The Neoliberal Arts: How College sold its soul to the Market - Polidicks

[Essay] | The Neoliberal Arts, by William Deresiewicz | Harper's.. Old issue of Harper Magazine. I think it'd be good to read this for how le stem face this place is, and talks a lot about the direction college is going in America. It's a disgrace how people here shittalk degrees that aren't "practically applicated" directly to feed into business and markets, especially when you're shamed for pursuing a topic that interests you instead of "being an engineer" or what have you. People think about college all wrong and I feel like I needed to post this even if it changes a few minds to see things in a new light.

What a good fucking article. We see its shadow in the relentless focus on “basic skills” in K–12, as if knowledge were simply an assemblage of methods and facts. In the move to “informational” texts in English classes, as if the purpose of learning to read were to understand a memo. In our various testing regimes, as if all learning could be quantified. In the frenzy of the MOOCs, as if education were nothing more than information transfer. In the tables that rank colleges and majors by average starting salary, as if earning power were the only thing you got from school.

I am pursuing a degree in anthropology and I am particularly interested in medieval history and archaeology; I'm aware that it may not have as much practicaal application as a STEM or business degree, but goddamnit, it's what I want to study, and that's what's important to me

The professor overseeing my internship(that I had to pay for because they made it an independent study) refused to let me use it on helping run and plan veteran charity events because it didn't have enough applicable PR.

I do a degree in Politics and one of the reasons I chose it was to use it against people who disagreed with me, and one of the first things I learnt was that doing that was a terrible argument lmao

That's a side effect of how exhorbitant the cost of attending is. When you spend that much money to go the biggest concern stops being 'what do you want to study' and starts being 'what can you study that'll quite literally pay off this mountain of soul-crushing debt you'll accrue through virtue of attending'. If college in America wasn't designed from the ground up to pull money into college coffers we'd see a lot less of that. But as it stands, if you want a 4yr degree in a good school you're gonna be spending somewhere between 50 and 150 thousand for the privelege, and for the majority of us, that necessitates majoring in a degree that has a matching salary range attached to it.

Studying the humanities, arts or soft sciences is all well and good, but in a country like America my concern would be that I would be saddled with obscene amounts of debt that I would likely never be able to pay off. However, if you live in a country like where I live where tuition is either free or heavily subsidised, that opens up more options. I already have a BMus and shortly I will be starting a degree path in environmental science specialising in water management which will cost me so little as to be insignificant, probably enough that I could repay easily within a single year when on my projected career path. University should be a place where students are free to explore academic paths, I agree. When I was doing by Bachelors of Music I was fully aware that it was incredibly unlikely that I would ever make a living off of it, but it was something I wanted to do and I lived in a country where I could afford to do that. However, a small percentage of people I know studying subjects such as philosophy or gender studies seem convinced that they are going to be raking in tons of money by 'being a philosopher', whatever that is meant to mean, although this is something they can actually afford to study. University should not be a place where you are concerned if your chosen subject is going to make you financially stable, and this is offset in most of Europe by having education either free or heavily subsidized. If I was an American I doubt I would ever have studied music since that is just going to saddle me with far too much debt that I would seriously struggle to pay back. tl;dr people shouldn't be a dick to soft sciences, arts and humanities, but there should be realistic expectations. If you are aware that you are going to have debt to deal with but want to continue studying English Literature or whatever then more power to you. University should be a place of academic freedom and it is a shame that places like the USA make studying some of the most interesting and life-fulfilling subjects hard to justify economically