What struck me in this post was the reveal that this BYU program is funded by the Mormon Church. I was surprised that universities would be willing to adjust like this, especially offering tuition adjustments. Then I realized it's spearheaded by missionary orgs, and it made more sense.
I'm definitely still sitting with this, but my initial reaction is !! Hell yes, this is so cool, why isn't everyone doing this, see I told you we can be creative and resourceful and we don't have to settle for how things usually are!
I do think interjecting an anti-work perspective might solve a lot of the issues people have raised with the implementation/scaling of initiatives like this. I'm chipping away at a couple essays which will do just that.
I'll be really curious to read what you come up with! I'm all for creating well rounded people but I'm not sure the university system is set up for that. (I'm so game for Epicurus' garden though, I'd be there in a heartbeat.)
On the one hand, education is incredibly expensive, and if seen as exclusively a tool for expanding job prospects, then yes cutting what's not directly applicable makes sense.
But as people below have pointed out, that's such an incredibly myopic view of education. Let alone that you need exposure to liberal arts to be a good citizen, even if you only care about your ability to innovate and "create value," I'd venture that most innovation happens from lateral thinking when people are engaged in topics that aren't directly applicable to a career. Business school is a model that most closely resembles what you're talking about, and (no offense, but) I've been exposed to enough clients who have what I now refer to as "Business School brain"...rigid, inflexible, unimaginative. The worst mindset you want to have for business.
I do think your solution of integrating liberal arts into all of life, making it accessible, is the ideal. But this also feels like a cop-out around the real problem, which is that colleges in America shouldn't be as expensive as they are in the first place, electives or not.
It's definitely a "yes, and" situation. We need free education and we need vocational training that will help us improve our earning potential. But we also need to be well rounded people and that needs to be part of our lives, not just one year in college. I'll do some more thinking on other areas that could come from, but I do think just about everyone learns more from life than from that one year of electives. So I'll have to think about that some more.
One more thing: speaking from solely personal experience, yes I have a whole internet of knowledge available to me. But for a lot of people, forced exposure to classes they wouldn't otherwise pick is a catalyst for realizing how much is out there, for activating a habit of proactive learning. Now, this could be done much earlier in life than college, and should. But for whatever reason, most American's curiosity horizons seem to be activated in college rather than high school or before.
I wonder if that's true about forced exposure to classes we wouldn't pick? I'll never forget taking choir class in high school, surrounded by people who loved choir so much that we spent hours after school practicing so we could get into competitions. When I took choir in college, I was surprised to find the class filled with kids who didn't care about singing at all and were just trying to get an easy A to fulfill their elective credit. I'd be curious to know how much enrichment comes from forced study vs. self-directed study? But again, you're making me want to look further into that....
Oh it definitely would be, I think. Not EVERY class, but every, idk, 2 out of 5? Enough to make it worth it. In my own (admittedly personal/anecdotal) case, I was in a school that forced you to take a core curriculum, and by far the most consequential class I took in college was a humanities class I definitely wouldn't have taken a second look at. The second most consequential was a core ecology class for scientists which has gone on to influence how I think about social problems. You just don't really know where the learning will come when you're choosing classes, or choosing anything really. That's why I'm a high believer in having a certain percentage of your experiences be randomly locked in
Good question. I think the Biden Administration's pursuit of free college for everyone plus their general antipathy towards business has the perverse effect of not leading efforts to form business/academia partnerships.
Am I reading this correctly? The reason behind to dropping of electives is to reduce the financial burden of a degree by one year’s expense. But, to be in the program you have to agree to not take financial assistance. If that is correct, then the program is selecting only students who are currently able to afford their education.
The purpose of higher education is to push the boundaries of our present understanding. We explore complex principles in our fields of study and develop aptitudes in various areas. But the idea of education is very functional in our system so those 30 credits seem like a “waste” but that’s what a well rounded education is. It’s about pondering different questions and giving our minds time to do that. Mathematicians should explore art and biochemists should have options for music classes because it’s that subconscious mind (in my experience with no peer-reviewed evidence 🙂) that solves problems.
The other part to balance is that we do spent a lot of time in school and are not being better educated than other countries. Part think starts at the beginning, where schooling amount to glorified childcare and by the time a child does develop reasoning and computation skills, they’re bored with the routine and eager for more play. We develop little workers and not little thinkers.
"We develop little workers and not little thinkers" = EXACTLY. At university, we like to believe we're educating the whole person, but they come with bad habits and expectations installed by the K-12 system.
Teaching freshman in college must be very tough then. The most I was told was a teacher would not remind me an assignment was do, not that they would have to undo what I was taught!
If that is the goal of higher education, I'm not sure that's how we're using it. I agree that mathematicians should explore art and biochemists should explore music. But spending $100,000 to learn math and art doesn't make sense to me? Especially if you're only going to ultimately make $50,000 as a math teacher.
Free education is definitely one solution. But if free education could be continuous and gradeless, so that we could access that ongoing for the rest of our lives rather than just during that one year of electives, I think that would be even better!
You’re right. Education is practical and when you consider cost/benefit, then no, it doesn’t make sense to invest in what won’t pay off. But we should be honest about what we’re doing. Higher education is really job training. If that’s it, then we should cut the chaff.
Brief diversion: Teacher salaries are criminal. Just released a podcast episode today and the main character gets screwed on his wage.
Education with electives and time to research or think is really meant to be free if we hope to enrich people. Right now we just make them wage slaves after graduation. I would have loved to take classes for the fun of it but there was no money even if I had time.
Interesting that instead of advocating for reducing the cost of a college education (by taxing those with obscene incomes to finance it) so we can have people with well-rounded backgrounds, you advocate for limiting a broad liberal arts education instead--essentially turning colleges into trade schools.
The problem here is valuing money more than people. This idea is not utopian. It's utilitarian.
I highly value people with well-rounded backgrounds. I'm just not sure elective credits are the thing that make that happen. It wasn't one year of elective classes that made Leonardo Da Vinci a well rounded person, it was critical self study and inquiry. I wonder if that would be better achieved outside of classes and grades. The unschooling movement, for example, I think better achieves that!
Maybe one way we could get that is if college was 10-20 hours a week of vocational training, plus some kind of self-study projects of our own choice. You could build robots or go to a workshop to build things or participate in a dance program and that would be how you spent most of your afternoon. (Rather than sitting in a one hour Music Theory 101 class that you have to take tests in).
I might have overlooked it, but the missing factor is "capital participation." Capitalism requires a civil, educated labor force. Under the current model, they don't contribute to the educated workforce that they demand. We need to expand the corporate-paid apprenticeship concept to include all higher education skills. Why not hire the future personnel manager in high school and help finance her college degree in personnel management?
I love the idea of a corporate-paid apprenticeship! I know Google does that for hiring tech workers out of high school. They actually train them in coding at Google.
That makes me bristle... coding is a trade whereas an education across a broader study where one is exposed to philosophy, poetry, ethics, history, language, cultures unlike your own leads you to question WHY you are writing this code, WHO it affects and whether or not you should be writing this code.
A bulldozer operator might be great at their job, but if they bulldoze an entire village with people living there, that’s... probably bad. A drone operator might be great at their job but if they use those skills to carpet bomb an entire swath of civilian housing, hospitals and schools... that’s probably bad.
Of course Google wants fresh kids to train how to code so they never have the outside exposure to question if they should be writing that code....
If an employer values exposure to those "boader studies," they can pay for them in the form of some kind of apprenticeship. There's no reason to limit this college/business partnership to "trade skills."
No, not directly. But if you never have exposure to any world outside of your insular community, you don’t know what you don’t know. Corporations know this. It’s baked into their “benevolence” and their funding in anything education. (I’ve been in meetings where this was expressed quite bluntly, especially at the start of the dot-com era. I’m watching corporations taking over public education in my state of Ohio! They aren’t even being subtle about it anymore... because they don’t have to...) Corporations, militaries don’t want thinkers; they want do-ers.
"Maybe it’s time to remove the "liberal arts" from our "liberal arts" degrees."
Well... I kind of hate it. We do have technical and vocational schools that offer these types of degrees or certifications in even less time, and some states, like Tennessee, are moving to nature 2-year degrees free, so there's some hope. The fact that it was a politically viable thing to do in Tennessee is just another sign, I'm afraid, of the devaluing of degrees now that so many more people have them, but it's a step in the right direction if the goal is to get people into good jobs.
I just hate the idea of university not being what it was intended to do: help people become well-rounded individuals who learn for the sake of it as well as as a means to a good career. Our society is desperately missing that well-rounded aspect right now.
I understand that, but I wonder if college education really does help people become well-rounded individuals? Maybe I'm speaking too much from my own experience, but I learned more from the extra curricular activities that were part of the high school experience (choir, dance, theater, gymnastics, etc) than I did from taking an elective course in college. I kind of wonder if that humanitas/liberal arts training shouldn't be graded work, but should be interested self study work.
Then university landscape in America is so expensive and ... terrible that I’m electing to complete my Masters in Denmark, Aarhus University. I’m in my 60s; I’m not getting an MA in English with any expectation that it will lead to a profitable job! I’m getting it because I delayed because of children and life... and now that they are grown and flown, I find this country has basically priced me out. Moreover, all these admission people care about is getting me to pay $40-60k minimum for a degree, mortgage my home, cash out the retirement funds, take out student loans... DUDE, 20 YEAR OLDS AINT MAKING ENOUGH IN THEIR ENTIRE LIFETIME TO PAY BACK LOANS!! I know the degree is in English, but I can do the math!!
Anyway, I read this earlier and noodled over it since and I can’t really add anything that @JulieGabrielli already said. I’m dismayed that the capitalist forces have turned education into job training and now are working to strip education out of a college degree. That’s very sad.
Or are we working to add education outside of a college degree? Was it your one year of elective classes in college that made you a well rounded person? Or was it something else?
We need vocational job training, but I also think we need interested self study. I'm not sure they have to take place within the same institution?
Three year degrees without liberal arts electives is the standard for undergrad here in Australia so it can definitely work, and would probably make sense for the average student. I always found it a bit odd that degrees in the US were a year longer than here
I personally didn't do many extra curricular activities (wasn't the best student admittedly, although in general there's less of a culture of extra curriculars being required for resume building etc here).
As far as learning things not relevant to my degree, I was a bit unusual in that I did a lot of outside reading on things of interest that are outside the scope of the degree. Within a course, you can do a course or two outside the normal degree track, but it's a bit hard to negotiate and most people just opt to do their regular degree courses. Within those degrees there's usually a choice of a few elective courses that allow for a bit of specialization, I don't think to the same degree as in a typical US four-year degree.
That's interesting. I'd be very curious to know if there is a difference in "well roundedness" between different types of university educations. (As well as what that achieves at a societal level). Thanks so much for sharing that!
Hi Elle -- I appreciate the sentiment behind this idea, but I fear that what such programs will do is create (or rather, further entrench) a multi-tiered university education system in which the rich will get richer. In this version of the future, there will still be 4-year degrees available from the most prestigious institutions (believe me, Harvard et al. will NEVER get rid of their liberal arts electives) and the rest of the great unwashed will earn 3-year vocational degrees. The rich and privileged will be skimmed off for the best (white-color, managerial, high-paying) jobs because, believe it or not, such employers want well-rounded employees who can write and think clearly. Everyone else will be slotted straight into dead-end middle-management and other "vocational" jobs. This is basically how the system works now, but informally -- this plan will simply make the tracking more blatant. The only way to achieve what you (and I and Epicurus) want is state-funded, excellent university educations available to all.
Why does writing and thinking clearly have to be absent from a vocational style college education? Vocationally oriented college degrees can produce a well rounded education. Most colleges already have effective writing labs, making English lit classes unnecessary. Moreover, I disagree that philosophy classes teach practical thinking skills. General philosophy teaches one how to obfuscate the simplest matters. Focused philosophy is another matter. The philosophy of science, for instance, is included in the vocational style curriculum for someone aiming to be hired by a drug company (which, by the way, should pay for apprenticeships right out of high school).
"Most colleges already have effective writing labs, making English lit classes unnecessary." Are you sure you want to die on that hill? Giving you a chance to let what you just wrote sink in.
🤣 Well, I'll die on a clarified hill. Most college majors don't need English Lit or other humanities. Most jobs in business require a specific set of skills, and not the "well rounded" person others have attributed to the humanities. Moreover, I'm not concerned when I read about a college dropping the humanities, although it's the administrative layer in the academic industrial complex that's bloated.
I like the idea of focused philosophy, although I’m not sure where I’d draw the line. My college education (St. John’s College) included original texts from the history of science and mathematics, and many of these had came with plenty of philosophy (Galileo, Descartes, Mendel and Darwin for example. )
Nowadays other disciplines in the social sciences can provide perspectives on science and other vocational fields. Pierre Bourdieu is a sociologist I’ve dipped into--from Wikipedia it looks like he’s tackled objectivity in science. (How many scientists believe they and their grantors are 100% objective?) All business majors should read Adam Smith and Marx, along with certain Federalist papers.
Maybe each field needs a mandatory humanities curriculum designed around the typical ethical questions of that field, along with readings/discussion/writing assignments to counteract its typical conceptual shortcomings. As for healthcare, the Western canon, not to mention poetry and literature, has plenty to offer on pain, illness, disability, suffering and death. More recent writings, prior to or corrective to the less-thoughtful trends in CRT, are needed for anyone in health or medical fields for increasing awareness about the wide diversity of human bodies and minds.
As for the tech bros, I’m sorry - they obviously need a thorough grounding in Western Philosophy, world history, art and literature (but oh well.) Maybe some Eastern philosophy for a reminder about the core ethical concepts there. At any rate, they need something to counter narrow worldviews gained from reading only certain sub-genres of science fiction.
Along these lines, one of my thoughts was if I were an employer, I’d want to know which job applicants had studied the humanities, and that would give them a leg up in the hiring process. For one thing, there would be a higher probability that they could actually write, and even better, think while reading and writing.
In my experience as a business consultant, which included reforming the hiring process, businesses do not prefer candidates who have taken courses in the humanities. Writing and language skills need to be demonstrated, but businesses do not even look for applicants who have taken history, philosophy, art, or English lit classes.
This is not a value judgement, but rather an observation from extensive experience.
Absolutely true, and something I’ve been fortunate to find rather amusing. I once wrote a paper for a compiler class. The assignment was to compare and contrast two technical papers on parallel processing. I got an A+ “you should consider software engineering as a career!!” but I was merely using the reading and writing skills I had learned in college and graduate school to drill down into the vocabulary and parse the sentences.
I did go on to a IT career in local government, where I was able to use my whole brain on a wide variety of tasks. Managers expressed amazement at how fast I could churn out a decent documents, and sometimes asked me to write up feasibility studies that the execs could understand. On the other hand, sometimes I think those of us with humanities backgrounds (or who just read a lot) were regarded more as pests who were always asking annoying questions.
Then advocate for it instead of throwing up your hands. Isn't this newsletter supposed to be about imaging, and advocating for, a better world. When did The Elysian become about what's practical?
I think education should be free. But I do still wonder if it is still the correct place to receive the "humanitas" liberal arts education. In my opinion, high school in the US, with its bevy of extra curricular activities, does more to reach that end then college electives do. When I was in high school I was also in the choir, the theater, dance, and so many things I was interested in pursuing after school. I don't remember anything from my elective classes in college.
I wonder if we need 1) vocational training and 2) space for self study and extra curricular involvement (ungraded, untested interests we can pursue).
As a college professor who certainly has many beefs with the state of higher ed today, I find this argument triggering. It depresses me that the answer to the very legit question: “What do you do when 34% of your students sometimes struggle to find at least 2 meals a day?” is to treat higher ed as vocational training for individuals seeking to increase their earning potential. Why can't the answer to the question be, "Make college available and affordable (if not free) to ALL who have the interest, commitment and aptitude"? I understand that higher ed is far more global now, but looking for a one-size-fits-all solution isn't the answer. Many high-touch fields require high-touch educations on a diversity of subjects (including ethics) that take place in community with others. I mean, Epicurus' followers gathered *in a garden* to hash out ideas *together*.
The internet is too isolating to teach / learn / experience living and learning in community. I'm worried that the best this approach will do is turn out even more individualistic people, at a time when collaboration in community is what's most needed to address today's wicked challenges.
It's probaby true that liberal arts derives from white privilege and is tainted by colonial, western myopia. But there are other brilliant thinkers that we can learn from, not throw the whole thing out in favor of fast-tracking training for jobs that are still firmly entrenched in capitalist systems.
The stuff we have from the “dead white guys” goes back 3,000 years (Hebrew Bible, Homer) and it’s not just each thinker’s individual ideas but century upon century of dialog between generations. As a result we have a record not only of innumerable ideas and concepts, but endless examples of how men (and no doubt the women they talked to) have named and wrestled with life’s basic questions. What was found to be most pertinent and valuable across the ages is what has continued to be read and discussed. (Thus we’re still talking about Plato’s cave.)
Women and others can now come along and build on that, but to dismantle the underlying foundations would be a dire mistake. (At any rate, it’s not hard for me to interpolate women’s experience into what the guys were talking about. We have the pain and risks of childbirth, they have the pain and risks of war.)
Do other cultures have similar legacies? Or perhaps other cultures have legacies that require entirely different meta-strategies for exploring and studying them. I for one will pay attention regardless of whether the culture was imperialist or racist (probably both, if it’s still around)
Maybe the "something" could be universities getting together to lobby for free higher ed. It's so frustrating. Since I started teaching, the level of middle-management bureaucracy at my university has skyrocketed. There's all this unnecessary complexity that adds to cost. Plus, fancy new dorms and fitness centers and dining halls that look like a spa vacation. *grumble*
Right, but what if you could get the credentials you need to be an architect without all of that extra fluff. No dorms or fitness centers, just the classes you need for that job. AND that gave you the time and space to pursue liberal arts interests?
In my opinion, high school in the US, with its bevy of extra curricular activities, does more to reach that end then college electives do. When I was in high school I was also in the choir, the theater, dance, and so many things I was interested in pursuing after school. I don't remember anything from my elective classes.
I wonder if we need 1) vocational training and 2) space for self study and extra curricular involvement (ungraded, untested interests we can pursue).
There is no way to educate a whole architect without a well-rounded curriculum. Vitruvius was not wrong, then or now. I’m surprised that just because you can’t remember what you call “electives” (that I’m now unclear what specific courses you’re thinking of), doesn’t mean humanities and other topical classes don’t make impressions on students. They think they know so much from watching TikTok and YouTube but they really are so young and naive. At a time when people are already so siloed, we need more diverse education not less.
Well yes, I agree we need a well-rounded education, and that that creates better architects. And I'm not suggesting they get that from TikTok and YouTube instead of from their college education. But I'm also not convinced they are getting that from one year of college electives.
Now, if we had free education all the way through and we included classes about ethics and morality and humanities as part of that, I think that would be great. But I also wonder if it could be better achieved outside of the education system like extra curricular activities are in high school!
That's what you get when the government finances higher education, a total disregard for costs. Universities should be the only ones assuming the risk of loaning a student money to pay for their education.
What struck me in this post was the reveal that this BYU program is funded by the Mormon Church. I was surprised that universities would be willing to adjust like this, especially offering tuition adjustments. Then I realized it's spearheaded by missionary orgs, and it made more sense.
I'm definitely still sitting with this, but my initial reaction is !! Hell yes, this is so cool, why isn't everyone doing this, see I told you we can be creative and resourceful and we don't have to settle for how things usually are!
I do think interjecting an anti-work perspective might solve a lot of the issues people have raised with the implementation/scaling of initiatives like this. I'm chipping away at a couple essays which will do just that.
I'll be really curious to read what you come up with! I'm all for creating well rounded people but I'm not sure the university system is set up for that. (I'm so game for Epicurus' garden though, I'd be there in a heartbeat.)
I'm incredibly torn on this.
On the one hand, education is incredibly expensive, and if seen as exclusively a tool for expanding job prospects, then yes cutting what's not directly applicable makes sense.
But as people below have pointed out, that's such an incredibly myopic view of education. Let alone that you need exposure to liberal arts to be a good citizen, even if you only care about your ability to innovate and "create value," I'd venture that most innovation happens from lateral thinking when people are engaged in topics that aren't directly applicable to a career. Business school is a model that most closely resembles what you're talking about, and (no offense, but) I've been exposed to enough clients who have what I now refer to as "Business School brain"...rigid, inflexible, unimaginative. The worst mindset you want to have for business.
I do think your solution of integrating liberal arts into all of life, making it accessible, is the ideal. But this also feels like a cop-out around the real problem, which is that colleges in America shouldn't be as expensive as they are in the first place, electives or not.
It's definitely a "yes, and" situation. We need free education and we need vocational training that will help us improve our earning potential. But we also need to be well rounded people and that needs to be part of our lives, not just one year in college. I'll do some more thinking on other areas that could come from, but I do think just about everyone learns more from life than from that one year of electives. So I'll have to think about that some more.
One more thing: speaking from solely personal experience, yes I have a whole internet of knowledge available to me. But for a lot of people, forced exposure to classes they wouldn't otherwise pick is a catalyst for realizing how much is out there, for activating a habit of proactive learning. Now, this could be done much earlier in life than college, and should. But for whatever reason, most American's curiosity horizons seem to be activated in college rather than high school or before.
I wonder if that's true about forced exposure to classes we wouldn't pick? I'll never forget taking choir class in high school, surrounded by people who loved choir so much that we spent hours after school practicing so we could get into competitions. When I took choir in college, I was surprised to find the class filled with kids who didn't care about singing at all and were just trying to get an easy A to fulfill their elective credit. I'd be curious to know how much enrichment comes from forced study vs. self-directed study? But again, you're making me want to look further into that....
Oh it definitely would be, I think. Not EVERY class, but every, idk, 2 out of 5? Enough to make it worth it. In my own (admittedly personal/anecdotal) case, I was in a school that forced you to take a core curriculum, and by far the most consequential class I took in college was a humanities class I definitely wouldn't have taken a second look at. The second most consequential was a core ecology class for scientists which has gone on to influence how I think about social problems. You just don't really know where the learning will come when you're choosing classes, or choosing anything really. That's why I'm a high believer in having a certain percentage of your experiences be randomly locked in
Here's the sort of arrangement I'm talking about when I say that business needs to be involved in funding higher education.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/workforce/13-major-health-systems-partner-with-high-schools-in-250m-bloomberg-initiative.html
NYT also has a story on this. Why do we have to wait for philanthropists to get things like this going?
Good question. I think the Biden Administration's pursuit of free college for everyone plus their general antipathy towards business has the perverse effect of not leading efforts to form business/academia partnerships.
Am I reading this correctly? The reason behind to dropping of electives is to reduce the financial burden of a degree by one year’s expense. But, to be in the program you have to agree to not take financial assistance. If that is correct, then the program is selecting only students who are currently able to afford their education.
The purpose of higher education is to push the boundaries of our present understanding. We explore complex principles in our fields of study and develop aptitudes in various areas. But the idea of education is very functional in our system so those 30 credits seem like a “waste” but that’s what a well rounded education is. It’s about pondering different questions and giving our minds time to do that. Mathematicians should explore art and biochemists should have options for music classes because it’s that subconscious mind (in my experience with no peer-reviewed evidence 🙂) that solves problems.
The other part to balance is that we do spent a lot of time in school and are not being better educated than other countries. Part think starts at the beginning, where schooling amount to glorified childcare and by the time a child does develop reasoning and computation skills, they’re bored with the routine and eager for more play. We develop little workers and not little thinkers.
"We develop little workers and not little thinkers" = EXACTLY. At university, we like to believe we're educating the whole person, but they come with bad habits and expectations installed by the K-12 system.
Teaching freshman in college must be very tough then. The most I was told was a teacher would not remind me an assignment was do, not that they would have to undo what I was taught!
If that is the goal of higher education, I'm not sure that's how we're using it. I agree that mathematicians should explore art and biochemists should explore music. But spending $100,000 to learn math and art doesn't make sense to me? Especially if you're only going to ultimately make $50,000 as a math teacher.
Free education is definitely one solution. But if free education could be continuous and gradeless, so that we could access that ongoing for the rest of our lives rather than just during that one year of electives, I think that would be even better!
You’re right. Education is practical and when you consider cost/benefit, then no, it doesn’t make sense to invest in what won’t pay off. But we should be honest about what we’re doing. Higher education is really job training. If that’s it, then we should cut the chaff.
Brief diversion: Teacher salaries are criminal. Just released a podcast episode today and the main character gets screwed on his wage.
Education with electives and time to research or think is really meant to be free if we hope to enrich people. Right now we just make them wage slaves after graduation. I would have loved to take classes for the fun of it but there was no money even if I had time.
Very good points.
Interesting that instead of advocating for reducing the cost of a college education (by taxing those with obscene incomes to finance it) so we can have people with well-rounded backgrounds, you advocate for limiting a broad liberal arts education instead--essentially turning colleges into trade schools.
The problem here is valuing money more than people. This idea is not utopian. It's utilitarian.
I highly value people with well-rounded backgrounds. I'm just not sure elective credits are the thing that make that happen. It wasn't one year of elective classes that made Leonardo Da Vinci a well rounded person, it was critical self study and inquiry. I wonder if that would be better achieved outside of classes and grades. The unschooling movement, for example, I think better achieves that!
Maybe one way we could get that is if college was 10-20 hours a week of vocational training, plus some kind of self-study projects of our own choice. You could build robots or go to a workshop to build things or participate in a dance program and that would be how you spent most of your afternoon. (Rather than sitting in a one hour Music Theory 101 class that you have to take tests in).
This is quite appealing.
I might have overlooked it, but the missing factor is "capital participation." Capitalism requires a civil, educated labor force. Under the current model, they don't contribute to the educated workforce that they demand. We need to expand the corporate-paid apprenticeship concept to include all higher education skills. Why not hire the future personnel manager in high school and help finance her college degree in personnel management?
I love the idea of a corporate-paid apprenticeship! I know Google does that for hiring tech workers out of high school. They actually train them in coding at Google.
That makes me bristle... coding is a trade whereas an education across a broader study where one is exposed to philosophy, poetry, ethics, history, language, cultures unlike your own leads you to question WHY you are writing this code, WHO it affects and whether or not you should be writing this code.
A bulldozer operator might be great at their job, but if they bulldoze an entire village with people living there, that’s... probably bad. A drone operator might be great at their job but if they use those skills to carpet bomb an entire swath of civilian housing, hospitals and schools... that’s probably bad.
Of course Google wants fresh kids to train how to code so they never have the outside exposure to question if they should be writing that code....
And I know for damn sure that is a bad thing.
If an employer values exposure to those "boader studies," they can pay for them in the form of some kind of apprenticeship. There's no reason to limit this college/business partnership to "trade skills."
Yes but is it really your college electives that make you a moral drone operator?
No, not directly. But if you never have exposure to any world outside of your insular community, you don’t know what you don’t know. Corporations know this. It’s baked into their “benevolence” and their funding in anything education. (I’ve been in meetings where this was expressed quite bluntly, especially at the start of the dot-com era. I’m watching corporations taking over public education in my state of Ohio! They aren’t even being subtle about it anymore... because they don’t have to...) Corporations, militaries don’t want thinkers; they want do-ers.
I'm all for morality and ethics and philosophy being part of the school system, but that's not typically part of the core curriculum.
"Maybe it’s time to remove the "liberal arts" from our "liberal arts" degrees."
Well... I kind of hate it. We do have technical and vocational schools that offer these types of degrees or certifications in even less time, and some states, like Tennessee, are moving to nature 2-year degrees free, so there's some hope. The fact that it was a politically viable thing to do in Tennessee is just another sign, I'm afraid, of the devaluing of degrees now that so many more people have them, but it's a step in the right direction if the goal is to get people into good jobs.
I just hate the idea of university not being what it was intended to do: help people become well-rounded individuals who learn for the sake of it as well as as a means to a good career. Our society is desperately missing that well-rounded aspect right now.
I understand that, but I wonder if college education really does help people become well-rounded individuals? Maybe I'm speaking too much from my own experience, but I learned more from the extra curricular activities that were part of the high school experience (choir, dance, theater, gymnastics, etc) than I did from taking an elective course in college. I kind of wonder if that humanitas/liberal arts training shouldn't be graded work, but should be interested self study work.
Then university landscape in America is so expensive and ... terrible that I’m electing to complete my Masters in Denmark, Aarhus University. I’m in my 60s; I’m not getting an MA in English with any expectation that it will lead to a profitable job! I’m getting it because I delayed because of children and life... and now that they are grown and flown, I find this country has basically priced me out. Moreover, all these admission people care about is getting me to pay $40-60k minimum for a degree, mortgage my home, cash out the retirement funds, take out student loans... DUDE, 20 YEAR OLDS AINT MAKING ENOUGH IN THEIR ENTIRE LIFETIME TO PAY BACK LOANS!! I know the degree is in English, but I can do the math!!
Anyway, I read this earlier and noodled over it since and I can’t really add anything that @JulieGabrielli already said. I’m dismayed that the capitalist forces have turned education into job training and now are working to strip education out of a college degree. That’s very sad.
Or are we working to add education outside of a college degree? Was it your one year of elective classes in college that made you a well rounded person? Or was it something else?
We need vocational job training, but I also think we need interested self study. I'm not sure they have to take place within the same institution?
This should have been done a long time ago. Yay!
Three year degrees without liberal arts electives is the standard for undergrad here in Australia so it can definitely work, and would probably make sense for the average student. I always found it a bit odd that degrees in the US were a year longer than here
I'm curious if you also did any kind of extra curricular activities? How do you learn about things not relevant to your degree?
I personally didn't do many extra curricular activities (wasn't the best student admittedly, although in general there's less of a culture of extra curriculars being required for resume building etc here).
As far as learning things not relevant to my degree, I was a bit unusual in that I did a lot of outside reading on things of interest that are outside the scope of the degree. Within a course, you can do a course or two outside the normal degree track, but it's a bit hard to negotiate and most people just opt to do their regular degree courses. Within those degrees there's usually a choice of a few elective courses that allow for a bit of specialization, I don't think to the same degree as in a typical US four-year degree.
That's interesting. I'd be very curious to know if there is a difference in "well roundedness" between different types of university educations. (As well as what that achieves at a societal level). Thanks so much for sharing that!
Well that just makes so much sense!
Hi Elle -- I appreciate the sentiment behind this idea, but I fear that what such programs will do is create (or rather, further entrench) a multi-tiered university education system in which the rich will get richer. In this version of the future, there will still be 4-year degrees available from the most prestigious institutions (believe me, Harvard et al. will NEVER get rid of their liberal arts electives) and the rest of the great unwashed will earn 3-year vocational degrees. The rich and privileged will be skimmed off for the best (white-color, managerial, high-paying) jobs because, believe it or not, such employers want well-rounded employees who can write and think clearly. Everyone else will be slotted straight into dead-end middle-management and other "vocational" jobs. This is basically how the system works now, but informally -- this plan will simply make the tracking more blatant. The only way to achieve what you (and I and Epicurus) want is state-funded, excellent university educations available to all.
Why does writing and thinking clearly have to be absent from a vocational style college education? Vocationally oriented college degrees can produce a well rounded education. Most colleges already have effective writing labs, making English lit classes unnecessary. Moreover, I disagree that philosophy classes teach practical thinking skills. General philosophy teaches one how to obfuscate the simplest matters. Focused philosophy is another matter. The philosophy of science, for instance, is included in the vocational style curriculum for someone aiming to be hired by a drug company (which, by the way, should pay for apprenticeships right out of high school).
"Most colleges already have effective writing labs, making English lit classes unnecessary." Are you sure you want to die on that hill? Giving you a chance to let what you just wrote sink in.
🤣 Well, I'll die on a clarified hill. Most college majors don't need English Lit or other humanities. Most jobs in business require a specific set of skills, and not the "well rounded" person others have attributed to the humanities. Moreover, I'm not concerned when I read about a college dropping the humanities, although it's the administrative layer in the academic industrial complex that's bloated.
Clarence did you realize you are talking with an English literature professor here? 😳 😆
I like the idea of focused philosophy, although I’m not sure where I’d draw the line. My college education (St. John’s College) included original texts from the history of science and mathematics, and many of these had came with plenty of philosophy (Galileo, Descartes, Mendel and Darwin for example. )
Nowadays other disciplines in the social sciences can provide perspectives on science and other vocational fields. Pierre Bourdieu is a sociologist I’ve dipped into--from Wikipedia it looks like he’s tackled objectivity in science. (How many scientists believe they and their grantors are 100% objective?) All business majors should read Adam Smith and Marx, along with certain Federalist papers.
Maybe each field needs a mandatory humanities curriculum designed around the typical ethical questions of that field, along with readings/discussion/writing assignments to counteract its typical conceptual shortcomings. As for healthcare, the Western canon, not to mention poetry and literature, has plenty to offer on pain, illness, disability, suffering and death. More recent writings, prior to or corrective to the less-thoughtful trends in CRT, are needed for anyone in health or medical fields for increasing awareness about the wide diversity of human bodies and minds.
As for the tech bros, I’m sorry - they obviously need a thorough grounding in Western Philosophy, world history, art and literature (but oh well.) Maybe some Eastern philosophy for a reminder about the core ethical concepts there. At any rate, they need something to counter narrow worldviews gained from reading only certain sub-genres of science fiction.
Hear, hear! You said it better than I ever could (and I tried!).
Along these lines, one of my thoughts was if I were an employer, I’d want to know which job applicants had studied the humanities, and that would give them a leg up in the hiring process. For one thing, there would be a higher probability that they could actually write, and even better, think while reading and writing.
In my experience as a business consultant, which included reforming the hiring process, businesses do not prefer candidates who have taken courses in the humanities. Writing and language skills need to be demonstrated, but businesses do not even look for applicants who have taken history, philosophy, art, or English lit classes.
This is not a value judgement, but rather an observation from extensive experience.
Absolutely true, and something I’ve been fortunate to find rather amusing. I once wrote a paper for a compiler class. The assignment was to compare and contrast two technical papers on parallel processing. I got an A+ “you should consider software engineering as a career!!” but I was merely using the reading and writing skills I had learned in college and graduate school to drill down into the vocabulary and parse the sentences.
I did go on to a IT career in local government, where I was able to use my whole brain on a wide variety of tasks. Managers expressed amazement at how fast I could churn out a decent documents, and sometimes asked me to write up feasibility studies that the execs could understand. On the other hand, sometimes I think those of us with humanities backgrounds (or who just read a lot) were regarded more as pests who were always asking annoying questions.
I'm definitely all for state-funded, excellent university educations in the US!
Then advocate for it instead of throwing up your hands. Isn't this newsletter supposed to be about imaging, and advocating for, a better world. When did The Elysian become about what's practical?
I think education should be free. But I do still wonder if it is still the correct place to receive the "humanitas" liberal arts education. In my opinion, high school in the US, with its bevy of extra curricular activities, does more to reach that end then college electives do. When I was in high school I was also in the choir, the theater, dance, and so many things I was interested in pursuing after school. I don't remember anything from my elective classes in college.
I wonder if we need 1) vocational training and 2) space for self study and extra curricular involvement (ungraded, untested interests we can pursue).
As a college professor who certainly has many beefs with the state of higher ed today, I find this argument triggering. It depresses me that the answer to the very legit question: “What do you do when 34% of your students sometimes struggle to find at least 2 meals a day?” is to treat higher ed as vocational training for individuals seeking to increase their earning potential. Why can't the answer to the question be, "Make college available and affordable (if not free) to ALL who have the interest, commitment and aptitude"? I understand that higher ed is far more global now, but looking for a one-size-fits-all solution isn't the answer. Many high-touch fields require high-touch educations on a diversity of subjects (including ethics) that take place in community with others. I mean, Epicurus' followers gathered *in a garden* to hash out ideas *together*.
The internet is too isolating to teach / learn / experience living and learning in community. I'm worried that the best this approach will do is turn out even more individualistic people, at a time when collaboration in community is what's most needed to address today's wicked challenges.
It's probaby true that liberal arts derives from white privilege and is tainted by colonial, western myopia. But there are other brilliant thinkers that we can learn from, not throw the whole thing out in favor of fast-tracking training for jobs that are still firmly entrenched in capitalist systems.
The stuff we have from the “dead white guys” goes back 3,000 years (Hebrew Bible, Homer) and it’s not just each thinker’s individual ideas but century upon century of dialog between generations. As a result we have a record not only of innumerable ideas and concepts, but endless examples of how men (and no doubt the women they talked to) have named and wrestled with life’s basic questions. What was found to be most pertinent and valuable across the ages is what has continued to be read and discussed. (Thus we’re still talking about Plato’s cave.)
Women and others can now come along and build on that, but to dismantle the underlying foundations would be a dire mistake. (At any rate, it’s not hard for me to interpolate women’s experience into what the guys were talking about. We have the pain and risks of childbirth, they have the pain and risks of war.)
Do other cultures have similar legacies? Or perhaps other cultures have legacies that require entirely different meta-strategies for exploring and studying them. I for one will pay attention regardless of whether the culture was imperialist or racist (probably both, if it’s still around)
well said. The dialogues across generations are priceless. We slight them at our peril.
Oh I'm with you. We definitely need free higher education, something has to be done!
Maybe the "something" could be universities getting together to lobby for free higher ed. It's so frustrating. Since I started teaching, the level of middle-management bureaucracy at my university has skyrocketed. There's all this unnecessary complexity that adds to cost. Plus, fancy new dorms and fitness centers and dining halls that look like a spa vacation. *grumble*
Right, but what if you could get the credentials you need to be an architect without all of that extra fluff. No dorms or fitness centers, just the classes you need for that job. AND that gave you the time and space to pursue liberal arts interests?
In my opinion, high school in the US, with its bevy of extra curricular activities, does more to reach that end then college electives do. When I was in high school I was also in the choir, the theater, dance, and so many things I was interested in pursuing after school. I don't remember anything from my elective classes.
I wonder if we need 1) vocational training and 2) space for self study and extra curricular involvement (ungraded, untested interests we can pursue).
There is no way to educate a whole architect without a well-rounded curriculum. Vitruvius was not wrong, then or now. I’m surprised that just because you can’t remember what you call “electives” (that I’m now unclear what specific courses you’re thinking of), doesn’t mean humanities and other topical classes don’t make impressions on students. They think they know so much from watching TikTok and YouTube but they really are so young and naive. At a time when people are already so siloed, we need more diverse education not less.
Vitruvius is marvelous, even for an absolute layperson.
Well yes, I agree we need a well-rounded education, and that that creates better architects. And I'm not suggesting they get that from TikTok and YouTube instead of from their college education. But I'm also not convinced they are getting that from one year of college electives.
Now, if we had free education all the way through and we included classes about ethics and morality and humanities as part of that, I think that would be great. But I also wonder if it could be better achieved outside of the education system like extra curricular activities are in high school!
I'm going with both/and here -- high school and college. And yes to free college - with application and aptitude for the proposed field of study.
That's what you get when the government finances higher education, a total disregard for costs. Universities should be the only ones assuming the risk of loaning a student money to pay for their education.
Basically typing out the same thing at the same moment!