Yesterday, I discussed my lack of sympathy for students who majored in the humanities without any particular direction - and who then end up waiting tables as described in a recent New York Times article. In that post, I also commented that the liberal arts are an important component of university education. This blog post will attempt to answer how to major in the humanities while avoiding the unsavory service jobs that some graduates have faced upon graduation.
I'll discuss three plans: 1) Humanities Plus, 2) Practical Humanities, and 3) Pure Humanities.
Plan #1: Humanities Plus
This plan complements a major in a humanities discipline with a skill-based discipline like statistics, computer science, economics, engineering, business, etc. (one could arguably add a critical language like Chinese or Arabic as well if at a high proficiency). This particular approach allows for a tremendous amount of choice, and can also provide considerable depth in the humanities field. A minor in a skills-based discipline at Stanford is 32 units, and if these are spread over 12 quarters, one could take as few as 3 units a quarter to attain the minor at graduation.
While some are surprised to hear this, many careers only require basic knowledge of a few skills - the rest are provided on the job through training and are customized for the particular your particular job function. For instance, technical writing does not require a tremendous amount of knowledge of engineering, but strong communications abilities are crucial for success. Stated without further comment, consulting and finance work in much the same way too. A minor can thus open important new career fields that were not previously available.
In some ways, this is the plan that I chose in my undergraduate education. While I majored in Mathematical and Computational Sciences, I
Meet the members of what might be called Generation Limbo: highly educated 20-somethings, whose careers are stuck in neutral, coping with dead-end jobs and listless prospects.
And so they wait: for the economy to turn, for good jobs to materialize, for their lucky break. Some do so bitterly, frustrated that their well-mapped careers have gone astray. Others do so anxiously, wondering how they are going to pay their rent, their school loans, their living expenses - sometimes resorting to once-unthinkable government handouts.
The views of this group are summarized by one student in particular:
"We did everything we were supposed to," said Stephanie Morales, 23, who graduated from Dartmouth College in 2009 with hopes of working in the arts. Instead she ended up waiting tables at a Chart House restaurant in Weehawken, N.J., earning $2.17 an hour plus tips, to pay off her student loans. "What was the point of working so hard for 22 years if there was nothing out there?" said Ms. Morales, who is now a paralegal and plans on attending law school.
How much sympathy should we have for these students? More specifically, how much sympathy should we have for others in our generation who have been caught up in a bad economic situation?
Despite being empathetic and sympathetic for anyone caught in this economic morass, I can't help but feel that these people made seriously bad decisions - majoring in areas like English and the arts that have poor job prospects no matter what the outlook of the economy. While I am a strident defender of the classic liberal arts, these subjects must be
I have arrived in South Korea, and now that the jetlag and immigration offices have been handled, I finally have the time to begin updating this blog with a little more frequency (of course, I am no doubt setting myself up to fail on that point).
I study industrial policy, which is heavily related to science and technology policy and political economy. The picture above, shot in the center of Seoul, encapsulates what in my mind is so fascinating about South Korea: a rush to the future at breakneck speed. Few countries have ever industrialized as fast as South Korea, and despite the attempt of many, I believe those ranks will stay rather small even into the future.
This NYTimes article, "Does America Need Manufacturing?," perfectly encapsulates why industrial policy must become a major component of the government's efforts to renew and rebuild the American economy. There are strong echoes in this article of Clyde Prestowitz' "The Betrayal of American Propserity," a book that convinced me to move away from software programming and toward economics.
Important Quotes:
For decades, the federal government has generally resisted throwing its weight - and its money - behind particular industries. If the market was killing manufacturing jobs, it was pointless to fight it. The government wasn't in the business of picking winners.
Repatriating a high-tech manufacturing plant to the United States is not simply a matter of hiring the local talent. It requires good-old foreign know-how. "We call it 'copy exact,' " Forcier said. "We bought a company in Korea that had the technology around this type of battery and had developed the manufacturing process there. We basically brought that here, copied it exactly and scaled it up." A123 also brought a team of six Korean engineers to help transfer the technology to the U.S. and sent a team of Americans to Korea to learn.
And most importantly to what I study:
Federal agencies like the Department of Energy have long financed scientific research - through university grants, for instance - on technologies like lithium-ion batteries. But a basic feature of government policy is to allow corporations and entrepreneurs to pick through the results of that research, commercialize the promising ideas and let the market sort things out. In other countries, it often works differently. Governments are more willing to help companies pool information about a new industry or technology and (especially in Korea and China) assist with the early-stagecommercialization of products, including
Marc Andreessen is certainly bullish on the value of software if his recent op-ed in the WSJ, entitled "Why Software Is Eating The World," is any indication. Andreessen writes that "My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy." He then proceeds to list almost every industry in existence (no really, he has separate paragraphs for all of them) and how they are being affected by software.
His main point though, is that these developments in software "makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the recent turmoil in the stock market." I'm not optimistic.
No other force in existence today is driving greater social inequality than the development of software. The death of Border's also means the death of the jobs for almost 20,000 employees in the United States, yet those jobs are not re-materializing in quantity elsewhere in the economy. Amazon.com, theoretically the most important competitor for Borders for instance, only has 34,000 employees. This disruption is at the heart of the current internet revolution.
I believe in progress. I don't shed a tear at the demise of the buggy-whip manufacturers who confronted the rise of the automobile - Detroit's rise provided a bounty to millions. I worked at Google this past summer building a new social network, and I saw progress happening in real-time. But is software really providing progress? Software disruption has often meant replacing thousands of people with a single piece of software designed by a few dozen or hundred people.
We are approaching a society in which the only occupation will be software programmer. That
The New York Times reports on the quick decline of vocational education in the United States, due to a greater push by the Obama Administration and others to get students to college. While funding remains over a $1 billion, the total funds have declined (and are a pittance compared to funding for colleges and universities). Such an overwrought plan, though, is likely to be tremendously damaging to students for whom a vocational education is a perfect fit. We must be mindful that the future global workforce is going to need a spectrum of skills, including those provided by a vocational education. There is an elitism about a college degree that I think is unwarranted.
Members of the Obama Administration have complained that Jon Huntsman is running for the presidency after the president appointed him as ambassador to China. It seems to me that such anger is misplaced - if Huntsman benefited from the arrangement, it was ultimately the president's decision. There may not have been a tacit agreement between the two regarding Huntsman's candidacy, but we cannot forget that Obama was trying to avoid a race with Huntsman in the first place. Seems as if each side played against the other.
Talks on the deficit seem to be breaking down quickly. Republicans have little incentive to solve the deficit, and Obama is weak in support. This is a very dangerous spot for the United States, and mirrors the situation being seen in Minnesota: neither side has an incentive to get the policy right. The tea party conservatives that are pushing hard against a compromise need to be reminded that living in a pluralistic democracy requires just that - compromise. Without that, our democracy will fall apart.
Texas Governor Rick Perry is driving to create metrics to hold professors accountable for
People who joined the military since 9/11, when the money spigot was opened full, have no sense of the budget environment they are heading into. Kind of reminds me of the time during the Depression when the military took a month-long pay holiday. Back then George Marshall, overseeing a garrison, encouraged his subordinates to make sure that married soldiers planted vegetable gardens, to ensure that their families would eat.
The state's two-tier system has long been seen as a model of public higher education, with the University of California's 10 campuses as major research hubs and the California State University's network of 23 campuses graduating tens of thousands each year. But the cuts, which are the biggest in the state's history, threaten to erode the system's stellar reputation.
"There's no question that California has had the most emulated public universities in the nation, and for the rest of the world," said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education. "What we are seeing is the abandonment of the state's commitment to make California's education available to all its citizens."
The architecture for the system came from California's Master Plan during the 1960s, a time when Berkeley was among the great universities of the nation (and led by one of the greats of higher education administration - Clark Kerr, known for coining the term multiversity). The destruction of those dreams is shocking when one considers that the system lasted only about a single generation - far shorter than the visionaries behind it intended.
The second story comes from Minnesota, where the state government continues to be shut down over an impasse regarding the state's budget. The Star Tribune's introduction says it all:
Budget talks have produced few clues about how Minnesota's historic government shutdown will end, except for one: Schools likely will pay the price for yet another stalemate in St. Paul.
The state intends to withhold payment to the schools so that the money flows from a
Hi, I'm Danny. I'm Head of Editorial at VC firm Lux Capital, where I publish the Riskgaming newsletter, podcast, and game scenarios. I'm also a Fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York. I analyze science, technology, finance and the human condition.
Formerly, I was managing editor at TechCrunch and a venture capitalist at Charles River Ventures and General Catalyst.
