Kyso has an interesting post up about the discourse that posits that certain liberal arts majors (like mine—English literature) are “useless”. It started with a thread that I couldn’t get invested in at Offsprung, because it was about whether or not you should pick your major for love or money.* It’s all very romantic, but I went to college with my dad’s advice to just get that damn piece of paper at the end and as quickly (therefore cheaply) as possible, which would incline me to say to pick your major for love, because that’s the only way that coursework will be exciting enough to get you to class every day and get that piece of paper for you.
Kyso’s post about defining terms was interesting. The “can’t get a job with an English degree” has never proven to be true in my lifetime. Sure, you may have to get a job closer to entrance level coming out, and I did, but I got promoted nearly immediately in most workplaces and I wouldn’t have if I didn’t have the degree—and the way of speaking, carrying myself, dressing, and socializing that all indicates that I have one. I would say that what I do now, which I would actually call being a “writer” or a “cultural critic” would be pretty much impossible if I hadn’t been dumped into course after course where our main objective was to read a lot and come up with interesting and thoughtful opinions on the material. I’d like to flatter myself and say that I have some sort of natural talent and would have been a big time blogger without the degree, but there’s exactly no way. Natural talent will only get you so far. You need training and, just as importantly, you need social capital.
I’m the first person in my family, as I’ve mentioned before, to get a college degree. Now, I grew up middle class, because I grew up a beneficiary of the labor struggle and mid-century liberal dominance, which means that my parents—who were at the time of my birth a fire fighter and a bank teller—had health insurance, 40 hour work weeks, middle class salaries, and a government program to help them buy their first home. But it was definitely working class middle class (though my mother did manage to work her way up to be a loan officer, something I don’t think would be possible anymore without a college degree—imagine how many great jobs someone of her intelligence would have had if someone had invested in her!), and I grew up with the drumbeat that going to college was all but mandatory. It didn’t matter for what, just get the degree and try not to get too deeply in debt. My parents knew something that I find is often left out of discussions about college majors, which is that to be a member of the middle class in good standing, you must have a college degree. That’s doubly true of women. There are still middle class-salaried, blue collar, male-dominated jobs out there (though they’re sadly vanishing), but in order for a woman to get one, she has to have some sort of feminist awakening to both think she deserves it and to fight the sexist shit she’ll get for pursuing it. And, to be blunt, a college degree improves a woman’s chances to define her social class in the other way women get to—through marriage. You can have a salary of zero but still be middle or upper middle class if you married a member of the class, but odds of that happening if you don’t have that nifty piece of paper (regardless of the major) are exceedingly low.
What my parents called “the piece of paper”, social scientists call “social capital“. And it’s much more than a piece of paper. In college, you learn to act like a member of the college-educated middle class. You share cultural touchstones with them. It’s often a little unnerving for me because whenever I run with people that are clearly college-educated and come from a background of college-educated people, they accept me as one of them, because I am, after all, one of them. But I’m acutely aware of the fact that if I’d grown up like my mother did, when the idea of spending money educating your girls was seen as a rip-off (she’s a military brat), there is exactly no way I’d find easy acceptance in the middle class. My world would be completely different in ways too numerous to count, from my job history to my dating life. I sure as hell wouldn’t be a major panelist at Yearly Kos or about to publish a book. Which isn’t to say that I think that strict classism dictates who rises to the top of something like the blogosphere, because being educated is more than a piece of paper and I learned skills that I use every day in college. But social capital is a huge part of it—no one does anything alone. Just sticking to myself, I can safely say that I’ve been helped tremendously by a lot of other bloggers (Jesse, especially), an opportunity that probably wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t had the education that puts me in a situation where I can socialize with ease with other educated people.
Which is not a slam on them—being an educated middle class person is obviously a pleasant thing, which is why so many people strive to reach that goal. It’s nice to be around people who share your cultural references and there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with that. Entitlement isn’t inherently bad, it’s when it becomes a privilege that is limited to a select few that it becomes bad. Being a member of good standing in the middle class with a college education is fucking wonderful, and I want to expand that opportunity to everyone, which is one reason I’m so hell-bent on fighting the Republicans, war and various other things aside. At their core, they will always be about resisting the democratic social experiment and disempowering the working class so they can’t do things like send their kids to college.
It’s theoretically possible for a self-educated person to get the cultural capital to fake their way into the educated middle class and obtain the social capital, of course, but that’s not an option for the vast majority of people for various reasons, so while I anticipate that will be an argument raised against the “need” for a college education, I have to note that the objection makes no sense outside of a “Talented Mr. Ripley” pulp novel scenario.
The fact that a college degree is the entrance requirement to the middle class is not exactly controversial. I was listening to Marketplace last week and they had a story about lower income students striving to get that piece of paper, and they extracted this quote for the teaser on the story and for good reason:
Once a first-generation college student gets their degree, the likelihood that everyone in their lineage gets a degree increases exponentially.
That little factoid contains a world of information. First of all, it indicates the income difference for people who get degrees that they can expect college education for their children as a matter of fact. Second of all, it’s a staunch class indicator about entitlements and expectations; if you’re born to the college-educated middle class, doing anything but going to college after high school is breaking the mold and hard to do. I found that to be an interesting feature of both Kyso’s post and the discussion at Offsprung about majors—the discussion assumed that choosing a major is extremely meaningful, which points to an unacknowledged assumption that getting a college degree at all is expected and not really up for debate. That you will end up at the end of it all as a member of the middle class in good standing goes unquestioned if you’re born into it. The only discussion after that is whether you’ll be middle class because you have a job that’s a lot of fun but doesn’t put you in the BMW-buying category or if you have a job that does but might be a rat race job. It’s a good entitlement to have, but it’s important to remember that it is in fact an entitlement, mostly because we’re in situation now where decades of Republican dominance have shrunk the middle class (and therefore reduce the number of people who feel that entitlement) and they give every indication of hoping to shrink it further.
*I also couldn’t get invested because the thread was started by someone that I predicted with 100% accuracy would a) diss my major and b) insist that the sole value of a degree was measured in dollars and cents.
146 Responses to “There’s a reason to frame your degree”
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Hell, if people think an English degree is useless, what are they gonna say about my BA in Music?!
One of my favorite exercises dealing with this issue is to ask my class:
For how many of you was the question, “Where am I going to college?”
For how many of you was the question, “Am I going to college?”
I get completely different responses based on the school I’m teaching at. At the elite schools I’ve been teaching in the last couple years, the answer has been nearly universally the former. For the first generation college students at state schools it’s nearly universally the latter. It serves as a nice conversation starter (particularly when combined with a reading from “Ain’t No Makin’ It.”)
I always used to hear some statistic(I don’t know where it came from or how accurate it is)that something like 80% of college graduates work in occupations that are unrelated to their majors, so if that is true; you might as well study something you like.
MAJeff:
I was part of that former group. Even though I went to a public school, it was in a town that was very much a privileged place. While college was a given, the “where” was questioned. I went to a state school and was mocked for not going to Brown, or Rice, or any of those Ivy League places. Oh the faux tragedy. My parents both had degrees, but also had military backgrounds that made them acknowledge the importance of both hard physical and intellectual work.
Amanda:
My parents also encouraged me toward a “useful” degree, which led to me graduating in journalism and going back to study subject matter that I was actually interested in (not that journalism wasn’t interesting, I just wasn’t particularly good at it–c’mon, who ever heard of a journalist that overuses parenthesis and creates deliberately run on sentences?). My mother actually steered me away from the “feminine” degrees (teaching, nursing, anything remotely nurturing or purely creative) that her mother had directed her towards, probably because she couldn’t stand the idea that my career path should be dictated by what types of bits I had between my legs.
Of course, the “useless” degree I got later was the one I actually make money at today. In my experience, the career path is paved less with what’s actually written on that piece of paper and more by life experience and self-driven learning. Then again, self-driven learning is usually what gets you that piece of paper to begin with, right?
It’s sort of like being a member of the titled nobility, isn’t it? Your family might be flat broke and inbred, but if you had a handle on your name, you’d get the job offers, be invited to join the committee, &c.
At least getting “the paper” is merely difficult for a peasant to get, not impossible.
I think part of the problem is that colleges (even really good ones) do a woefully inadequate job of showing students all they can do with a degree in humanities/arts/more qualitative social sciences. I majored in American studies (functionally equivalent to English), and I had no idea what I could do after graduation other than short-term do-gooding (Peace Corps, Teach for America, or similar, smaller programs) or graduate school. So I worked/lived for a year in a homeless shelter and now I’m in graduate school, and I’m planning on being a professor. But…sometimes I wish I’d known what some of my other options were. My college’s career office was basically useless in this respect, and I had no one else to show me what was out there.
If an english major is useless I wonder how useful my degree in Philosophy and History of mathematics is.
Well, Amanda, you have demonstrated that you’re a good analyst and I suspect you interview pretty well. If you ever get bored with beating up conservatives on the interblags I could think of quite a few ridiculously lucrative opportunities that could use your skills.
The key I tell people is, “You’re not a history major, you’re an historian. You didn’t major in literary criticism, you ARE an analyst. You’re a biologist. You’re a linguist. Tell me, what can a linguist do for a Fortune 500 company that is worth a six-figure salary?” If you come out of school with a literary studies degree and all you can think to do is study literature, then you’re limiting yourself.
As for myself…I was born into that college-educated middle-class family, flunked out of college, got into and later out of the military, and breezed into a consulting job because I was able to convince someone that 3/4 of a bio degree (minor in philosophy) and a service background were worth lots and lots of dollars.
I’m not sure what class this puts me in (nor, suddenly, precisely what defines “class” aside from income) though you raise an interesting point with the “Talented Mr. Ripley” bit. Am I “faking it” when I try to talk to college-educated people about current events, politics, investments, philosophy, books? I’m just a dropout who reads a lot–am I trying to weasel into a group to which I do not belong? I never thought of myself as a social climber.
I was also the first woman in either side of my family to get a college degree- my parents were both the first generation to get high school degrees. But rather than get a “4 year degree”, I attended a 2 year community college and obtained an associate’s in medical technology.
My father (a milkman) and mother (a housewife) knew they couldn’t swing the 2 year overlap of my younger sister and I attending college at the same time. My sister was allowed to attend a 4 year college and get a BA in nursing.
Neither of us particularly enjoyed our careers- but we were told that women, unless they were getting married, had 2 choices- nursing or teaching. Our degrees were simply to get us out of their house and able to support ourselves. Imagine how close we all were at the time, huh?
“College for fun?? What’s that??”
In retrospect, I wish I could have been told about what a college loan was and gone into cartooning- dead serious.
People always diss the English major — and other majors in the arts and humanities — as being ‘too easy’ or something that ‘won’t get you a job.’ But I’m constantly seeing articles about how a liberal arts degree is actually quite desired by many employers — no matter the field. The Chronicle of Higher Education seems to run one of the articles almost annually (usually at the beginning of the academic year).
I’ve also heard — annecdotally of course — that employers really do prefer people with degrees in subjects that 1) they enjoy and 2) challenge them to think critically. This is what a liberal arts degree does for many people. Sure, it’s easy to get by with a ‘C’ average and get that degree in English. To excell in English, however, is hard work. I remember hearing from my friends in college (who all majored in things like business, computer science and engineering) how hard they thought English classes were. And these are smart people who did well in those classes.
Anyway … Amanda, this is an excellent discussion of the cultural capital of the college education. I’m going to keep trying to convince my students that they should at least minor in something they enjoy, like art history, or music, or English, or biology. College is about more than the dollars and cents you’ll get afterwards.
But I have to say that, since I teach at that level and I’ve spent the last 11 (yikes!) years of my life getting degree upon degree.
Great deep thread, out of time, quick-fired thought:
Education, like anything else, has a dual nature; there is the inherent worth of it, and then there is its role as a gatekeeper in society.
In the latter role, the more working-class people can acquire a given level of credential, the less useful that credential is in gaining access to the elite levels of society. In the former, presumably more education enables performance on a higher level, which ought to increase the net wealth of society to be distributed.
Put them together, and it’s entirely possible to have gradual equalization based on uplifting the masses–but it’s also possible to have rising social wealth and rising relative polarization, leaving the working masses objectively standing still or even getting worse off while elites’ effective wealth and power skyrockets on the rising, but unrewarded, productivity, of those better-educated masses.
Guess which of these possibilities I think the real world as we know it more closely resembles.
I was a Comparative Literature major, English Ph.D., and it hasn’t been my experience that English gets called “useless,” though it’s definitely very near the border, and does tend to lead towards the dreaded “what are you going to do with that?” interrogation from relatives and acquaintances. But at least people think they understand what English *is*, which is much to the benefit of English departments worldwide; and there does exist a set of jobs related to writing, which the casual observer can picture the English major doing.
I think people who major in sociology or anthropology or various kinds of interdisciplinary, ethnic, and cultural studies get the worst of the “useless” remarks, because people in general don’t quite know what they *are* as fields, and struggle even more with trying to map the field onto a job. As frou-frou as many people find the idea of an English major, the trade-off is that it definitely confers that cultural/social capital, because it projects a knowledge of Great Art (*shudder*). When you don’t have The Major That Means You’re Set For A Job, and you also don’t have The Major That Means You Appreciate Art, *that’s* when people get really confused, because they can’t understand how it helps you be either prosperous or, on the second-tier of middle-class characteristics, cultured.
Betsy: I had no idea what I could do after graduation other than short-term do-gooding
Yes, absolutely, this is a huge issue, and when I advise students I try to give them at least some sense that there are things you can do as a humanities major other than work in publishing, which for many of them is just about the only kind of job they’re even aware exists as an option.
Petey,
I don’t like to think of what I’m doing as ‘faking it’, so much as operating under deep cover. At long last I finished a BA in public policy, which made me as qualified as the next PoliSigh to attend law school.
Can I help it that, although I never got around to that last step, many people I work with in politics assume a set of credentials must accompany my expertise? I think that’s part of the fun.
However, I also acknowledge that I’m extraordinary. While I will encourage my kid to take a gap year or five, like both her parents did, I won’t expect that she will be able to benefit from the autodictact abilities we brought to it, making us able to attend and finish undergrad while in disguise as middle-class people who got off the conveyor belt. Not accurate but projecting that image allowed each of us to obtain the social capital that would have been out of reach to ‘older’ students otherwise.
PhoenixRising,
Indeed. In my line of work credentials are everything…people spend thousands on training seminars to get them and they always ask me “What certifications do you have?” Well, none. Nor a degree. It’s working out just fine so far.
Anyway…so, you do feel a disconnect from the “college-educated middle class” that Amanda mentioned? I do as well. I don’t understand what “a member of the middle class in good standing” means or why it’s a goal to which I should aspire (except inasmuch as “bad standing” or “lower class” are by implication not as good).
I’m not saying I consider myself some kind of proud individualist, I just don’t grok what Amanda is discussing right now.
As a socilogist, um, yeah. (and former professor of ethnic studies)
I am also the first in my (immediate) family to get a degree. I went to a small state school in Kentucky and had absolutely NO CLUE what I wanted to major in. I didn’t delare until the summer after my sophmore year and decided Sociology was the one for me. I loved it. The analisys & study of why people are the way they are because of the society & culture they live in was hugely interesting to me. I was not an outstanding student, but I graduated and now I can say that I definitely have a better job (& probably more respect from my parent’s friends) because I am a college graduate. That job, of course, is not in the field of Sociology. It’s in the real estate industry. I always tell my nieces & nephews, “go to college, not just for the education, go for the life experience”. It’s at least as important because, as Amanda has noted, you learn a lot about how do deal with people in an intelligent way.
My Lit degree has been a huge help in various jobs in Marketing analysis and Product development, because the skills I had to develop in order to get a Lit degree are useful:
— Reading large quantities of text quickly and pulling out common themes and important ideas. (When we had to study 2000 pages of focus group transcripts and write a report, most of the account managers froze up. To me, it was no different than comprehensive exams.)
— Learning how to evaluate sources based on primacy of information, implicit or explicit bias, coherence of argument, logical fallacies, etc.
— Learning how to find specific information in the freaking library (or on the Internet). Wow, is this ever an under-taught skill! Worse, I know a lot of people who, when faced with a question, don’t even consider the possibility of looking it up: the whole concept is just so foreign to them.
— The use of rhetoric and the concise, coherent expression of ideas. I know this isn’t specifically “Literature based”, but I went to college before the concept of “English composition” was separated from “English literature”, so I include this in the skillset.
Could I have gotten these skills in a different major? Sure, as long as it was pretty much a liberal arts major. I went to a core-curriculum-heavy liberal arts college, and these skills were noticeably weaker (but still present) in the math and science majors than in the liberal arts majors. I suspect that at a “regular” college or at an “Engineering” college, these skills might be pitifully weak or even non-existent in the Math and Science departments.
That suspicion is intensified by the sheer number of engineers I see who have fallen prey to the right-wing noise machine: their “bullshit detectors” seem to be mis-calibrated, and I guess that’s because empirical data doesn’t really try to “trick” you. Narrators often do.
Great thread. My parents both have advanced degrees, and I went to a private college-prep high school on the East Coast, where over 95% of every graduating class (and often 100%) went to college. The idea that I wouldn’t go to college was unthinkable, which sort of confirms MAJeff’s point.
I am currently not using my undergraduate major (Geology/Environmental Science) although that major helped get me my first job (an office job where some scientific knowledge was helpful) and I gradually morphed into the Office Computer Geek, landing me my current job as a computer expert for an Apple reseller.
Ways in which my degree has helped me: I can write clearly. That’s a big deal. Lots of people in the working world cannot (and some of them even have college degrees). There’s definitely a difference between the way the college-educated talk and interact, and the way others do.
*sigh* I have to say I’m pretty depressed after reading this article.
“Natural talent will only get you so far. You need training and, just as importantly, you need social capital.”
As someone who likes to blog on well, everything and anything, I always feel incredibly depressed when educated people rip me up for my comments. It simply is not fair that i lack the skills to represent my views accurately. I didn’t get to go to university and it might turn out that I never will. So for me, I’m doomed to mis-represent myself over and over in blog posts and comments. I can’t help but think that blogging would be much easier had I been able to get some sort of degree or even attend a rudimentary critical thinking class. I constantly feel anger in commenting on blogs like feministing because I lack the skills to articulate my views. To read that I will most definently need training to make anything of myself is very depressing.
Another comment: I chose my major because I found it interesting (rocks are cool! volcanoes are Teh Awesum!) not because I had any interest in pursuing it as a career. I sometimes wonder how my life would have played out if I had, but grad school sounds like a tough slog, so I kind of floated along until I landed in my current position.
The benefits I got from college were also, as others have pointed out, not entirely academic. Socialization was a *huge* benefit for me, as I started college young (didn’t turn 18 until late in my Freshman year) and pretty immature.
Paul Graham was just discussing the value of a college education as well.
His point was that he doesn’t believe it matters where you go to college anymore–who you are and how you take advantage of the experience is more important.
He’s coming at the question from a pretty different place– How well does a founder’s choice of college predict the success of an internet start up, but I think your two pieces make an interesting argument together.
If I had it to do over again, I would still major in English. It’s only as a result of my training that I’ve been able to distill so many personal experiences – both my own and those of the people I interview – into accounts that make for good reading.
Being a writer isn’t terribly glamorous, and the pay sucks, but there’s scarcely another profession that allows its initiates to sample so many different occupations and profit by them all.
Here’re some of my perspectives:
My aunt was (I believe) the first member of my family to get a degree. She got hers in math in 1929 from Transylvania in Lexington. After my father died (who had a 9th grade education), she told my sister and myself that she felt she had received her inheritance from her parents when they paid for her college. Four of her five daughters got degrees and her grandchildren and great-grandchildren have graduated from Ivys and other great schools with advanced degrees.
My brother and I both got our degrees after/while in the service. I had spent a number of years partying as a Sociology major before I joined the USAF where I completed the degree in Comp Sci. But I finally got it. BUt Sociology was the first love and I have used many aspects of the Soc training in my CS work in Quality Assurance.
Bottomline? Amanda is absolutely correct (like that’s something new huh?)
Me: BA in Anthro, MA in English. I wouldn’t have been considered for any of the jobs I’ve held without my BA. It isn’t fair, but it’s how things are nowadays. A BA is today what a high school diploma was fifty years ago. It is the bare minimum that people will accept to allow you to stay in the middle class.
My husband: MFA in Creative Writing. A common question when he started the program was, “What are you going to do with that?” He is now a college instructor, thank you very much.
The piece of paper… and piece of paper… is very very valuable. Why do you think the powers that be are trying to price it out of the reach of the working classes? They can’t risk allowing too much real social mobility.
I’m the second in my family to get a college degree. My grandfather has a PhD in pharmacology, and worked for the NIH as a grant reviewer after a couple decades spent in academia. Then none of his children went to college. 2 of my uncles work in technical fields (computery stuff), 1 is a mechanic for a Benz dealership in Yuppieville, MD, and my mom is a secretary. I grew up in the working poor category, I’d say. We’d have been in trouble without Gramps.
I went for that college degree for money. I did enjoy chemistry, and I still think it’s pretty cool. Now I’m a pharmacist, and I think it’s pretty cool, but I’m looking into epidemiology as a new career (though I’m getting too old for this school shit.) I love languages, though. I’d love to study the history of the German language, but I can’t really see a good paycheck in that.
I wanted to get out of the shitty job, low income, “can we pay the bills?” hell I grew up in. I like science, and I like the arts, but I decided science would help me make more money than the arts would. And judging by the people I know who have BAs and work as administrative assistants or the like, I went the right way.
I find that I’m much happier if I view my job as a way to get the funds for my hobbies (mostly costuming, but I enjoy traveling, too.) Science is my job, but art is my hobby.
In my generation, I, my sister, and 2 cousins went to college. 2 cousins went to trade school, and 1 is still in grade school, but he’s on the college track most likely.
On the other side of the family, I was the first to get a degree. 2 of my cousins on that side went to college, and the other is in trade school.
Typo above. What I meant to say was ‘any piece of paper’ not ‘and piece of paper,’ which makes no sense.
Two comments, first of all, FlipYrWhig is completely right about sociology, anthropology, interdisciplinary, etc majors getting the “useless” remarks. I’m an interdisciplinary Sociology/Psychology major, and not only are people confused when I told them the name of my major and didn’t know what that would lead, my fellow majors and I (small school) had not idea what we could go on to do with it. Well, other than going on to work in social work.
Secondly, though my major was “useless” in that it wasn’t a business or engineering degree, my connections through my school and the experience in analysis I gained through the courses I took led to me gaining a salaried position directly after graduation with a consulting company. And I think that’s an excellent, concrete example of one type of the social capital that can be gained through the college degree. Not only does a college education lead to a skillset, more importantly it leads to meeting and hopefully impressing people in a position to give you a hand up. If you don’t go to college you’re less likely to meet such people, and even less likely to be in a position where you can impress them (not because you’re not impressive, but because you don’t have a shared background and context that allows them to recognize your skills and abilities).
I was ready to re-post what I’d said over at PunkAssBlog, but the tenor of the conversation here is different, so I’ll adjust accordingly.
I’m also a first-generation college graduate, and I was encouraged to remain in a science major by my working-class parents because of the earning potential (which turned out to be not that great anyway). Two years after I graduated, I left the field and subsequently entered graduate school in one of the humanities.
I certainly don’t believe in “useless” degrees, but I do think it’s important to consider balance, especially if one is considering graduate school. Academia likes to portray itself as a place of “purer” intellectual exchange, but that’s bullshit. That attitude often gets you 6-10 years in school to earn a degree that the school won’t help you do much with unless you want to be a member of the club.
A couple of interesting asides:
1. If you’re in, or considering grad school, but want some guidance as to how to do different things other than academia with your degree, check out, “So What Are You Going To Do With That?”: Finding Careers Outside Academia, by Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius. They have some good advice and offer lots of good examples of people who were able to find jobs by broadening their view of just what they were able to do.
2. I wonder if we’ve done too good a job of pushing college on people. I recently read a story in my local newspaper about how some of the trades are having a hard time finding people to fill apprenticeships and such so that certain jobs can be filled later. These are skilled blue-collar jobs that can start at $50,000/yr, which ain’t bad. But they don’t have the social cachet of a desk job at MicroBorg. This is too bad, because they’d be great jobs for smart people who just don’t want to be in college, and with a salary like that, you can find opportunities to get the cultural capital you need to hold your own with the college folk.
Forgot to mention, I have worked with folks who had Music degrees who became programmers. They were among the best as they understand syntax and structure but also were able to understand the effects a particular program could have on people.
The same is true to an extent with other folks who have worked in the tech field but have come from the stereo-typical liberal arts background. These individuals have had a much more empathetic outlook on the ways the technology impacts people and have consequently been much more willing to follow presentation guidelines AND fix seemingly minor defects. The hardcore techy geek might see a defect as just a minor nit where the non-technical user sees a major impact on the ability to use the application.
Wouldn’t it be funny, Mark, if we went to the same “small state school in KY.” I know exactly where you’re coming from re: recommending college for “life experience.” For one, college is where I learned that talking about why black folks must just sit around coming up with nonsensical names for their children is racist. And that gay folks don’t sashay about in feather boas surrounded by invisible clouds of STD germs. I feel a lot less threatened by the world now than I did at 16, I tell you what.
Which is not to say you can’t get out of a state school in KY the same ignorant bastard you were when you came in, but boy does it go a long way towards learning that people all over the country and all over the world don’t do things the same way people do them back home, and that’s a-ok.
I don’t regret my English degree, but if I had it to do over again I wonder if I wouldn’t have been more aggressively practical about what I did with it. I went on to do a graduate degree in Religious Studies, vaguely toying with the idea of a career in academe but mostly out of interest. Afterwards, I ended up having to start at the bottom of the admin ladder - which I could have done without the damn degrees - and claw my way upwards from there. Although I have definitely been able to move up the ladder faster with the degrees than I would have done without - partly because people like to see the piece of paper, partly because of the skills/experience I gained…but also due in large part to experience gained through employment programs that specifically target students, even in the arts.
If I’d done my degree in something like U Waterloo’s Rhetoric & Professional Writing, I could have used their mad co-op opportunities to launch myself straight into fairly lucrative work after undergrad. I could have probably taken advantage of the bridging programs offered by the Canadian public service, too, if I’d arranged my graduate timetable a little differently. I just didn’t make it a priority (talk about privilege :p)
Well, I haven’t found that my BA in Phil. from a fairly-prestigious little New England liberal arts college was worth the money I put into it in terms of getting decent jobs, at all. That piece of sheepskin has opened exactly zero doors for me and gotten me no promotions, and it has worked against me getting into jobs, aka ye old “Overqualified” response.
The things I studied in the course of it have helped a lot with giving me stuff to blog about and with, so it wasn’t a total loss, but in terms of “social capital” and so forth, it’s been a complete wash - what would have helped, based on what I’ve seen of my classmates’ careers, would have been being born into a much richer family, or at least one that had the slightest interest in promoting their childrens’ futures, instead of telling them that all that mattered was good grades and hard work, and obviously we’re all losers because we haven’t succeeded in bootstrapping ourselves out of debt and into the landowning class, just like they…didn’t. (Loads of grandparental help to buy house etc doesn’t count as bootstrapping.)
My grandfather has a PhD in pharmacology, and worked for NIH as a grant reviewer after a couple decades spent in academia. Then none of his children went to college.
There’s something about being in academia that does a lot of damage to your family like. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I find this pattern a lot… lots of people who are successful in academia have children whose problems in academic achievement are more in line with those whose families are comparatively less educated. I’m not saying I have statistical backup for this, only that it’s my anecdotal experience, compared to people who came from families where the parents were medical, financial, or legal professionals, as opposed to academics.
In any case, my experience with those who are the first in their families to go to college is that their families are very risk averse… their parents want them to go to college but steer their children into accounting, education, or medicine, because their is a guarantee of employment and (at least) middle class lifestyle. The risk of ending up underemployed in a pink-collar job or low-level sales positions is minimized.
Personally, I think your success after college with whatever degree you have is highly dependent on your mindset– you either have a goal of being an independent professional, in which case you will be relatively likely to do well, or you figure, “I’ll just get a job that pays my rent,” in which case you run a much higher risk of falling into a dead-end position
On my first day of college, at the freshman orientation, we sat in a circle and had to answer the question, “Why did you decide to go to college.” And I had to answer that I hadn’t decided to go to college - it was never presented to me as a choice. My parents both had doctorates, I was tracked into advanced classes when I was seven, it honestly never occurred to me that I wouldn’t go to college. Nowadays, I realize what a privilege that was.
Incidentally, I majored in chemistry, which is one of the “useful” majors, and I have never used my major in any professional way. I’ve used the computer and math and analytical skills, but not the actual chemistry. And at my last banking job, I worked with a botany major and a Japanese language major. We all made the same amount of money.
Which was more than the people without degrees.
I have you beat, MAJeff: BFA in Sequential art. That’s comic books, folks.
Sure it didn’t get me a job on Spider Man, mostly because that wasn’t why I went to College. I went to learn things, all kinds of things, about life, school, people all that happy sociology shit. But the Piece of Paper, even in some BS degree like comic books helps. If for no other reason than it got me into Grad School so i could get a professional degree that has landed me a solid career as a Librarian, working at an art school with a huge comic book collection. So I am using both degrees, just in unintended ways.
Having the POP gets you through doors. Doesn’t mean you’re on easy street once you walk through that door, just an adjacent boulevard with a lot less traffic.
The stereotype about not being able to get a job with a degree in English goes double for an Art-School degree. I went to film school and have a bachelor’s degree in Fine Art, and it would basically get me nowhere if I were trying to get a job in the film industry.
Thankfully, I’m not trying to do that; all my jobs have been production / coordination work for various non-profits (with a smattering of retail jobs to help pay the bills) — BUT i doubt I would have been able to get most of those jobs without SOME kind of college degree. It’s a quick, easy way to establish with prospective employers that I have a certain set of social / professional / critical-thinking skills, and that I’m responsible and competent (even if i DID got to art school)
My parents didn’t have college degrees, either, but they moved us to a suburb where something live over 95% of the students at least tried to go to college, so yeah, the assumption that this was not optional was always there.
Which was kind of a good thing and kind of not: I wasn’t ready for college when I went, and could have used a year or two or work first. Since that option was unacceptable, I wasted a lot of time and money.
Well, when I was at Stanford, I was repeated told that my English degree meant that I could do anything. I could read, analyze, and communicate. Any job-specific knowledge could be gained on-site, b/c what company really wants a 22 y/o coming in and telling them how to do the job s/he was hired to do?
Of course, when it came down to figuring out what I should do with that degree, I got fuck all for help.
My academic advisor found out my dad was a banker and had a family business and immediately decided that’s what I should do, even though I didn’t want to work for dad.
The career planning and placement office was crap. They basically outsourced the English dept graduates to Oracle. Once they found out I was moving back to Chicago, and therefore unavailable for Oracle, they came up with some computer/technology writing job in Highland Park.
“I’m going to live in Chicago. I won’t have a car. I need a job there, not in a suburb an hour away.”
Well, that just pissed the guy off to no end! Obviously I was just being obstenant! Why on earth would I think I would be able to live in a city of 3 million people and a great public transit system and get a job in that city of 3 million people with a great transit system? The only jobs in Chicago are either that writing gig in Highland Park or an engineering gig at Motorola. No one actually works in Chicago proper…at least according to the resources available to the CPPC!
Dicks. I ended up learning the one real lesson, which is you have to make your own way in the world and not expect the system to take care of you.
Keith, that is EXACTLY what I would have wanted to shoot for!!
Instead, my working class parents (milkman and housewife; neither attended college) told me “that the options as a girl were either nursing or teaching”. Got an Associate’s in med tech; younger sis got the BS in nursing- the parents weren’t going to spring for us both to get a BS, as it would have been a 2 year overlap.
Their goal: get the girls educated and out of their house. It worked. Not one extra class allowed and strict control over finances; hell, my dad even checked the mileage on my car every night to make sure I wasn’t being wasteful or out raising hell. Live on campus? Not a chance in hell- home with TV off and lights out by 8pm!!
College for FUN??? What- in Puritan Northern New England? Not on my father’s dime!! Happiest day of my life was when I told him I had a full-time job and was moving out.
Oh, how I wish someone had told me and my parents that it could be ANY piece of paper! We totally fell for the “find the perfect school/high tuition means high prestige” crap, and while I did learn lots of valuable skills at my tiny northeast liberal arts college, I could have spent $60k less somewhere else and learned very similar skills. (I did get the message that any major would do, though, which is how I ended up with a BS in Archaeology and have had exactly 1 job in 7 years that was even remotely related to the degree.)
On the other hand, my high-school-aged half brothers are growing up in an area heavy on the college-expected mindset but are most likely not college-bound themselves. They’re living in the kind of upper middle class household where they get pretty much everything they want - video games, fancy clothes, etc. - and I’m wondering how they’re going to adjust to life without that kind of disposable income & social clout when they’re grown up and out of the house. There’s always a lot of emphasis on the upward mobility of college degrees in this kind of discussion, but I’ve never seen much written about the flip side.
I recently got a PhD in a field that most people would consider immensely practical, even lucrative. And I love education, which is why I’ve gotten this far. Now that I’m at the end of the possible degree chain, I don’t know what to do with myself. I kinda wish I had studied English, and stopped at the bachelor’s level. My sister did an arts degree and is way ahead of me, career and financial wise.
Neither of my parents is college-educated. I found that when I was an undergrad, I was in a very small minority, but in grad school there seems to be a wider range of backgrounds.
My own degrees have been largely useless to me. Most of the jobs they’ve gotten me have either been very low-paying, dead-end, or just plain awful.
My college years were still my best, though, because they taught me how to meet people, how to learn from people, how to think beyond the high-school-shallow level.
I wish everyone could go to college — I think it’d improve things around the country.
Like Avogadro, I never realized that college was a choice for me, I just assumed I was going. (My parents never knowingly pressured me, either, but I come from a family with a lot of doctors and lawers, and a couple of judges, too.) It was a bad assumption, too. Although I am smart enough to do well in school, it was a real struggle for me, throughout h.s, and college. I went into an elementary education major, but realized pretty quickly that I DID NOT want to teach. After much soul searching, I ended up dropping out after 2 years, and getting a full time job in customer service (phones).
I felt like a total failure, until I finally realized that I got what I really needed from the two years of college I had. I got a taste of everything. My small lib arts college had a fantastic core of “little bit about a lot of subjects” classes. I took a little psychology, a little history, science, literature, contemporary math, philosophy, comparative religion. The core classes were designed to give the “undecided” majors a place to find what they wanted to do. But what it did for me was make me a well-rounded individual.
Keith - that’s a fantastic degree! It’d be hard to come up with anything less clearly perceived as useless - perhaps an MA in Paper Hats?
I used to be much more judgmental and credentialist before I got some real life experience trying to actually get things done as opposed to completing assignments. If I ever start a company I’ll put the Sequential Art major resumes in a special pile for followup - I bet you learn some really odd skills studying comics - never know what might turn out to be useful.
I once read (cannot find) that engineers stay in engineering on average 5 years.
“Twenty-five to 40% of engineering graduates don’t become engineers.”
The uber-practical degree becomes much less practical in that light.
In some ways this discussion goes back a ways. It used to be that all colleges were Liberal Arts–the idea was that a college would teach one how to think and a range of courses would get you there (Greek and Latin, math, english, history, …). The universities in Germany started getting practical and by the early 1900s had many of the leading researchers in all kinds of fields. ‘Tech’ schools then proliferated.
The debate has become urgent lately because a bachelor’s degree has now become a prerequ. for many (most?) of the good paying jobs. Also, the price of going to college has skyrocketed. Together, this means that a lot of people are going to college to get a job and paying a lot to do so. Of course, many of them will expect their degree to get them a good job.
Both my parents went to college (and my father was a prof), so it was assumed that I would. I went because I liked taking classes–I didn’t really choose a major, I fell into math because I was good at it but was also a history and lit minor.
They made me do English..a ‘required’.
What I really wanted was the MD. Screw English, I read good.
[Turned out I was really good at it, minored, liked it,
both parents major college cum laude lawyers types…figures].
A single course –required, again– from the English Department was
the most important single didactic of my life.
It was logic or clear thinking or ad hominem and deductive/inductive
and post hoc ergo propter hoc or
‘argument’/dialectic/discourse or syllogism…all that.
And I was ok with this but really oblivious…
had no idea it would shape my ‘thinking’, like…forever.
The vastly fuc*king most important of any single course taken in college or med school.
Makes it a lot harder for pricks to pull the wool over one’s eyes.
So if that clarity of mind
[in my case, invariably secondarily muddled one way or t’other]
tends to happen in the English Department, well…there.
And good on ya, mate!
Frog queen, don’t be too down. One thing college teaches you and fast is how to teach yourself—especially liberal arts degrees. English has something like 40 hours of homework for 15 hours of class a week. What I learned was that I like working that hard as long as it’s information-gathering. I’m far smarter than I was at 21 when I graduated, because I just put my mind to the task of keep learning. Blogs are a great resource, they really replicate a lot of the best parts of college (arguing, thinking, informing) and with smarter people than your average college kid, to boot.
Same for me. It was just expected. I didn’t realize there *were* any other options after high school. ‘Cept only one parent was a college grad, with a Master’s in Education, in fact.
Ami’s comment was spot on for me too: I don’t regret my political science degree, but I would have been more aggressive in its practicality.
For the money students spend today, they need stronger work-oriented gen eds - like, how can someone graduate with a bachelor’s without knowing MS Office? - and other general knowledge of finance and investing, statistics and foreign languages. And the academic advisor programs many schools offer actually need to be taken seriously. I didn’t know how to use my advisors to my benefit, so I had quite a struggle moving from a bachelor’s degree, with no related job or internship experience, to a job (which has nothing to do with my degree). I didn’t have parents who knew how to help - mother was a career home ec teacher - so I totally screwed myself by not being more proactive in finding out how to make the most of my degree.
I definitely went to college to get an education, but I also went to get prepared for a career. I don’t consider those goals mutually exclusive.
As an aside, I think the white-collar homogeneity in “business or finance degrees preferred” job postings is over-the-top ridiculous. So much in business is learned on the job anyway, they’re really trying to force people into cookie cutter educational programs that mean nothing. Get kids in debt for tens of thousands of dollars and then pay them shitty salaries to keep them tethered. I just feel sorry for master’s degree holders who had to pay their own way through college.
I wish I had gotten the English degree. I opted for a journalism major because I was pressured to be practical, and I settled for an American Studies minor that was mostly American lit. As it worked out, I haven’t worked in a job related to my degree for 17 years.
Which is not to say what I learned hasn’t made a difference. The writing and critical thinking skills I honed in college have made every part of my life better.
As far as jobs and my career (such as it is), the piece of paper hasn’t made much difference. The fact that I take that degree for granted, that I consider it just part and parcel of a “normal” transition to adulthood made the difference. The fact that I assume I can learn whatever I need to know and master whatever skills a particular job requires made the difference. The whole set of assumptions that came from growing up in my mix of middle and upper class environments gave me huge advantages. There’s no denying that.
My lovely story starts with my college-educated dad saying after I had the gall to be born female, “Well, at least I don’t have to pay for college.” I fought tooth and nail to get myself into and through college. Just not natural for girls to want to be educated! Fuck that.
I got myself through with a major in German, and a double minor in business and Chinese. 20 years later I’m an IT consultant and lovin’ it. I believe that just my tenacity in going to college and paying for it myself gave me so much practical experience that I think many people don’t have. School of hard knocks and all that.
Flash forward 20 years and my folks are all over my niece to go to college. Sounds like progress to me!
Pretty stratified sense of class you’ve got there, Amanda, at least is it relates to college degrees.
I don’t know. I get along pretty well with the plumber next door, despite the fact that he works fewer hours than I do and makes 3x my salary. Granted, we don’t talk much about Plato or Chaucer (my English/Greek Classics degree is from U.C. Berkeley). But in plumbing emergencies I’m actually quite grateful that he lacks a degree in accounting. His wife is a college grad, and they seem pretty happy, though you never know I guess.
I’ve dated banquet servers and lawyers and artists, and I just don’t see the division you describe. No one can deny that class mobility among groups has declined dramatically over the last decade. But one of the most satisfying things in my life has been mixing it up with people from different classes and backgrounds whether as friends, lovers or whatever.
I was in engineering in college and currently work as an engineer (though not in the exact field I studied). The “useless majors” snobbery was enormous in school and is still present here in industry whenever discussions of college come up. It was so bad that my classmates would routinely diss even psychology and sociology majors as being the “soft sciences” and therefore not challenging and relatively useless. God help you if you were an English major or anything like that.
The problem is that most engineers who take a few classes in the liberal arts/humanities only do so for their distribution requirements. They tend to take lower-level classes (Sociology 101, for example) and come into the classroom with the view that the content is easy and the course will be a joke. And this then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as they invest only minimal effort in the class. They think that ALL courses in the major must be like the 101 (or whatever course they take).
Even if they get an “A” with minimal effort, they rarely have actually learned from the course–there can be a big difference between the grades you get and the amount of knowledge actually absorbed and comphrehended, imo.
Choosing a major based upon “personal fulfilment” or similar concepts thereof is lovely, but it really is a luxury, one that can only be enjoyed those who are single at the time of college and have a family who is supportive of their college attendance, either financially, emotionally or both. Not only is absolutely nothing wrong with choosing your major based upon your employability and projected income upon graduation, for some people, it is a flat requirement, especially those facing a steep loan repayment schedule after graduation.
A social cachet from attending college is mostly only gained by those who actually lived in the dorm or with college roomies. If it becomes common knowledge that you were, say, a young working mother of two at the time whose “college experience” was limited to solely “attending classes” (imagine that, like that’s the purpose of college or something), you will lose the cachet. You may gain secondary cachet by impressing people with your ability to get a degree in hard engineering while working and raising babies, but frankly, if you did this while majoring in “English” or “Art History,” you will not get the secondary cachet either. If you did not live in the dorm or with college roomies, and did not party during college, you will also lack pretty much all subconscious “cultural touchstones,” as the culture you missed was the one of not-quite-adults who are still basically being cared for by others (their family, whether emotional, financial or both) and have no derivative family of their own to care for at the time.
As far as an English degree goes, I have no doubt that it is helpful to take course after course where one is required to read a lot and then disgorge thoughtful and interesting opinions. However, that’s something that my entire family used to do in their leisure time as a matter of course–there are also many ways to do this for free outside of college just as effectively. However, good luck learning how to define and solve a momentum transfer problem in fluid flow dynamics in the same way. Just a thought?
Lisa, who figures that if anybody reads this post, it will be fairly unpopular (sigh)
my parents were the first in their families to have college degrees, and it was expected of me.
i am ever so grateful. i think college is about learning to think, learning to interact with all kinds of people, learning to write and share ideas, sampling and debating a lot of different ideas. so, my english major wasn’t wasted, nor the classes i took either as requirements or for fun. nor all the other stuff i did during those years — at some point when you least expect it, some experience or piece of information will be very useful.
i had no idea what to do with my english major, and went to law school primarily because i scored well on the LSAT. by accident, i stumbled into a strange area of law, representing poor people in death penatly cases. since literature provides windows on the human condition, my english major has been extremely useful in considering issues related to my clients’ experiences and functioning.
your mileage may vary, but college opened doors i never would have known existed.
Quite easily. I get quite a few papers emailed from students in Works, and I have to ask them to re-send as Word or rich text docs because I can’t open them on my Mac. We’ve got specialized statistics software, so Excel serves no purpose (the only reason I know how to use it is because I had to teach myself on the job while I was temping). And powerpoint? Why bother?
DCC, you say “stratified” as if that word is an inaccurate description. Classes, I do believe, are by definition stratified. I’m not saying that dating non-degreed people is out of the question (I’ve done it), but it’s pretty rare. After graduating college, most major contenders in my life have been similarly degreed.
No, I don’t really believe in the myth of the classless society. That’s a myth that educated people tell themselves to justify pulling up the rope.
Generally, unless your parents can help you out later on down the line, you have to be pretty risk-averse. Doctors, corporate lawyers, and people in finance/consulting make a lot of money. No one else does, unless they somehow manage to start a lucrative business on their own.
If you don’t want to get stuck in some kind of dead-end job path or pink-collar career, you pretty much need to hit the ground running when you graduate college, and that means preparing to go into one of the “practical” professions that guarantees a presence in the middle classes: accounting, education, nursing, engineering, etc.
There are plenty of jobs where you “work your way up” from an entry-level position or internship, but the risks are, in my mind, too high. Why risk getting stuck in a career rut for the simple “chance” that you might make it? At least if your degree is in accounting, you have something to fall back upon.
I had a friend who grew up in a working class immigrant neighborhood where most young people were the first in their families to go to college. She joked, “All the men got degrees in accounting, and all the women got degrees in education.” The community was, understandably, pretty risk averse.
Yeah, Amanda, classes pretty much are stratified, but we’ve also got fucked up ideas about class in the U.S. We don’t know how to talk about it. Is it the Marxian sense of position within the relations of production? Is it income? Is it consumptive lifestyle? All of these get termed “class” and yet which definition gets used has vastly different implications.
I’m supposedly part of the “professional” class as a college teacher. That should put me pretty high up. In terms of income, though, I make shit as an adjunct (an academic temp–highly exploitable labor). Income-wise, I’m way below the median income. Which class am I a part of? Depends on which definition and system of measurement.
I’m sort of with you, Lisa. I lived in dorms & partied, but I was a scholarship/grant/loan student. And as I said in my previous comment, college was for me a ticket out of the pink-collar hell my high-school-grad mom lived in. So I needed to pick a major that would equal a paycheck when I got out.
When I told my mom I was looking into colleges (I was on the nerd track, and my teachers pretty much told me I’d be going to college), she asked, “Why would you want to do that?”
Adjunct faculty is barely a step above indentured servitude. It’s hard to find another job that requires such a high standard of knowledge and skill while paying such a crap salary. I suppose that there are probably places where nursing fits the bill.
The adjunct system as it currently exists is simply abusive. The only reason it functions at all is that there are large numbers of smart, hardworking people who would like to make careers in academia and are willing to be totally screwed in order to have a shot at it.
I’m with you, Lisa. As I commented waaaay above, I saw college as a ticket out of the pink-collar hell my mom lived in.
My mom also asked me why I would want to go to college. Bleh.
(Hoping this doesn’t become a dual-post…)
togolosh…exactly.
My contract makes it explicitly clear that I am only being paid to teach. Whenever a student comes in to ask me to sit on a panel or a committee or do anything else, I turn them down and explain to them in terms of my contract why. I’d be doing more work without any extra pay–in other words, I’d be allowing the university to exploit me even more. They’re getting enough out of me. They want more, they can pay for it.
It simply is not fair that i lack the skills to represent my views
It might not be fair that you didn’t have the opportunity to acquire those skills, but it is the very definition of fairness that people who acquired those skills have them and people who didn’t, don’t. Certainly a university education isn’t the only way one might acquire the liberal arts education necessary to articulate one’s views and make a coherent argument.
To read that I will most definently need training to make anything of myself is very depressing
Why is that depressing? It might be depressing that we missed out on certain opportunities in life, but wasn’t it pretty much told to us that to make something of our lives, we would need some kind of training and some base skillset?
I went to a liberal arts school and got a BA in Physics. There were loads of us in the major because the profs emphasized that you can do anything you want after college with that degree. (Although if I had to do it again, I’d go to a big state school. I was ostracized far more in college than I was in high school because I neither binge drank nor played D&D. At least in a big school there might be a niche for female geeks interested in literature and languages who also happen to have wimpy livers.)
Now, I also have an astronomy PhD, and don’t work in that field either. The key is really focusing on what you like to do and can do well, regardless of subject matter. Whether I’m programming stellar orbits or online banking interfaces, I’m using the same skills.
It’s an interesting bit of minor serendipity that you posted this today. My dentist, who is Korean, was telling me this morning that there’s an ongoing scandal in South Korea these days. Of the universities in SK, only three have much prestige at all (the so-called SKY universities: Seoul National University, Korea University, and Yonsei University), so there’s been a rash of celebrities and politicians who have been discovered to have fabricated their educational background in order to make it seem like they graduated from one of the three when they really didn’t.
And I can definitely grok the middle-class expectation to go to college. I’m not even close to being the first person in my family to get a degree, so there really wasn’t any question that I would, too. I have no idea what I would have done with myself if I hadn’t.
I’m also not currently doing something that has anything whatsoever to do with my bachelor’s and master’s in music, and I work with high school kids who, with a few notable exceptions, have little hope of making it to college at all.
I said your sense of class is stratified, and that’s maybe poor phrasing on my part (sorry). What I meant is that you seem quite confident in defining the essential elements dividing one class from another, a degree in this case.
Class distinctions are far more slippery and the boundries are blurred in my experience. I just don’t know what these “touchstones” are supposed to be. My blue collar family, friends, neighbors, and dates aren’t that different from me in terms of their interests and experience. Are they supposed to be watching NASCAR while I’m at the book club or the opera? You’re right: clearly there can be a stark difference in job opportunities between the degreed and non-degreed (though the trades can be quite lucrative and are immune to outsourcing; you can’t wire a building from India). It was the comments about acceptance, ” the people you run with” and the impact on your dating life I didn’t get.
I don’t live my life (consciously, anyway) based upon some skein of class and cultural signifiers. Of course I’m not a powerblogger or a lawyer in a big name firm or a Madison Ave. broker. All I’m saying is that there’s real sliding scale for the social significance and capital of things like a degree, and it depends largely on the context (professional or otherwise) and more importantly, on how you choose to live your life.
DCC…how are you defining class?
This is an excellent and important point. I’ve never made much money, and most years, my income is decidedly lower class. Yet, I’ve never felt poor. My income is low entirely by choice, and I’m always aware that I have a safety net and untapped resources. I have most of the trappings of a middle class lifestyle, and the ones I don’t have, I don’t care about. If I had to define my “class,” I don’t know what it would be.
MAJeff,
Yeah, as per your comment above, defining class is hard. All I’m quibbling with is the claim that certain class signifiers shared by the degreed vs. the non-degreed necessarily act as some sorting mechanism determining who’s middle class and whom we hang out with, date, etc. Amanda’s point about disparities in employment and what that means for women is undeniably true.
Lisa KS and C. Diane:
I think it is, to use a hackneyed phrase, a question of balance. Certainly it’s a good idea to have an eye towards the future when choosing a course of study, but even the most financially promising degree may not be very useful if one finds that one doesn’t like the material or have an aptitude for it.
While I can accept that one can simulate the kind of learning required for an English degree outside of college more easily than one can do for engineering, the fact of the matter is that we can’t all be engineers, doctors, businesspeople, etc. And there’s nothing wrong with that. There ought to be an avenue for people whose talents and interests lie in the realm of the traditional liberal arts. Because these folks do not or have not learned to solve the kinds of problems you do doesn’t necessarily make their educations superfluous.
Togolosh,
Among the unusual skills you learn with a degree in Sequential Art: being creative on a deadline (Ten fully penciled and inked pages in two weeks? No problem), getting used to the idea that a lot of work with tiny pay off is acceptable (man hours per comic book page: 8 on average; time it takes to read that page: 30 seconds, if you read slowly), being extremely mindful of the details (”There’s just something not right about the third panel on page five… Oh! Spiderman’s wrist is bent in an awkward position and it’s throwing off your shadows!”) plus the finer points of doing what you love regardless of whether or not it’s lucrative. No comic book creator, no matter how successful, thinks they’re going to get rich. and for the ones who are only in it for a lark, you learn to appreciate the finer points of doing work you like just because you like it.
I think the usual arts/liberal arts fields get a bad rap. Just because they aren’t immediately marketable doesn’t mean their aren’t high quality and much needed skills being learned.
I’ll encourage my children to go to college and major in whatever they want so long as they enjoy it and get somethign out of it. Then, I’ll encourage them to get a Masters degree in something practical so they can learn how to apply those skills.
As a general rule, tough, it’s true. For the most part, people stick with people within their own class position, including when it comes to socializing, dating, etc. Your experience may be different, but if it is it’s more likely to be the exception than the rule. Social and cultural capital are highly class-based, and this goes for pretty much each definition of class.
#33: There’s something about being in academia that does a lot of damage to your family
I was a faculty kid, and a lot of my contemporaries didn’t want to have anything to do with academia after graduation. Reasons included: wanting to get into a new environment, wanting to make more money, having seen all the bullshit aspects of the academic life from birth, not wanting to follow parental expectations - in fact, just about every reason one has for not wanting to follow in daddy’s and mommy’s footsteps. But there’s one difference. Kids from other backgrounds may use college as a way to get into a different life, but for faculty kids the college environment is already one’s known life. I think this becomes worse when one lives in an academic town like Amherst, Ithaca or Chapel Hill, because there’s no real adult culture outside of the university there.
Phoebe Fay: It’s what they used to call “genteel poverty.”
What I meant is that you seem quite confident in defining the essential elements dividing one class from another, a degree in this case.
Obviously, the lines are blurry. I pointed out that the labor movement helped create a blue collar middle class, which is quickly disappearing. So I wouldn’t say that I am being as simple as you’re implying. I would say there’s a fairly well-defined professional middle class in the U.S. who is noteworthy from their clothing to their cars to the fact that they drive the microbrewery industry.
That some blue collar workers make as much as they do is great, but it’s relevant to point out that said blue collar workers often then turn around and put their kids through college, which they wouldn’t do if they didn’t know what a lot of middle class professionals ignore, which is there is a middle class and they want their kids to be members in good standing instead of living on the sidelines being a joke for their college-educated middle class friends. (The plumber! Makes as much as me! Can you believe it?)
That there’s bleedthrough is great, but it’s the direct result of the mega-growth of the middle class to encompass blue collar workers and will disappear if the Republicans have their way.
MAJeff,
No doubt people tend to stick to their own class. That’s unfortunate for them. To be clear, these are the sentence I was disputing:
‘What my parents called “the piece of paper”, social scientists call “social capital“. And it’s much more than a piece of paper. In college, you learn to act like a member of the college-educated middle class. You share cultural touchstones with them.’
I don’t know what the touchstones are, and I don’t know what it is “to act like a member of the college-educated middle class.” As with many things, this is likely due to ignorance of some common knowledge on my part. Shit, come to think of it, maybe I’m not even in the middle class and just don’t know it.
Now I wouldn’t pull out my Greek dictionary and head to my plumber neighbor’s house for an afternoon of translating Herodotus. But I wouldn’t do that with an engineer down the street either. My neighbor and I get up and go to work each day, we try work on our cars and bbq once in awhile. So what way am I supposed to act that he isn’t?
Alright Amanda,
Ah, my point about my neighbor is that he makes MORE than I do and works far less. And that’s something to think hard about for a daily grind, paper-pushing “professional” like myself.
I have to say, I don’t think of anyone who performs an honest day’s labor as a joke and can’t imagine associating with someone who does, middle-class or not.
I see your point, though, about college degree as supposed gateway to the middle-class.
DCC, your arguments amount to, “I can’t understand it, thus it must not be true.”
Want an indicator of class? Look around how many books are around the house. Listen to the sort of language/words people use. What kind of priorities to they have for their school-aged children? What sort of experiences to they reminisce about in their pre-married, pre-mortgage youth? Where do they vacation? These are all class/status markers which are only loosely associated with income.
These things are much more obvious to people like Amanda who grew up in one class and ended up, by dint of that piece of paper, in another.
I found out fairly quickly that I had to pick a degree for love. If I don’t like a class, I tend to do really, really crappy in it. So, I’m inchworming towards a degree in Literature and Illustration, hoping no one closes my low-cost loophole on me before I’m all the way through it. And some of the most fascinating stuff I’ve learned has been outside the classroom…being sober in a dorm at 7 a.m. on a Saturday can yield all sorts of nifty life lessons…
I would have to say that I fundamentally disagree with Amanda’s thesis.
Liberal-arts degrees work especially well for people who go to the absolute top range of schools, have extensive social connections (whether familial or otherwise) and are very socially adept. Then they are permitted access to a range of employers most college students can’t actually dream of. But those students could have done anything anyway.
But this isn’t even true of other liberal-arts students even attending those exact same schools. I personally was (and am) very socially inept and lacked any social connections, even though I was at a quite notable school.
Though eventually I did get a fairly spiffy job at a Fortune 500 firm, it took nearly a year and was an extraordinarily stressful and difficult process. Which would have been significantly easier if I had gone to a cheaper, easier and more vocational school. And that liberal-arts degree has continued to hinder me - my academic background continues to be weak in a couple key areas, which has prevented me from getting multiple jobs in the past and present. There are some things I find simply can’t be learned on the job.
Sure, if you’re at an Ivy League and your parents are well-connected, it probably doesn’t matter anyway. But I likely wouldn’t do a liberal-arts degree again, and I would probably encourage my own (future) kids to generally avoid them.
I would have to say that I fundamentally disagree with Amanda’s thesis.
Liberal-arts degrees work especially well for people who go to the absolute top range of schools, have extensive social connections (whether familial or otherwise) and are very socially adept. Then they are permitted access to a range of employers most college students can’t actually dream of. But those students could have done anything anyway.
But this isn’t even true of other liberal-arts students even attending those exact same schools. I personally was (and am) very socially inept and lacked any social connections, even though I was at a quite notable school.
Though eventually I did get a fairly spiffy job at a Fortune 500 firm, it took nearly a year and was an extraordinarily stressful and difficult process. Which would have been significantly easier if I had gone to a cheaper, easier and more vocational school. And that liberal-arts degree has continued to hinder me - my academic background continues to be weak in a couple key areas, which has prevented me from getting multiple jobs in the past and present. There are some things I find simply can’t be learned on the job.
Sure, if you’re at an Ivy League and your parents are well-connected, it probably doesn’t matter anyway. But I likely wouldn’t do a liberal-arts degree again, and I would probably encourage my own (future) kids to generally avoid them.
Linnaeus, I see your point. There aren’t any guarantees. If I had a first love for writing or the arts, I’d have trouble studying science. Luckily, I like science. I discovered a bit late that chemistry research isn’t where I wanted to be, so I headed into pharmacy, which is working out fairly well.
My sister, though, got a B(F?)A in musical theater. She’s an administrative assistant, but she does theater stuff on evenings and weekends.
To read that I will most definently need training to make anything of myself is very depressing.
Bull fucking shit. You’re more articulate than 90% of the people who graduate college judging by your post and the essays I read from my dad’s 400-level history classes.
But what do I know? Shit, according to this thread my chances of really existing are slim to none. I’m solidly middle class yet have no degree nor even a highschool diploma. Plus I’m happilly married to a woman with an MA in English Lit and can discuss philosophy with the welder who lives next door while we bleed the brakes on his Studebaker hotrod.
I guess I’m just faking it all.
The typical defense of liberal-arts subjects is that they build analytical skills. In my personal experience, that doesn’t help most student’s careers (at least, in the business world I’m familiar with) because most jobs are really not analytical in the way that liberal-arts studies develope in students.
Liberal-arts tends to help, in my experience, if you’re thinking about very big-picture items. But that type of thinking is only permitted in the highest levels of the corporation - or for the management consultants. Most people in most firms are severely discouraged from any real thinking on that level - your job is to execute the commands of senior management - with employees providing some level of technical expertise, or with modifying commands on a microscale and tactical level.
Liberal-arts people want to think big picture, when big-picture responsibility is usually confined to a few, highly political, very difficult to get jobs.
DCC, I wasn’t trying to pick on you. My point is the standard-issue “the plumber makes more than me” demonstrates that even people who are skeptical that America has classes understand that America has classes and what they are. Even though you think it’s good that the plumber makes the same as you, you get that plumbers are traditionally in the blue collar class.
One of the problems is that class is complex and there’s a lot of stratas. Someone like me sits pretty comfortably in the lower middle class strata, which means that I do socialize some (though increasingly less so as I get more into political blogging) with non-degreed working class people. There’s minor mobility within the middle class, but getting from working class to rich in a generation is hard to do.
I don’t think it’s “unfortunate” or “fortunate” that people stick to their own rough class. There’s something kind of unappealing about the upper class tendency to slum and treat hanging out with the working classes as if it’s a novelty.
These things are much more obvious to people like Amanda who grew up in one class and ended up, by dint of that piece of paper, in another.
The fact that I drive a grody pick-up truck and clip coupons are considered personal quirks of mine by most people who know me, I think, but there’s an argument to be made for the fact that my broke-ass childhood inclined me to be open-minded to some of the advantages of going cheap. Just one example off the top of my head. The ongoing mockery of my willingness to drink cheap beer is another thing that might be a “personal quirk or West Texas lower middle class habit?” affliction. I unashamedly buy clothes at the thrift store. It’s really hard to separate your own quirks from your upbringing, though. The fact that my mother married up the class ladder when I was a teenager also confuses the issue. But it also clarified a lot of stuff for me, since our stepfather was pretty bent on instructing us on what behaviors would totally sell us out as not belonging when we went to college, particularly if we were dating appropriately (middle class men) in his eyes.
One weird thing, and this was true of a friend of mine who also banked way up the class ladder (from being genuinely food stamps-using poor as a kid) is this like consistent inability to pronounce a lot of big words that you know—a sure sign that someone’s vocabulary came all from reading and not from exposure to others with a big vocabulary.
C. Diane:
I should say that, looking back at my post, I may have come across as a bit defensive and I didn’t mean to. Sorry if I did.
Short form comment:
1) There is a huge amount of word from my quarter for LisaKS’s comment above. As well as some sympathetic hmm hmms for DCC.
2) It goes like this, although I’m sure most people know this: People work with whom they feel comfortable with, along interest and along class lines. Part of that comfort is about protecting their egos. Moreover, people are really irrational about what constitutes protecting their egos. I’m a somewhat large 6′ 250lb black guy with a distinctive face…slightly Asian eyes, defined cheeks and chin. I can run faster than most people, I am stronger than most people, and I am smarter than most people. But the last part is most significant. I wear hearing aids. That makes all the difference in the world for some people. Some people really hate losing to me, even if it’s at something that is entirely irrelevant to the hearing thing. It doesn’t help that I have all the social skills and fashion taste of an amoeba, so I cannot make people at ease.
College degrees are about making people comfortable with the decisions people have already made. It’s self catalyzing, hiring people without a degree but with relevant experience says something to the people that are hiring (and who has degrees). It tends to subconsciously say bad things about the recruiter, or parents, say. As some people know, many people have truly twisted ideas about “fairness”, where a cad feels that someone else in irrelevant circumstances should be less successful because they didn’t make the same decisions the cad made, with the corollary that the Other’s gains should be redistributed to the cad. I was never someone who was easy to give work to, when the work was important. People always felt more comfortable with the idea of giving aid to me. That way, they feel most in control of their feelings (insecurity).
Seriously, be like Keith. Do your own shit. You *could* have the lives like those teens in Better Luck Tomorrow, and always strive to please the system you despise. That’s not a very good way to avoid soul-deadening though. In real life, if you’ve got good social skills, and the right stuff, get a degree in what interests you. There’s no such thing as a profitable job degree anymore, given the kind of debt that is required for a reliably professional education. I went by my own drumbeat, and am pretty happy with my education; even for all that it doesn’t lead to any kind of job prospects. I know more about the world, if not the people in them, than most people as well, and I very much enjoy interacting with the world and my knowledge of it. A business degree would have made me richer, but I don’t think I would have been very happy.–> Sneaking suspicion I would have been happy anyways…
Sarcastro, I think your situation is what we call one of the exceptions that proves the rule. I didn’t say it was impossible to “fake” it into the middle class. I just said it was a path for the few, and the rest of us have to go about it the boring way.
I made a longer comment, but hey, the short one is still in moderation.
?:~)
alex, well, to a degree, what you point out is an example of how a university education is what you make of it. While the most obvious, least-risk-averse use of an elite education for someone from a more working-class or middle-class family is to go into a highly paid profession whose access and success is based almost entirely on grades/merit (eg, medicine or law), some people use their time at an elite school to figure out how to think and act like a management consultant or investment banker, because they want access to the professional and financial rewards… and they figure if they weren’t surrounded by that sort of culture growing up, this would be the time to learn about it. While I and many others would view this sort of thing as something less than “honest work,” compared to other professions, one can argue that an elite university provides an environment in which one can learn how to “break in” to these fields that they wouldn’t otherwise have access to if they went to a less elite university.
Tyro,
Sorry if I’ve expressed myself poorly. Any argument I make from personal experience will of course be anecdotal.
Ok. You give me list of class indicators above. But my question wasn’t about markers associated with income but rather with a baccalaureate degree (as people have noted above, the two have been somewhat decoupled lately). Amanda makes the point that degree-holders by a large margin urge their children to get degrees. No dispute there. What I am questioning (and admittedly found a bit offensive) was the positing of some grand degree-holder’s club whose members are de facto middle-class and know each other by a secret handshake and “the way they act.” I just wanted to know what that behavior is supposed to be.
By the way, thanks for the assumptions about my background. My father worked his way up from ductworker to drafter to project manager in HVAC; no college degree. None for my mother either. Her parents are Mexican immigrants who picked in the fields before finding other jobs. A college degree is respectable in my family, but so is any skilled job working with your hands or military service.
Sarcastro - I think the issues discussed here are rather broad-brush, so your existence as a counterexample isn’t too surprising. I know a lot of people with no college education who are very smart and well informed about the world, but the college degree as ticket to class membership is still there - they are exeptions to the rule. George Dyson springs to mind - no college education, but he’s a popular writer and he almost singlehandedly brought the art of skin-on-frame boatbuilding into the 21st century.
It’s not enough to be smart and well informed from the standpoint of class membership - class exists in spite of the fact that the nominal criteria for membership are met by people outside the group. It’s about dogs sniffing each other’s butts, not rational judgment.
However, good luck learning how to define and solve a momentum transfer problem in fluid flow dynamics in the same way.
You know, it’s true, I’ve had zero success teaching myself how to define or solve momentum transfer problems in fluid flow dynamics. Stupid liberal arts college.
(How many jobs, or lives, require a good knowledge of fluid flow dynamics? Not being snarky; I honestly don’t know. Do you consider it to be a kind of practical knowledge — believe me, I have a shortfall of that — or specialized expertise?)
Actually, there’s a lot of truth in your idea that you can do a lot of humanistic study on your own, outside of educational institutions. I would argue that you benefit a lot from practicing it — let’s call it “critical judgment” — in the context of a classroom with a professor who’s a trained expert. But you can definitely be both self-taught and self-cultured, and the history of art certainly tells us that often academic training is a hindrance.
DCC, my markers weren’t exclusively associated with income, either. And, in fact, I tried to repeatedly make that clear.
I’m actually really curious why you would find such a clear observation so offensive. You know who most clearly articulated how a baccalaurate puts you in a same social class as other holders? Lisa KS. The fact that someone came from a family whose circumstances allowed him to go away to college and receive a degree creates a set of shared experiences, both social and academic, that gives a person a base in the class system from which to work off, because the person’s professional peers and superiors will almost invariably have had those same experiences and background. This isn’t some sort of offensive statement of exclusivity. It just is what it is.
The vast majority of business organizations are Microsoft shops. In your specific experience these may not be necessary skills, but spreadsheet functions, database management and report generation are pretty bread and butter, at least to every professional job I’ve ever heard of. Sure, students *may* not graduate with these skills, but I don’t think that’s a good thing. Networking, Microsoft product training, basic email communications etiquette and grammar… these are all things college students should get experience in before they graduate.
I don’t know many people who go to college and don’t care whether their education gets them a job. Purely from my experience, people are looking for credentials and skills that will give them a foot in the door. It’s disadvantageous to the students to not incorporate basic skills within a larger educational framework, when they’re competing with so many new graduates for low-paying entry level jobs, especially if they end up working in a discipline outside of what they majored in, which is likely.
Lisa KS- I hear ya. But an opposite example would be my S.O.’s sister, who got her master’s in French, writing her thesis on French language acquisition. You know where she lives? Outside St. Louis, Missouri. She has over 150,000 in debt, a poor family that tries to help with the loans, thyroid cancer she’s being treated for - and thus unable to work - and no job prospects whatsoever. And she’s 30. Pitiful. She has now actually decided to go back to school, after the long years of French - oh, and a sojourn in Cork, Ireland to study the Irish flute - to study nursing because she can’t get a job with her current educational background and has no related work history. She had no luxuries, but she chose the stupid route.
“some people use their time at an elite school to figure out how to think and act like a management consultant or investment banker”
In my personal experience, I haven’t known anyone who wasn’t already from at least the upper-middle-class successfully long-term enter those careers. Thinking back - my classmates who did were children of: a Stanford Med School professor, an director of an investment bank, a Yale Med School professor, a lawyer for Kraft, a wealthy high-tech entrepreneur, a very senior commercial banker, some other doctors, etc. People whose parents were more middle-middle-class generally were NOT able to do so. The college experience generally wasn’t enough (even at the very top schools, and I was at one) to break that barrier.
I’m not saying it hasn’t been done, but it’s uncommon, at least in my personal experience EVEN with the degree from a top school.
I’m not sure that made the point I wanted to make. You can be a great singer and never take voice lessons. But the lessons help. You can be a great writer/critic and never take a college class where you have to read literature and write essays. But the practice helps. How much it helps is a matter of opinion and totally subject to raw cost-benefit analysis — i.e., it could well be Not Worth It for many, many people.
Most degreed people I know can’t be middle-class until they’ve finished paying off their exorbitant student loans and working to afford their insanely high east coast rents, which happens sometime around their mid-30s, if they have no kids, are single and are earning well-over 40,000 a year.
phoebe that is one of the biggest indicators of social capital. my parents have been the same way for most of my life. They make very little, and yet live solidly middle class lives without much real fear that they will be impoverished in the future. It is that relative lack of fear, and the assumption that you have resources at your disposal, that is the immense privilege of having social capital.
Oh, Amanda,
“Slumming it”?!? It is unfortunate when people are insular. What is the point of diversity if you make no use of it? Doesn’t anyone meet, talk to, and even become friends with people of various backgrounds anymore? What hell? I’m starting to sound like a touchy-feely Californian, so I’m going to have to leave off this now.
But you know what really hurts my heart. The characterization of a loyal, beloved pick-up as “grody.” I spent the Saturday putting a starter in my 1990 Nissan D21. I have had that truck since college. Man, I love her (tear).
My husband, when interviewing as a stock broker for Merrill Lynch in NYC about 1986, got to the 4th or 5th interview when someone finally noticed that he had majored in Chinese with a minor in Asian economics- not exactly what they expected.
But as the interviewer said, “If you can learn Chinese, you can learn this stuff.”
Even though thread takes on it own life after the post, sometimes in here, I think Amanda Marcotte is pretty different from most of the commentors, personality wise.
I don’t know how true that is, but I have to constant go back and figure out who said what. I realize too often that I’m responding to the tone of the thread rather than the post. Scratch scratch scratch and rewrite over…
DCC, re: “slumming,” the idea isn’t that interacting with people with different backgrounds is bad — far from it. But it starts to get dodgy when it becomes self-congratulatory: “I talked to the plumber, and, my word, he turned out to be surprisingly normal!”
“Choosing a major based upon “personal fulfillment” or similar concepts thereof is lovely, but it really is a luxury, one that can only be enjoyed those who are single at the time of college and have a family who is supportive of their college attendance, either financially, emotionally or both.”
Lisa, I see this all the time in the college courses I teach, and it breaks down within the same major (This is purely anecdotal) but In my biology classes, the intended post-college career path of my students is often determined by their background.
Students of color, first generation to go to college students, students on heavy financial aid, etc. are for the most part all gunning towards medical school or dental school. Often, they do so because their families expect them to do so. Financial success is a priority. They may love the idea of researching a particular bird species in the field, but it is looked at as a frivolous distraction.
Students who just expected to go to college, who had parents go to college are more likely to get excited about and pursue some of the less financial-rewarding areas of biology and ecology, like being a PhD student for years and years, heh. It is, I realize my pursuit of a doctorate has much to do with me being in the latter category.
A good friend of mine in my doctorate program, who is Native American and the first in his family to go to college, said he got some flack from his family for getting a Masters and PhD in biology instead of going to Med School. His family felt like he let them down, since being a PhD doesn’t necessarily make you flush in funds.
Tyro,
I bet you bought a school ring, too. Unless you sit around at work reminiscing about the good old days in library (or around the keg), I don’t know what you mean. Nearly all my co-works are college grads, but I doubt school has come up more than 3 times, and I work at a University!
Maybe you’re a principal in a large firm, and on the executive level that sort of thing is important. The vast majority of us don’t work on that level. I can see your point when it’s law school or graduate school both of which can entail some amount of agony. But I’m not even sure attending a small private school and a large public university provides much common ground anyway.
“one can argue that an elite university provides an environment in which one can learn how to “break in” to these fields that they wouldn’t otherwise have access to if they went to a less elite university.”
But what we’re talking about is the vast bulk of liberal-arts students, who are precisely (by definition) NOT at elite schools. They can’t get jobs as management consultants or investment bankers - those firms try to hire from the best at elite schools.
And many (and perhaps even most) students at elite schools can’t get those jobs either, whether through lack of social connections, unfamiliarity with university environments making it difficult for them to pick easy gut courses or the right fraternity, poor social ability, occasional economic recessions, etc.
All of these students are actually considerably worse off, not better off or neutral, than their classmates with more vocational degrees - and they’re much worse off now than they used to be, before 1980 or so.
Corporations used to have fairly large training programs, only a handful of which remain (I was in one of the last ones myself). Marketing majors used to be considered equivalent to liberal-arts majors - which is also no longer true. The traditional hirers of liberal-arts grads - publishing, advertising, marketing, commercial banking - are either in tailspin economic declines or shifted to hiring vocational majors.
I am a business degree with a minor in sociology, and for some reason people tend to try and crap on sociology degrees.
I tell most that Sociology is basically the study of the big picture.
something in me can’t help but cringe at this idea of a profitable degree. i’ve tried getting jobs without a degree, and i know full well that even entry-level receptionist gigs want you to have BAs, these days — but i see my friends with BAs and more applying for those jobs and, frequently, getting turned down. why spend four years of your life making yourself miserable with a business major when you’ve only got a dead-end $25K/yr office job to look forward to? that’s still $10K more than i made without a degree, of course, but at least i didn’t have all the debt.
no major’s certain to bring you a decent paycheck. if someone’s pushing you towards a guaranteed-sure-thing-moneymaking career track, it’s safe to bet that most of your competition is getting the same advice. odds are you’ll wind up in a crap job anyway, so you may as well take the chance to study something you love.
I have a number of different responses to this post/thread.
First, as someone who does a great deal of hiring, and consults with others seeking to hire technical people, I have found the best candidates and long term employees are those with either liberal-arts or traditional hard science degrees. I have yet to hire a CS major who could keep up with work or the changes in the industry. Overall, I have found that those who pursue liberal-arts degrees are more auto-didactic then those who have professional degrees. This is simply my experience across numerous companies and several hundred hires.
Second, the issue of class is far more fungible in the modern workforce then it was in the past. Most modern workers, outside of the trades, that I know define themselves as white-collar middle-class workers. Even among service employees I know they define themselves as middle-class. Yet, for most the type of work done, even in offices, would generally be considered blue-collar. In many ways, I still consider myself a blue-collar worker — though I manage several departments and serve as an officer, I still spend much of my time fixing potholes on the information superhighway.
In America definitions of class have become cultural markers more then descriptions of economic status or work-type. People who earn 150K+/yr often define themselves as middle class, as much as those who earn $35K/yr. I have often thought that definitions of class have really become an extension of political ideology; rather than any measure of work or economy.
Even though thread takes on it own life after the post, sometimes in here, I think Amanda Marcotte is pretty different from most of the commentors, personality wise.
Damn - you’ve figured out the secret. There’s only me and Amanda posting here; Amanda fakes all the authors doing the original posts and I supply all the comments.
MA Jeff, Mr Nice Guy, LiztheFair - all my alter egos, I’m afraid.
Keith (#35) had a degree in sequential art, but it didn’t get him a job doing Spider-Man.
I got a degree in Medieval German Literature that ended me up at Marvel Comics.
No, the degree didn’t get my foot in the door at Marvel, but what I learned did.
Seriously. Most conventional studies of fiction haven’t got a clue of how to talk about a continued story. Studying Wolfram von Eschenbach ans the Nibelungenlied do.
Shortly before gettting my BA, I got a job offer from a guy based on how I talked at a conference. He said this: ‘I don’t want people who understand my business. I understand my business. I want people who know things I don’t, and I can teach them my business.”
That kind of businessman may be extinct, but I don’t think so.
DCC wrote:
To which Amanda responded:
If we were talking about race rather than educational “class,” you’d be appalled by admitting to this self-segregation.
DCC brings up the very important point that somehow seems to be taken for granted: all of those blue collar people out there perform functions in our society which are both essential to society and deserving of respect.
Not everybody is college material, but, then again, not every career needs college. The houses or apartments in which everybody here lives were built, primarily, by people who were never graduated from college, and not so infrequently by men who could barely, if at all, read and write.
We all honor doctors and lawyers, granting them both gobs of money and high social status, but if all of the doctors and all of the lawyers and all of the garbagemen went on strike, for the vast majority of people it would be the garbagemen we missed first.
Though no one said it here, it seems to me that there is a slight looking-down-of-the-nose at the men who drive trucks, at the women who work in Dunkin’Donuts and convenience stores. at the people who stock the shelves at the grocery store or who pick up the garbage.
I know (knew, really) two brothers, the sons of a plumber. One went to college and law school, and wound up a highly respected district attorney, while the other never finished college, and took over the plumbing business. He once told me that he made the money he did because he was willing to stick his hands into other people’s shit.
What we should honor is work, not a piece of paper that says you are edumacated.
My BA from the University of Kentucky (Class of 1977) is hanging on the wall, within arm’s reach. But my hands and arms also worked a shovel today, cleaning under the tail pulley of a conveyor belt at the concrete plant I run. It was a job that needed to be done, and it wasn’t beneath my dignity to do it, just as it isn’t beneath the dignity of the yard man or drivers to pick up a shovel as required.
I’m more educated than the other men at the plant, and I make more money — for 22 years of technical experience rather than my degree — but I’m no better than any of them. I honor and respect the guys who come to work, every day, when it’s 95º in July or 5º in January.
Possibly it’s because I live in a small town, and the opportunities to have separate housing areas for the various classes don’t exist here. My neighbor across the street is a steel fabricator; his wife works at the bank. To my left is an independent website consultant (for major, major firms), who can work from home; his wife runs a spa in the tourist trap section of town. To my right are a real estate agent and a couple of retired people, and then the family that runs a small diner. Like DCC said, I’m not going to be able to discuss Plato with the fabricator across the street, but we were able to talk about the wood he used when he rebuilt his front porch a few years ago — since I’m doing mine next weekend!
It is unfortunate when people are insular. What is the point of diversity if you make no use of it? Doesn’t anyone meet, talk to, and even become friends with people of various backgrounds anymore? What hell?
My only point is that it’s understandable that people make friends with people they have stuff in common with. It’s not wrong and if you seek out friends as if you were collecting novelty items (I have a black friend, a broke friend, a construction worker friend, etc.) then you’re not doing anyone favors. Make friends according to what makes you genuinely happy and everyone will be the better for it.
I’ll add that while you may think cross-class marriages are no big deal, that might not be true to the couple. I came from a similar background to my ex and got a college degree and he didn’t, so even though we had a lot in common, the fact that I was more educated than he was created a constant source of strain.
What I am questioning (and admittedly found a bit offensive) was the positing of some grand degree-holder’s club whose members are de facto middle-class and know each other by a secret handshake and “the way they act.”
I don’t think anyone made a 100% all-the-time assertion. Consider it 90% true if it makes you feel better. Yes, some people (less all the time) make it into the middle class without a college degree. Yes, some middle class professionals have a spattering of non-college-degreed friends. Yes, people marry outside of their class.
Most of the time most people who want to be in the middle class, especially women, have to get credentialed. If you took a sample of people with standard middle class careers, from managerial jobs to computer programmers to writers to most anything with a white collar and a middle class paycheck, you’re talking someone with a college degree. Sure, not all. Just most. Hit up a crowd of young professionals at happy hour and you’re probably going to find 85-95% of them have college degrees.
If we were talking about race rather than educational “class,” you’d be appalled by admitting to this self-segregation.
Your intellectual failure in this thread, Dana, is that you are taking my descriptive words and assuming they are prescriptive. They’re not. I’m just observing that people are human and policy should reflect that. No one is going to pretend you’re middle class if you haven’t cleared the hurdles, so what we do is get more people into the race.
Amanda wrote:
And if I said what I had in common with most of my friends is my caucasian skin, what would you call me? Is there some other commonality of interest about which you wouldn’t have something negative to say about such self-segregation?
I guess that this is an urban thing, because if I went to Crocodile Lyle’s, the bar down the street, I’d find people from all sorts of professions around here. Of course, in this town there aren’t that many bars from which to choose.
Amanda wrote:
It’s rather rare to find you so charitablty descriptive about something of which you disapprove — especially when you have noted that you engage in this self-segregation yourself, for the most part.
It’s highly uunlikely that we’ll ever get everybody into the middle class, not only because some people simply aren’t as productive as others (to justify the wages), but because we have created a culture in which that piece of paper has a social value above the respect for work that people do.
Yeah, I’ve got my degree; it reflects something that I accomplished thirty years ago. What does that say about me now? Is whatever respect I have among my neighbors and friends and co-workers a result of a thirty-year old degree, or what I do with my life today?
Like Av0gadro, I was shepherded into the gifted student program at a young age. As I’m the 3rd generation in my family to obtain a graduate degree, college is just what we do. Incidentally, I’m married to a “talented Mr. Ripley”. He’s a professor’s brat but doesn’t have a degree. That hasn’t stopped him from fixing equipment and doing research for professors in my department, however.
Wow was this a hard post for me to read. As a twenty-something who ought to have graduated by now, but couldn’t due to horrific anxiety attacks, I feel the pangs of both worlds.* I’m now employed as a pink-collar worker alongside professionals and I can definitely see the unspoken classism at work in interactions everyday. Social capital indeed. I try to count down the days when I can pay off enough loans by trying to see my situation in the light that a: it’s something for the resume and b. it invaluable life experience that someone who finished as quickly as possible might not have. But it sure doesn’t help that old feeling of dropout anomie. Also if I ever do go back, it’ll be for a BS in Interdisciplinary Studies. (How’s that for a blank stare.)
*It’s also interesting to see how the rate of even finishing college compares with the increasing population of students with mood disorders with the general population. When I finally admitted that I needed help, the checklist the student health service provided was a surefire way to figure out how to fail miserably at school.
I think it also might help to drag out that fusty old term “anomie” here.
“She studied sculpture at St. Martin’s College…”
In case I wasn’t clear, it would seem to me that there is a subset of the former student population who by “slumming” might be better served using the term anomie. I know it certainly is the case for me, this ex-sociology (add in ex-english) major working in a pink collar job.
It’s not that I can’t relate to my coworkers, but I certainly can’t relate to them as well as I want to. Even amongst the college educated professionals, my frame of reference are so alien to their’s that it’s not even funny.
I wish I could say it’s generational, and a good deal of it might be, but I really don’t think it can explain everything. The whole concept of “slumming” and the “McJob” (which I picked up from a hipster handbook, take that as you well) might mean that we’re on a trend here. This calls for a good old fashioned study
So Law School over Grad School for a Poli Sci Major then
Amanda sez:
I don’t think that’s the way it works. People mostly affirmatively define themselves by what they are not. They are not someone else; they don’t have the same look, or sexual equipment, or taste in pop music.
Allow me to appeal to your “Inner Music Snob”. If you liked only what you liked, and nobody else, say an album of “Amanda Marcotte sings in the Shower!”. How would you talk to anyone else? If this taste was important to the world in some way, how would you demonstrate the superiority of your musical taste to other people, so as to get whatever you crave, approval, cash, company…? If there were many other people doing the same thing, how do you define your taste? Is it easier to say (in such a fashion that your audience understands) all the things that your tastes represents, or all the things that your taste doesn’t represent? There can be an infinity of words to the affirmative, but much fewer words to the negative, because you and your audience only share a part of each other’s collective understanding, as per a Venn Diagram.
What if somebody understood that? And they sought to have the fewest reasons to reject differences? Dress like Amanda, Talk like Amanda, and even try to steal Amanda’s Charming Boyfriend? You would try to change how you perceive yourself and how the world perceives you to preserve your sense of identity and ego, right? At least change how you interact with your boyfriend to make sure he stays your boyfriend?
Let’s move back to college education. People often define themselves as belonging to the right population, or at least a population suited to them. Successful folks, right? Nobody likes to be a loser, right? College degree is an indicator of success. However, there are many indicators of success, including things that people cannot emulate, like the right kind of hair, body, or friends. What if a whole bunch of people started getting degrees, but without all the other signs of success, like superbright smiles? Well then, the value of college degrees is going to go down as a proxy for sumptuary laws, right? Sumptuary laws always have been stupid, but people like them because it provides a sense of security for their ego’s feelings of superiority (or identity). Therefore, substitutes are prevalent. When college gets to be the equivalent to the Yogi Berra quote “Nobody goes there anymores, it’s too crowded”, then college will be dropped from the list of things that makes one seen as successful, or turned into a deeply basic prerequisite…
This was a very long way of saying that the last sentence of the quote is, at a minimum, deeply impractical.
Another English major here. I now work in software development in the publishing industry. After college I got a low-wage job acquiring documents for a reference publication, and worked my way up to assistant managing editor. Then I got recruited for the software side (data analysis, and eventually a bit of development too). I found that my education prepared me with the ability to recognize and track patterns in data, spot errors and anomalies, that sort of thing. My writing background was priceless when it came to writing analysis-level specifications–it’s not easy, even for an experienced expository writer, to clearly explain to someone else–me, who didn’t originally speak fluent computer, explaining to someone who often wasn’t a native English speaker–what needs to be done with this or that chunk of data.
As for the class thing–a degree is now the entree to middle class jobs. Which is more or less a prerequisite to the middle class. It didn’t used to be that way. My grandfather, who never finished high school, was a UAW factory worker and part-time chef and my grandmother a secretary and sometime seamstress–and yet they were able to live a middle-class lifestyle, put 2 daughters through college and graduate school, and retire in relative wealth. I don’t think without college degree that kind of lifestyle is remotely accessible anymore. Now, they did this with a 2-earner family in the 1950s which was stereotypically the era of the middle-class at-home wife and mother, so my grandmother’s working outside the home may have made a great deal of difference in their prosperity. (My grandmother was a first-generation immigrant, and her family must have endured horrible poverty during the Depression because they had to send her brother to live in an orphanage. I suspect this may have spurred her to work even after marriage and thus moved her and my grandfather into the middle class).
Er, I think we’re missing the point with too much discussion of side issues. The heart of Amanda’s essay is social capital. Where it goes wrong, I would argue, is in essentially equating educational capital with social capital.
What Amanda’s account ignores or elides is that she is so successful partially because of her own talent and partially because of her education, but a huge factor was that she successfully exploited a technological gap: the initial era of blogging.
The test of this is to hypothesize where Amanda would be if she decided to tackle writing in a more traditional fashion. Most likely, she would be graduating from a graduate journalism or writing program right now and struggling fairly hard to get any sort of reasonable job. That’s not a comment on Amanda, but a comment on the reality of that marketplace.
I’m sure that Amanda would have been successful, but only after years or decades of struggle (which, of course, can derail or embitter or defeat anyone).
Meanwhile, again in our hypothesis of the traditional publishing or writing world, Matthew Yglesias - having the same BA degree from a different school - would still get his first job out of college at The New Republic, The Atlantic or some similar venue. That’s what well-connected, wealthy graduates of Harvard can do and Amanda can’t. It’s only because Amanda entered into the then new - and thus an unclarified or incoherent space - space of blogging that she quickly became as heralded as Yglesias.
IE, both Yglesias and Amanda entered a space where social capital was far less important. There were very few institutions within blogging at that time that could give Yglesias credibility versus Amanda.
The important thing to recognize, though, is that even if Yglesias completely failed as a blogger, he would have lost very little - he would merely appeal to his father’s connections and then relatively easily obtain the same prestigious journalism, etc job he could have gotten earlier.
Amanda, however, would have been in an entirely different and much worse position if her blogging had failed. Most likely, she would be applying to graduate schools with a gap in her record labeled “blogger”, which is even today not really regarded a profession or an art.
This fable illustrates the difference between social capital and educational capital.
Wow. Sure, I know in a business environment, I was a nobody and would always be a nobody because I didn’t have a degree. I even got treated like dirt by people who asked me to proofread their letters or do their homework for them because they knew I was smarter than them. I know dropping out of college will always effect what jobs I can apply for.
But I thought– and I think this is the same thing bothering folks like Sarcasto and DCC– I would never feel like my political peers would look down on me for lack of “the paper”. I learned more about most things after dropping out because I had time to read Stephen Jay Gould, research references I kept hearing in culture but had never had covered in school, immerse myself in current events, pick up new skills, etc. And I know people with college degrees who act trashy– shallow, consumerism-obsessed, and unclear on boundaries between private and public behavior.
While I understand the purpose of the post was to talk about what IS– that for most people a degree confers social status– isn’t there also usually a point made on Pandagon, either directly or implied, about what SHOULD BE? Republican sex-obsessed politicos turn out to be hypocrites: they should come out of the closet and start behaving with respect to their own and others’ sexuality by sticking to consensual behavior. Women aren’t paid as much as men for the same work: they should be judged by their ability, not their gender.
So why wasn’t there a “should be” of judging people by personality, expressiveness, and ability implied in this piece? It did come across as accepting the idea that the non-degreed just aren’t that bright.
So why wasn’t there a “should be” of judging people by personality, expressiveness, and ability implied in this piece? It did come across as accepting the idea that the non-degreed just aren’t that bright.
Not to mention the tendency to talk over our heads, which has at a point or two in this thread seemed apparent. It’s not so much that the conversation has been directed away from points that have been made by the folks who don’t have degrees, as that many of those points seem to have received answers which could most accurately be described as facile and dismissive.
For example, the point that these class stratifications are not at all as rigid in all times and at all places as they happen to be where Ms. Marcotte is coming from. That’s been raised several times, in voices much more polite than Sarcastro’s — not, mind, that I’m getting at Sarcastro; quite the contrary, he strikes me as having been more honest and direct than most of the rest of this thread — and, every time, it’s received an answer on either the theme of ‘That may be so, but it’s not really what we’re talking about’ or of ‘I’ve never seen that so either it’s not true or I don’t care about it’.
Now, if that’s not what the conversation is about, then so be it — but, from the original post and the drift of the thread, it certainly sounds like the conversation ought to take that into account. If these generalizations about who is likely to socialize with whom and in what way, and who is likely to end up sleeping with whom and for what reason, don’t hold true in conditions as general as those which are claimed for them, I’d tend to think that kinda matters, at least if the conversators would like to retain (or at least to claim) credibility as people who are Seriously Considering the Situation, rather than people who are enjoying an opportunity to congratulate themselves on their inheritance and/or amassment of social or educational capital.
Ms. Vimes suggests that, in addition to the ‘here is how it is’, there should have been an ‘and here is how we think it should be’ in the original post, or at least somewhere in the comments. I’m not sure what I’d want the ’should be’ to be, or if I even want there to be one. I do think, though, that in any conversation of this sort carried on primarily by a batch of folks with sheepskins, it should be a lot easier to tell whether the atmosphere of unconscious entitlement comes from one’s own imagination or from the thread one is reading.
Of course, hell, I don’t know. I was raised half middle-class by one divorcee parent and halfway honest by the other, and as far as I can tell I’ve landed right down the middle with a slight lean away from the bourgeois; if I’d stayed in college, instead of dropping out freshman year, I’d probably have landed in the same spot but just leaning the other way. I’m not sure what that does for my own credibility, but it probably means I’m full of shit no matter which side I argue, so I’ll leave off with another exhortation to, y’know, try harder not to sound so damn patronizing of people who don’t have degrees, because it eventually does get tiresome.
I think it is strange that the fact that I have an education and enjoy hanging around with educated people is being equated with racism. I’ve met some self-educated people who are extremely interesting and well-informed, but not too many. It is easier for me to have an entertaining and well-reasoned conversation on challenging topics with people who took a few years and learned how to think cogently. Sue me. I’m not going to pursue friendships with people I find uninteresting just because I want to support the illusion of a classless society.
I am very sorry that access to higher education is becoming so prohibitively expensive, because I believe that a BA (at least) should be accessible to anyone who wants to work for one. That used to be the goal of the higher education system in California, but it has been eroded to the point now that a BA from a state school is starting to cost what a private school would have cost twenty years ago. That’s not inflation; that’s class abandonment.
So there’s the problem. A wall is being built between the middle and working classes and it will be harder for young people to make the leap from one to the other than it has been in the recent past. The people on the wrong side of the wall will blame the middle classes, when in fact the blame should be laid on corporations and government, who see the value of a permanent underclass more than they see the value of an informed and upwardly mobile electorate. We fight each other and the enemy is still up there.
You know who were really class conscious and intensely focused on being able to be accepted (or have their children) accepted by middle class standards? My grandparents. You know why? Because, lacking a degree or social connections, they had to be.
For those of us who have enough social capital, confidence, and a large enough margin of error that we don’t have to worry about losing everything, we can get away with not worrying about or thinking about class issues.
I think I used to be offended when people would, for class reasons, be obsessed with “putting on the right image” when it came to looks, degrees, house location, etc. Now I pretty much understand. There are enough people out there just waiting to pass someone over for a job or a contract or a social opportunity for class reasons that you can hardly blame anyone who tries to play the game and insist that their children do.
(Then, of course, this creates another layer in which worrying about class is, itself, a class marker. The upper classes, of course, never have to worry about their social standing.)
Yet another English major here. I went to a college that was hard-core geeky and hard-core academic among the undergrad population (which was a source of alternate pride and frustration). I’m from a working-class family and was the first to go to college except for an aunt in nursing.
My college was completely the right place for me and it whipped me into intellectual shape. I loved it even as the workload crushed my soul. It was a perfect fit for me.
HOWEVER, I knew a LOT of miserable people at that college. From my knowledge of my classmates, the most miserable were those who were Bio majors because they wanted to be doctors–not because they loved researching and learning biology (and of course, we had one of the toughest O-Chem courses in the country specifically designed to weed out the 30% of each class who wanted to be pre-med.) Or Econ majors who didn’t love studying economics–they did Econ because they wanted a finance job. And the workload and intellectual intensity of almost all majors was simply too much for people who didn’t love what they did.
Of course this might be different in colleges where most people aren’t expected to go on to grad school, or where people are doing lots of socializing and partying. So even though I was, like many classmates, asking, “Should I spend 4 years and go $20,000 in debt to get a “useless” degree?” I also knew to ask, “Do I really want to spend thousands of dollars in money to study something I HATE for 60 hours a week? Do I want to spend 4 years of my life being MISERABLE?”
Yet another English major here. I went to a college that was hard-core geeky and hard-core academic among the undergrad population (which was a source of alternate pride and frustration). I’m from a working-class family and was the first to go to college except for an aunt in nursing.
My college was completely the right place for me and it whipped me into intellectual shape. I loved it even as the workload crushed my soul. It was a perfect fit for me.
HOWEVER, I knew a LOT of miserable people at that college. From my knowledge of my classmates, the most miserable were those who were Bio majors because they wanted to be doctors–not because they loved researching and learning biology (and of course, we had one of the toughest O-Chem courses in the country specifically designed to weed out the 30% of each class who wanted to be pre-med.) Or Econ majors who didn’t love studying economics–they did Econ because they wanted a finance job. And the workload and intellectual intensity of almost all majors was simply too much for people who didn’t love what they did.
Of course this might be different in colleges where most people aren’t expected to go on to grad school, or where people are doing lots of socializing and partying. So even though I was, like many classmates, asking, “Should I spend 4 years and go $20,000 in debt to get a “useless” degree?” I also knew to ask, “Do I really want to spend thousands of dollars in money to study something I HATE for 60 hours a week? Do I want to spend 4 years of my life being MISERABLE?”
Oh, sorry, if this turns into a double post, but I should also say that I felt some of the pressure to do a “lucrative” degree simply because of my background. And there was definitely that sense among my (few) college friends who came from roughly the same social class.
I say I studied English Lit because I love it dearly and I want to go to graduate school, but being a Selfish Bitch also helps a lot too. If I hadn’t been able to say, “It’s important to me to study what *I* LOVE and to earn the degree for MYSELF”, then I would have gone to a cheaper, less intensive school and studied to become a teacher.
(That’s what’ll get you to bend to someone else, as a working class girl. Not so much Fat, not so much Slutty even, but definitely Selfish.)
We’re good enough to be invited to become co-bloggers at Pandagon, but not good enough to have our existence actually recognized when making a rhetorical point. When a rhetorical point needs to be made, then it’s fine to say that we don’t exist, except in “pulp novels” about violent sociopathic fakers.
It’s true, though, that our friendship won’t get one too far into the upper echelons of blogging. So I guess it’s OK to kick us in the teeth on one’s way up there, where one will presumably meet plenty of new, degreed friends, with whom might actually be possible to spend time without “slumming.”
I think Tyro’s point is valid on an individual, developmental level, too. I come from a family that doesn’t believe in higher education for women. I was slated to become a secretary, before my high school teachers interceded with me for my parents. I have great respect for secretaries, but I would have been a horrible one; my gifts are more cerebral and less practical, and I was ridiculed by my more “normal” family and peers for being an “egghead” from a young age. I was very conscious of stepping out of my expected role when I went to college, and then on to graduate school.
For years, I tended to socialize only with other college graduates. This had something to do with common interests, but more, I think, with my fear of slipping back into a role I had narrowly escaped. As I have grown older, more experienced, and more secure in my role as a “smart person,” I have also grown more flexible in my definitions of intelligence and sophistication, and have found common interests and friendships among a much larger range of people.
Having a son who is much smarter than I am by nearly any definition, but who is bent on a blue-collar career–his vocational interests are technical and practical, like his grandparents’, and he has ADHD and finds school stultifying–I’m now having to contend with the pity of my peers whose kids are looking at the Ivy League, for having raised an underachiever, a loser. Personally, I’m thrilled that he is a kind, responsible, thoughtful, and productive individual who has discovered a vocation that can both support and fulfill him. There is no question that he can hold his own with Ph.D.’s, if they are capable of seeing him, and not his job.
I wonder how much the belittling of Liberal Arts degress has to do with the courses as being characterized as being favored for women and/or because the traditional result of completing a degree in them is a so called “woman’s job” ie Teaching, Social work?
Sorry, screwed up block quote.
That was supposed to quote Tyro above: “There are enough people out there just waiting to pass someone over for a job or a contract or a social opportunity for class reasons that you can hardly blame anyone who tries to play the game and insist that their children do.”
So true. Heck, there are plenty of those folks on this thread.
But if we don’t “pass someone over”, then it’s tokenism, so really, why resist. Just go with the flow.
Tyro’s point about the need for putting on a good image is right on too.
I’ve always been chagrined that my Mom didn’t raise me speaking Spanish as well as English. But being multilingual (esp. with sub par English) was a liability, not a benefit. English-only was standard practice in that Mexican household.
Gee, am I the only one who has both an undergrad in English and Engineering? No, English never got me a job. Yes, it made all the report writing I do for my engineering/project management so much less daunting. And real, having both and being a woman does give you a jump. But my job, which I love? Never in a million years could I have gotten it without the engineering degree. The EIT license helped, too. I refuse to go for a PE as that will likely move me out of the field and into the office as an administrator, just like getting dragged any further into contracts or management would. No thanks, that was the world my English degree was leading towards. I consider myself to have made a lucky escape.
But being multilingual (esp. with sub par English) was a liability, not a benefit. English-only was standard practice in that Mexican household.
But, see, this was another example of class-insecurity. Plenty of families who couldn’t speak English in the first place never spoke English at home, and their kids learned English at school without any problems.
This is definitely a phenomenon in the dead center of the class spectrum– the lower class immigrants didn’t know any English in the first place, and couldn’t have insisted on it. The more secure immigrants figured, “my kids will learn English in school just fine. There are no consequences to speaking the native language at home.” In the middle though, you have people who are knowledgeable enough in english and insecure enough in their social position that they couldn’t afford the risk of figuring that their kids would pick up English outside the house.
Knowing what we know now about the acquisition of language, I don’t think there are any more families that insist on abandoning the native language anymore, and outside of spanish, most people in the US have abandoned the idea of speaking a foreign language at home as a negative class marker.
But this is much like what I was talking about before. I might be offended at families that are so paranoid about what people will think that they insisted on stopping use of their native language, yes, at the same time, their precarious position that causes that worry is completely understandable under the circumstances.
Jeff wrote, well above:
While I have my degree, I suppose that running a concrete plant, which entails running heavy equipment, shoveling under conveyor belts, and generally coming home dirty and sweaty, doesn’t enjoy the prestige that being a college teacher like Jeff ought to bring. Yet Jeff said that he is way below the median income, while I’m significantly above it.
I’d bet that Jeff could put on a suit and tie, and look perfectly comfortable and hob-nob with the most august of professors. Me? I wear jeans and work shirts and boots, and putting me in a suit and tie is only slightly less comical than dressing up a chimpanzee.
Given the comments in this thread, would some sort of middle-class unity, some kind of commonality of expectations and respect for the holders of degrees explain Judge Rayford Means sentencing Penn professor and highly regarded medical researcher Dr Tracy McIntosh to 11½ to 23 months of house arrest for rape?
The Philadelphia area has been bothered by this case for 2½ years, because Dr McIntosh was apparently too important to go to jail, and a judge, who should have recused himself two years ago when questions were raised about his ethics and judgement fought to stay on the case. The natural suspicion is that money changed hands, but no investigations have found any evidence of such. Upon reading this thread, I began to wonder: is Dr McIntosh so much a part of the type of people, the class, that Judge Means would never consider as anything but honorable that it simply never really occurred to him that the good doctor should have to be punished by living among all those swarthy men in the state penitentiary?
Samantha Vimes: It did come across as accepting the idea that the non-degreed just aren’t that bright.
It did? I thought the point was that college education is one kind of class marker; financial prosperity is another; and the two don’t always fit together, leading to some unpredictable results. Like being white, male, straight, or moneyed, being college-educated is something that gives you privilege and access that people without those attributes could well miss out on. I’m surprised that there have been so many responses along the lines that the piece, or the discussion, suggests that “degreed” _is_ better, smarter, etc., rather than that it’s _taken to be_ those, erroneously. (I may have a blind spot — I’d like to know.)
I too thought Amanda’s point was that a college education is a class marker for the middle class, so therefore we should make it so that more people can get a college education, thereby bringing more people into the middle class, not that having a college education automatically means you’re brighter and better than those who don’t.
A couple people have already criticized that possible change, saying that as more people are able to acquire it, it will simply cease to act as a functional marker of the middle class.
And that’s why I think the only possibility is REVOLUTION!
Also, I thought steve at 8:26 pm upthread had an interesting point– “In America definitions of class have become cultural markers more then descriptions of economic status or work-type. People who earn 150K+/yr often define themselves as middle class, as much as those who earn $35K/yr. I have often thought that definitions of class have really become an extension of political ideology; rather than any measure of work or economy.”
Something I kept thinking about was how in my Intro to Sociology class we had a long discussion about what “middle class” meant in the U.S. We kept getting caught up in how some of the students, from the suburbs of Chicago, had grown up in areas where their parents made 100k while all their neighbors made 300k, and considered themselves to be solidly middle class especially as compared to their neighbors who were “well off”. Which left the students like me (my four person family lived off of an annual income around 25k) wondering where that put us. Y’know, because we’d always thought of ourselves as middle class–maybe not quite as solidly so, bu still. And 100k seemed (still does) like a lot of money. But there was a lot of difference in lifestyle between me and and that girl coming from a 100k family. I don’t think I really have a point, I’ll just end it here.
An excellent book that delves further into this topic is The Overspent American: Why we Want what we don’t Need by Juliet B. Schor.
I got pulled aside by a guidance counselor in (public) middle school and told that I should no longer share so freely that both my parents had Ph.D.s. I didn’t get why it mattered until she explained how many kids’ parents didn’t go to college. It was one of my first wake up calls about the amount of privilege I had…