Comments on: The Usefulness of Uselessness, Redux

By: Nicoleandmaggie

Nicoleandmaggie — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 18:55:53 +0000

I was told at my SLAC that employers would value my ability to think like a mathematician or economist even if I never did math or economics on the job. The logic skills were the true value.

By: Withywindle

Withywindle — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 02:42:28 +0000

Longer comment here.

By: Withywindle

Withywindle — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 17:15:33 +0000

I may even come up with a post on this subject myself, doubtless repetitious. But I’ll start by saying you really have to distinguish between what is appropriate for the elite–i.e., Swat students and their peers–and the mass of students in the public universities for whom the governors are responsible. Swat students have different job prospects, and their skills when they emerge with a history major, say, are quite different from what you emerge with from a public university. Most bluntly: where I went to graduate school, the faculty admitted that their undergraduate majors with A averages were not equipped to enter their graduate programs. You should acknowledge that gap in any defense of the liberal arts you mount.

Security word is “Artless Nedje,” which sounds like a character from the Dutch translation of Oliver Twist.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 15:48:29 +0000

I don’t really understand what a university education would look like that could provide graduates with the hard skills necessary in the word force. Swarthmore social science graduates go into dozens of difference professions, each with a few, or maybe many ‘hard skills’ that could potentially be taught to undergrads. So Swarthmore should teach journalism and law and R and copy-editing and bookkeeping and social media marketing and GIS and…? How are students supposed to know which of these will be useful? I don’t think there is any one major or coherant plan of study that could completely prepare almost any humanities and social science swat grad that I know for their career almost 10 years later – I don’t see how this is really a problem, except that most of the ways of getting that knowledge after graduation are expensive (not as expensive as Swarthmore though).

By: nord

nord — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 12:50:08 +0000

I hear what Brad is saying, BUT, in his terms, it is the difference between teaching undergrad economics at Berkeley or Penn vs. undergraduate economics at Hass or Wharton. Could business school students be taught “write, speak and think well, who has learned to ask open-ended questions, who can find the tools they need to deal with problems both known and unknown, etc..”?

Yes, of course, but that isn’t how it works. Writing and speaking has emphasis, but having any interest in something outside the comfort zone/narrow focus of finance, IT, and commerce, like for example, colonial africa? No way.

By: Valerie

Valerie — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 02:46:49 +0000

I was a liberal arts major in the 80’s. So was my husband. We have paid top dollar to afford our children university educations in the liberal arts, because we believe that the flexibility of mind encouraged by learning a variety of different frameworks for making sense of the world makes a difference in the ability to be effective in whatever direction one might choose to go professionally. Certainly, this has been our experience. After 20 years as a primary care physician, my husband’s career growth in the administration of outpatient clinical medicine benefits greatly from the cause-and-effect models to which he was exposed as a history major back in the day. My own major in economics with a bunch of French Literature on the side has proved surprisingly helpful in raising children and in being a one-woman IT department for a small-company. It also informs the things I teach my karate students.

When we can’t know what the world will ask of us, preparing ourselves with different ways of thinking about things is probably the best possible thing we can do. Learning how to make a cogent argument doesn’t hurt one bit, either.

By: john theibault

john theibault — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 17:40:42 +0000

You’ve probably already seen that Brad DeLong has responded in obtuse Brad DeLong rather than sensible Brad DeLong mode to your post: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/02/higher-education-the-utility-of-uselessness.html As if you harbor any particular hostility to a well-constructed course on the fall of Microsoft, much less determinants of real wage growth in nineteenth and twentieth century America on “liberal arts” grounds. Or as if he could guarantee that every student would learn more of vocational value from studying the determinants of wage growth in nineteenth and twentieth century America than they would from studying colonial African material culture.

Like you, I don’t think I’d want to take my stand primarily on general education — liberal arts as leavening for vocational majors to provide them with the flexibility to deal with continual change. Instead, I’d want to emphasize commonalities of approach across liberal arts majors that make them “vocation ready,” combined with distinct inflections in each major that lead them to be particularly useful in different career paths. The major limitation does not seem to me to be that liberal arts majors don’t teach marketable skills so much as that liberal arts faculty do not know how to advise students on how to break into career paths other than teaching and scholarship.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 13:10:14 +0000

I would share that sentiment, Ted, though not necessarily in terms of a gen ed core curriculum. Liberal arts, if it means anything, is about the overall philosophy of an educational institution, not a defense of every specific curricular choice made by specific departments or even of the proposition that the curriculum should be left to departments to plan in isolation from one another. That’s pretty much the thrust of the longer piece that I’m working on: while various governors and critics are wrong and in many cases malicious, neither do existing curricula at many institutions (public and private, selective and not) actually reflect much of the spirit of the liberal arts, either. If we believe in the proposition that it is a bad idea to fit our curricula to narrowly satisfy the perceived needs of particular employers, then there are some corollary propositions that should follow about how you build “predictable unpredictability” into a college experience.

By: Ted Underwood

Ted Underwood — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 12:55:45 +0000

I can strongly support the value of a liberal-arts education for everyone, at every kind of institution. But I don’t feel any parallel confidence about liberal-arts majors. I don’t feel prepared to say “Don’t worry about a vocation! Major in English, and figure out the vocation afterward.”

I wish journalists would spend more time exploring the gulf between those two ways of framing the issue. I’m not a fan of conservative governors meddling in curricula at all. But if I were going to mount a defense of the liberal arts, I’d take my stand on general education requirements for everyone. At many institutions, we’ve watered those down and retreated to departmental fiefdoms.

By: Withywindle

Withywindle — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 02:53:11 +0000

I would distinguish more clearly between liberal-arts institutions and liberal-arts majors–I’m assuming that public universities aren’t what you mean by the former, although they have the latter.

I think I’ve already given you various sour & despairing comments about the collapse of higher education; the short version is, “most colleges are high schools anyway, so it doesn’t matter if the students aren’t taking liberal arts. It’s not as if they’re really going to college.”