets, worked in grocery stores who were able to afford a very nice life. They were able to put their children through college.
But since the early 80s, those jobs are now a race to the bottom. Now it seems you are hired only if you are pigeon holed into a specific career, and if that career path becomes obsolete, you are SOL.
In the early days no one could hire people who had degrees in these fields, because the university courses didn't exist. So they had to go further afield.
Also in these early days fewer people had college degrees. You were hiring the social (and sometimes intellectual) elite whenever you hired anyone with any degree.
In my day, a fair chunk of the English majors had it in mind to go to law school. A very few aspired to become professors, and some may actually have done so; but I don't remember any undergraduate peers who spoke of wanting an academic career.
All those english majors who could do a lot of things need more skills to get started in other fields. Partly that would be because companies are interested in more skills coming out of college. But this whole thing comes down to lack of good jobs for english majors.
Writing is a skill, but the vast huge world doesn't need so much of it, or we get along with terrible blog posts etc. The world is at a weird point, at least the western world. A lot of countries have significant labor shortages but many of these shortages don't require the education people might get in such an area in college. Plumbers, engineers, medical field.
Are the standards to get into university that low?
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!
500 words on the Thirty Years War generated by an AI and submitted by a high schooler I could understand. But arent college standards higher?
When I started undergrad there in '72 (yes, even some generations ago), if you didn't have close to an 800 verbal SAT, you had to take a remedial writing course as a frosh.
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.
> 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.
Like tell me that doesn’t paint a picture - in a fine narrative voice!
For my part, I've never once in my academic career had to explicitly identify sentence parts.
EDIT: I wonder if maybe the long florid sentences are the entertainment of that time, kind of like how folks 100% video games today, spending a lot more time than necessary for fun. Definitely it is... Verbose though.
What you have quoted, incidentally, is complex because it combines a lot of ideas that follow on from one another. The second paragraph, in particular, starts with the forefathers of Boston allocating land for a prison and ends with disappointment and sadness that prisoners are not even afforded the beauty of nature.
In between it observes that the prisons decays rapidly and is a “gloomy” place with poorly maintained grounds, and observes the general air of hopelessness of the prison.
It’s kind of beautiful, really. It gives a lot of context.
Edit: FWIW, I have ADHD. This wasn’t an easy read, but it was worth it.
It's entirely possible that by the time I was into the second paragraph that I had simply adjusted to the writing style and was able to proceed without any issue; I haven't the time to properly compare the two.
That said, after struggling through it a couple of times, taking time to reread portions, it really painted a vivid picture, casting a Gothic pall over the scene in ways a more to-the-point passage might not.
Poignant. Thanks for sharing.
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.
It took me awhile to realize that what most of the class were struggling with was not a grasp of the English language per-se, but the overwhelmingly majority of people in the class were dyslexic. And because of that, they were in an art and design college.
My biggest complaint with old books is I want them to STFU and get to the point!
That said, the most brilliant writing I know came from the 1800s, especially the American Civil War: Abraham Lincoln, Sullivan Ballou, and popular novelists like Charles Dickens. Perhaps their extraordinary expressiveness arose because, for the first time in history, writing could be appreciated by many. Certainly authors of those times more often wrote from the heart, not just to entertain.
They should be. And if you’re not in love with the sound of the author’s voice too, you shouldn’t be reading their works.
Literature is a luxury. It’s not constrained by utilitarian purposes. Save the short and concise sentences for the newspapers. (Not to say that simple and clear sentences can’t ALSO be beautiful, of course; it’s just that that’s not the ONLY type of beauty to be found in literature.)
“Hester,” said he, “I ask not wherefore, nor how, thou hast fallen into the pit, or say rather, thou hast ascended to the pedestal of infamy, on which I found thee. The reason is not far to seek. It was my folly, and thy weakness. I,—a man of thought,—the book-worm of great libraries,—a man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge,— what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own! Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself with the idea that intellectual gifts might veil physical deformity in a young girl’s fantasy! Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise in their own behoof, I might have foreseen all this. I might have known that, as I came out of the vast and dismal forest, and entered this settlement of Christian men, the very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself, Hester Prynne, standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people. Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church-steps together, a married pair, I might have beheld the bale-fire of that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our path!”
"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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
They don't, though?
> The median family income of a student from Harvard is $168,800, and 67% come from the top 20 percent. About 1.8% of students at Harvard came from a poor family but became a rich adult.
From a NYTimes analysis [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
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?
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.
Pyramid fields are those like pro football quarterback or famous youtube personality where a handful of people with world wide famous names make 99.9% of the income in that field, and almost everyone else working in the pyramid is at minimum wage or volunteer income status.
As a concrete example of a pyramid field, the 1900th best football player in the USA is a wealthy NFL pro ball player, but the 2000th best football player in the USA is probably selling used cars right now, maybe coaching, maybe unemployed. On the other hand essentially 100% of physio degree holders are doing physio and not getting rich but not getting poor. I'm sure the number of men willing to play pro football somewhat exceeds 2000... there's over 73000 NCAA college football players right now so I would guess that the "20K or so" who graduate this year would all love to get pro ball salaries, but the entire pyramid is less than 2K total, so even if 10% of pro players retire each year that would be 100 applicants for every paid position, everyone else can become a barista.
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.
Yes, publishing and communications professions can be perfect for English majors.
But how many jobs vs how many applicants is the problem.
Of course the joke always was that he was majoring in English to teach future majors in English.
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.
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.
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.
I welcome this change. The less grievance studies majors there are, the better off society will be.
When it comes to learning, never take the narrow view.
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.
This is the most annoying sentence I've ever read.
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.
I think this has turned out to be an incredibly useful skill for me, much more than any algorithm I’ve learned. I learned out to read deeply and consider my words very carefully when I write. Programmers are not really engineers. What we do is applied logic, yes, but ultimately we’re writers, and we’re readers. We write code and documentation, and we read code and documentation. Most programmers don’t consider their audience when they write. They just write for the computer. But the most important audience of your code is your team, who has to read it. I wish most engineers had the English class I did. I think it would help them immensely.
The End of the English Major? Not So Fast (April 13, 2015)
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/end-engli...
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.
> 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.
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.
Let's call it not English major, a mostly literary scholar, but a master of natural language communication and epistemology. Definitely it's a set of skills useful in a wide variety of positions.
It takes an exceptionally affluent society to let everyone pursue their interest as their full-time occupation. I expect the few of exceptional ability to make a living off literary research pursuits, via grants and book sales, with others who love it doing it as a hobby, or after retirement. This is roughly how it worked for many centuries in the past, and the results are impressive.
I'm sure your average psychiatrist graduate can communicate and think logically, despite having a high paying job. Or airline pilot, or naval officer, or air traffic controller, or scientist, or businessman etc.
So I guess if we're talking about a utopia where all our food and clean drinking water and maintenance and every other essential service is perfectly automated with no need for human intervention, then sure. Pursue whatever you want. As it is, it makes more sense for people to pay for stuff that they find is generating some value. If your passion is producing something really good and people want it, they'll pay you. But that's not the case for most people.
The only difference between that and our own industry is that there are plenty of people full-time writing bad code that no one wants to use, except there are procurement departments, execs, and the like who ring up million-dollar contracts for that software, leading to long-term vendor lock-in.
I studied business and computer science in college - that now pays the bills.
I study European History in my free time, and even with all the hundreds of books I have read and own, probably haven't spent $1000 on that 'interest'.
"You just spent 150 grand on an education you could have gotten for $1.50 in late fees at the public library." - quote from Good Will Hunting.
I'd also like to propose that reading history novels isn't the same as a history education, in much the same way that reading those novels isn't the same as an English degree.
I am not sure if everyone was pursuing their interests, certain degrees will be much more populous than others.
Many people do STEM, especially CS / SWE for money (which is fine), and affluent people do Arts degrees because they probably just want a degree.
Maybe that's what you mean by genuinely affluent society, and I'd agree one of those societies would not only allow people to pursue but reap the benefits of its populace pursuing those things.
However I don't think it's possible with the current incentives in place. While being educated and pursuing your interests are allowed and in some circles lauded, your basic needs being met far outweighs any other incentive any actor has.
Maybe we should focus on allowing building that society but I don't think that means in the current society we can even begin to pretend people are encouraged to pursue their interests at the costs of their basic needs being met.
Even if they do that and rack up the loans, they may go into the real world naively and end up not making it big. Ever.
I guess my thought is, there's something creating that desire or urgency too. As System of a Down put it, "Advertising causes need."
Until you need a philosopher to help you solve a problem...
I'm definitely in the camp of, "All knowledge has value, no knowledge will ever go to waste if you find where it is needed".
English studies is like Philosophy in a way - it lets us turn a critical lens on ourselves, our past selves, and examine how we think and what we value. There's many applications for such knowledge.
Surely a more noble pursuit than building dark UI patterns into websites.
philosophy seems too academic and to far removed from practical problems from what i have seen at least.
Marvel movies make tons of money, but do they have value as art? Do they really say anything or regurgitate quips and simple plots that could just as well come from ChatGPT?
From the opposite end, does a rogue artists self published book of avant garde poetry have much of a monetary value? Probably not, but it possibly has more original thought than the Marvel movies.
The starving artist trope has been around for a long time but the push for STEM coming from the cold war has devalued the average person's ability to make art to an all time low. We tell high schoolers that caring about literature or art will ensure they're destitute. We treat teachers and professors who continue teaching the arts like absolute trash, because its a field where the joy and personal value taken from the work allows the devaluation to continue because its still a worth while endeavor.
But hey, the stock market will go up forever so we'll never run out of Marvel slop.
Education for education's sake seems to have gone the way of the dodo bird. That's a sad state of affairs.
That's a simple matter of fact. That's the reason these courses are plummeting in enrollment. The economy sucks.
Based on what metrics? Unemployment in the US is low. Wages have gone up. Inflation is up as well. Companies are mostly profitable (despite layoffs).
At worst, we're seeing some mixed signals, and might be heading into a recession. But, we aren't there yet.
Are you talking about the US economy? Because it is doing extremely well right now, click-bait headlines notwithstanding.
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.
The real mystery is why non-credit Japanese taught by the same instructor in the same room using the same text and same syllabus on a different night of the week has a tuition of $45 but the for-credit class version of the same class is around $2K. I would guess the ivy league tuition equivalent of the same class would be $15K? The irony is the grads of all three expense levels are roughly equally skilled.
It doesn't help that in the turf battles between university departments, clout comes with enrollment and so they have incentives to exaggerate the career opportunities available to gullible post-grads. We have mandatory nutrition labels on food, it's long past universities were required to give objective numbers on career opportunities and salaries for the various majors.
I absolutely understand the point of view of the top comments saying that it people should be allowed to pursue their interests, and I agree, but it shouldn't come to the detriment of the basic quality of life of people that are barely old enough to take those decisions.
The title of the article is perfect. It's the end of the English MAJOR. Study it as a Minor. Go back to school at 40 once you have your career built if that's what you want. But don't shoot yourself in both feet when you're 18.
Otherwise I should have been allowed to do - and be respected for doing - a Major in video game playing and TV series watching, because that's where my interests laid when I finished highschool.
