One of the articles that recently crossed my desk
was an interactive online presentation [1]
from Georgetown University’s
Centre on Education and the Workforce, highlighting
which college majors are the most (and least) economically valuable. The list
is unsurprising: every last one of the most lucrative college degrees belongs
to a scientific, technical, engineering, or mathematics (or STEM, as we call it
in the “ed biz”) field. On the other hand, the least-lucrative fields overall—with
the one notable exception of early childhood education—belonged to the arts,
the liberal arts, and the humanities. This presentation, along with a couple of
recent article [2]
I’ve been reading about Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame, the social
media-savvy populariser of technical and skilled-trade education, prompted me
to a meditation on the sad fate of the liberal arts.
The popularity
of Mike Rowe [3] is not at all difficult for
me to understand. Encouraging more and more high-school-age youngsters to enter
trades and to acquire practical skills is a worthwhile and laudable goal, and I
have nothing but the most profound respect for it. I’m speaking here as a
former AmeriCorps volunteer who worked with low-income and first-generation students,
many of whom wanted to know which degrees would help them get decent-paying
jobs as soon as they left. Technical schools and community colleges were very
often the (only) reasonably priced options.
 |
| Author: Rob Ketcherside |
Taking a somewhat broader
spiritual view, Rowe is performing a truly valuable service [4] in making the
skilled trades again a competency that has social currency—that
is, giving the youngsters who don’t get into the liberal arts schools of their
choice a decent shot at self-respect and competence in skills, which have become
criminally undervalued in a “cognitive” age ruled by the digitally nomadic
“symbolic analysts” (to use the term coined by Robert Reich and borrowed
subversively [5]
by Christopher Lasch). Rowe, a good populist at heart—and who doesn’t love a
good populist?—is doing yeoman’s work, and he is doing it well: re-establishing
the self-respect and self-awareness of the working classes. He’s trying to
spare working-class families money and humiliation by not having them and their
children chase degrees they aren’t economically equipped to use effectively
while their wealthier and better-connected classmates are able to live on their
parents’ cash as they pursue career-starting unpaid internships, and so on.
He’s trying to help them build respectable conditions for themselves on
their own terms. For this he deserves three very hearty cheers.
Well, if I were
feeling particularly uncharitable and cantankerous, I might give him two and a
half. That’s because Rowe’s work is propped up, in part, on a devaluation of
the four-year liberal arts degree. This is a devaluation for which neither he
nor the political tendency he represents—a political tendency I share, by the
way—is responsible. All the same, it is there. Our age does not trust the
liberal arts degree. It isn’t immediately applicable. It doesn’t come with a
guaranteed cash pay-off at the end. Think of the stereotype of the
English-major barista [6] saddled down
with six-figure student loan debt, and also of the derision this tends to draw.
Many of us are inclined to view the liberal arts degree as impractical [7],
an unwise indulgence of the sons and daughters of privilege, which lands them
in a penury fully deserved on account of their naïveté and lack of
foresight. Mike Rowe’s success is built, partially, on a very real cultural
desire to avoid, not necessarily even the poverty, but the social stigma
that comes with failure: a social stigma measured in the dollars and cents you
could have been earning and saving and accumulating, but are instead using (if
you can get them) to pay off the interest on a debt that might hound you to the
grave. The sad reality: in America there is no crime more unforgivable than
that of being poor.
The blunt truth
is that Rowe is reacting to these social and economic realities in a wholly
level-headed, understandable, and sympathetic way. No, if we are to understand
the devaluation of the liberal arts degree, we have to look for the deeper roots,
and these roots are many layered and overlapping.
This is indeed a major theme in the opus of the great social historian Christopher Lasch. In
his book. The Revolt of the Elites [8], he turns to the conflicting aims, the built-in
contradictions (considered almost in a Marxist fashion), between the myth of
meritocracy on the one hand, and the self-perpetuation of a managerial and
professional élite on the other, whose hallmarks are mobility and
managerialism. The academy has come to serve both. It does this firstly by
extending the promise of social mobility—if you get a degree here, you will
have a limitless future, boundless opportunities! Secondly, by entrenching
professional status and expertise as the primary (if not sole) marker of social
worth, it ensures that children born into families that already have a
professional background have a leg up. Thirdly, the meritocratic norms of the
academy effectively shield the perpetuation of professional class privilege
from serious scrutiny. Advanced degrees and cushy managerial jobs, so the
reasoning goes, go to the people who are smarter, who are more
ambitious, who are harder-working, who have earned said
positions rather than inherited them.
Lasch makes the
point with startling and brutal effectiveness that “social mobility” is a
recent ideal and an ameliorative one, which arose after the Great Depression to
replace the older ideal of American producerism that economic disaster had
depreciated. In the older tradition of American producerism, the concept of the
“producing class” was expansive enough to include (in the words of social
reformer and Unitarian minister William Channing) the “professional,
commercial, manufacturing, mechanical, agricultural orders.” It was an ideal in
which wealth and productive property were not entirely out of the reach of the
poorest of the producing class, yet honest work—even manual work—not yet
beneath the wealthiest. This producerism was also somewhat anti-capitalist [9] insofar as it had
precious little use for usury, speculation, and the manipulation of money, and
sought to discipline all three through collective action and government
regulation. However, as Lasch takes pains to highlight, the ideal also allowed
for a broad distribution of intellectual assets. Even poor workers and
farmers were not excluded from the realm of the fine arts, of music, of
literature, of philosophy. Whether rightly or wrongly, Americans of the
nineteenth century prided themselves on the fact that their poor workers and
farmers were better-educated—in the classical, liberal-arts sense of the word—than
Old Europe’s!
The post-Great
Depression doctrine of social mobility undermined this ideal irrevocably. When
it became clear that work and productivity alone were no guarantee of the
ability to enjoy a sufficient existence, the old ideal that a liberal education
was meant to supplement work gave way to the idea that liberal education
was meant to supplant it. For the first time, a life of manual labour
became something the successful student was expected to escape. Or, as Lasch
put it, “it was only when the hierarchical structure of American society became
unmistakable that opportunity came to be widely associated with the achievement
of superior standing in an increasingly stratified, money-mad, and
class-conscious society.” And the education system inevitably became the
vehicle by which the ordinary worker or farmer could hope to improve his
economic lot in life, or—more likely—the lot of his children.
 |
| Author: Matej Batha |
From here, it’s
not difficult to piece together the trends that followed. When the purpose of
education shifted from the supplementation of labour with learning, to the
escape from labour by learning, learning itself increasingly took on an
‘economic’ character. Knowledge itself became something specialised and
managerial. This trend Lasch ties, with some rhetorical flair, into other broader
social trends: “the concentration of corporate power, the decline of
small-scale production, the separation of production from consumption, the
growth of the welfare state, the professionalization of knowledge, and the
erosion of competence, responsibility and citizenship.” And from the interactive
web feature put out by Georgetown, it’s hard to argue with his conclusions. The
most lucrative degrees all mesh neatly with the specialised demands of
large-scale production and entrenched corporate power: petroleum engineering;
pharmaceutical sciences and administration; metallurgical engineering; mining
engineering; chemical engineering. The least-lucrative are those meant to
facilitate social consciousness and the building of basic spiritual,
intellectual, and emotional competencies in the young: early childhood
education; human services; studio arts; social work; normal education; visual
and performing arts; theology and religious vocations.
It’s difficult to look
at these results—and there’s no reason to deny their factuality—and not come to the
same sobering conclusions Lasch did about the choices we’ve made as a society.
We have decided, first-order, that accumulating wealth, in the crassest and
most materialist sense, is of overriding concern. On another level, we have
decided that any effort spent on cultivating spiritual or æsthetic pursuits is a waste of time and energy,
and we compensate those engaged in such cultivation accordingly—both in terms
of social respect, and in terms of the wealth we have deemed all-important.
Needless to say, though, this is a worrying prospect. When, as Lasch
claims, our élites are indeed in revolt against not only democracy but
the very basis for any kind of high culture, we have run up against a
civilisational crisis. No civilisation has long survived in any meaningful way
that has so devalued its arts, its literature, its pursuits of the great
humanistic questions, or the men and women responsible for inculcating their
appreciation in its young. And as much as I endorse the need for low-income
students of working-class backgrounds to look to technical training and the
skilled trades in the current social and economic climate, I can’t help but
worry that this is a greater indication of the unsustainable direction of our
culture.
—Matthew Franklin Cooper
Matthew F. Cooper is an AmeriCorps alumnus, ESL teacher and policy
analyst currently based in Rhode Island, where he makes up about a third of the
bass section in the choir of St. Mary Antiochian Orthodox Church in Pawtucket.
He has done some policy writing for PlaNet Finance China, as well as for the
Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council; the opinions he rather haphazardly
scribbles elsewhere are very much his own, however. He is a contributing editor
at the Solidarity Hall thinkerspace,
and maintains a blog at The Heavy Anglo-Orthodox,
where he meanders about theology, geopolitics, economics, and heavy metal.
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