Paging Wendy Dant Chesser: "Students At Most Colleges Don’t Pick ‘Useless’ Majors."

Vile humanities major. 

I'm never, ever going to let this one drop. Wendy Dant Chesser is One Southern Indiana, and 1Si's operating philosophy of "What's Good for Our Oligarchs Is Good for You, Peasant" will never be my cup of tea.

Hello Wendy, Part One: In which we are properly warned not to heed the oligarchs' call to discount the value of liberal arts degrees.

Hello Wendy, Part Two: "Are dissidents born or made? A humanities major examines his life and locale."

Here's some refutation for Dant Chesser to enjoy with her morning Starbucks. For as long as she's over there and I'm back here, this will continue to be grist for the mill.

Students At Most Colleges Don’t Pick ‘Useless’ Majors, b Michelle Cheng (FiveThirtyEight)

.. The vastly different college paths that Mehta and Speers took illustrate an obvious point that is nonetheless often overlooked in discussions of higher education: Students attend college for different reasons. Some, like Mehta, see college primarily as a financial decision, an investment that they hope will have a relatively short-term payoff. Others, like Speers, may hope that a degree will bring financial rewards, but their focus is more on the intellectual and social aspects of the college experience. (Others, of course, seek both.) Those different goals affect where students go to college and what they do once they get there.

These varied approaches to college are clear from the fields that students at different colleges choose to study. According to data from the federal Education Department, students at elite universities are more likely to pursue degrees in the humanities, arts and social sciences than students at less selective schools, who tend to choose majors that are more likely to lead to an immediate, well-paying job.1
The most popular fields of study among students at the most selective schools are the social sciences, with 19 percent of degrees awarded in majors such as political science, economics and sociology. The next two most popular groups of majors are the biological and biomedical sciences and engineering. At less selective schools, the most common fields of study are related to business (the Education Department calls this category “business, management, marketing and related support services”), with 19 percent of degrees awarded in those majors. The next most popular group is “health professions and related programs.”

Career-focused majors — such as business, education and journalism — are more prevalent at less selective schools than at top-tier schools. Education ranks as the fifth most popular major at less selective schools but is the 21st most popular major at the most selective schools. Other vocation-specific majors such as law enforcement are also more popular at less selective schools.2 In total, more than half of students at less selective schools major in career-focused subjects; at elite schools, less than a quarter of students do so.

These numbers run counter to the common stereotype of students majoring in “useless” subjects and complaining when they can’t find jobs. In fact, comparatively few students at less selective schools — the vast majority of U.S. college students and the ones most likely to be pursuing degrees primarily for their career benefits — major in these less practical fields ...

Hello Wendy, Part One: In which we are properly warned not to heed the oligarchs' call to discount the value of liberal arts degrees.

Or else THIS happens.

First, we have this wonderful statement of principle doubling as a middle finger to oligarchs everywhere.

In Part Two, there's a look back at what first prompted this specific middle finger to the oligarchs ... one that isn't being decommissioned, any time soon.

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Bellarmine professor: Don't discount the value of liberal arts degrees, by Dr. Justin D. Klassen (Courier Journal)

The liberal arts, and the humanities especially, are under attack these days for their supposed uselessness. Gov. Matt Bevin recently urged universities to cut programs that do not generate obvious economic returns for students, and mentioned “interpretive dance” as one example.

Bevin is not alone in his thinking. In 2015, for instance, Japan’s government urged its national universities to close faculties of humanities and social sciences, ostensibly to prepare students better for competing in a technology-oriented global economy.

Gov. Bevin and the Japanese government are not wrong to seek value for the money we invest in education. Where they are misguided is in their understanding of how to measure the value of education. This, above all, is where we need some clarity. If we take this question seriously, both philosophically and in terms of the data, it becomes clear that the most trustworthy measure of education’s value is breadth, specifically the breadth of subjects and ideas covered.

I understand if this sounds far-fetched at first glance. Even students who choose to attend a liberal arts school tend to see breadth requirements as needless obstacles to what they “really” should be doing.

I know from years of reading course evaluations, however, that many of these same students discover over time that breadth is more tangibly and enduringly valuable than specialization alone. Seeing the world through the lenses of disciplines beyond their major teaches a crucial lesson: that the world is more complex than any one discipline could ever capture.

This discovery is no small or useless thing! Indeed, we should not consider ourselves mature human beings until we can admit and abide the complexity of life, which is precisely what a liberal arts education makes possible. That is to say, a broad education reveals the world’s uncountable nuances, while giving us the tools we need to approach them with confidence. Such an education therefore frees us to be creative where we might otherwise accept the status quo without question. It prepares us to be more compassionate with others, by requiring us to see our fellow human beings beyond easy stereotypes, and thus as possible collaborators and friends.

In a word, a broad education frees us to be reverent. Reverence, says the theologian Barbara Brown Taylor, is “the proper attitude of a small and curious human being in a vast and fascinating world of experience.” The liberal arts can teach us this properly human attitude. Honestly, what could be more valuable?
If you are willing to grant that a liberal arts education is transformative and even liberating, yet remain skeptical that knowing something about history or ecology or literature will enhance one’s employability in a specific field, please bear with me just a moment longer.

A friend of mine sells commercial real estate in a booming North American city. He makes a lot of money. He has been at it for a while now and regularly hires entry-level agents, drawing from a growing pool of similarly credentialed applicants. When he interviews people for open positions, he says he can tell immediately who has had a broad undergraduate education and who has not. Knowing that he prefers the former candidates, he spends little time these days looking for specialized credentials alone. Instead, he looks at where applicants went to college, and prioritizes those with liberal arts degrees.

Why is this important to him? Does he spend his days arguing about Plato, or Emily Dickinson? Is he some egghead realtor, with a penchant for “interpretive dance”? No. He spends his time building relationships with clients and prospective clients, and he needs co-workers who know how to relate to people with a wide range of backstories. In other words, he needs people experienced in being humane, in thinking on their feet, in listening and making arguments with sympathy and grace. He can teach them the industry-specific skills they need. But he can’t teach them from scratch to be mature, well-rounded human beings, which he knows is more crucial to their business success than any credential on its own.

My friend is not alone in his understanding of the value of a liberal arts degree.

We must vehemently reject fashionable dismissals of the liberal arts. If we really care about getting value for our education dollars, we can do no better than to demand from our schools and our policymakers a promise to educate our citizenry broadly. And to my colleagues who profess various disciplinary approaches to the truth of our human condition: let us make this promise loudly, and continue in our fidelity to it.

(Dr. Justin D. Klassen is associate professor of theology at Bellarmine) University.