to STEM or not to STEM

I am awfully glad that it is Friday night.

One of my facebook friends posted this article a couple of days ago, titled “This is Irrefutable Evidence of the Value of a Humanities Education.”  I do not like this article.

I would like to disclaim, right now, about my dislike.  I am obviously a STEM student (that’s science, technology, engineering, mathematics).  I am sure that there are lots of STEM people who look haughtily down their aquiline noses at humanities peons and laugh about how there aren’t any jobs in their selected fields.

I am not one of these people.  Do what you’re suited for: if you hate math, science, engineering, then don’t do them.  It doesn’t make any sense, and I don’t care much one way or the other.  Although I would like a job, so if chemists could file out and to the left… I’m mostly kidding but let’s be real.  The job market in the hard sciences is often not much more promising than the humanities.  Joke’s on us.

I think there’s very real value in many of the humanities fields, and I would never condemn anyone’s choice to not do science.

But this article starts out with a quote that says “you shouldn’t enter college worried about what you will do when you exit.”  And I just think that’s wrong.  I think that if you’re going to make that substantial financial investment, especially if it’s promising to leave you hopelessly buried in student debt, you should have some sort of exit strategy!  You absolutely should worry about what you will do when you exit.  I suppose you do have four years to figure it out, but I’d think it would be high priority.

And then there’s a list of “10 highly successful people… who prove that humanities majors are anything but useless”, and I’m thinking, hey, great!  We’re going to find logical career trajectories for humanities degrees!  This is nice!

The list comprises a politician, four people in the entertainment industry (two talk show hosts, one writer, one screenwriter), three CEOs, an entrepreneur, and the founder of CNN.

In terms of utility of this list, let’s strike Spielberg, Rowling, Conan and Jon Stewart.  They all made it big.  They made it big with raw talent.  Their degrees probably helped them make it big, but let’s be reasonable: “I’m going to go into the entertainment industry” is just not a recipe for widespread success.  How many liberal arts degrees have failed in the same venture?  (I don’t know, but I’m gonna say a lot – I don’t like those odds).

So we’re down to six.  Well, we can disqualify Romney and Blankfein on the basis of their law degrees, both from Harvard.  Romney also has a business degree from Harvard.  Carly Fiorina has an MBA (UM) and a MS in business (MIT), so we’ll strike her.  Jamie Dimon has an MBA from Harvard, so we’ll strike him.  It’s really not fair to laud the so-called useless degree for these successes.  It is fair and also great to talk about how it sets you up beautifully for the graduate degree, but that’s not what’s happening here…!

And now we’re left with the Flickr co-founder (MPhil), who I would argue definitely counts toward the purpose of the list, and Ted Turner who founded CNN and did it without the graduate degree.

I’m actually not sure what the explicit purpose of the list was.  You can cherry-pick 10 incredibly successful people using any metric you want, probably.  I just don’t think that this was a particularly useful exercise in positive thought for struggling humanities majors.  It would be more reasonable to show some career paths / strategies / trajectories for which the humanities degree is particularly useful and how there’s room to climb the corporate ladder.

At the end of the day, though, there are far too many students majoring in subjects without real future plans or career options, and – this is the kicker – racking up enormous debt to do so.  It seems so futile to me.

And I still don’t think there’s anything wrong with the humanities.  I just think that it, as does anything else, requires some planning in order for it to pay out eventually.  And that you learn some critical skills in humanities classes.

The article still seems really vapid.  When people get defensive about not being in STEM, it makes me feel defensive about being in STEM.  Weird phenomenon.

This has been an exquisitely boring and probably offensive post.