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Notes -
Disclaimer: this is a serious test for shady thinking. My apologies. Consider this a strawman, and please try to confront a steelman.
Note: see disclaimer above. This is shady thinking in note format.
EDIT: This is mostly in response to https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-is-the-academic-job-market-so particularly thinking about Scott analyzing how the academic job market actually works. I bet Scott's analysis is super annoying to many of those in the market, and likewise super satisfying to others. My thesis is that the others are rationalists and the many are not.
idea
rationalists explain foreign things from "first principles"
they liken themselves to newton and hooke, exploring new frontiers
for better or worse
to the experts in the field, they are cringe and dilettante, sneer worthy
the problem
within every field, there are certain "touchy areas"
everyone understands the truth but pretends not to
a bigger problem
rationalists home in on touchy areas
rationalists can't "understand the truth but pretend not to"
rationalists "say the quiet part out loud"
the solution
demonize the rationalists
sneer at the rationalists
how cringe, what baby
Damn browser ate my reply, and I have no desire to retype it, in brief:
IPEDS Completions Survey shows more than 23 000 Americans obtain a bachelor's degree in history every year. That's just too damn many. Becoming a university researcher is the best career choice that utilizes their degree for most of them. There's no industry outside the academia that can consume that many graduates like it does in STEM and law and theology. Of course the universities exploit these rubes by dangling the carrot of tenure in front of them and letting anyone who wants major in history.
The best advice an adjunct teacher of history (or of English lit) can give to his or her students is: if you can dream of not being a historian and aren't independently wealthy, go major in something else. 2300 history majors is a much more sustainable number. 230 history majors is an even better one: everyone will be able to get a job as a historian.
I think honestly it’s a self-solving problem as long as the politicians can stop messing with the loans. The high cost of college is starting to make students more aware of major-related job prospects which should drastically cut down on vanity degrees. If you’re unqualified for a good paying job, yet spent (over a lifetime) over $100K on a degree you’re shutting yourself out of a lot of normal life experiences. That negative consequence, when seen by others, will lower the demand for those degrees.
I suspect that’s why the sudden push to simply wipe away the debt. It’s not for the students, it’s because the school’s’ economic model depends on fleecing humanities students to pay for the labs of students seeking actually useful degrees. Every student in the history department is paying just as much to read books and know things useful in case they’re ever invited on Jeopardy as the kid in a STEM class learning to build useful technology. Unless the debts get picked up by the government, this model will eventually fail when kids are no longer willing to pay big money to read books in the library.
And honestly, I think most humanizes should be autodidact pursuits. There are tons of resources, including online courses, books (and if they’re only enough, for free on Project Gutenberg), videos, museums, and so on. These resources are cheap if not free, and widely available. There’s not much added value to going through a history program at a university— you can ask the TA questions, you’ll be assigned things which I think would help in directing your study, but even this can be emulated with other methods if you are motivated enough.
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