College is a Promise, Unless You’re a Humanities Major

Frank Bruni covers some familiar terrain in this column from the Sunday Times. He points to data demonstrating that the choice of college major increasingly determines income and employability just as much as access to higher education. In short: what you study is just as important as earning a degree.

The column cites Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce, whom I often find useful, to tell readers what most already know: if you want a job after college, major in a STEM field, nursing, or accounting; don’t major in the humanities. Bruni then trots out the pet anecdote of Silicon Valley and Tom Friedman:

The thing is, today’s graduates aren’t just entering an especially brutal economy. They’re entering it in many cases with the wrong portfolios. To wit: as a country we routinely grant special visas to highly educated workers from countries like China and India. They possess scientific and technical skills that American companies need but that not enough American students are acquiring.

Everyone in Silicon Valley knows this is bullshit. H1B workers are cheaper, full-stop. That’s why companies go through the hassle of recruiting them. There are 1.8 million unemployed engineers in this country. They can’t compete with cheaper imported or outsourced labor. Studying engineering may be a more secure path to post-graduate employment, but it doesn’t insulate one from the growing global talent pool. More importantly from a policy perspective, we don’t have a shortage on engineers. What we have is a shortage of cheap engineers.

The policies Bruni advocates here are designed to nudge students to STEM degrees, especially engineering. Make science and math cool beginning at the elementary level. Tie student aid packages to particular areas of study. Align local college curricula to the needs of local employers. These ideas betray a worldview in which some types of knowledge are more valuable than others because they are more marketable. This is why I’ve resisted calls to emphasize the marketability and utility of humanities degrees – that’s ground on which we cannot win. Instead, we must make the more fundamental assertion that knowledge of the humanities is valuable even if it is not marketable.

Presumably, Bruni knows this. I doubt he pursued his B.A. in English at Chapel Hill with a career in mind.

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Daily Wisdom

It will be a service to the Church of great consequence to carry the gospel into those parts of the world, to help on the coming of the fullness of the Gentiles, and to raise a bulwark against the kingdom of Antichrist which the Jesuits labor to rear up in those parts.

– John Winthrop in the 1629 petition to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony

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Santorum and Cultural Catholicism


On Monday, Frank Bruni examined the most recent example of the yawning gap between the institutional Church and professed Catholics. His column takes the candidacy of Rick Santorum as a kind of touchstone for adherence to Catholic orthodoxy. He points out the many ways that Santorum’s campaign is a megaphone for the Church’s various positions on social (read: sexual) issues. That this campaign consistently lags far behind the candidacy of the Mormon Mitt Romney among Catholic voters is, Bruni argues, indicative of just how unwilling American Catholics are to endorse the teachings of their Church.

Two-thirds of the way through, Bruni makes a key point: “Catholicism is as much ethnicity as dogma.” » Read the rest of this entry «

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LOTR Fridays

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A Dumb Smart Picture


This picture comes from a Birmingham News report on an Alabama-Florida game. Notice the face of the kid in the stands (click the image for a larger version if you can’t see it here). He’s making the same face as the larger version of his head he’s holding.

There’s something to be said here about the reproducibility of our personalities and images, about how the digital age abstracts and commodifies our bodies in the service of late capitalism. These dehumanizing processes become all the more insidious when internalized and re-presented in the performance of the athletic spectacle. We must “make faces” thrice over (when taking the picture, when holding the head, when performing the face live) to have our “selves” seen. Maintaining the self, then, is an increasingly labor-intensive practice.

But seriously, just look at this doofus. He’s awesome.

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The Dumbest Sentence Published Today

The half-century between 1912 and 1962 was a period of great wars and economic tumult but also of impressive social cohesion.

–from today’s column by David Brooks.

To be charitable to Brooks, the first half of the sentence is not entirely incorrect. Between 1912 and 1962, there were many great wars and much economic tumult. That much is pretty indisputable and not at all stupid. “But also of impressive social cohesion” — woo, boy, is that a howler. I thought of making a list of all the things you’d have to ignore to think that claim is true. Then I remembered I have other things to do today. So I’ll stick to two:

  • I might be whiter than David Brooks, but even I know that Jim Crow was a pretty freaking huge impediment to social cohesion in the early decades of the 20th century. Kinda hard to ignore that one.
  • Religious discrimination that saw Catholics (and immigrants from Catholic countries) legally prohibited from equal protection resulted in the Catholic ghettos of urban centers and the popular suspicions of Catholic politicians (Al Smith, JFK, anybody opposing Prohibition). There was social cohesion as long as you went to the right church.

The periodization is, of course, also very interesting. Why Brooks chooses to date the end of social cohesion at the beginning of various important social movements would be curious if his motivations weren’t so transparent. Why does this matter, anyway?
» Read the rest of this entry «

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LOTR Fridays


What Gandalf should have said at Helm’s Deep.

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Daily Wisdom

1. It’s always better to be a little bit overdressed than a little bit underdressed.
2. There’s nothing wrong with caring about aesthetics.
3. Remember that your dress isn’t just about yourself, it’s about your respect for the others around you.

– Jesse Thorn’s three essential style tips for young men

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Ice Cube Wasn’t Always Like this


Proof that some of the best humanities research is taking place outside the cushy confines of academe: this simple tumblr post.

Poster Donovan Strain set out to figure out when, precisely, was the nominal good day in Ice Cube’s 1993 hit “It Was a Good Day.” He uses specific references in the song’s lyrics (e.g. “the Lakers beat the SuperSonics”) to work out that the song must be referencing January 20, 1992.

Now that’s how you do research.

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“At best moronic, at worst an epic swindle”

That’s how this article from The Dallas Observer describes college football’s bowl system. The point of the article, believe it or not, is not that the BCS is a terrible way to decide a champion or that the bowl system is a diluted shell of what it traditionally has been. Instead, it makes a very cogent argument that the entire bowl system constitutes a giant transfer of funds from university budgets to marginally non-profit entities paying exorbitant salaries to a handful of executives.

As an academic and a college football fan, I’m obviously conflicted. This is one more arrow in the quiver of those who despise the emphasis on athletics in higher education, particularly at large state-funded institutions. Now, I’ve always found those arguments to be premised on ludicrous assumptions about the role of the academy. However, a situation like this one shows certain institutions actually losing money on the pursuit of nominal athletic glory, inevitably (although no one will admit it) at the expense of more worthy pursuits. I think college athletics – even big time, big money college athletics – have a place in the life of the university. I am finding it harder and harder to justify the financial sinkhole that constitutes the traditions of my favorite sport at the same time tenure-lines are being cut and tuitions are skyrocketing. Eventually, something’s going to have to give.

Also, Nebraska has lost its last two bowl games. That makes me dislike the system, too.

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  • About Me

    I am a professor of literature and writing in Chicago, where I write about Catholic Literary Modernism and Globalization Theory. This site is my mental clearinghouse.