Last night, I went to an event for entrepreneurs. I was there to float my idea, wherein you take classes at a bar — hey, if you’re going to treat my beloved Plato as frivolous, I’m not going to argue anymore. Let’s go all the way and make it entertainment.
A self-described ‘student-entrepreneur’ was the most skeptical of the idea, noting that students wouldn’t be interested unless there was credit offered. The adults in the room quickly jumped in to note that obviously students weren’t the main audience for this idea as they didn’t really appreciate learning. They were correct, and I was pleased that, for once, I didn’t have to be the one to say it.
Chatting afterwards, the student confirmed what I’d observed on the teaching end: since kids only care about the grade, class seems like a waste of their time; this is why they skip or text their way through it; and they especially dislike those annoying, required classes that fulfill degree requirements. (This is an a la carte generation, you know. They’ve never had to buy entire albums, only the songs they like.)
I met another person who had originally wanted to do an advanced degree in Econ — except they’d wanted to do applied Econ, and been told, in no uncertain terms, to go back to social work school because applying knowledge was not what grad school was for.
It’s so refreshing to discuss higher ed with people who aren’t involved in the industry. No one’s trying to cover anything up. Nobody’s arguing with the fact that students have no idea why college is valuable, or that the highest of higher ed aims to be useless, or that good teaching is not rewarded — oh, yes, all the students know this, but they don’t get upset because they don’t see the value of classes in the first place.
Behold the future, in which education is more optional than it’s been for a long time. Check out James Altucher’s list of alternatives to college:
- Start a business.
- Work for a charity.
- Travel the world.
- Create art.
- Master a sport.
- Master a game.
- Write a book.
- Make people laugh.
While I’d object to the socioeconomic assumptions behind the idea — which are basically the same as those for college –I can’t argue too much (Hell, looks like I’m doing 1, 7, and 8, right?). I also can’t argue with people who say that education is not the key to solving the unemployment crisis, because it’s been one big Ponzi scheme to fund corporations universities.
But here’s the thing. Although I agree that that college has not made itself particularly useful, and that 20-year-olds are not the best audience for learning (in all seriousness, their critical thinking skills aren’t fully developed), having them write books or start companies will just lead to a world filled with bad art and reprehensible customer service. Even smart kids need a little life experience before they succeed at most things.
We’re also dealing with an extremely incompetent generation of college-age students. Their not learning anything is not entirely the college’s fault; these kids have been shuffled through a system that teaches to the test for twelve freaking years, then dumped somewhere they’re supposed to a) learn critical thinking that b) ostensibly does nothing for their real lives. What do we expect to happen?
Long story short: I agree with Obama that the future of education lies in community colleges. I think debating whether higher education should remain ‘higher’ is a point rendered moot by the failure of the general K-12 system — these kids need further training, whatever you want to call it, and it’s going to teach the remedial writing, social contract, life skills, and media literacy they didn’t learn already. (Please note I am not volunteering to teach in said colleges until some brilliant economist shows me how this is going work without exploiting teachers.)
Despite the fact that humanities could do all of this, many decry the idea of community college as higher ed, using ‘vocational’ in some derogatory sense that I’m just not getting. Sure, let’s teach people to teach, to read Latin, to do history, but not how to apply any of it to real life. Does the application of a subject sully some unspoken ideal of pure-as-the-driven-snow uselessness? Maybe. But keeping learning frivolous clings to a thousand-year-old model where universities only cater to rich people.
Fear not, academic conservatives, rich people aren’t going away any time soon and they will continue to attend prestige institutions. In the meantime, maybe it’s time to re-think your elevator pitch. Or, if you’re going to embrace the frivolity, go whole hog with it. I know I am.
Late breaking post-script: to my astonishment, a respectable scholarly organization agrees with me. Thanks to Maureen Ogle for bringing it to my attention!
Now, I love everything about my liberal arts education (and my school has about ten bajillion general requirements – thank you, Ignatius of Loyola – that proved worthwhile in the end), but I agree with you. As I watch my friends go on the job market, the ones who get jobs don’t get jobs because they had 4.0s double majoring in history and philosophy. They get jobs because of the jobs and internships and service they did while studying history and philosophy. I definitely think that the liberal arts enrich a person’s life, but I don’t think think that they, in a vacuum, make a person’s life.
That said, I have to admit I’ve never read Plato’s Symposium, just the Republic. Two of my housemates are philosophy majors, and one is writing her senior thesis on the Symposium, so I’ve been asking her about it. She offered to lend me her copy and asked that I just leave it around the house when I wasn’t actively reading. Her roommate commented that she also has a copy of the book and said that they could keep one in their room and the other in the living room, for day use. So Plato is the coffee table book in our house. A bar talk really isn’t much of a stretch, if you’re coming to town anytime soon
Yes, networking will always get you the job, but liberal arts are still considered more ‘useless’ than other degrees on the job market. it may sound funny to say ‘applied history’ but that’s exactly what would improve the critical thinking and media literacy skills that everybody claims they want in employees. Until liberal arts people get their heads out of the sand (to pick the polite metaphor), modern ‘disciplines’ such as communication and management sound useful and earn money while resting on theories that are just as stupid/unproven as anything you’d find in, say, a poetry class. That said, it’s fine if you believe liberal arts are there for ‘enrichment’ as long as you don’t expect people to give you (or your favorite dept.) any money for them on those grounds.
Plato’s Symposium is IMHO his best literary work (Woodruff translation is my favorite) and well worth reading. Though I love the facism emerging in the Republic.
I can’t think of a better place to teach Symposium than a bar.
We thought it was a pretty obvious combination! We’ll keep you posted.
Cant wait to get my brain on.
“one big Ponzi scheme to fund corporations universities.”
When N.YU. and Columbia are bigger landowners in Manhattan then Donald Trump you know something isn’t right on their spreadsheets.
True ’nuff — and maybe you need a ‘philosophy booth’ to serve some drinks at Kulture Klash?
[...] worst college degrees – Google Blog Search [...]
HAR!
A la carte generation, indeed! Avoiding core courses is an art. If it isn’t helping the students directly, then they won’t do it.
That said, many classes that students like to avoid could be useful to them. Perhaps colleges are doing a poor job of selling those classes. Math and economics could be “How to Avoid Being Broke,” and English/History/Etc could be “How to Avoid Looking Stupid and Being Taken for a Sucker.” Courses with those titles might get a little attention.
PS–I would totally take a class at a bar!
Agreed that requirements aren’t necessarily a bad thing, but think this generation is particularly resistant to the ‘whole package’ idea! Also think you have a future in marketing education, should you feel like selling out
Let you know if we branch out to Boston!
This is literally the third time I’ve read basically this today. I want to point you to a comment on a post about why PhD students are so mad (blah, blah, blah). It’s number 18 (I get a shout-out in comment 11) but I’ll copy-and-paste it because it is relevant.
(From here: http://chronicle.com/article/Theyre-Mad-as-Hell/126199/)
Having a keynote speech the next day at a Las Vegas hotel, I drifted across the street to buy a $10.99 steak special. Facing a line, I winced and another “single” asked if I wanted to share a table.
“Only if you promise not to talk,” I deadpanned. What followed, naturally, was a fantastic, career-affirming chat.
He was in Vegas to act in a prison movie with Wesley Snipes. I whined that I wasn’t looking forward to my talk, because my pay was way under-market. Mostly, I was there to launch my new book, a few hundred of which had been purchased by the event’s producer.
My table mate gave me some sage advice about faking enthusiasm, and then went on to tell me how he was cutting his own deal with Hollywood, which I offer to the job-challenged doctoral folk, here.
“The way I stay busy is by writing screenplays, and naturally, in each one I write myself a serious supporting part, as an actor. If they want my movie, I earn several paychecks.”
This package-deal enabled him to take the famine-minus out of the feast equation, and he was even able to pay cash for a place on the Jersey shore.
I had been doing something similar for many years, devising my own seminars, pitching and booking them, delivering them, transmuting them into books, audios, videos, and corporate consulting.
The net of it was that I could “teach” through multiple modalities once I had untethered myself from being a conventional college professor. I was doing what I loved, my way, just as my Vegas pal had been doing Hollywood, his.
I had no right to whine. I accepted the speaking gig, which I had created by writing my 12th book.
My advice is to write yourself a new part to play. Where the action takes place, well, that’s your call.
End quote.
I love this. Write yourself a new part to the play. Awesome. And, my little bro, with a welding certification, makes more money than I go. Money isn’t everything, but he’s also just as happy and fulfilled. I wish I could teach English in a bar. Pay for my drinks and…wait, that might be taken as something else.
As happy as I am to be part of a larger wave of protest, I’m skeptical about anyone still clinging to their laurels. Particularly this part of the original article: “A Ph.D. may not prepare a student explicitly for any one profession, but it remains a credential that people respect, and it frees its holder to live creatively outside as well as inside the university walls.” Whoo, we got some major denial here: note the continuing dedication to the prestige value of the PhD (hah!), the apparent lack of awareness of how negatively most non-academic employers see PhDs, and the (still!) anti-vocational sentiment — the “I went to grad school for its own merit” thing earlier in the article, because of course goal-oriented learning is just too pedestrian.
All of this has to go, as well as the denial about how PhD programs are really just underpaid labor for unis. Though truthfully, I wouldn’t expect anyone still working in ed to admit any of this stuff if they wanted to keep their job. (I’m at a distinct advantage here…)
As for the commenter, I agree with him generally but as a business prof he frankly has no idea what happens to you if you don’t act your expected part in more conservative disciplines. You’d have to give up any hope of tenure, I think, which isn’t a bad thing necessarily, but it’s a risk nonetheless.
About the drinks thing…yeah, you caught us, we are kind of working the Greek hetaira model.
I graduated from a “Great Books” liberal arts college where I majored in philosophy, and I can say without a doubt that the most enlightening conversations I had were drinking and talking lit, politics, and philosophy around the bar or a camp fire. We all took similar classes, so it was easy to relax and just get to the nitty gritty of why were doing what we’re doing, but at my current ‘elite’ (read: expensive) university this seems to be anathema. It strikes me as an almost universal forgetfulness as to why people want to study things like philosophy or literature. After a while, it starts to look like a weird gnostic cult; hell, we even get a cape and a weird ceremony of initiation!
Now, to your bar idea: love it! My church started a theology on tap event with the same idea in mind, wherin we would ask a theologian, philosopher, or historian to give a brief talk, serve some beer, and let the questions flow. It was fun and it attracted a lot of people, including those dreaded vocational school folks! Nothing delighted me more than when the bar tender asked, “But how can Augustine account for free will if he also believes in providence?” So, if you start something like that in the windy city, you will have many a drinking buddies with a thinking problem.
That. Is. Awesome. I think every prof would love to imagine a moment where they really did ‘get through’ like that — and yeah, that Augustine has a lot to answer for, whoever you are! Theology on tap sounds like a great idea…maybe you could make it a side project?
That’s the plan. I’m in a similar process to you of transitioning outside of the academy and trying to figure out which city I’ll be living in next year. As scary as it is, it’s far less frightening than working another six years to live East of the middle of nowhere. Plus, as I’ve hinted before, I came to the academy with an idealistic notion that the humanities were integral to the life of everyone and I would someday take that knowledge to the world. Well, there went that idea on first day of grad school!
Now, I’m leaving to fulfill a goal and thinking of projects like Theology on Tap or perhaps writing The Confessions of St. Augustine and Zombies.
Well, sir or madam, if find yourself in the good city of Austin please consider contacting us…Lord knows we don’t want to teach Augustine, even in a bar.
I like the part about how this is an ala carte generation. True. Of course, I teach in one of those community colleges. On the one hand, A lot of practical instruction comes from those places where many of the teachers are living in the real world. Of course, the places have plenty wrong. I am proud that many students over the past few years have told me I’m better than anyone they’ve ever had at there Division I school, CMU included. I know that but administration never will.
That’s the major problem with any govt. intiative like Obama’s. All they do is say comm. colleges are the future and then they dish out money to hire more administrators who are just as clueless as the current gaggle. Teachers are ignored. Paying me or trying to even understand why I’m good is never going to be thought of, so I just keep moving. Eventually I’ll make money somewhere else.
“All they do is say comm. colleges are the future and then they dish out money to hire more administrators who are just as clueless as the current gaggle. Teachers are ignored. ”
Amen. I’m watching it happen at the college where I teach. But thank goodness the cafeteria is being renovated!
It’s not just a gov’t-run thing, though. The well-off private colleges are just as bad about overpaying their admin, spending the money on koi ponds, etc. No matter who’s running it, the overhead is just enormous, and for no good reason. That’s a huge issue that needs to be addressed, and no, ignoring teachers is certainly not the way to do it!
“Does the application of a subject sully some unspoken ideal of pure-as-the-driven-snow uselessness?”
Bahahahahahahahahaha. Yes. Apparently. I want to be an applied mathematician (which is NOT the same thing as a physicist or a statistician, thanks very much), and I cannot tell you all the crap I get from my pure maths colleagues about my selling out/lack of rigor/etc. Far be it from me to point out how most of the astonishing pure number theories and set theories have resulted from applied maths of hundreds (or occasionally thousands) of years ago. Nevertheless, the pure science is supreme. I’ll laugh at them when I get paid twice as much for doing essentially the same stuff.
I’ve heard that elsewhere, that math is particularly snobby in this regard. So you’d think they would get along with those head-in-the-cloud humanities folks a lot better than they do!
You’ll laugh, but they’ll accuse you of being a sellout because you care about money. That’s also unacceptably ‘vocational’ :-
“these kids need further training, whatever you want to call it, and it’s going to teach the remedial writing, social contract, life skills, and media literacy they didn’t learn already. (Please note I am not volunteering to teach in said colleges until some brilliant economist shows me how this is going work without exploiting teachers.)”
A wise choice on your part. I, unfortunately, was not lucky enough to realize this before I got sucked in. I know I’m being exploited as an adjunct, but I find it very hard to leave. While I certainly see my share of students who really should go to trade school and not even a community college, I also think that the majority of them _can_ handle more training in critical thinking and “higher education” but have never been expected to, either by parents, teachers, or themselves. So the come to my remedial writing classes, or freshman comp or lit classes (or, as I occasionally refer to it as, “the 13th grade”), and they are suddenly expected to think more deeply about the world than they had been before. I do take their real world needs and interests into account while holding them to a higher academic standard and the ones who stick around (gotta love that community college retention rate!) are noticeably better at the end of the class than they are at the beginning. And I really like being a part of that, even as I get angry at the lack of appropriate recognition for the work I’m doing.
Community colleges really are a strange hybrid of vocational and liberal arts training. I’ll teach my students that these writing skills will be critical for them if they are ever going to have a job that involves even email, but we also do units on logic and the freshman comp classes have to do research papers. The key is to give different options for the students who may be attending a community college for various reasons. Some are there because they don’t know what to do with their lives and their parents are forcing them to do something. Others are there because they flunked out of a 4-year school. Others are there because they are trying to save money by doing 2-years at the cheap comm.college and then transferring. Finally, we have a huge population of people who are coming back to school after years in the work force because they want more – either professionally or mentally. There needs to be an acknowledgment that all the students need some real world skills, but the academic standards need to be high enough so the schools can meaningfully prepare those students who really do want a higher education and to transfer to a 4-year school. So far, I feel we’ve been able to do that.
I’ve said for years that trade schools should be a more accepted, less stigmatized option for many people who assume they have to go to college to “be someone” – lord, if I had a dime for every time I heard THAT from our students!
This is the problem, though, that because the people who go to comm. college are in more need (whether financial, career, whatever), teachers are more bound by the feeling that being severely underpaid is okay. It also speaks to the screwed-up allocation of resources — if the majority of people need community college, why isn’t more money going into them, govt. or otherwise?
Apropos of that, in MI, there was a tacit agreement between a couple of two-year community colleges and the University of Michigan. The colleges fed into the plan, and let UM feel good about itself for having students that were from ‘nontraditional’ backgrounds who couldn’t have made it in straight out of high school. But when the comm. college was going to expand to being four-year, UM was the first and loudest opposition, claiming that the college just couldn’t provide a ‘quality’ four-year education. Can you say ‘protecting your investment’?
Ah yes, I forgot. I realize that this may make me sound like a lush, but the idea of holding a class in a bar would be aces in my book!
Certainly not, the overall opinion was that this would be a fine idea all around!
Well, yes, but to express great enthusiasm for class-in-bar can be tricky without it being interpreted as a robust enthusiasm for just the bar part
You know…. it’s possible a Critical Mass is in the process of taking shape. I mean think about it! Enough of the Fed Up Crew get to talking amongst themselves on the web, and hey! We might have a rebellion.
Hey, kids! Let’s have a rebellion!
Count me in, you know where I’ll be!
This is more of a request for advice (or rather a commission for a new entry) from WorstProf than a direct response to the vocational school topic.
However, I will first chime in and say that the Obama college-for-everyone plan turns my stomach. When I brought this up to my brother and his wife, both of whom are what I call Ivy League limousine-liberal types, they were deeply offended. Neither of them are enamored of academia — in fact my brother is downright anti-intellectual at times (despite being a sort of public intellectual himself) — but they took my opposition to the Obama dream to be either elitist or just plain heartless. On the contrary, most Americans would be better served by devoting more resources toward high school, not to mention various sorts of 2-year deals. And, I still think that _everyone_ should read philosophy — it’s the oldest and cheapest form of education — but they can do this without all the campus centers, leafy quads, and, let’s be honest, faculty research.
BACK to the commission: I myself have started “retooling” in the midst of a history PhD. Among other things, I’ve chosen a dissertation topic that satisfies my interest in intellectual history while allowing me at the same time to dig a few footholds to ease the inevitable transition out of academia. This way, hopefully, I have my cake (canonical texts, famous debates, great reads, research trips) and eat it too (a job and a sense of belonging in the world around me!). A big part of the dissertation is the intellectual history of marketing and market research. At some point (actually, I know exactly when: it was while reading Bourdieu’s “Distinction,” which had a tremendously liberating effect on me, and I’d recommend it to anyone on this blog who hasn’t read it) I realized that marketing is in many ways the same thing as intellectual/cultural history: I love thinking about who read/listened to/watched what, for what reasons, and how it was received. Why not try to work in marketing at a media company? A good historian, IF he/she can manage to catch up to the contemporary world, could make a terrifyingly good marketer.
Here’s the tie-in back to this thread: You, WorstProf, often talk about “media literacy” as one of the historian’s skills. In one of your comments above, you mentioned how the squares in HR have trouble seeing that you have many of the same skills as someone with a degree in communications and marketing (minus all of the quantitative stuff that they do in marketing nowadays). So, the question I pose to you is, in your experience or perhaps just in your imagination, how do you sell this skill? What other catch phrases have you lit on besides “media literacy”? Many post-academic blogs talk about “transferable skills,” but I’d be interested in hearing how to (or not to) pitch those skills and what sorts of hilarious experiences you and everyone else have had in this regard.
Yeah, that would be part of the book I’m writing…but we’ll see what I can do.
Here is what marketing does: repeat something over and over, until people believe it. Idealists often can’t bring themselves to admit this works (hello, Democrats) but it does. So the only advice I have is to pick your catchphrases (e.g. critical thinking and media literacy) and repeat them over and over and over, throwing in some smart observations. and interesting, relevant looking lectures/blog posts to throw into conversation, and better yet, something concrete to point to (improving class enrollment, increasing blog readership, etc.) — this while you are networking with non-academics, always always always networking so you have an ‘out’.
Re this:
>>hey can do this without all the campus centers, leafy quads, and, let’s be honest, faculty research.
True — but without faculty, they will misinterpret, impose their own cultural values without thinking, and make stupid assumptions, past high school and unto death. Most people simply aren’t qualified to be auto-didacts, however good their intentions. To assume they are is to assume that no, we just don’t need college, which is I guess where we’re headed anyway. Win?
I think the “class in bars” idea is great – truly, not even in a “Ah, delightfully whimsical and iconoclastic, dearWoPro!” way. Anything the demolishes the mythos and gets back to the fundamental truths of education – that it’s human nature to want to learn until our schools teach us to hate it, and that it’s fun to learn things, especially with others learning too – is great; it gets to the essence of our very humanity. It’d be the Fat Albert, “If you’re not careful, you just might learn something” environment that’s so enriching.
I like the Fat Albert comparison, that’s exactly why I think it’s time to switch gears!
“…having them write books or start companies will just lead to a world filled with bad art and reprehensible customer service.”
Oh. mahgawd.
I can’t stop reading this and laughing, laughing, laughing.
Nope. Just tried again.
Glad to help (?).
I just want to reply to “e” above. Having had to consider what other skills or how best to apply my skills as a Classics PhD to non-academic environs I admit to coming up fairly short on a list of specifics (apart from: I can do everything your secretary can do, but with Latin). For good or ill, I’m still in the academic game and so I haven’t really had to revisit this list; however, my sister-in-law does pharmaceutical sales, and she is pretty bad ass at it (#2 in the nation for J&J) so I take what she says about her business fairly seriously. She mentioned to me once, that in general she prefers to hire more humanities/liberal arts types because they are ‘interesting’ and make better sales people (presumably than Business folk, which she seems suspicious of). Especially when her racket deals with educated (MD’s, etc) people it is better to use people who aren’t duds to schmooze/network. Bloom said something about reading making people interesting, but I remain at a loss as to how being ‘interesting’ can be a marketable skill, though in some gray amorphous way apparently it is.
The very fact that someone was persistent enough to get the damned degree, reliable enough to show up teaching, innovative/flexible enough to make up class material isn’t enough? The application of this general competence to regular jobs should be obvious. Only when academics stop hedging and start selling the humanities as relevant will we make any progress. It should go without saying that they are, but guess who won that PR battle?