"People just can’t afford to be educated; they almost have to be trained.”
That from a former college president, quoted in the Wall Street Journal the other day. He didn’t mean it in a good way.
The story was about the number of liberal arts colleges that aren’t any more. Instead, more and more are switching to training young people for the workforce. The number of degrees in humanities has dropped almost 9 percent in two years, and programs on the upswing focus on math, security, engineering and business. You know, the important stuff. Or as a CEO of a “labor market analytics” firm told the Journal: “Go study feminist anthropology, but make sure you’re picking up some skills on the periphery so that you can get a job when you graduate.”
Leave it to the CEO of a labor market analytic firm to insult a liberal education.
After all, why read? Why research and write a thesis about some moldy historical era? Or learn Latin? Didn’t you hear it’s a dead language? Artes liberales may have been a big deal in antiquity, when it was thought that such an education made better citizens, who not only understood geometry and grammar, but rhetoric, logic, and astronomy, too. These days, you need to know how to optimize cost efficiencies to leverage key learnings. Which is easier to understand than most of Shakespeare. Why do any of that elective stuff in college when there’s a labor market to analyze?
“Note, too, that a faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and permits it not to be cruel.”—Ovid.
Yeah, but who listens to poets anymore? There’s no money in it.