It’s way past time colleges cut these basket weaving degrees.
“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples’ money.”
Margaret Thatcher
Are they cutting grievance programs or ‘stuff worth knowing if you want a job’? As soon as any profession or organizations becomes over half female, it loses status. Not saying it’s fair - just that it is.
Mostly I wholeheartedly agree. But music at least requires skill and some mental acuity and discipline. It was among the Ancient Greek arts that were foundational to a good education.
When I think back on those days, very few of us went to school to ensure employment and many valued education just for its own sake.
Now one of the most important statistics for schools are their job placement rates.
All the colleges now compete with each other for the same students and recruiting men to campuses has become particularly difficult.
So many colleges planned based on those baby boomer years and now families aren’t having children any more. My alma mater continues to succeed but it occupies a small educational niche … four year school, no nontraditional students, everyone lives on campus, located in the woods on lakes on monastery grounds. It’s expensive but competitive with other small private schools but the campus experience is unique. And in at 18 and out at 22. No five year students.
1. Administrators. There are a veritable army of them at universities across the country. They have grown in proportion to students at an almost exponential rate over the last 50 years. Many of them are paid well into 6 figures in salary every year. They're also overwhelmingly communists. Cut. Cut. Cut.
2. Cut majors like East African Transgender Theory Studies in Oppression. All those future HR employees and future Cat Ladies will just need to find something else to major in. There are always the old standbys like English they could major in instead. That at least might be marginally useful. The boutique communist majors have no value at all.
They’ll probably cut engineering and hard sciences in favor of LGBT Dance Theory
The number of bizarrely specific majors offered, entirely a factor of marketing by the department and college, is ridiculous. Many represent weirdly specific vocational tracks, such as music therapy for the elderly (I’m just making that up here to fit the example), as opposed to more basic groupings such as music in general.
Also, departments that have made their subjects miserable to study, such as English, are often fracturing into ever smaller departments as the number of students majoring in their subject shrinks.
The feel-good story of the day.
Instant Unemployment Degrees/IUD’s are expensive and basically worthless in today’s world.
Universities have entirely lost their way.
The ideal was to raise up a thinking human being, adaptable to any situation, who could do anything from lead people to write novels, solve human dilemmas or technical challenges.
A few people with dedication would be professors; for the students, the major would be almost an afterthought.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” — Heinlein
Two things happened, not both at once, but very related.
- Industry figured out that it didn’t have to hire an expert and the materials to support him if it could farm out the work to an academic. Efficient for both; the university people do what they do best for company A today and B tomorrow, and the company doesn’t have to incur the overhead.
Problem is that this means money, which isn’t bad in itself but $millions is quite compelling, so grants and the pursuit of grants overtook increasing human knowledge. (IMO back to the patronage system and good bye to independent thought).
- The industrial and technological ages have required a multitude of specialized skills to advance their fields — whether aerospace or chip design, the generalist isn’t going to just jump in and create the next new wave. So while on one hand the research $$$ tells academia to abandon people and deliver product, on the other hand market demand tells academia to produce marketable resources, not rounded human beings.
Between these two the idea of inculcating a human being capable of having moral thought other than that force-fed, the knowledge to build on the foundations of history and literature, and the skills to apply them in the world is gone.
THEN, into that vacuum the left, already strong in academia where they liked getting paid, stepped in. Thus whatever-studies majors and other tripe, who being indoctrinated into communist activism now also run HR departments and DEI departments and artificially create demand (from the same diploma mills) for more activists.
Since those people produce net negative value, it’s collapsing on itself with this result (and, as with company layoffs, first the valuable people who were too busy producing to prioritize CYA above all else).
Frankly as a very experienced professional, having seen “must-have” requirements from applicants which are then stale and useless two years later, the whole system is garbage now.
If companies just want a skill, use an apprentice system as many firms again do, and bake into your financials the cost to keep people skilled — or bake into your financials the massive cost of losing domain knowledge and hiring people anew.
If as a person you rightly see the need to be more than an ant, the resources, without the indoctrination, are now abundantly available without enriching sniveling socialist departments at U of Whatever.
As a library worker (though not a librarian), I see library & information science the new “law school” — a refuge for liberal arts majors who might pursue a dual degree program of library science and a specific subject (i.e. Jewish studies, Black studies). Libraries now are being specialized; “servicing marginalized communities” is the mantra. This hybridization is the only way humanities and social science departments (or anything outside of STEM) can survive.
However, my co-worker, who started library school, complained about its infiltration by leftists, who push Critical Race Theory and other garbage. He is biting the bullet, trying to finish his courses in order to get a higher-paying position. Sadly, as a white conservative male, he will find himself shut out.