Dear Lt Gov. Hampton,
You probably don’t know me. I run a modest little blog where I talk about history and film. But I’m also a professional historian. I teach history at the college level. I’d like to think I know a few things about studying history.
So I was distressed when I read an interview you gave recently in which you said, in reference to university degree programs, “I would not be studying history. Unless, you have a job lined up. Unless there’s somebody looking for a history major. And there are some places that are looking for that sort of wide background, but…” Elsewhere in the interview, you compare studying French literature unfavorably to studying electrical engineering, and you seem to say that universities shouldn’t subsidize the study of the Humanities with tax dollars.
There are a lot of things in that interview I disagree with, but let me focus on just that quote and the assumptions underlining it. Your comment reveals that you, like a lot of people, don’t see much value in studying history, that it’s something one does purely for personal enjoyment. You seem to think that studying history doesn’t really have much value in terms of a career, unless one wants to be a history teacher.
But a lot of people would beg to differ. Those who have studied the past at a university understand that it has a great deal of value in a wide range of fields.
Just ask Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, or Sonia Sotomayor or Elena Kagan, or the late Antonin Scalia, all of whom earned a bachelor’s degree in history. I’m sure they think that the training in close reading of historical documents that their history degree gave them is enormously useful in doing a close reading of a legal brief. (Incidentally, Clarence Thomas studied English literature, and Stephen Breyer studied philosophy, two more Humanities fields. Interesting that 6 out of 9 member of the Supreme Court chose the Humanities for their entrance into law.)
Or just ask a few of our past presidents, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Richard Nixon, or George W. Bush. (Eisenhower and Kennedy didn’t study history academically, but they both wrote on the subject.) Or maybe ask a few other important politicians such as George McGovern, George Mitchell, Henry Kissinger, Newt Gingrich, Orrin Hatch, Eric Holder, Robert Gates, Porter Goss, Joe Biden, James Baker, Dianne Feinstein, Jerry Brown, and Cory Booker, all of whom studied history or classics. I’m sure they found a historical perspective on politics and international conflicts an asset while they were in office.
Or if you want an explanation of how a history degree might be useful in business, try asking Carly Fiorina, Lee Iacocca, Martha Stewart, Jeff Zucker at NBC, William Clay Ford, Jr. of Ford Motor Company, James Kilts of Gilette, Robert Johnson of BET, Patricia Russo of Lucent, Ted Turner (who did classics), or any one of a large number of other CEOs. I would imagine they find the broad perspective we take in history useful in a variety of business situations.
Or ask J.K. Rowling, whose love of Latin and Classics shows itself every time one of her characters calls out “Expelliarmus’ or “Expecto Patronum!” She’s not the only famous author with a degree focused on the past; others include Annie Proulx, Rita Mae Brown, Willa Cather, C.S. Lewis, Ayn Rand, Salman Rushdie, and P.G. Wodehouse (although he dropped out for financial reasons before finishing his degree).
Think it’s only intellectual types who study history? Think again. Successful athletes like Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Grant Hill, Leo Lett (three-time Superbowl champion), and Troy Polamalu (another Superbowl champion) are all history degree holders; Vince Lombardi studied classics.
How about some successful entertainers, like Katherine Hepburn, Larry David, Sasha Baron Cohen, Jimmy Buffett, Jeanane Garofalo, Michael Palin of Monty Python fame, Chris Martin of Coldplay, Conan O’Brien, Tom Hiddleston, Lauryn Hill (although she never finished her degree), John Lithgow, Edward Norton, and Steve Carell, to name just a few.
Do I need to go on?
My point here is that history degrees don’t just prepare you to teach high school. They prepare you for a wide variety of careers. A history degree can prepare people for nearly any field that involves reading, writing, and thinking critically, and what fields DON’T require those skills?
But you’re skeptical. I get that. You have a sense that there really aren’t a lot of jobs of history majors. So let’s look at the numbers, and compare history majors against your favored example, electrical engineers. According to this study of employment rates in 2010-11, history majors fresh out of college have an unemployment rate of 10.2%, compared to an electrical engineering major’s 7.3% That looks bad, until you take into consideration that an engineering degree is closely aligned with a specific career, and a history degree isn’t. So the history major takes a bit of time to find his or her career path. But once history majors gain some work experience and find a career direction, their unemployment rate drops to 5.8%, just slightly above the electrical engineer’s 5.2%. This is hardly evidence that history majors don’t have careers to look forward to.
And look at the poor architecture majors. Their unemployment rate is 13.9%, and only drops to 9.2% with some experience. And yet, somehow, you don’t seem to have a sense that architecture is a useless major.
Furthermore, what happens to the electrical engineers who don’t find work in their field or who decide that the field isn’t for them? They’ve trained for a very specific sort of work, and are likely to have a substantial retraining period ahead of them. In contrast, history majors who decide not to pursue, for example, teaching or working in an archive can easily transition to business, or law, or a host of other fields. History degrees don’t prepare you for a specific field; they prepare you for a wide range of fields, which means that a shortage of jobs in one specific field doesn’t hurt history majors the way it would hurt engineering majors. In a complex business world, where job needs are unpredictable and workers are likely to switch careers several times, history and other Humanities degrees are in many ways a safer bet than many single-track fields.
There’s also the fact that Humanities degrees train students in creative thinking and clear communication, which might be why Silicon Valley has been hiring so many non-tech people lately.
And I haven’t even raised the personal benefits of studying something you love rather than something you think is employable. I haven’t brought up the fact that the Humanities are about quality of life, not just quantity of income. I haven’t gotten around to pointing out that life has more value than just the one you can measure with dollars. I haven’t looked at the way that studying history changes and enriches the way you understand the world around you, the news, and maybe your own life. As I tell my students, history is the most interesting thing there is to study, because everything you’re interested in has a history.
Don’t just take my word for it. Try studying it a little. I guarantee you’ll learn something worthwhile.
Or just ask a few of our past presidents, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Richard Nixon, or George W. Bush. (Eisenhower and Kennedy didn’t study history academically, but they both wrote on the subject.)
This undermines the argument. Lt Gov. Hampton is not devaluing the study of history, she’s saying that–if anything–the taxpayer should be financing the learning of skills one needs to make a living in this world. These gentlemen managed to study history on their own dime, not other people’s.
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I suppose you could read it that way. But she seems to be arguing that, in contrast to electrical engineering, history is not a useful field of endeavor, except if there’s a specific job waiting at the end. My central point is that history is much more useful than she thinks it is.
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“You are saying that college is a right? It’s interesting the things we think are rights. Because what I hear in my head when I hear something is a right, somebody has to provide that.”
This is her argument. Is there a right to have me pay for your education in French literature? It would be disingenuous to ignore her explicit core point.
The allegation that that she thinks the study of history is not useful or valuable is not proved by the interview. Does she value employable life skills higher? Does she think providing these are much more the purview of the state than French literature?
Yes, and yes. But that is a separate argument.
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Then why does she single out electrical engineering to favorably compare to French literature and history? Electrical engineers have no greater right to taxpayer funded education than anyone else, unless they are somehow ‘useful’ to society when those other two fields aren’t. She’s making a faulty value judgment and hiding it behind a specious taxpayers rights argument. The core of her argument is actually that taxpayers don’t benefit from people studying the Humanities and therefore we shouldn’t fund the Humanities.
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Well, I have a nephew with a computing degree flipping burgers at McDonald’s and a friend’s son with an electrical degree working in a pizza shop (not sure what the specific degrees are), and this is a few years after they graduated. So I definitely do not see a technical degree as being a good guarantee of a professional career. Not that there’s anything wrong with working in the food industry, but it does seem to be a waste of their training. Maybe they’d have been in the same place if they majored in history, or maybe they’d be better off, but they certainly wouldn’t be worse (and they’d be more interesting to talk to…lol)
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Obviously, I don’t know the specifics of their employment situation, but this is the sort of thing I’m getting at. Technical degrees are great if there’s demand for those skills, but if the market shifts, it’s often quite hard for the graduate to adapt because they lack the broad training necessary to do something outside their degree. Humanities grads tend to role with the punches better, at least once they get their foot in the door professionally, because Humanities degrees train people to be broadly proficient.
I’ve heard a number of businessmen say that they’d rather hire people with solid competency in things like writing and making arguments and train them to the specifics of the particular job, than find someone with the specific skills and then have to train them to write or think.
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Back in the late 60s/early 70s, I got a BA in English Lit and American history. Not teaching degrees but we did things like that back then when jobs were plentiful; my first post-graduate job was in accounting – go figure. I stayed home with my children until they were in school and during that time I got a degree in computer science from Purdue University.
I’m retired now, but the skills I learned getting that BA, especially all the writing i had to do, helped me become a great analyst, particularly in understanding users’ needs. The people coming right out of school with only tech courses a) seem to relate much better to their computer than people and b) consider users nuisances.
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I’ve spoken to several older businessmen over the years who’ve told me that the Liberal Arts were much better training grounds for business than business degrees were.
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All anecdotal. Jobs, Gates and Zuckerberg dropped out of college. This means…?
It’s not to say college is without value, but I guarantee if you spend 4 years writing and drinking and reading history, it won’t matter much whether you do it for free or whether you do it running up $100K of student debt.
Well, except for the $100K of course–but Lt. Gov. Hampton’s real point here is that the taxpayer shouldn’t have to pay it, is all.
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The reason the American Middle Class expanded in the post-war period was due in substantial measure to government subsidies for college level education, which made college affordable to a large swath of the population who wouldn’t otherwise have been able to afford it. As the government has retreated from funding college, it’s slowly become unaffordable for many people, and predictably the Middle Class has begun to shrink. Education is not the only issue here, of course, but it’s a major component. Basically, without affordable college education, you can’t have a large Middle Class. So if we want a large Middle Class, we have to subsidize it. Given that literally every other developed nation can do this, there’s no reason the US can’t.
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The reductio is that unless the government finances the study of French literature [or other such arcane pursuits], the middle class will collapse. This of course is nonsense.
The other unintended consequence of such good intentions is of course that government money has inflated the cost of higher education far beyond reason and value.
$100K+ for glorified classes in writing is a bit steep.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-education-bubble-is-now-upon-us-2015-11-09
Lower unemployment rates for college grads can easily be explained by greater intellectual ability and stick-to-itiveness rather than the content of college itself. Correlation is not cause, as any good history [or science] major knows. 😉
And I fully question that an alleged “unaffordability” of college is tied to the shrinking middle class. College enrollment in the 21st century has been at record highs; the shrinking middle class problem predates that by decades.
As the government has retreated from funding college, it’s slowly become unaffordable for many people, and predictably the Middle Class has begun to shrink.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc, if they still have logic class in college [a taxpayer expense I would support].
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Let’s go back to the beginning.
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Whether or not it’s a good idea is an ancillary point.
“You are saying that college is a right? It’s interesting the things we think are rights. Because what I hear in my head when I hear something is a right, somebody has to provide that.”
This is her argument. Is there a right to have me pay for your education in French literature? It would be disingenuous to ignore her explicit core point.
The reductio is that unless the government finances the study of French literature [or other such arcane pursuits], the middle class will collapse. This of course is nonsense.
The other unintended consequence of such good intentions is of course that government money has inflated the cost of higher education far beyond reason and value.
$100K+ for glorified classes in writing is a bit steep.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-us-education-bubble-is-now-upon-us-2015-11-09
Lower unemployment rates for college grads can easily be explained by greater intellectual ability and stick-to-itiveness rather than the content of college itself. Correlation is not cause, as any good history [or science] major knows. 😉
And I fully question that an alleged “unaffordability” of college is tied to the shrinking middle class. College enrollment in the 21st century has been at record highs; the shrinking middle class problem predates that by decades.
As the government has retreated from funding college, it’s slowly become unaffordable for many people, and predictably the Middle Class has begun to shrink.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc, if they still have logic class in college [a taxpayer expense I would support].
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Ok, so here’s the nub of the issue. Education is essentially a right in the US at the primary and secondary level, but not at the college level. In other developed countries, college education is, for the most part, a right. And those countries that have declared college education a right all beat the US in terms of educational achievement.
Now, Hampton is asserting that she shouldn’t have to pay for someone to get a degree in French literature (and presumably history). Why not? Because she thinks that studying things like French literature and history are useless, dilettantish pursuits. She’s wrong. They’re not useless. Their use is demonstrated over and over again by the way they train people to think, write, read, and argue critically, skills that are pretty much of universal value, regardless of career.
Nor can she argue that she shouldn’t have to pay for those fields because the people who get degrees in them don’t get jobs. They do get jobs. In history, they get them at comparable levels to electrical engineering, a field she thinks she should have to pay to support.
Her argument is essentially that she shouldn’t have to pay for people to study fields she disapproves of. But trying to pick and choose which fields have value and which don’t pretty much impossible. If employment rates are the metric, we shouldn’t have to pay for people to study architecture. I’m not sure what other metric we can use to measure which fields have value. Perhaps she thinks that the fact that electrical engineers make a lot of money means that we ought to subsidize that, but I would reply that we shouldn’t be subsidizing fields at which people can make a lot of money because those students ought to go into debt because they can pay those debts off with their future earnings.
And if her argument is that she simply doesn’t benefit from people studying history and French literature, I reply that as a childless gay man, I don’t benefit from the education that I subsidize for my straight couples who send their children to public grade schools. Of course, I do actually benefit from having a well-educated citizen base, just as she benefits from having a citizen base that can read, write, think, and argue critically.
I am not engaging in Post Hoc Propter Hoc. The evidence that college is ceasing to be affordable for the Middle Class is quite well-documented. Here’s one example: http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/13/news/economy/college_tuition_middle_class/
Millennials also have a much lower rate of degree-holding (contrary to all the hype about them being the best educated generation), and those who do have a degree are struggling with well-documented loan debts that are preventing them from doing things like buying houses. Enrollment rates have, in fact, declined the past four years in a row, and college completion rates have also been dropping. At for-profit colleges (you know, the ones that aren’t directly subsidized by governments, only subsidized by loans that have to be paid back, which is essentially the alternative model that Hampton’s approach leads to), completion rate is only 22%, sharply lower than at traditional colleges.
Middle class jobs in a post-manufacturing economy require a college education. Given that only 19% of Millennials have a bachelor’s degree, compared to about 35% of Gen Xers, it’s hard to see how the average Millennial will get a middle class job without the education required for such a job.
Yes, the shrinking Middle Class is a problem that goes back decades; that’s because the first blows came in the form of jobs lost oversees and wages that have stagnated since the 80s. That affects the current generation of Middle Class people; the contraction of degree-holding is the next wave of the problem because it affects the incoming generation. It’s honestly not hard to see this connection.
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Now, Hampton is asserting that she shouldn’t have to pay for someone to get a degree in French literature (and presumably history). Why not?
Why not? This is not a rebuttal. Only a capricious theory of rights makes your degree in French Literature my financial responsibility. Lt. Gov. Hampton is on solid ground with both James Madison and common sense and did not earn the derision heaped on her here.
As for the desirability of universal tertiary education as policy, generations not yet born are already $19 trillion in debt*; all possible goods cannot be provided by the government and it is not only immoral but stupid to keep digging in hopes that French Literature will turn around an economy that you yourself concede is under pressure for reasons unrelated to education.
As for what Europe does, it’s by no means self-evident that their system is sustainable and that we should aspire to be like them. In the least, Lt. Gov. Hampton’s demurral is valid.
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*https://twitter.com/shailenewoodley/status/721402922672791553
$226,000 in student debt to become a speech therapist? Easy government money has created a bubble in higher education, pushing tuition and fees far beyond their cost and value. Damn right she’s voting for #Bernie, who will push her debt onto future generations, not her.
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Yes, it is a rebuttal. I’ve made a clear case for why the Humanities are just as valuable as fields like electrical engineering, and in fact you’re the one who’s not engaging in a substantive response to my arguments. You’ve consistently chosen to not actually reply to my arguments but to address tangents instead.
And let’s get into the question of federal debt. We miraculously had the money to invade Iraq, despite warnings it would be far too expensive. If we can always find the money for wars, we can start finding the money for our citizens’ actual needs too.
It’s clear to me that you’re not interesting in debating the actual merits of the case here. So I’m going to wrap up the discussion here. Thanks for playing.
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Not a case, an assertion. College is not without value, but you’ve a long way to go until you prove that hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars for a degree in French Literature is worth it, or is the responsibility of the government to provide.
For the gentleman working at the warehouse [above], I think Lt. Gov. Hampton would be fine with carving off a couple thousand for an AA degree in industrial management at the community college [as am I], but saddling our young with unpayable debt for “campus rock climbing walls, sushi bars, and designer sundae stations”
Oh, So That’s Why College is So Expensive
is unconscionable. The edu-industrial complex is corrupt, and that’s what Hampton is talking about.
As for jawing about Iraq, I gave that up back in ’07.
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As I said, I’m closing this discussion.
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I thought millennials were people born after the millennium, in which case they’d be 16 years old at most and not going to college or buying houses yet. Pardon my chiming in here, but as an uneducated laborer, I have no issue with government helping to pay for college, regardless of the chosen field. Without an education, I’ve spent 25 years lugging boxes around warehouses. The result is a bad back, bad knees, (some say a bad attitude) and no chance to improve my situation since even a supervisory position in a warehouse now requires two years of college minimum (though I’m not quite sure how two years of any subject is going to teach someone how to run a warehouse better than 25 years of experience, but that might just be the bad attitude weighing in). So if we don’t want a nation of grumpy, hunched over peons, the government needs to step in and help get people educated. I don’t want to see my nephews, nieces or friends’ children having to put up with what I do.
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Millennials are the generation born after Gen X, that is to say, starting in the mid-80s. The current college age generation are the Millennials.
The situation you’re in is a big part of the reason that education is valuable. Manual labor is extremely hard on the body–I’m sorry to hear that it’s affecting you so badly. Without education, people have to do manual labor, which is rarely well-paid enough to be Middle Class, except in the case of unionized factory work. So the only way to keep the Middle Class large is to make sure that public education is available to everyone who has the desire and aptitude for it.
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I looked it up, you are correct about millennials. My confusion is that I’ve always heard them as Generation Y, which is another name for them, and I assumed millennials was the first generation born in the new millennium (doesn’t that make sense?).
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Yes, it does make sense. I’ve always hated the term Gen Y, because it treats them as just a retread of Gen X, when they’re quite different.
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