"Duane Taylor was studying the humanities in community college and living in his own place when he lost his job in a round of layoffs"
Read - this guy was not only studying something with a very questionable market value, but paying through the nose and going in debt for that, when the actual objective truth reminded everyone that indeed was the truth and that there was no way around it.
I'm sad for the suffering he incurred, but it was logical and likely.
I think you're being a bit harsh. He's partially to blame, but everybody makes mistakes. I think there's a slight lag in what people educate themselves in. For the longest time, only a minority went to college. When few go to college, having a degree at all meant you could get a job, so there was this culture of "study what you're passionate about, it'll be alright". This is unfortunately not true anymore, but this is what the older generations are telling us young people, because they haven't realized that things have changed. Today, you have to be able to make a life determining decision right out of high-school, with limited and outdated information and years of the older generations giving you an incorrect view. Soon we'll probably get an over correction with nobody going into humanities and loads of people going into engineering and computer science.
What's really needed is mandatory statistics for every degree and school on the form "1 year after graduation 70% of graduates was able to find jobs, 40% related to their degree, 30% with salaries of $50k+, do you still want to apply?". That's what's needed to even remotely be able to make a rational choice. If you're great at humanities and you love it, it might be worth the chance, but for us average people, we're better off with something that gives us a better chance of success.
No, I would say you have to super dumb if you 'chose' to study something that doesn't have much value or doesn't pay well. Its your life and you have to make smart decisions. Its not a game, where you can just shrug it off as a mistake, blame the government and then expect something miraculous to happen.
Looking back, I can tell you about my own experiences here in India. When I opted to study engineering and before that science for my pre-university college, there were a lot of friends of mine who wanted to study history or commerce because it was 'easy'. Really, you have whole life to live on that and you take a wrong decision just because you want it easy for the next 4 years?
Now after 4-5 years when we were all looking for jobs, the very same people who consciously studied history and commerce complained that either had no jobs or jobs that payed very poorly. Most of them either ended either being clerks(where their jobs are constantly threatened by automation) or working at call enters. And again you see the same government blaming. How can the government or people around you help if you make wrong decisions all over the years?
And not surprisingly it turns out most of such people are generally the kind of guys who don't very hard and are always looking for short cuts. One fine day you suddenly wake up and realize its not that easy after all.
Hah, it is the same here in the USA. The people who studied the easy stuff don't have jobs, and if they do they are low-paid and don't offer much security. The sciences don't even pay that well, although they can if you try hard and schmooze.
100% of the people that I know who studied CS or Engineering (Chemical/Mechanical) _have jobs_ that are well paid, have nice benefits, and are able to live in nice areas of the country and if they want to raise a family. The liberal arts kids, not so much. There is no way of saying it nicely, but for the next 10 years of their lives, they're fucked.
It is IMO hugely unethical for the educational system to shove 'you can be whatever you want to be' down everyone's throats during HS, then expect the Liberal arts to actually be able to find a job, earn enough money to pay off student loans, save $ for a house down payment, pay for health/car/etc insurance, and be able to save for retirement. I am never reproducing (yay childfree), but I shudder to think how my peers with children are managing to pay for for childcare. Oh, and don't forget those who do did not finish college, yet still have $20k of loans collecting interest.
Would you write a check for $150k to a 18 year old kid and let them go party in NYC/LA/Paris for 4 years? Replace Paris with college and that's what college is like, unless you study engineering or maybe medicine.
The old joke is that because of the downturn in the airline industry, the largest employer of aeronautical engineers is McDonalds. These are 4 year college degree graduates, not aviation mechanics, which go to trade school.
Just like being in the group "college educated" is not a free ticket to a successful career, being in the group "engineer" is not a free ticket to a successful career.
Is a college educated person in a better position to have a successful career? Of course. Is an engineer in a better position to have a successful career? Of course.
The only difference between an engineer in the wrong discipline and a college graduate with the wrong degree is magnitude.
If only those disciplines would not be shifting. Being in my mid 40s now I have seen shifts to and from mechanical/electrical engineering, physics, biology, chemistry, computer science, business or law degrees and many more.
Actually when I graduated from high school the safest and easiest path to employment that was recommended to us was to study a humanity and become a teacher (teachers here - Central Europe - are much better paid than in the US) or get a business degree and work for a bank or insurance company. Both of these paths seem ridiculously risky now (or at least last time I checked).
As a conclusion I would argue that there is no such thing as a "free ticket to a successful career". Chances are high that at one point or another there will be a surplus of people in everyones profession and almost everyone will experience unemployment or need to shift careers.
That would be a rather poor joke, though, since it's probably not true, and the demand for them (as engineers) was still strong when I left the field. (I left because I like programming more, not because I was worried about my job.)
Education and the surrounding social structure is basically a bioreactor for ideas. I know this is HN, but the blatant disregard for how the humanities effect the enjoyability of your life is vulgar.
Why should we not allow people to devote their life to historical studies? Why should we look down at those whose studies may inspire the simstim visions of our great-grand-children?
Society is creating enough wealth to ensure the pursuit of knowledge for those who wish to undertake it. And pursuit of knowledge is a more driving force for economic growth than any subsidy, any tariff.
"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."
> Education and the surrounding social structure is basically a bioreactor for ideas.
In theory, yes. In reality, I sense is that this was destroyed in many places by the manic push to make everyone go to college. I went to an engineering college, and while I did meet brilliant people there, the "bio-reactor" was severely diluted by a large body of students who basically treated it like high school year 5-8.
Like Kamaal, I've met many students who chose "high school year 5-8" based on what is easy, commerce and humanities, so I wouldn't be surprised if many of these places were even more diluted.
I have no problem with people studying humanities and commerce, I even have little problem paying for it. I do have a problem with a candidate leaving with a humanities degree and them complaining that it's hard to get a job in her or her field. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that there is a limited demand for pure literature degrees. In a way engineers don't have to as much, people with "soft" degrees need to articulate much more clearly how they're going to add value in a job - and that's hard, and it's not my impression it's taught in these programs.
Perhaps they could profess that devotion without taking out student loans and drowning in debt? Like, you know, by checking out books on historical studies at their local libraries, and enjoying them every evening?
>>I know this is HN, but the blatant disregard for how the humanities effect the enjoyability of your life is vulgar.
I am not disregarding humanities or history. But it makes more sense to read them when you have no other better work to do. Sorry for putting it bluntly, but you should have better work to do than studying philosophy and arcane trivia about the past.
>>Why should we not allow people to devote their life to historical studies?
Because they don't pay well. And sometimes don't pay at all. Nobody is going to pay you for just knowing 1000 things that happened some hundreds of years back. Such knowledge is not useful to solving any pressing problems that exist currently.
>>Society is creating enough wealth to ensure the pursuit of knowledge for those who wish to undertake it. And pursuit of knowledge is a more driving force for economic growth than any subsidy, any tariff.
Which knowledge, not all forms of knowledge are same. Are they?
And ironically, while you have a degree and express your opinions about education, your wording makes you sound like you are in high school. While I agree with the sentiment that there are other more in demand degrees, calling humanity studies 'arcane trivia about the past' or saying that 'such knowledge is not useful to solving any pressing problems that exist currently' reminds me of all those people for whom news are dumbed down to a 14yr old level because they don't understand any context anyway. To add more to the irony, AFAIK your country is quite overflowed with IT graduates who end up in call centers or other technological slave labor just like their buddies from commerce. So in the end, your enlightening gospel kind of invalidates itself.
Are you seriously suggesting the people continue to study things which don't pay them well or don't pay them at all?
And if that happens, they follow their passion and when they come out of college and don't find jobs who should they blame? How is the system's mistake that your passion is not in demand and doesn't pay well?
Look I'm not saying you should study philosophy at college. But at the same time you shouldn't look too surprised if with that degree you don't get a job that pays well.
I said none of those things and I won't explain what's already written in front of you (talk about understanding context). Just keep in mind that excess of labor force in a sector leads to decrease in wages and increasing demand in neglected markets. Between 'we demand jobs for philosophers' and 'everybody should just study IT' there are more balanced scenarios. Trends don't change in one year cycles - when you notice that something went wrong it's already too late and it takes long years to fill the gap, and only assuming a too agressive correction doesn't happen.
"I am not disregarding humanities or history. But it makes more sense to read them when you have no other better work to do."
How is this not disregarding? Just to put things a little bit into perspective. I have an advanced degree in physics and a minor degree in maths. The most part of my professional career have I spend in various IT related positions, running my own businesses for the last 15 years. I am making enough money to lead a comfortable life. But if basically the only even remotely relevant thing (by other measures than monetary, i.e. improving the lives of anybody else) I have ever done was build a website for a global NGO and a mobile app for a local opera house. If anything I have worked for companies whose success might quite likely have made that world a worse place.
Last year I accidentally ran into a girl I knew back in college. She was majoring in sociology. She is my age(40-50), still living in a shared apartment and currently working for close to minimum wage for a local non profit that helps fugitives and illegal immigrants to get legal support and generally help them in their daily struggles.
My point is: Yes I make more money, but I have an immense respect for people like her who sacrifice this for ideals and actually improve peoples live on a regular basis. And in this regard your attitude (like "but you should have better work to do than studying philosophy and arcane trivia about the past") is not only disregarding but insulting and quite frankly shortsighted and ignorant.
Because they don't pay well. And sometimes don't pay at all. Nobody is going to pay you for just knowing 1000 things that happened some hundreds of years back. Such knowledge is not useful to solving any pressing problems that exist currently.
You really should read your Marx. We're in an overproduction crisis: the world's most pressing problem is its lack of problems to solve.
"Why should we not allow people to devote their life to historical studies?" (or any other thing that won't pay well)
Well, we should allow them, and in fact encourage them if a) it's their passion b) it's on THEIR dime, not mine - ie they are rich or very aware of the consequences.
No need to bankroll economically stupid negation that will result in their employment.
"Today, you have to be able to make a life determining decision right out of high-school, with limited and outdated information and years of the older generations giving you an incorrect view."
I remember being terrified in 11th grade - all my friends were doing college applications, and it all felt permanent. I remember crying in the counselor's office one day, and she didn't understand the pressure.
"I'm being told I have to choose 'a major' in a college, which is going to determine the rest of my life, and I can't even drive yet". "Oh, don't worry, you can always change it later!" (She was nicer than that, but that was the gist).
You can change it later, it just takes a long time to realize it, at a huge financial cost. I chose wrong, but I was lucky that I realized it so soon, after only 6 months. It was a decision made out of laziness as much as anything. I realized that the one programming class I took was way more easy and fun than anything else. I should've gone into CS right away, but for some reason I thought I was way behind the "nerds" who would go to CS, the people who had been coding since they were 6. I thought that I would have no chance in that environment.
That said, not everybody wants to, or can become an engineer or scientist, and they shouldn't. If the choice for a person is between not going to college at all, and going for a humanities education, I vastly prefer they go for the education. I think people getting educated and pursuing their passions are a good thing for society as a whole, if we can afford it.
> For the longest time, only a minority went to college. When few go to college, having a degree at all meant you could get a job, so there was this culture of "study what you're passionate about, it'll be alright". This is unfortunately not true anymore, but this is what the older generations are telling us young people, because they haven't realized that things have changed.
So true. We're currently suffering badly a similar effect in Poland. My generation and current graduates were raised in the belief that you got to have a diploma to find yourself in the market. That led to a crisis of vocationale schools and an overflow of private colleges offering the wackiest fields to graduate in. Now we have waitresses and mcdonalds cashiers with degrees, and employees facing hiring problems because of unskilled labor. Of course all those "educated" youngsters are frustrated, they were told if they study they'll get a career other than salting fries. Only recently our education system started slowly recovering from this madness.
What I don't understand is, why weren't more people able to make the inference I did: "If a college education doesn't actually make you better at performing a job, then there's nothing to sustain the trend of employers from hiring you simply because you have one -- they could just quit doing it one day, and I'd be out in the cold. So I should take a major that is actually needed for certain jobs."
Or, to put it another way, "College doesn't actually make you a better worker for most majors, so hiring based on it is stupid -- that trend can't continue."
If I could see it long before applying for college, why couldn't others? Yet I was continually seeing many, many people around me taking majors with no clue as to how that would make them substantively employable.
While humanities majors are on the lower end of salary scales, there are plenty of assumptions that you made there. For one, "paying through the nose" is unlikely -- one term at Seattle area community college is about $1,300.
A tenth of that pays for a full year in the FWI, and leaves enough for ~ 3 month of housing. And there are other countries in the world - you don't have to study in the same place.
So I repeat myself - paying through the nose. Unless these things he did want to learn were so secret there was no public course online and no information on the internet, I fail to understand what kind of RoI this education would make during an education bubble.
I'm sorry he wasn't in a position to do something stupid (and something many people also did while managing to escape the consequences of their acts) but it was totally predictable.
When somebody is employed and supporting themselves, it's pretty harsh to fault them for what they study in their free time. Plus, it's a community college. Studying the humanities is a good way to get practice and competent feedback on your writing, which has a crucial impact on how you're perceived professionally.
>>Read - this guy was not only studying something with a very questionable market value
One thing that a person must almost remember before doing anything(apart from recreational and entertainment stuff) is to immediately question the 'worth' of what he/she is doing.
So it goes like this. A couple of days back my manager spots a architect during lunch and starts talking about how great the architect is. The conversation over the lunch table descends down to my manager just showering praise on the architect about how much the architect knows. It went on for like 20 minutes and then at the end I just asked him- 'So, what is all that worth?', and then there was like dead silence after that.
Most of the problems exists because people do not understand how much they know or how intelligent they are is irrelevant to people around them. If you are wondering why the cab driver who drives you back home, or the guy who sells candy in the subway is financially worth more than you. You still haven't figured the mere basic fundamentals of the demand-supply problem. You have to sell/do/provide some product/activity/service which people need. It can be painful for you to know while you can architect a complex system, a intern who just arrived can make more money by selling a simple game on the android market.
Add to this class problems. People have a difficult time digesting that a cab drivers kid can go get a engineering degree while a clerk's kid can't. You also have to be ready to do something small time, or things that don't attract respect or jobs that don't command much self respect.
And lastly. Please save money, that's important. Theory say you can earn endless money. But if you are from the middle class, face the hard fact now. There is only X amount of money you will ever earn. So learning how to get rid of debts, savings and investments are crucial for your financial well being. If you are in financial mess because you have badly managed money- You can blame nobody else.
My initial reaction was similar, but, upon further reading, it appears that his only family, his mother, was in similarly dire straits, and thus the option of commuting from home to save money was not available.
I spent three years studying whatever at community college, fulltime, while figuring out what I wanted to do. That's one of the best things about community college - you don't pay through the nose, you can learn for 'cheap' while you figure out what you really want to do. Then you can choose a university and go from there.
If he was doing this studying in a community college, he was likely not paying through the nose - Community Colleges are a type of two-year institution in the States that are supported by local government, usually charge per course rather than per semester, and rarely cost more than $1000 a year.
The newspapers cherry-pick stories whose situations sound "rightful". There are plenty of unemployed accountants, lawyers, engineers, IT support workers and, yes, programmers.
Would you say the same of an education that did not come from a western university? What if instead of studying the arts in a school in Kansas, it is my burning life desire to hitchhike around southeast asia for five years. Should I not be "penalized" (read: not be in demand) for making that decision?
This isn't a silly exaggerated hypothetical either. It is exactly what I would have done if I had not valued career prospects so highly nearing the end of highschool.
In the US that's a broad term. People go to a university to "pursue education" by throwing a leather ball to a guy dressed in tight spandex pants.
People who know the best technique of tossing a leather ball to another guy are currently the most valued education professionals in university system: http://www.sacbee.com/statepay/
True. Still, I found independent reading from library books to be much more informative than the liberal arts electives I was forced to take (and pay for) as GEC reqs on the exact same subjects.
Penalized for pursuing education, no. Penalized for making extremely poor life choices? Probably. But it's not really so much a penalty as an easily predicted result that people are steadfastly intent on ignoring, because that way they get four years of fun instead of work.
No one should be homeless and we should take steps to fix the hideously large gaping holes in our social safety net, stop charging $80,000 to attend even a state school, etc. Until it happens though, I think it's good to encourage an attitude of fiscal responsibility which is currently desperately lacking in many of those in my age group. So many have no idea how to budget their money because they live at home with their parents and have never had to pay for any living expenses.
I was really glad to see this article, though--I'm one of those people who don't have any family they can move in with, and I've come desperately close to being unable to afford housing in the past. Stressful times.
Ask any STEM undergrad what they think about the job prospects of their humanities peers.
This isn't a something that is really up in the air until you go through it and see how it worked out. Employment statistics are easy to find and are practically shoved down your throat when applying to colleges. Jokes about art students and coffee shops are now so strongly a part of popular culture that we see them in television advertisements.
There is a very large portion of the population that seems to have pretty crystal clear forward-looking vision with these things, and that's not a matter of luck but rather awareness.
In some situations the decision will only clearly bad in hindsight. Perhaps people looking to be lawyers or teachers a few years ago got legitimately blindsided. I think these cases are the exceptions that prove the rule though.
Yeah, problem is, not everyone can be a STEM major. Comp Sci degrees would be worthless everyone who failed to understand integrals in Calc 2 could get one.
Read - this guy was not only studying something with a very questionable market value, but paying through the nose and going in debt for that, when the actual objective truth reminded everyone that indeed was the truth and that there was no way around it.
I'm sad for the suffering he incurred, but it was logical and likely.