That’s been the underlying assumption behind the lament of the way academia has gone:
Today, college degrees are utilitarian documents used to secure good jobs. American workism undermines the traditional purposes of higher education, things like the pursuit of knowledge and the development of virtue. John Henry Newman described the goal of a college education to be “a philosophical habit of mind” characterized by “freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom.” However, American workism dismisses such notions. The truth is actual learning is hard, and it takes more effort to understand the world than to earn a degree.
I find liberal arts dirges like this tiring. All of my students are pursuing an engineering degree with the idea that they will obtain a good job and earn a good income after four years (well, maybe more) pursing an undergraduate degree. I did the same. Is there any real virtue in planned educated poverty? Is there not worth in financial independence? The alternative these days is to live off of some kind of dole, and that includes the sinecures we have in our government/NGO bureaucracies. And if you’re on the dole, you’re beholden to the one doling it out, which the biggest driver of our “woke” society.
But waiting until university to inculcate character, to instill basic understanding of the world, to form a world view, doesn’t work. By that time it’s too late. That process needs to start earlier. Any children’s or youth pastor knows that. We have leaned too long and too hard on our universities to compensate for the inadequacies of our primary and secondary education. That’s expecting too much.
Positive Infinity 
It’s wildly incorrect and cocky to assume liberal arts majors end up on the dole. I studied the liberal arts and everyone from my department ended up in law, consulting, medicine, banking, diplomacy, the professoriate, or media, i.e. they’re all in fields that pay better mid-career than engineering except for the professoriate and government service. More important, they are contributing in ways suited to their talents. Granted I went to a good school.
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The reason why liberal arts majors have the “leg up” you describe is because the U.S. has stuck with the arts-centred British system of education, which carries into real life, rather than transitioning into a science-centred system. We’re about to find out which one is better–or at least more successful–because all of our enemies–and I do mean all of them–have science-centred systems.
ICYMI the “dole” includes the sinecures we see in bureaucracies, and that includes higher education. I sadly neglected to include the deleterious effect of income that struggles to keep up with student debt, a debt that has ballooned, in part because of the proliferation of these sinecures. Some of them are due to the lack of preparation afforded by secondary schools, but I addressed that issue as well.
As far as the “professoriate and government service” goes, I’m in the former (since I teach at a state university, I guess I’m in the latter too. We struggle to keep up with academic staffing as we have to compete with industry and large government agencies. I would say that the better funded universities have an easier time of it, but I went to one of the best funded state universities of all, and I was still criticised for my choice. It wasn’t their idea (and probably not yours either) of a “good school.” Teaching civil engineering as I do, many of my students end up at the DOT or a federal agency, and it’s a good living, although I don’t see them buying property in Palm Beach any time soon (I can’t even afford the place any more!)
It’s too bad you won’t be in my class the first day of the semester when I plan to bring up engineers’ relationship to the arts.
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Let’s take the pandemic as an example. America was unique in two ways compared to its peers. We lost a lot more people to death on a per capita basis, and we pioneered mRNA vaccines and a lot of the tech behind them. I would argue that we had so many excess deaths for social reasons. Chief are scientific illiteracy about vaccines, distrust of weak public health, and overall distrust of and lack of access to the medical system. So I can easily see how wider scientific literacy could have saved lives. I am all for that. But I also think that many of the social/political/cultural factors would have benefited from wider humanistic and social science literacy too. The CDC could have a had a better understanding of how to build and keep trust. If they had understood the sociology of trust, they might have steered people to their local doctors sooner and been more decentralized. Americans as a whole might have been smarter media consumers and less susceptible to misinformation. And if we had had a better grasp of history, we might have built a better public health system. Certainly the politicization of our political system and medicine didn’t help. A lot goes into that, but I can’t help but think that a more widespread grasp of basic civics would help there too. My point is that greater scientific literacy would have helped but so would a better grasp of history and sociology. I think that there are a lot of problems like that in America.
As for my peers, I think there are a lot of jobs that benefit from humanities and social science excellence. If you’re a ivy league english or history major, you’re assigned 1200-1600 pages of reading a week, plus regular papers, plus decent foreign language proficiency, plus maybe a 80-120 page thesis. If you go into finance or consulting, two areas I have worked in, guess what? There’s a lot of reading and synthesizing of information, and you need to be able to write clearly. You also have to deal with a lot of vague uncertain situations that can’t be precisely measured or modeled. I mean I just threw some murky problems at my Big Law lawyer the philosophy major, and she was great at picking out what was important, verbally clarifying everything, reading the room, making holistic judgments, and applying abstract laws concretely. I’m not saying that engineers or scientists can’t do that but a lot of those skills are stressed more in the humanities. And I think that clients and employers value those skills in certain jobs. A little bit of that may be a leftover from British academic prestige, but there’s a lot of money at stake to care that much about nineteenth century intellectual fashions. I know a bunch of investment managers. That’s a very competitive world, and at the senior levels, it’s got a mix of backgrounds and styles in it because the math just isn’t that hard in many strategies, so all kinds of people can perform over time.
I spent a semester at Oxford studying history and lit. It’s a much more focused system. It’s a 3 year degree with no classes outside your “major.” In terms of depth and scope, it’s more like an American masters. I think our system is less susceptible to some of your concerns. I mean I was a liberal arts guy, but I still got through multivariable calculus, an engineering statistics class, a lot of econ, some gnarly philosophy on interpretations of quantum mechanics, and a bunch of psychology. I don’t think I’m that unique. A lot of kids get that comparative literature degree but add some computer science or finance on the side. And then they go to med school or wherever and learn professional skills.
Any way, I’m going on about this because I enjoyed my liberal arts classes, thought they had value, and fear that we miss a lot of value in the humanities as a people. I think that’s because many benefits of the humanities are more public goods that are diffuse, hard to quantify, or are outside the market. How do you put a value on having better foreign policy?
It would be nice to go to your class. I’m guessing you stress some of the social aspects of engineering.
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In addition to the factors you mentioned, there were several others that made COVID-19 such as fiasco in the U.S.
The first was the fact that it invaded a population with many co-morbidities, such as age, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, etc.. It almost seems from that respect that COVID-19 was made to attack our population.
Second, the powers that be decided from the beginning that any cure/prevention for the disease disseminated have an unexpired U.S. Patent. That’s why things such as hydroxycholoroquine or ivermectin were shunted aside, irrespective of their merits or lack of same.
Third, the introduction of mRNA vaccines on a population of 300+ million with as relatively little dissemination of these vaccines (and with as little testing as was done due to time constraints) was irresponsible. But our powers that be used Americans’ obsession with “the latest and the greatest” to attempt to popularise this, up to and including a disinformation campaign against J&J.
Fourth, our authorities spoke with scientifically unjustified certainty about the way to combat the spread of the virus. We went into this “behind the eight ball” of knowledge and should have been more up front about that. When things didn’t go the way they said they would, trust was eroded. I discuss the whole business of certainty (or lack thereof) in scientific and engineering processes in my post Teaching Secular Blasphemy.
Fifth, the way reputable people were treated who dissented from the solutions determined was shameful. I’m thinking primarily of those who signed and supported the Great Barrington Declaration.
Sixth, HIPAA made effective contact tracing impossible, thus the lockdown was the only alternative, collateral damage following.
I happen to teach a specialty (geotechnical engineering) which is basically an applied earth science. As such uncertainty due to the complexity of the environment is part and parcel with the field. Engineering students find that hard to take sometimes but they need the perspective. You can view my engineering courses (with the videos I produced for COVID) here.
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Agree on 1,4,5, and prob 6. No opinion on 2,3.
Judging from my engineering stats class, you guys can do cool stuff with statistics. My guess is that operations research and financial engineering in particular do some fancy stuff around Markov chains and Monte Carlo simulations. Would guess that even there though that all your concepts and terms are pretty nailed down. The value of some financial option may be uncertain, but it will be measured in dollars. Or some material will be able to handle some range of pressures within some confidence interval. In the humanities, you can get into some vaguer issues. Why does Hamlet hesitate? What is justice? Or questions about ends that are arguably subjective like what is the purpose of life? How should we organize society?
I have a lot of respect for engineers, but I’m more theoretical in my interests personally. It always seemed to me as though engineering classes cover lots and lots of content but never really had the time to explore different ways of conceptualizing the terrain. And there’s less emphasize on proof than in math or philosophy. And I’m guessing less time for experiments around scientific law. That’s all very STEM-y stuff even if it’s not the E part as much. But the humanities can still get pretty theoretical in their emphasis on argumentation, interpretation, and point of view. Generally, that work is pretty easy to do decently but hard to do extremely well. Whereas you can’t b.s. your way through engineering, so the minimal standards are higher. But the really high end genius level innovation is more applied and maybe more limited in terms of scope. That makes me wonder if part of the reason that the humanities aren’t so strong at state schools but are at more selective institutions is inherent to the subject matter?
Another weird thing is that you get a lot of kids at high end schools who get forced out of some STEM subjects unnecessarily. I was talking to a very successful fund manager the other day who who got a 5 in BC calculus in high school and wanted to major in math at Stanford, but he couldn’t keep up because the department was kept small and run for people who were world class or just below that level. He ended up studying public policy and working for the govt out of college. If the US wants to ramp up STEM, it needs to make more room for people like him. No more brutal freshman survey classes designed to weed out interested students. And we also need to spend more money on research so students have somewhere to go.
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If you’re interested in Markov chains, you’ll enjoy my post Go Ahead, Make My Day. Excommunicate Me!.
The hardest course I took (well, maybe second hardest) in my PhD pursuit was Advanced Linear Algebra, which our professor taught using a “theorem and proof” method. The math majors were happier with that than the engineering and other majors. One community college physics prof said that about or three doing really and the rest of us were “sucking wind.” But the prof was impressed with the catch-up effort of the rest of us.
Our whole approach to mathematics education–especially in secondary schools but really at all levels–leaves a lot to be desired of. When in undergraduate school I took differential equations from one of the authors of an early textbook in numerical analysis, an experience I describe in Sometimes It Pays to Give Your Professor a Little Attention. When I started my MS, I took a course my first semester that covered much of the same ground, but this time I had a professor from Russia. Needless to say, my respect for their math education was enhanced, and I saw the drawbacks in ours. If our math education in general was stronger, our engineers could take a more versatile approach to their own profession.
The humanities have undermined themselves by being subordinated to the political objectives of the academics; fixing that would go a long way to addressing their shortcomings. High schools are becoming more attuned to the needs of STEM students; although that helps more people go into STEM, the jury is still out on whether that makes for better STEM people. Our public primary and secondary system is run by people who tend to subordinate content to pedagogy, and that too needs to change.
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Cool on Markov chains.
Agreed on problem of politicization in humanities. The English dept at my undergrad college basically put out a statement saying that they now exist to further progressive politics. Think about that. You can’t even try to hold them up to the purpose as a place to study literature because they disavow that purpose on the front of their website. And you can’t trust them to grade fairly. So it’s just this incredibly boring, super overpriced religion. Such a sad state. I really recommend Harold Bloom if you want a taste of what the study of lit can be, should be, and was. He’s not a great or even very good critic, but he’s incredibly well read and full of good book recommendations and the spirit of literature.
A lot of this comes from the depths of progressive politics and social media and the decline of reading, but I think that humanities departments are sort of crazily organized at the graduate level. That is, American uni’s are structures like German research uni’s. That’s great for areas like the sciences with big research programs ans agendas, but it creates a lot of dumb incentives to over-publish in the humanities and under-teach. Like if you have to spend 8 years writing a PhD on Shakespeare that says something new, then by now your only available move is to over-interpret and relate it to today’s concerns. Oxbridge has this problem too, but I think they are a little more chill about research and take a more traditional approach to curricula. They have classes like Victorian Lit and they do a lot of teaching around the core texts. We get junk classes like The Victorian Body in Distress: Female Horror Stories and Post-Feminism in the time of Disembodiment, or whatever.
Oh and I don’t think elite colleges care about building character. They certainly didn’t in the 90s. John Meirsheimer at Chicago gave a whole speech on this (and the purpose of elite schools) that raised eyebrows but no one really disagreed. They are so moralistic now that may have changed but I don’t think they think in terms of “character.” It’s more about having the right ideas and “changing the world.” But less idealistic, so that it’s more of a training in saying the right things but ending up at some high paying woke company.
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Superimposing the German demand for novelty in dissertations (and not all technical research is really novel either, as I mention here) in the humanities has been a disaster, and I’m glad not to be the only one to think so.
You are correct that imposing moralism isn’t inculcating character, it’s just the the poor substitute we’re left with these days.
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This is good: https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/A0025-1.pdf
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All of his ideas have been on display in his position re the war in Ukraine. This hasn’t stopped people from characterising his position as ranging from immoral to treasonous. But no good deed goes unpunished these days…
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