Given the great comments already posted, this seems somewhat trivial, but I just wanted to note that I listened to your post with a certain amount of incredulous astonishment. Wait, I kept thinking, THAT'S Chuck??? I know it's been over 20 years since I've spoken to you in person, but still your voice just seemed so . . . unfamiliar. And then, to make things "worse," I couldn't really figure out WHY I didn't think it sounded like what I (apparently) thought you should sound like. That is, I have no response to what I suspect would be your immediate query, "Well, what did you think I should sound like?" So bizarre. Still, great post and pass along my congratulations to your daughters.
Congrats to your daughters! That's a big accomplishment.
A couple of sincere questions. I understand the sentiment here: "If necessary, I am prepared to take out second mortgages on my organs to send my little ones to college." But I'm increasingly skeptical of the value proposition that college offers. I'll do everything I can to send my kids to college, too, but I wonder if that's really the best way to improve their lives now? One of my brothers just finished law school in New Orleans. He is working for $25/hr. Maybe he needs to be more aggressive, learn how to negotiate better, but there's a pretty big cadre of lawyers like him who are not unlike the adjunct class. By contrast, his cousins, who never left Montana, are debt free and have good jobs building log homes. One of my cousins, a former Marine, slowly worked his way up from logging and roughnecking to earn certifications as a welding inspector. He now earns north of $300K -- about the same as the president at my former employer.
Money isn't the only measure of success, but the push to send kids to college has always been more about improving their financial prospects. Statistics show that on average college graduates earn more than those who don't finish high school, but those numbers leave out key nuances. For first-gen students like me (and, I think, like you), the degree is just one factor -- you also have to know how to leverage it. If your native language is working class, there is an extra set of invisible barriers to overcome. I'm always annoyed by this on LinkedIn, where people (usually helpfully) try to explain how to translate obscure academic language into what seems like equally obscure industry language. Translating one secret handshake into another. Sometimes that includes changing the name of your job title from "postdoctoral researcher" (or whatever it was) to some industry-friendly term like "project lead." To a kid from a certain background, that looks like sleight of hand -- not the kind of thing you were taught to do when you learned to give a firm handshake and look someone in the eye.
While I'm at it, I'll mention that there's no "standard" anything in college anymore, at least not in the humanities areas that you describe. Those subject areas have been de-standardized already at least a couple of times -- once in the 80s and 90s, and again more recently. Decolonizing the university has played as key a role in undermining the institution as attacks from the far right or corporate takeovers have. There's no longer any guarantee that a college degree equips a young person for responsible citizenship. That was once the best argument for public education and for sending more young people to college. When I think about more young people choosing trades over B.A.s, I worry about reverting back to the 19th century and earlier, when a nuanced grasp of the Western and world traditions was a marker of privilege. But that ship has already sailed quietly. The tuition-strapped institutions are trying to chase industry trends while slashing their arts and humanities offerings. I don't know as much about what goes on at elite schools, but even there I don't think students get much that resembles the well-rounded education that was once valued everywhere. That is because dissertations in the humanities have been growing increasingly obscure. Course offerings, as a result, especially at the higher levels, are more boutique explorations of history and literature than attempts at a broad survey. Do I paint with too broad a brush? Perhaps. I'm still keen on sending my kids to college, but I think there are more options that I'd advise them to rule out.
And this says nothing of the problems that AP courses and their equivalents create for faculty trying to design and assess a developmental curriculum while students replace the introductory offerings with transfer credits and parachute into sophomore or junior-level offerings... As a parent, I understand celebrating achievement and whittling down the cost of tuition, but there is a transactional element to getting college credits "out of the way" in high school that reveals how much higher education has eroded as an institution.
I don't disagree with much of what you say here, at all. I've always seen college credit earned in high school as "cutting college," and we now have kids who earn associate's degrees in high school, which essentially makes an associate's degree for anyone else meaningless (I would argue the associate's had already become so unless is was hyper specific in nature, hence the surprise closure, pretty much overnight, of an entire 12-campus system of two-year schools.)
Where I would disagree is your take on humanities curriculum, which I see as more maybe halfway to what you describe. (I work as a humanities prof, so I am likely biased by what I see at my own institution.) As I return to the classroom this year, I will be teaching surverys and my Intro courses for incarcerated students include much of what I would consider "traditional" in humanities courses. Still, I think your point is well taken--for years I have been railing against a turn away from (at least in my discipline) having any anchor at all in a tradition of thought and instead opting for what is "cool" and trending in recent popular culture (the number of dissertations on zombies is not a small number), which doesn't even scratch the surface what happens when you only judge your current curriculum by the standard of identity. The fight against the far right is very real. One of my exam areas for my PhD was African-American literature, so that is foolishly being swept into counting as "DEI," and thus reading someone like W.E.B. DuBois could in the near future be prohibited. I do not rule out that as a possible reality.
Most importantly, I also hear you on ROI. This is where I am a little bit of a different person. When I went on to graduate school, it was with a mind that such study was my choice and my goal was to go as far as I could in what I loved most in the world; that's it. I never really assumed I would become a professor. (I also got certified to teach K-12 at the same time, figuring that's what I would likely do and be happy with--I taught at that level for four years and loved it), and I am okay with that frame of mind for my daughters, should they share it. What I know about them both is that they want to learn more and know more than they do now, and not in the vague notion of just having an "experience." I've made peace with that, though I will certainly guide them in terms of what generally was useful to me--I pursued my passion but also promised to simultaneously add to that pursuit (somewhere) a clear avenue to employability, and that's what K-12 was then, as the need for teachers was high (I was in Ohio at the time). But we still have a ways to go--we don't know what the scholarship picture will be for them and how much of an expense we're really talking. We're in Wisconsin, where tuition, because of the long-standing tuition freeze--which truly did hurt the majority of the schools--has made it more than affordable. Basically,, you can go four 4 years for less than the price of a lot of new cars. Madison is more expensive than the rest in the state, but that is relative and a great school, and Wisconsin has tuition reciprocity with Minnesota, which expands the horizon of quality quite a bit. So these are definitely things that we're thinking about.
But again, I don't disagree. I'll just say it plainly--the humanities and arts will be, in less time than we think, completely a luxury enjoyed by the elite. Everything at the level of state government(s) points this way, as we've reached a point where if a major does not have the same same as your job (nursing) then it must be useless. At my own institution we have cut two arts programs recently, and I fear this trend will continue.
And I really should have been clearer in this post--I don't really care about test scores or AP. It's really, as you recognize, about the value of a shared base of knowledge. You're right: it's evaporating. I teach a class called "Major Poetry" this fall, and yes, it now weighs in my head: who is this for? Who, other than maybe the people in the room, would see that as having any value at all? I could talk until I am blue in the face about the incredible value of reading, close reading, creativity with language, command of figurative language, control of rhythm in language, etc, etc, etc, has for the student, but is also valuable for any profession that involves writing, marketing, and engagement with rhetoric or image... but it won't matter. Yet, universities churn out Psychology and Business majors like mad and no one ever questions why such a degree is more "relevant."
I'll add to this the recent study that shows that the ROI is lower at schools where the student population is lower income, and things just get worse.
Sorry to babble on here. In short, I agree with pretty much everything you say. Still, I am committed to a life of the mind as being important and I have to live that value. Now, if one of my kids didn't want to go to college, this would be a different situation (without prodding from us, they both have said they want to go). Frankly, while they are both successful in their high school, it's still a largely standardized curriculum dominated by state-level standards and tests. Really, the extra-curriculars (for one of our daughters) has been the true education, as she has learned to read music, play saxophone, marched in the Rose Bowl parade, etc. Really, a higher ed experience for them will, in my view, deliver a type of learning and engagement they have yet to experience.
I mean, I have a PhD and I have never made over 100k a year except when I was in administration, which is essentially when I wasn't a professor. I remember being ready to quit because me being at home would have basically saved us the money we were paying on child care.
I really appreciate your comment here. Again, I feel like we have this uncanny amount of things in common!
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Glad to know that you're still offering some traditional surveys. I did the same, but pressure from our administration to recruit more enrollments in our classes led some of my younger colleagues to retitle their courses with "film" or "monsters." I think the monsters course was actually a Brit Lit survey in disguise. One need only look at the archives of PMLA to see how obscure literary studies has become over time. I stopped reading PMLA long ago, but for a time I was struck by how rarely I recognized the primary texts being examined.
When I first started posting regularly on LinkedIn, early last year, it was a booming market for UX researchers. Tech layoffs have now made that a wasteland. Building curriculum to map onto jobs is incredibly myopic because it makes programs vulnerable to the boom and bust, scarcity and glut cycles in industry. Once I started really studying career pivots for academics, I realized that most of them were fine once they made it through the first gate -- their competence was immediately evident once they were part of a team. And then, with that industry experience, they were off and running. So the Occam's Razor solution would be to invest in internship programs. Keep the liberal arts the way it is -- building well-rounded people and potential citizens -- and just ensure that every graduate has at least one or two internships under their belt before they graduate.
Glad to hear that you have affordable schools in Wisconsin. I think Penn State is a viable option for my kids, but it's much more expensive than it used to be. The first time I started to think about these things seriously was when one of my colleagues in Iowa helped his daughter attend St. Olaf in Minnesota. That school was outside our tuition exchange network, so he effectively paid sticker price for her degree in Classics. I remember thinking that the ROI for that degree, given what it cost him (his wife was also a professor, but their combined income was not more than $150K) and what it might yield, was perhaps not worth it. Especially since it forced their second daughter to attend our college -- not an elite school -- for the free tuition. It was a shocking revelation for me, because I had up to that point thought that there wasn't an upper limit on educational value. But there is, for every family with limited means.
This is well put for sure, and definitely accurate to my experience. Being in an English department, and you know this, the departments often offer themselves as experts in fields in which we have no training--film of course, most Women's/Gender Studies programs branch out of English, Zombies/Monsters/Comics/Movies, etc, all to meet the "fresh" demand you describe. Really, digital humanities was the real opportunity for us, and I pushed hard to grow this but, frankly, almost none of my colleagues in the humanities were interested, even with the potential for real project development and management, collaboration, digital editions, database building, basic coding and tagging, big data methodology applied to humanities relevant archives, and on and on.
And I hear you on the Tech issue. I often ask people, who is AI more likely to replace, someone in a humanities field or a computer programmer or a mathematician? You can literally have an Ai write python scripts for you in seconds. The massive layoffs in tech don't seem to register with people, especially those who say things like "You can go work at Google!" without any sense of what that might actually look like.
I like what you say about interships for sure. When I was still a Dean, I built an internship program with a local newspaper, really designed around what the future of journalism would look like, especially since a "journalist" is now essentially a one person who does it all production unit, and thus you have all of these transferrable skills. I tell people that we live in the agre of content--the age of the critic is dead. So if your have skills, especially in digital mediums/tools/platforms related to things like video, audio, writing for the web, then there is a pretty wide range of opportunity. Of course, that could change as well.
Given the great comments already posted, this seems somewhat trivial, but I just wanted to note that I listened to your post with a certain amount of incredulous astonishment. Wait, I kept thinking, THAT'S Chuck??? I know it's been over 20 years since I've spoken to you in person, but still your voice just seemed so . . . unfamiliar. And then, to make things "worse," I couldn't really figure out WHY I didn't think it sounded like what I (apparently) thought you should sound like. That is, I have no response to what I suspect would be your immediate query, "Well, what did you think I should sound like?" So bizarre. Still, great post and pass along my congratulations to your daughters.
Oh no! Did I sound worse then you remember, like..."He doesn't even have a voice made for radio" bad?
Congrats to your daughters! That's a big accomplishment.
A couple of sincere questions. I understand the sentiment here: "If necessary, I am prepared to take out second mortgages on my organs to send my little ones to college." But I'm increasingly skeptical of the value proposition that college offers. I'll do everything I can to send my kids to college, too, but I wonder if that's really the best way to improve their lives now? One of my brothers just finished law school in New Orleans. He is working for $25/hr. Maybe he needs to be more aggressive, learn how to negotiate better, but there's a pretty big cadre of lawyers like him who are not unlike the adjunct class. By contrast, his cousins, who never left Montana, are debt free and have good jobs building log homes. One of my cousins, a former Marine, slowly worked his way up from logging and roughnecking to earn certifications as a welding inspector. He now earns north of $300K -- about the same as the president at my former employer.
Money isn't the only measure of success, but the push to send kids to college has always been more about improving their financial prospects. Statistics show that on average college graduates earn more than those who don't finish high school, but those numbers leave out key nuances. For first-gen students like me (and, I think, like you), the degree is just one factor -- you also have to know how to leverage it. If your native language is working class, there is an extra set of invisible barriers to overcome. I'm always annoyed by this on LinkedIn, where people (usually helpfully) try to explain how to translate obscure academic language into what seems like equally obscure industry language. Translating one secret handshake into another. Sometimes that includes changing the name of your job title from "postdoctoral researcher" (or whatever it was) to some industry-friendly term like "project lead." To a kid from a certain background, that looks like sleight of hand -- not the kind of thing you were taught to do when you learned to give a firm handshake and look someone in the eye.
While I'm at it, I'll mention that there's no "standard" anything in college anymore, at least not in the humanities areas that you describe. Those subject areas have been de-standardized already at least a couple of times -- once in the 80s and 90s, and again more recently. Decolonizing the university has played as key a role in undermining the institution as attacks from the far right or corporate takeovers have. There's no longer any guarantee that a college degree equips a young person for responsible citizenship. That was once the best argument for public education and for sending more young people to college. When I think about more young people choosing trades over B.A.s, I worry about reverting back to the 19th century and earlier, when a nuanced grasp of the Western and world traditions was a marker of privilege. But that ship has already sailed quietly. The tuition-strapped institutions are trying to chase industry trends while slashing their arts and humanities offerings. I don't know as much about what goes on at elite schools, but even there I don't think students get much that resembles the well-rounded education that was once valued everywhere. That is because dissertations in the humanities have been growing increasingly obscure. Course offerings, as a result, especially at the higher levels, are more boutique explorations of history and literature than attempts at a broad survey. Do I paint with too broad a brush? Perhaps. I'm still keen on sending my kids to college, but I think there are more options that I'd advise them to rule out.
And this says nothing of the problems that AP courses and their equivalents create for faculty trying to design and assess a developmental curriculum while students replace the introductory offerings with transfer credits and parachute into sophomore or junior-level offerings... As a parent, I understand celebrating achievement and whittling down the cost of tuition, but there is a transactional element to getting college credits "out of the way" in high school that reveals how much higher education has eroded as an institution.
I don't disagree with much of what you say here, at all. I've always seen college credit earned in high school as "cutting college," and we now have kids who earn associate's degrees in high school, which essentially makes an associate's degree for anyone else meaningless (I would argue the associate's had already become so unless is was hyper specific in nature, hence the surprise closure, pretty much overnight, of an entire 12-campus system of two-year schools.)
Where I would disagree is your take on humanities curriculum, which I see as more maybe halfway to what you describe. (I work as a humanities prof, so I am likely biased by what I see at my own institution.) As I return to the classroom this year, I will be teaching surverys and my Intro courses for incarcerated students include much of what I would consider "traditional" in humanities courses. Still, I think your point is well taken--for years I have been railing against a turn away from (at least in my discipline) having any anchor at all in a tradition of thought and instead opting for what is "cool" and trending in recent popular culture (the number of dissertations on zombies is not a small number), which doesn't even scratch the surface what happens when you only judge your current curriculum by the standard of identity. The fight against the far right is very real. One of my exam areas for my PhD was African-American literature, so that is foolishly being swept into counting as "DEI," and thus reading someone like W.E.B. DuBois could in the near future be prohibited. I do not rule out that as a possible reality.
Most importantly, I also hear you on ROI. This is where I am a little bit of a different person. When I went on to graduate school, it was with a mind that such study was my choice and my goal was to go as far as I could in what I loved most in the world; that's it. I never really assumed I would become a professor. (I also got certified to teach K-12 at the same time, figuring that's what I would likely do and be happy with--I taught at that level for four years and loved it), and I am okay with that frame of mind for my daughters, should they share it. What I know about them both is that they want to learn more and know more than they do now, and not in the vague notion of just having an "experience." I've made peace with that, though I will certainly guide them in terms of what generally was useful to me--I pursued my passion but also promised to simultaneously add to that pursuit (somewhere) a clear avenue to employability, and that's what K-12 was then, as the need for teachers was high (I was in Ohio at the time). But we still have a ways to go--we don't know what the scholarship picture will be for them and how much of an expense we're really talking. We're in Wisconsin, where tuition, because of the long-standing tuition freeze--which truly did hurt the majority of the schools--has made it more than affordable. Basically,, you can go four 4 years for less than the price of a lot of new cars. Madison is more expensive than the rest in the state, but that is relative and a great school, and Wisconsin has tuition reciprocity with Minnesota, which expands the horizon of quality quite a bit. So these are definitely things that we're thinking about.
But again, I don't disagree. I'll just say it plainly--the humanities and arts will be, in less time than we think, completely a luxury enjoyed by the elite. Everything at the level of state government(s) points this way, as we've reached a point where if a major does not have the same same as your job (nursing) then it must be useless. At my own institution we have cut two arts programs recently, and I fear this trend will continue.
And I really should have been clearer in this post--I don't really care about test scores or AP. It's really, as you recognize, about the value of a shared base of knowledge. You're right: it's evaporating. I teach a class called "Major Poetry" this fall, and yes, it now weighs in my head: who is this for? Who, other than maybe the people in the room, would see that as having any value at all? I could talk until I am blue in the face about the incredible value of reading, close reading, creativity with language, command of figurative language, control of rhythm in language, etc, etc, etc, has for the student, but is also valuable for any profession that involves writing, marketing, and engagement with rhetoric or image... but it won't matter. Yet, universities churn out Psychology and Business majors like mad and no one ever questions why such a degree is more "relevant."
I'll add to this the recent study that shows that the ROI is lower at schools where the student population is lower income, and things just get worse.
Sorry to babble on here. In short, I agree with pretty much everything you say. Still, I am committed to a life of the mind as being important and I have to live that value. Now, if one of my kids didn't want to go to college, this would be a different situation (without prodding from us, they both have said they want to go). Frankly, while they are both successful in their high school, it's still a largely standardized curriculum dominated by state-level standards and tests. Really, the extra-curriculars (for one of our daughters) has been the true education, as she has learned to read music, play saxophone, marched in the Rose Bowl parade, etc. Really, a higher ed experience for them will, in my view, deliver a type of learning and engagement they have yet to experience.
I mean, I have a PhD and I have never made over 100k a year except when I was in administration, which is essentially when I wasn't a professor. I remember being ready to quit because me being at home would have basically saved us the money we were paying on child care.
I really appreciate your comment here. Again, I feel like we have this uncanny amount of things in common!
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Glad to know that you're still offering some traditional surveys. I did the same, but pressure from our administration to recruit more enrollments in our classes led some of my younger colleagues to retitle their courses with "film" or "monsters." I think the monsters course was actually a Brit Lit survey in disguise. One need only look at the archives of PMLA to see how obscure literary studies has become over time. I stopped reading PMLA long ago, but for a time I was struck by how rarely I recognized the primary texts being examined.
When I first started posting regularly on LinkedIn, early last year, it was a booming market for UX researchers. Tech layoffs have now made that a wasteland. Building curriculum to map onto jobs is incredibly myopic because it makes programs vulnerable to the boom and bust, scarcity and glut cycles in industry. Once I started really studying career pivots for academics, I realized that most of them were fine once they made it through the first gate -- their competence was immediately evident once they were part of a team. And then, with that industry experience, they were off and running. So the Occam's Razor solution would be to invest in internship programs. Keep the liberal arts the way it is -- building well-rounded people and potential citizens -- and just ensure that every graduate has at least one or two internships under their belt before they graduate.
Glad to hear that you have affordable schools in Wisconsin. I think Penn State is a viable option for my kids, but it's much more expensive than it used to be. The first time I started to think about these things seriously was when one of my colleagues in Iowa helped his daughter attend St. Olaf in Minnesota. That school was outside our tuition exchange network, so he effectively paid sticker price for her degree in Classics. I remember thinking that the ROI for that degree, given what it cost him (his wife was also a professor, but their combined income was not more than $150K) and what it might yield, was perhaps not worth it. Especially since it forced their second daughter to attend our college -- not an elite school -- for the free tuition. It was a shocking revelation for me, because I had up to that point thought that there wasn't an upper limit on educational value. But there is, for every family with limited means.
This is well put for sure, and definitely accurate to my experience. Being in an English department, and you know this, the departments often offer themselves as experts in fields in which we have no training--film of course, most Women's/Gender Studies programs branch out of English, Zombies/Monsters/Comics/Movies, etc, all to meet the "fresh" demand you describe. Really, digital humanities was the real opportunity for us, and I pushed hard to grow this but, frankly, almost none of my colleagues in the humanities were interested, even with the potential for real project development and management, collaboration, digital editions, database building, basic coding and tagging, big data methodology applied to humanities relevant archives, and on and on.
And I hear you on the Tech issue. I often ask people, who is AI more likely to replace, someone in a humanities field or a computer programmer or a mathematician? You can literally have an Ai write python scripts for you in seconds. The massive layoffs in tech don't seem to register with people, especially those who say things like "You can go work at Google!" without any sense of what that might actually look like.
I like what you say about interships for sure. When I was still a Dean, I built an internship program with a local newspaper, really designed around what the future of journalism would look like, especially since a "journalist" is now essentially a one person who does it all production unit, and thus you have all of these transferrable skills. I tell people that we live in the agre of content--the age of the critic is dead. So if your have skills, especially in digital mediums/tools/platforms related to things like video, audio, writing for the web, then there is a pretty wide range of opportunity. Of course, that could change as well.