A 2011 article by the CBS financial report, “Money
Watch” compiled a list of the top-25 college majors with the highest unemployment rates. Though rather predictable, the list warrants some
consideration in this era of “rethinking” education.
Clinical psychology ranked the highest, with an
unemployment rate of nearly 20 percent, followed by “Miscellaneous fine arts”
at 16.2 percent. The list can basically be summarized as such: Don’t major in
anything related to psychology, the humanities or fine-arts.
A similar article by Terence Loose on Yahoo!
enumerates the “Degrees employers hate and love.”
Again, applicants with B.A.s in philosophy,
architecture and fine arts will likely be passed over for those with degrees in
engineering, computer science, communications and anything related to health
care. Of the “impracticality” of a philosophy degree, Loose patronizingly lists
some of the hypothetical questions the field encourages students to ask: “What
is consciousness? Why should we be ethical? Why can’t I find a job? Oh sorry,
that last one is not usually asked in school…”
College students must do their best to avoid these
“dead-end degrees” another Yahoo! article—also by Loose—states. “[I]f you’re
thinking of going back to school but are unsure about what to study,” he
writes, “read on for some degrees that are a dark alley to nowhere and a few
more that look like a well-lighted expressway to the career world.” Given his
rank anti-intellectualism toward “dead end” (i.e. non-lucrative) humanities
studies, I would counter it is Loose who is stuck in the Dark Ages—never mind a
“dark alley.”
Look, I am not naïve. I understand the importance of
securing employment after graduating—particularly given the unfathomable loads
of college debt young graduates are now incurring. The weak economy only makes
the imperative to pursue a “practical” major all the more urgent. Indeed, this
likely accounts for the increased popularity of trade-oriented community
colleges in recent years.
But educational self-help lists such as these raise
a troubling question about what society considers the purpose of a college
education.
Based on these lists—which are ubiquitous on the
Internet and business publications—the sole aim of higher education is to make
students proficient in a marketable set of skills so they can obtain a
high-paying job. Period. Traditional educational ideals like expanding one’s
base of knowledge, learning to think critically, becoming civically and
politically engaged—these skills will not make anyone rich. Therefore, this
logic goes, they are a waste of time.
Colleges, in other words, have become glorified
job-training mills. And, rather than fighting this market-oriented shift and
standing up for education’s higher ideals, professors, deans and college
administrators have sheepishly accepted this utilitarian, college-as-job-placement
attitude. Educators who dare to object—professors like Noam Chomsky, Elizabeth
Warren and the late Howard Zinn—are branded “political,” and risk being denied
tenure. Those already tenured simply become pariahs within their own profession,
summarily dismissed because they do not work exclusively in academic “theory.”
University presidents—most of whom come from the
financial sector—typically have no firsthand experience in education. They are
essentially glorified CEOs for the college. Their job is to market and “brand”
the school, no differently than Ford does its trucks. This business mindset
leads to college administrators increasingly viewing students as “customers”
who are merely purchasing a degree. And nakedly for-profit colleges—like Kaplan
University and the University of Phoenix—now routinely appear on the NASDAQ and
New York Stock Exchange.
As Communications professor Neil Postman noted: “At
its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different
from how to make a living.”
As a Socratic scholar, Postman understood the
distinction between teaching a skill and teaching one how to think
independently. He realized that education is inherently political—even, at
times, subversive. Socrates, himself, called education, “the kindling of a
flame, not the filling of a vessel.”
I had the fortune of attending Colby-Sawyer College
in New London, NH where I received my B.A. in Communication and Writing. My liberal-arts
courses offered a mix of practical, hands-on learning in the video lab, radio
station and college newspaper, along with robust theoretical discussions, with
a strong emphasis on critical thinking. My professors not only taught me how to
write a news story, but prompted me to contemplate the role of a journalist in
a democratic society. Or to ponder the obligation a filmmaker has to use his
craft for social good.
In other words, we asked not only the “who,” “what,”
“where,” and “when,” but also the “how,” and “why.”
My courses and professors at Colby-Sawyer left a
lasting impression on me. They awoke within me a deep urge to constantly question,
challenge and rebel. They changed my life. And that, I believe, should be the ultimate
goal of higher education—to enrich students with the life-altering gift of knowledge.
Most graduates of my major went into marketing or
public relations. A few of them landed six-figure jobs at Wall Street. And an
alarming number have military husbands deployed in Afghanistan or Iraq.
My
former classmates seem to have few, if any, moral qualms about what they do.
The fact that they make their living perpetuating the consumer culture
industry, making corporations rich or selling fraudulent refinance loans to
low-income homeowners, perfectly aware they cannot afford them, does not bother
them one bit. For these “systems managers” as writer Chris Hedges calls them,
the ends—and the massive paychecks—justify the means. These young people are
what Hedges calls, “products of a moral void.”
“It is better to be at odds with the whole world,”
Socrates said, “than, being one, to be at odds with myself.”
The irony, of course, is there are no jobs out
there. Contrary to what you may have heard on television news, the Great Recession
is not over. Market-oriented colleges are basically training students for jobs
that do not exist.
Case in point, The
Maine Sunday Telegram/Portland Press Herald reported yesterday (04/07/13)
that many young people have simply given up looking for work entirely. Indeed,
many of my friends—all college graduates—are on food-stamps. Those that do work
have part-time, menial jobs that pay little more than minimum wage and do not
utilize their college education at all.
Given the economic reality, what better time to cast
off the practical vocational course of study and truly follow your
intellectual, spiritual or artistic passion. If you are going to remain poor,
you may as well be poor doing something you love, right?
“As a teacher, I am not interested in just
reproducing class after class of graduates who will get out, become successful,
and take their obedient places in the slots that society has prepared for them,”
Howard Zinn once said. “What we must do—whether we teach, or write, or make
films—is educate a new generation to do this very modest thing: change the
world.”
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