Comment by lbhdc
18 hours ago
As someone with a degree in fine arts, good. A lot more of these programs need to be downsized or removed. Not because they aren't popular, they are (or were when I went) extremely popular. Rather they have poor outcomes for the students. After 4 years, I was left with the realization that I had wasted my time, and I was further away from a career than my peers.
I know people will push back and say that is not the point of the university. But it doesn't change the fact that our economy is not built on poetry and painting, but we educate large number of people to specialize as one. Those people are instead left in debt with no path forward in their chosen field.
From a fellow classically trained artist, I too feel disenchanted with my BFA.
I'm surprised so many folks defend the university system for fine arts. It's a relatively modern notion, as in only a few decades! Historically, arts education is provided in museum, academy, apprentice, and/or community settings. Academic (as in the modern university system) art is still in its early stages and deserves criticism. I assume much of our cohort are in a worse position for their commitment to an art degree.
I think some of the disconnect is that when people think of humanities they think of the masters, and not attending figure drawing classes while accruing 5-10 years worth of salary as debt.
I'd say that this is a take only for your time, not for all time. For all time, learning about the humanities has shown to further one's ability to reason, create and imagine. IMHO Curiosity paired with an understanding of humanity (social skills) will become the most valuable job skills. The ability to talk and connect with people will outweigh any technical skill. You can only do this by understanding humanity and living in a society that promotes and fosters humanity.
In the near term, AI will override any and all non-physical skills. However AI is not able to create or imagine, it can only mimic and regurgitate. Additionally, it cannot fix a leaking shower, and it cannot make your bed. Add in physical real-world limitations and complexities,(randomness and disorder), and you have a world where physical skills and artistic abilities will dominate.
People will value authenticity, human touch and the magic that is human creativity (love) more and more as the non-physical world becomes less and less real.
Makers, Do-ers, Designers and Caretakers will dominate the workforce in 25 years.
I agree with your axioms but not your conclusion.
People do value human creativity, but why do you think that comes from the degree mills and monocultures of the humanities departments? I don't agree that these departments foster creativity, rather the opposite, they foster conformity. There are lots of concrete real life examples of this.
I think that creativity doesn't come from humanities departments, but more likely, organically from counter culture. Who doesn't know what a rick roll is? This did not come from a humanities department.
Edit:
Forgot to add my second point: AI is going to let people outside the mainstream produce genuinely credible, professional-level work without a massive budget.
That means further devaluing of establishment institutions like humanities departments. It strips away the gatekeeping power, deciding who gets to count as legit. AI blows that up.
I'm not sure why you're being down voted. Art degrees aren't aimed at artists. There are dedicated schools to go to for things like graphics design and other creative degrees, but those aren't the sort of humanities degrees that we're talking about.
I vaguely recall even creative art degrees as being looked down upon by artists as teaching you to conform to certain styles, essentially mimicry rather than creativity (though it has been some years since anyone in my network attended one).
In any case, despite the waxing philosophical of the personal growth value of a humanities degree, there's still the fact that every college and university also advertises job placement rates of their majors. Individual courses may focus on specific topics, but the people taking your money are promising job opportunities to parents and school councilors to convince them that the over inflated price tags are worth it.
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Christina P: “I graduated with a degree in philosophy only to discover The Philosophy Corporation wasn’t hiring.”
A good point in general but not here specifically: among the various liberal arts degrees, philosophy majors have some of the highest average earnings.
Because they have the highest IQs. Philosophy programs are a sink for smart students who don’t want to do math or engineering. Employers don’t actually value the philosophy degree itself.
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A large fraction of philosophy majors go on to law school. It's great training for analyzing complex texts and writing logically sound arguments. These are timeless skills that apply to many areas even if the philosophical content itself doesn't have as much practical value in the labor market.
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Let me push back and say that is not the point of university.
If you take the stance that education's function is to act like a feeder for business institutions; I guess? But that's only one byproduct of a strong education. Another is research; the other is critical thinking and civil productivity as a whole.
I'm as pro-capital as any private industry-focused tech worker is; but lets not pretend that's all the value we get out of the humanities.
Ever watch Netflix these days? Woof.
But that isn't the pitch. "You go to college so you can get a good job..."
The fact is, the entire college/university system is outsized and wrong-fit for what most people actually need. And while I don't think humanities programs should be cut from universities, I also don't think that taxpayer backed student loans or payouts should be made for programs that have vastly more people enrolled in than the general economy has a demand/need for.
I'd like to see more accredited options for trade schools beyond what people currently think of as trades. From accounting, to software development. I know there are some schools that focus on these things, I just think they should be more at the forefront and higher profile options.
Isn't it fine if different degrees lead to different job opportunities? A nineteen year old should be able to understand the difference between the job market for a doctor or engineer and the job market for an MFA.
We don't need to have different institutions to grant different degrees with different levels of marketability. A college that only taught lucrative subjects and a college that taught non-lucrative subjects would both offer less educational value than a single college that offered the full range.
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At the same time, a healthy society needs people who are trained in the arts and humanities. The reason you experienced a bad outcome is because our society doesn't care much about this, despite being richer and more able to afford the arts than at any point in history. I would also argue that, not coincidentally, our society is unhealthy, and getting more so.
Your solution is like pointing out that the patient can't tolerate food anymore, so the solution is just not to feed them. It's all true! And also misses the fact that something is causing the patient to starve.
It's more like the patient needs some fixed amount of food each day and it doesn't make a lot of sense to create lots more food than they need on the hopes that someday they'll want to eat more than they can.
If the argument is that everyone should focus on the arts at the expense of everything else, it's hard to imagine that's an ideal outcome relative to alternatives. If we're not arguing that everyone should focus 100% on the arts (no other degrees should be available), then it's a matter of degree and certainly some outcomes might end up with more people pursuing the arts than what society needs.
What is your solution? Should the rest of us all consume more art? A lot of people are struggling just to pay for housing and food.
In many wealthy societies, there is broad funding for the arts and humanities. Here in the US we're discussing massive cuts for art and humanities funding. These amounts aren't large, and presumably we can afford them -- given the massive tax cuts we just passed for people making over $500,000 and the increased funding we came up with for ICE and the military.
>Your solution is like pointing out that the patient can't tolerate food anymore, so the solution is just not to feed them. It's all true! And also misses the fact that something is causing the patient to starve.
Ironically, with chronic obesity and the related metabolic disorders becoming absolutely epidemic, people might do well to eat less. I can manage 48 hours at a stretch, it's only psychologically discomforting, I wish I could go 72 hours. It's like we have some sort of racial memory of the famines our ancestors suffered tens of thousands of years ago, and now we can't stop gorging ourselves.
>At the same time, a healthy society needs people who are trained in the arts and humanities.
Everyone thinks that the thing that they learned to do is what everyone should learn to do. Car mechanics think that people should be able to do repairs, at least know a little more about what goes wrong. And guess what? Our economy relies on them, and they're right... we do need people who can repair them. Janitors think that people should be able to clean things up. And guess what? We do need people who can clean things up. Shipbuilders, steelworkers, construction workers, farmers... we need people who can do those things.
No one was ever in danger and needed to be able to know Titian's third most famous painting. No one was ever rescued by liberal arts graduate's knowledge of third rate classical composers.
>I would also argue that, not coincidentally, our society is unhealthy, and getting more so.
I would agree. People need gainful employment opportunities, and the training to be able to take advantage of those. They need to enter adulthood debt free, and not just student debt, but to also know that the government isn't mortgaging their future paying for a bloated secondary education system today that is wasting years of their lives and hundreds of billions in fortune setting them up to fail. If academia doesn't want to be the vocational schools that it dreads to be associated with, then it should shut up and quit pretending that it has much to offer the vast majority of people. Maybe it didn't claim that these degrees would set everyone up for life, but it certainly didn't protest when others made that claim for it.
>despite being richer and more able to afford the arts than at any point in history.
We're all actually poor. As a country. (Other countries too, come to that.) We remember having once been rich, and we're in denial about it no longer being true. We can't even afford social security, old people will need to start dying sooner. Even the so-called billionaires for the most part just have a pile of stock certificates in the vault. Even on this very website, we see constant links about making people live in pods because it's no longer possible to build housing anyone can afford. You now rent the things your grandparents used to buy outright, and to buy seconds and thirds when they got bored with the first. You tell yourself it's because it's more convenient, but you couldn't afford to pay for it up front if you wanted.
We're that married couple swimming in credit card debt. They deny that it's a big deal, look here we can juggle this one and use that one to pay the minimum payment on the third card. And don't you think we can't keep doing that, we'll be able to do it next month too! But I'm not even allowed to talk about it, because a full 8 or 9 years ago the people on the left told everyone that credit card analogies don't work for a country as big and rich as the United States.
Fewer than 7% of all high school graduates should even go on to higher education. High school should become more strict, willing to flunk everyone who fails to meet rigorous standards. We need our government to make a true effort to reindustrialize.
I'm not even sure what it is you're complaining about. That people are forcing students to spend money studying subjects that don't have lucrative careers following them? None of this information is secret; if you think that rational people can't figure out that arts careers have poor prospects, then you don't believe in the free market in the first place. (And, to some extent I'm happy to entertain that discussion -- I'm just willing to bet that "the free market makes bad decisions" is not part of your specific basket of off-the-shelf beliefs.)
You're looking for a trade school. Universities have always been about education often for the sake of learning. Generating money just came to be a nice side effect as knowledge work grew in value.
That's a nice fantasy that hasn't been true for a long time. Even university websites talk just as much about career opportunities as they do personal growth.
Them mentioning both kind of destroys the idea that university is just a job pathway.
Long shot, but maybe require humanities as a minor for tech and business majors so that our technology might start to be built with humanity.
This is what a liberal arts institution is (the university I went to is one). At my uni if you are taking a science degree you need to take 4 social science classes and 4 fine arts/humanities. and vice versa for students in fine arts/social sciences.
Yes, some colleges already require that.
https://www.hmc.edu/hsa/program/
Actually I think it's the other way around. Humanities should require math and science in order for people to graduate.
At the minimum Calculus/Stats + a CS class + some kind of science should be the absolute bare minimum.
>> our economy is not built on poetry and painting
Really? Hollywood operates on the efforts of screenwriters and digital rendering masters, both areas very informed by poetry and painting. Graphic design and quick language are the basis of online ads, which in turn are what supports the likes of Facebook and Google. If not for the wordsmiths and visual artists, the modern internet would be a very different place.
Hollywood is part of the economy, but only a small one, around 3% of US GDP. All of arts and entertainment is around 4.5%: https://www.statista.com/statistics/248004/percentage-added-...
And without the DRM, lockdown and prosecution demands of Hollywood, the internet would indeed be a better, freer place.
Yeah, I feel like something has got to give, maybe we don’t fund student loans for certain majors. Maybe we bring back certain types of book or social clubs to learn these materials instead. Online learning? I totally see the beauty in the humanities, it’s largely all I read for fun, But you can’t have a system that incentivizes people to take out bigger and bigger loans on investments that don’t pay back.
Student loan approval and interest rates should be based on actuarial calculations that account for risk of default based on school and major. This will allow market signals to work rather than treating everyone the same. Some people have this fantasy that everyone should be able to study their passion even if it's something with no value in the labor market but in the real world society can collectively only afford to have a tiny fraction of scholars living a life of the mind.
Yeah, I’d love to live in the post-agi utopia where we can all do what we want, but liberals are often not good at making trade offs within our own value systems
That's kind of my pov, on the funding aspect. Student loans should definitely have an aspect depending on the major/minor chosen.