The simpler solution woukd seem to be fixing the core curriculum rather than trying to make the (desperate) case for an English major-plumber pipeline. Such a track seems necessary only in order to save English as a major. Given the content and quality of most English major curricula, this is a questionable goal—though I admit I’m shooting from the hip.
A plumber who gets an English BA is not necessarily more liberally educated than a plumber who went to a classical academy in K-12 and/or had a solid core curriculum experience.
Many humanities departments are wail and gnash their teeth that the humanities are being cut—but my experience with state legislators is that they perceive many humanities programs as protecting the jobs of their faculty at the expense of students and families. The student debt problem is the other side of the coin to the CIP-SOC issue.
Although I appreciate your critique of the current system, your description of the English major-plumber track seems romanticized. Becoming a certified master plumber requires time and training in its own right, and there is an opportunity cost to taking an English *major* when you could have been in an apprenticeship. This brings me back to the point about K-12 and core curriculum: the sticking point is our humanities BA’s *only* if our primary goal is employing all our current humanities faculty. The more natural preparation for a plumber who reads Homer and Shakespeare (which he is unlikely to read in an English BA anyways) is a Great Books K-12 education.
All of this being said, I graduated from a Great Books college, and many in my class are now in well-paying “blue collar” jobs. That was at a small religious college, and I do think such schools are more likely (and competent) to produce Homeric plumbers. All the same, one must work in order to have leisure, and I know many, many English Majors who are unemployed and unprepared to do anything but read (and mostly just banal literary criticism at that)….
This is the conversation I want to be having and thank you. I’ve written previously about the problems with gen ed which is being leveled down everywhere. And I totally agree about the need for better K-12 humanities. That is something out of my area of expertise however so I hope others will take this up
Colleges believe that education is for the purpose of job training and making money, and not for learning. their metric of success is graduating people who work in their field and make money, not graduating smart, critically thinking members of society. Thus, they build their English programs wrong (if they do any building of them at all). The reason the English major is such a dud at so many institutions is because of the very phenomena the author describes. It’s also the same reason that small (often religious) liberal arts colleges that tend to maintain countercultural values don’t have dud English programs.
Nice title, and thanks for the pointer to that Ed Studies article about Scott. I am completely with you on the way managerial efficiency works against higher learning and that state mandates around vocational outcomes are analogous to the stories Scott tells about forests and cities. Starting salary as a way to rank majors or a map of CIP to SOC are reductive and damaging ways to talk about the outcomes of a college education.
You lose me on the Neo-Leonist critique, though. The excesses of DEI in its bureaucratic formulations were quite irritating and insisted on a reductive framework for race and gender, so I can see lumping it in with the modernist impulses. As I witnessed it, the trainings were far from sophisticated and mostly consisted of trying to convince people that they might have biases that would lead them to overlook qualified minority candidates. But hey, there were excesses and enforced ritualistic observances in the form of diversity statements was a widespread practice.
But universal access and the doctrine?!? of social mobility? I can't fit those into the modernist framework. Anyone capable of learning should have access to higher education, right? Taking advantage of such access should have economic benefits, right? Despite the awkward attempts by actual states (not universities themselves) to measure such things using old assumptions (humanities are preparation for professional degrees) and bad measures (starting salary out of college), are universities and their bureaucrats imposing plans?
The problem here is that our discourse around the purposes of higher education has been captured by economists and journalists who (mis)read economists, so it is those who are paying the bill who insist on using reductive measures. It doesn't help that the discourse also focuses on the institutions producing Veblen goods and the market distortions that highly selective institutions bring.
Anyhoo, I look forward to some back and forth over this Neo-Leninist thing. As a long-time bureaucrat who has quit to serve out a term in my own re-education camp, I may still be blind to the excesses and failures of my former comrades. Like all middle managers educated in the long 20th Century, I overvalued measurement and rational planning, but I don't see evidence that it much affected what was being taught in the humanities classroom. There is still plenty of wildness in the form of intellectual pluralism. Any revolution that emerges would do well to cultivate the already existing ferment.
Thank you for your most thoughtful of comments as usual. And yes it’s complicated, is the short version of my response. As I argued before, the best humanities teachers are the ones suffering under the weight of the structure, as their classes shrink and everywhere philosophy departments are being cut. That crosswalk deserves better eyeballs than mine if you could be tempted to take a look!
The CIP SOC Crosswalk is a perfectly reasonable tool for assessing education, as long as you understand education to mean vocational training. Same with the ROI stuff coming out of Georgetown. And look, vocational training and ROI are perfectly reasonable ways to think about higher education. But like all models, they can't tell you anything about what they don't see.
What these economic models leave out is the stuff we care about: the value of sustained engagement with arts and sciences disciplines under the direction of people who spend their lives writing and talking about those subjects. The value of critical thinking is faintly visible in the general attitudes of college graduates when it comes to things like vaccines and how to resolve political disagreements, but these won't show up in anybody's KPIs, and information from labor markets doesn't apply, except for when those markets stop working (which could be any day now).
To your point, the collapse feels imminent, and how we got here is relevant. On one hand, the problem has been that the various governmental entities that regulate and fund (or used to) higher education don't understand the blind spots in the ROI model, or don't care to. On the other hand, the people doing the teaching in arts and sciences are working inside a system that rewards narrow scholarly outputs over doing a good job engaging with students. The surprising thing to me has always been how many truly great teachers are tenured and reasonably happy in their work, not how many miserable people teach at universities. The system seems designed to produce the latter.
How many states are now looking explicitly at the crosswalk? I know Utah is, and Indiana, and Florida's model has always been tied to certain CIP codes.
The real problem is we're not having this conversation INSIDE the institution.
For sure. Most academic administrators know CIP codes only as something to be gamed in terms of international student enrollment. You want to be coded as STEM so your international students qualify for post-graduate practical training, so social science and business program directors are constantly looking to update their codes.
I don't follow state regulation closely enough to know the answer to your question, but the CIP SOC framework lets those who want to defund the humanities identify where the cuts need to be made. As republican legislators expand the Trump regime's attacks on arts and humanities, CIP codes will make it easy.
the point of the university was always to prove that speech could defend activities other than just speaking. This came to fruition in 2008 (Heller) when words were able to defend action and not just other words, like speech in the first amendment.
Now that people know the university isn't about civilian-disarmament, but about protecting our hobbies as well as our values, people have started reading the classics again.
love this Hollis. The subversive part of me keeps imagining a perfectly laid out square of hedge, within which is something very much different. Rewilding in ecology needs reservoirs, in case there is no path to revolution - so there are alot of ways to think about the seeds in this essay.
The meme that humanities degrees durably aid in citizenship and understanding doesn't reflect measured reality. The Case Against Education is more than a decade old at this point and the evidence still holds up.
As a result, the idea that taxpayers should subsidize $100k English degrees for plumbers is questionable.
Your cop neighbor is welcome to learn about Shakespeare. Luckily, that has never been easier
The simpler solution woukd seem to be fixing the core curriculum rather than trying to make the (desperate) case for an English major-plumber pipeline. Such a track seems necessary only in order to save English as a major. Given the content and quality of most English major curricula, this is a questionable goal—though I admit I’m shooting from the hip.
A plumber who gets an English BA is not necessarily more liberally educated than a plumber who went to a classical academy in K-12 and/or had a solid core curriculum experience.
Many humanities departments are wail and gnash their teeth that the humanities are being cut—but my experience with state legislators is that they perceive many humanities programs as protecting the jobs of their faculty at the expense of students and families. The student debt problem is the other side of the coin to the CIP-SOC issue.
Although I appreciate your critique of the current system, your description of the English major-plumber track seems romanticized. Becoming a certified master plumber requires time and training in its own right, and there is an opportunity cost to taking an English *major* when you could have been in an apprenticeship. This brings me back to the point about K-12 and core curriculum: the sticking point is our humanities BA’s *only* if our primary goal is employing all our current humanities faculty. The more natural preparation for a plumber who reads Homer and Shakespeare (which he is unlikely to read in an English BA anyways) is a Great Books K-12 education.
All of this being said, I graduated from a Great Books college, and many in my class are now in well-paying “blue collar” jobs. That was at a small religious college, and I do think such schools are more likely (and competent) to produce Homeric plumbers. All the same, one must work in order to have leisure, and I know many, many English Majors who are unemployed and unprepared to do anything but read (and mostly just banal literary criticism at that)….
This is the conversation I want to be having and thank you. I’ve written previously about the problems with gen ed which is being leveled down everywhere. And I totally agree about the need for better K-12 humanities. That is something out of my area of expertise however so I hope others will take this up
Colleges believe that education is for the purpose of job training and making money, and not for learning. their metric of success is graduating people who work in their field and make money, not graduating smart, critically thinking members of society. Thus, they build their English programs wrong (if they do any building of them at all). The reason the English major is such a dud at so many institutions is because of the very phenomena the author describes. It’s also the same reason that small (often religious) liberal arts colleges that tend to maintain countercultural values don’t have dud English programs.
Nice title, and thanks for the pointer to that Ed Studies article about Scott. I am completely with you on the way managerial efficiency works against higher learning and that state mandates around vocational outcomes are analogous to the stories Scott tells about forests and cities. Starting salary as a way to rank majors or a map of CIP to SOC are reductive and damaging ways to talk about the outcomes of a college education.
You lose me on the Neo-Leonist critique, though. The excesses of DEI in its bureaucratic formulations were quite irritating and insisted on a reductive framework for race and gender, so I can see lumping it in with the modernist impulses. As I witnessed it, the trainings were far from sophisticated and mostly consisted of trying to convince people that they might have biases that would lead them to overlook qualified minority candidates. But hey, there were excesses and enforced ritualistic observances in the form of diversity statements was a widespread practice.
But universal access and the doctrine?!? of social mobility? I can't fit those into the modernist framework. Anyone capable of learning should have access to higher education, right? Taking advantage of such access should have economic benefits, right? Despite the awkward attempts by actual states (not universities themselves) to measure such things using old assumptions (humanities are preparation for professional degrees) and bad measures (starting salary out of college), are universities and their bureaucrats imposing plans?
The problem here is that our discourse around the purposes of higher education has been captured by economists and journalists who (mis)read economists, so it is those who are paying the bill who insist on using reductive measures. It doesn't help that the discourse also focuses on the institutions producing Veblen goods and the market distortions that highly selective institutions bring.
Anyhoo, I look forward to some back and forth over this Neo-Leninist thing. As a long-time bureaucrat who has quit to serve out a term in my own re-education camp, I may still be blind to the excesses and failures of my former comrades. Like all middle managers educated in the long 20th Century, I overvalued measurement and rational planning, but I don't see evidence that it much affected what was being taught in the humanities classroom. There is still plenty of wildness in the form of intellectual pluralism. Any revolution that emerges would do well to cultivate the already existing ferment.
Thank you for your most thoughtful of comments as usual. And yes it’s complicated, is the short version of my response. As I argued before, the best humanities teachers are the ones suffering under the weight of the structure, as their classes shrink and everywhere philosophy departments are being cut. That crosswalk deserves better eyeballs than mine if you could be tempted to take a look!
The CIP SOC Crosswalk is a perfectly reasonable tool for assessing education, as long as you understand education to mean vocational training. Same with the ROI stuff coming out of Georgetown. And look, vocational training and ROI are perfectly reasonable ways to think about higher education. But like all models, they can't tell you anything about what they don't see.
What these economic models leave out is the stuff we care about: the value of sustained engagement with arts and sciences disciplines under the direction of people who spend their lives writing and talking about those subjects. The value of critical thinking is faintly visible in the general attitudes of college graduates when it comes to things like vaccines and how to resolve political disagreements, but these won't show up in anybody's KPIs, and information from labor markets doesn't apply, except for when those markets stop working (which could be any day now).
To your point, the collapse feels imminent, and how we got here is relevant. On one hand, the problem has been that the various governmental entities that regulate and fund (or used to) higher education don't understand the blind spots in the ROI model, or don't care to. On the other hand, the people doing the teaching in arts and sciences are working inside a system that rewards narrow scholarly outputs over doing a good job engaging with students. The surprising thing to me has always been how many truly great teachers are tenured and reasonably happy in their work, not how many miserable people teach at universities. The system seems designed to produce the latter.
I've gotten some notes today from higher ed funders who hadn't really understood the crosswalk but their student loan portfolios are based on it! There's also a nice thread on Bluesky. https://bsky.app/profile/cynamon.bsky.social/post/3lolumeubfc22
How many states are now looking explicitly at the crosswalk? I know Utah is, and Indiana, and Florida's model has always been tied to certain CIP codes.
The real problem is we're not having this conversation INSIDE the institution.
For sure. Most academic administrators know CIP codes only as something to be gamed in terms of international student enrollment. You want to be coded as STEM so your international students qualify for post-graduate practical training, so social science and business program directors are constantly looking to update their codes.
I don't follow state regulation closely enough to know the answer to your question, but the CIP SOC framework lets those who want to defund the humanities identify where the cuts need to be made. As republican legislators expand the Trump regime's attacks on arts and humanities, CIP codes will make it easy.
the point of the university was always to prove that speech could defend activities other than just speaking. This came to fruition in 2008 (Heller) when words were able to defend action and not just other words, like speech in the first amendment.
Now that people know the university isn't about civilian-disarmament, but about protecting our hobbies as well as our values, people have started reading the classics again.
love this Hollis. The subversive part of me keeps imagining a perfectly laid out square of hedge, within which is something very much different. Rewilding in ecology needs reservoirs, in case there is no path to revolution - so there are alot of ways to think about the seeds in this essay.
Thank you yes I need to think more about rewilding…
The meme that humanities degrees durably aid in citizenship and understanding doesn't reflect measured reality. The Case Against Education is more than a decade old at this point and the evidence still holds up.
As a result, the idea that taxpayers should subsidize $100k English degrees for plumbers is questionable.
Your cop neighbor is welcome to learn about Shakespeare. Luckily, that has never been easier
Caplan’s book has many fine arguments but you’re overstating the signaling aspects of a mid-tier state degree.