Everyone Can't Become An Engineer
Virginia Postrel writes at Bloomberg, "If everyone suddenly flooded into 'practical' fields, we'd be overwhelmed with mediocre accountants and incompetent engineers, making lower and lower salaries as they swamped the demand for these services":
The higher-education system does have real problems, including rising tuition prices that may not pay off in higher earnings. But those problems won't be solved by assuming that if American students would just stop studying stupid subjects like philosophy and art history and buckle down and major in petroleum engineering (the highest-paid major), the economy would flourish and everyone would have lucrative careers.That message not only ignores what students actually study. It also disregards the diversity and dynamism of the economy, in good times as well as bad.
Those who tout Stem fields as a cure-all confuse correlation with causality. It's true that people who major in those subjects generally make more than, say, psychology majors. But they're also people who have the aptitudes, attitudes, values and interests that draw them to those fields (which themselves vary greatly in content and current job prospects). The psychology and social work majors currently enjoying relatively low rates of unemployment -- 7.7 percent and 6.6 percent respectively -- probably wouldn't be very good at computer science, which offers higher salaries but, at least at the moment, slightly lower chances of a job.
...As any good economist will remind you, income is just a means to utility, not a goal in itself. Some jobs pay well not only because few people have the right qualifications but also because few people want to do them in the first place. In a culture where many people hate oil companies, petroleum engineers probably enjoy such a premium. Plumbers -- the touchstone example for critics who think too many people go to college -- certainly do.
The critics miss the enormous diversity of both sides of the labor market. They tend to be grim materialists, who equate economic value with functional practicality. In reality, however, a tremendous amount of economic value arises from pleasure and meaning -- the stuff of art, literature, psychology and anthropology. These qualities, built into goods and services, increasingly provide the work for all those computer programmers. And there are many categories of jobs, from public relations to interaction design to retailing, where insights and skills from these supposedly frivolous fields can be quite valuable. The critics seem to have never heard of marketing or video games, Starbucks or Nike, or that company in Cupertino, California, the rest of us are always going on about. Technical skills are valuable in part because of the "soft" professions that complement them.
...The skills that still matter are the habits of mind I honed in the classroom: how to analyze texts carefully, how to craft and evaluate arguments, and how to apply microeconomic reasoning, along with basic literacy in accounting and statistics. My biggest regret isn't that I didn't learn Fortran, but that I didn't study Dante.
The most valuable skill anyone can learn in college is how to learn efficiently -- how to figure out what you don't know and build on what you do know to adapt to new situations and new problems. Liberal-arts advocates like this argument, but it applies to any field.
Likewise, the most important parts of my education were learning to think and "habits of mind."
We already have a problem with mediocre people in the "soft" sciences: teachers who can't teach because they can't actually do anything... a "counselor" once told someone very dear to me she was lying - after three minutes. These people often "hide" behind the supposed nobility of their job.
Radwaste at March 22, 2014 6:46 AM
1. About 60% of all students major in occupational subjects, not academic arts-and-sciences or fine arts and performing arts.
2. The engagement that students have with the academic arts and sciences and fine and performing arts are generally to fulfill haphazard distribution requirements which amount to padding. One, two, three, and four year courses of study in discrete subjects should be the order of the day.
3. The time students spend in college is further padded by lax rules about course withdrawals, the scheduling of required courses per the department's convenience and not the clientele's convenience, and common requirements that one's last semester be full time.
4. A great many occupational programs are suffused with humbug and mainly act to restrict entry and screen out people with a low tolerance for tripe (teacher training, social work, and library administration to name three).
5. Others are odd contrivances that may teach some skills but which it is difficult to regard as actual disciplines as opposed to a confluence of marketing imperatives and staffing imperatives. Just what is 'health resources management'?
6. A selection of occupational programs have padded entry requirements. You do not see such requirements abroad and they were not universal as recently as 1920. The main examples would be the common requirement of a baccalaureate degree to enter schools of medicine, law, and peri-medical disciplines. That should cease in favor of preparatory certificates (perhaps 18 months for law and 24 months for medicine).
7. Credential creep is just amusing. You now have doctorates in physical therapy and 'nursing practice'. Time to do some pruning.
8. Fix by law the length of the academic year and end institutional coin-clipping.
9. If you're concerned about general education, do something about the state of secondary schooling rather than requiring tertiary students to take a jumble of arts-and-sciences course in college.
10. At the tertiary level, you can provide an option for a general arts-and-sciences degree that might run from 1 to 4 years of study. You could have the following options: a St. John's College type program; a fragment of such a program running 1 or 2 years; a medieval trivium and quadrivium; or a two year course of philiosophy, history surveys, mathematics, and statistics (foundational disciplines).
11. As is noted in these complaints, much of the academic arts and sciences has been corrupted. The silly victimology programs are the grossest example. Another would be what has happened to sociology, anthropology, American history, English literature, and comparative literature.
Art Deco at March 22, 2014 7:47 AM
I should note that the '60% figure' I quote above applies to those enrolled at baccalaureate granting institutions. For students enrolled at community colleges, I think about 90% of the associate's degrees awarded are in occupational subjects.
Not everyone can be an engineer, but there are huge swaths of people seeking to be nurses, schoolteachers, accountants, athletic trainers, dieticians, &c.
One thing we do need is updated bankruptcy law to readily liquidate institutions going tits up. We also need tough disclosure rules so prospective students get a passable idea of what their future might look like if they purchase tertiary educational services. Another thing we need to do is cut out the bloody subsidies and institute state and federal labor laws which make any employment contract longer than six years unenforceable.
Art Deco at March 22, 2014 7:52 AM
While we are at it, can we ban the use of the term 'university' for any institution which is not at least up to its ankles in the training of aspirant professors?
Art Deco at March 22, 2014 7:55 AM
"Radwaste" nails part of it: the "stupid subjects like art history and philosophy" really are stupid for most of the students who pursue them, not just because the number of jobs in them is small but because they are already swamped with mediocre people, exactly the way Postrel worries that engineering and accounting will be swamped.
A major part of the solution is Mike Rowe's idea: go back to "tracking" a large part of the student body into vocational training for blue collar jobs and away from college, preferably as early as junior high.
While we're at it we should end federal aid for universities, which has done nothing to improve its quality or usefulness, but has hugely driven up its price, flooded the market with inferior colleges and un-respectable degrees ("feminist studies", anyone?), given lots of shrill fools tenured jobs in teaching those stupid subjects, and saddled millions of hapless twenty-something people with huge, bankruptcy-proof debt for which they get little or no value in return.
jdgalt at March 22, 2014 8:45 AM
"Radwaste" nails part of it: the "stupid subjects like art history and philosophy" really are stupid for most of the students who pursue them, not just because the number of jobs in them is small but because they are already swamped with mediocre people, exactly the way Postrel worries that engineering and accounting will be swamped.
It's liberal education. It is not meant to be preparation for a specific line of work. Having prospered studying it is a signal to employers that you have a certain value, of course. The subjects are not stupid in and of themselves, either (though, like anything, they can be made stupid).
The problem is not that there is liberal education. The problem is the decay of secondary education and the hypertrophy of tertiary education. The padding of tertiary schooling with forced completion of haphazard assemblages of arts-and-science courses is an aspect of that. A conjoined problem is the corruption of various academic disciplines. Sociology and anthropology and American history decay into social propaganda, literary study decays into cut-rate sociology (which is social propaganda), and art criticism decays into ludicrous intellectualizing.
While we are at it, the arts-and-sciences faculty I know best hands out 650 diplomas a year. The art department and the philosophy department are responsible for perhaps 9% of the total. About half the art department's manpower is devoted to studio art, so perhaps 7.5% of the students are invested in philosophy and art history. Again, only about 40% of the baccalaureate and graduate degrees are issued in liberal subjects (and the philosophy department has an abnormal following at that school). Not that many people are cadging degrees in these subjects (IIRC, the federal Education department statistics report categories too coarse to distinguish degrees here from other humanistic disciplines).
Someone should properly study the humanities.
Art Deco at March 22, 2014 11:05 AM
One of the problems as I see it is that far too often (and not just with educational issues) people are often looking for a "one size fits all" solution.
That is already one of the problems with education in the US - and critics are right - not everyone can and should go to college. The mantra of the left has been exactly that for years and it hasn't worked.
But, it is also true that not everyone is cut out for STEM either.
And, no I do not think "tracking" is the answer. Pigeon-holing students isn't right either.
What is needed is something that has more options; not less. So, the real question (which I really don't have an answer for) is how do we get more options for most students?
Charles at March 22, 2014 11:07 AM
Even today, I'd much rather get someone junior who has a real passion for the job. Someone that loves to dig into things on their own in order to learn how it works. We still have a hard time finding people who are actually good unix sysadmins and not just generic computer people.
Miguelitosd at March 22, 2014 12:15 PM
I think we will see more bosses in the near future who will see your degree or degrees on paper but simply ignore it. So much of what college teaches is completely worthless. I am not saying do away with colleges, for some professions they are required; doctors and related fields, engineering, etc...
If I could afford it right now I would hire a UI developer and I wouldn't care if they got some fancy degree or 18 just out of high school provided their examples were sufficient. I really don't give a crap whether someone got a 4.0 in underwater basket weaving, I need an artist who knows their crap and wants to learn more as new things become standard... not the typical "this is how it is" (and by is I mean was when the class books were created).
NakkiNyan at March 22, 2014 2:45 PM
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
— Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
@ 62 I can say I have successfully accomplished all but the last
RRRoark at March 23, 2014 9:53 AM
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