The Growth of College Grads in Dead-End Jobs

For context: I spent my time across the arts and sciences at a top 20 school and graduated with a very high GPA — all without ever writing a paper longer than 12 pages. A lot of this was my fault, but it should not have been close to possible for me to graduate.

The problem to me is larger than which degree someone graduated in. It's that college isn't rigorous enough in general, and the only people who see the real benefits of education are people that study the sciences AND are curious and motivated. See, with science, business, and technology, the worst case scenario is that the teacher is terrible and the textbook takes over the responsibility of pedagogy. This, along with a motivated student, is enough to salvage an education.

In the humanities and the social 'sciences' (which, in my opinion aren't really science in how we tend to define it these days — and I say that as a great admirer of sociology, political science, psychology, and economics), motivation from the student isn't enough to save them from the worst case scenario: the student graduates underdeveloped, unfocused, and scattered with only the seeds of critical mind if the curriculum and teaching is poor. And that worst case scenario happens A LOT since, as previously mentioned, lack of rigor and inconsistent teaching quality is poor across all departments at the university level. With very few exceptions, my social science peers didn't have even a high level understanding of the alternatives to a intellectual framework like positivism. I doubt they would even know what I would mean by an intellectual framework or positivism. Technical students don't need to know this (though they should), but as a social science student, you can't do your most basic work without an understanding of such topics.

College has become a replacement for high school, because high school has become a daycare. University teaching is inconsistent because universities are confused on their role in society. This teaching problem is cross-discipline. However, with the sciences, the textbooks can more or less set an expectation of learning. Other subjects require a very disciplined teaching method to be valuable — the professor must direct the path. Humanities and social sciences require boldness and direction from its teachers, which they can't do because the university is a hostile environment for professors.

The only solution I see to this problem (on a personal level) is to encourage aspiring college students to choose the HARDEST college (the reading difficulty and writing quantity should terrify the applicant), which explicitly and forcefully values teaching, and has the highest level of prestige (for when it comes time to showing that resume around).

If you're a humanities or social science major, you should be reading at least a book every week (I'll give you 2 weeks for Das Capital ;) and always MULTIPLE books on any topic. Otherwise, you're wasting your time and money. I wish someone told me this, so I hope a high school or current college student comes across this comment and thinks about transferring to a serious institution.

Ironically, my dad's advice to me was that college-level English is completely useless, maybe even counterproductive, and I'd be better off doing almost anything else with my time. He had a master's in English and made his living doing training (ie, public speaking) and writing books (over 40 of them).

His take is that communication absolutely critical. But what college English courses teach you is not so much how to communicate as how to bludgeon readers with how terribly erudite you are by using longwinded, stilted, and dense verbiage. ie, they teach you the exact wrong way to write.

Yeah. I think being able to write is one of those things that acts as a multiplier on your other skills; It's not worth all that much by itself, but knowing how to write and having some other skill is vastly more valuable than just having that other skill.

Right now? I think just programming pays pretty okay, even when you don't have much else... but I don't think that will last forever. I think in the future, having basic programming skills won't get you a good job by themselves, but basic programming skills plus something else will be vastly more valuable than just that other skill alone.

>His take is that communication absolutely critical. But what college English courses teach you is not so much how to communicate as how to bludgeon readers with how terribly erudite you are by using longwinded, stilted, and dense verbiage. ie, they teach you the exact wrong way to write.

Yeah, but I was talking about the "gen-ed" classes. I would expect gen-ed English to be, you know, basic. I would expect graduate courses in English to be more about writing as art, which is rather less generally useful.

You're right, I made a mistake.

I should have pointed out that I didn't do anything of this stuff while in college. I didn't really know what positivism was. I didn't read Das Kapital (I didn't even spell it right!). I didn't know what an intellectual framework was.

But I've played catch-up since graduating. I hope to save someone else that dysfunction by just going to a proper institution that cares about disciplined learning.