Authors: Sarah Devlin and Colette McIntyre
Sarah:?First thing?s first: please list your degree/major and any minors.
Colette:?Hahaha oh god, okay. I was an English major with a Concentration in Creative Writing and an Anthropology and American history minor. ?So Words, People, and Things That Already Happened.
Sarah:?Hahaha
Colette:?Clearly my real major was indecision, since I have fourteen different minors and concentrations. Nonsense.
Sarah:?And I have a BA in Political Science/Creative Writing with a minor in Spanish from a big state school, and and MFA in Non-Fiction Writing from a very expensive private college. So suffice it to say, we did not take the advice in this?Forbes piece.
Colette:?We done goofed?
Sarah:?However, we are both employed! And graduated in the midst of the Great Recession.
But more than just that, I want to pose a question to you: is it a problem that we place so much emphasis on job training/employment via university education? On the one hand, that?s not really what college is about. On the other, given that it?s so darn expensive these days, that BETTER be what it?s about. Thoughts?
Colette:?I do think it is a problem, and believe me, I am not speaking from any place of financial privilege ? it?s not as if my parents were able to bankroll my dalliances in the liberal arts. But since when do we have to justify education by demonstrating its financial reward? I understand that tuitions are soaring and students have to worry about real life things like rent, food, car payments, etc. But measuring the worth of knowledge through starting salaries is destructive, I think. Many things of value in a liberal arts education aren?t monetarily quantifiable ? like critical thinking skills, quantitative reasoning, problem-solving, creative thinking?
Sarah:?Well, I think it?s more a question of what you?re hoping to get out of a university education. If you want to treat it as a trade school, you should definitely be looking at that stuff. If you want it to be something else, then this information isn?t super useful. And I agree with you! HOWEVER.
Colette:?Exactly!!! Uh-oh?
Sarah:?I think we liberal arts people maybe get a little bit?OVER-defensive about how useful our educations are? I understand that it?s frustrating for people to not understand that you can develop skills by studying things other than engineering/hard sciences, but I?m also 1000% certain that my ?Intro to Writing Poetry? class did precisely jack sh*t to help me develop as a thinker/person/future employee. I almost feel like it would be useful for someone to say ?Look, going to college is useful because you can say you went/bond with other middle class educated people/apply for most jobs, but if you are hoping to maximize your earning potential you should maybe not f*ck around with anything other than a medical/hard science degree.? I mean, I sort of wish that we had that conversation with more 17 and 18 year olds. Fewer people might decide to go to college, and I feel like for a lot of them that would probably be a positive thing. Or fewer people would take out loans to screw around for four years at a private school and go to a state school instead, and so on.
Colette:?Well said. I do tend to get a little prickly when forced to discuss my education, which is silly because I shouldn?t worry whether or not others feel comfortable about what they perceive as my success. But, when you have people like Marco Andreessen, the founder of Netscape and a big cheese in the tech world, dividing college into two types of degrees ? a math-based major and ?the softer soft? and alleging that the average college graduate witha degree in English is going to end up?working in a shoe store??? can you blame me? But you?re right; high school students should spend more time thinking about what they wish to gain out of college and what they personally value. But I also believe that if tuition prices were more reasonable or if loans were more bearable, perhaps you would see more students going into liberal arts colleges.
To finish reading this post, head on over to The Jane Dough.
To finish reading this post, head on over to The Jane Dough.
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