![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
There is a post on Charlie Stross's blog regarding a pledge by Rishi Sunak to eliminate degrees which lead to less well-paying jobs. Aside from noting that such a programme would likely lead to the abolition of Greats, the degree held by the current PM - as a rule, degrees in classics are not roads to riches - this would seem to be irrelevant, as Tory party members seem to give Liz Truss a pronounced edge (not because she's any brighter, but because she is more in their image).
But what is the value of a university degree? In the STEM area, generally, the "useful" (engineering end of the scale) degrees apparently now have a genuinely useful life of about five years. If you have a degree in pure math, it doesn't age at all, but it is about as useful as a degree in philosophy (which also doesn't age at all, at least if it covered core subjects).
On the other hand, my current employer not only wanted proof of my degrees from the early 1980s in an unrelated field (well, two unrelated fields) but apparently had the same demand of a colleague whose degree is from the late 1970s. It didn't care what they were in - experience rendered that irrelevant - but they certainly wanted proof of graduation.
Whatever Sunak believes, most degrees which are not specialized professional degrees have about the same value: employers want "a degree" for a vast number of middle-class office jobs and don't particularly care what in. For all that university calendars pitch the practical application of the most abstract of disciplines to students, a course of studies spent studying Peter Abelard, Guido da Montefeltro, and Dante is generally just as useful as a credential as one spent studying the most "relevant" of subjects.
Not that the former is very likely, these days. Many if not most smaller universities have abandoned anything even loosely related to the kinds of education which would satisfy anyone with a real appetite for systematic or eccentric knowledge. (Larger universities retain them because they need to support schools of graduate studies across a full range of disciplines.)
I have three degrees, each with its own lesson in later years.
The first was a BA from Trent University. In those days - which are now, I gather, considered part of the "early days" despite my very clear sense that I was nearly a decade after the real early days - it was a reasonable place to go for a small-class humanities degree, even if its tutorial system did not approach real Oxbridge tutorials. I did a major in English Literature and minors in Mathematics and Classics. What I did would now be impossible; the calendar no longer supports the courses I took.
My second was an MA taken with the course work from a doctoral programme at The Johns Hopkins University. I got out because I disagreed with where the discipline (and the humanities in general) were going. I cannot say in retrospect that my assessment was mistaken.
I then proceeded to a law degree at the University of Toronto. I was really the only student in my year who approached it out of an interest in law as such, and got the greatest amount out of courses in jurisprudence and legal history, including a directed research course in legal history. I did not get an offer to article at any of the firms I interviewed at. However, the degree did give me the one actual "practical" use of any of my degrees: it gave me a foothold as a legal editor at a Toronto publishing firm.
While there, I eventually shifted function and became a software developer, which is a long and complex story in itself. By the end of the 1990s I was experienced enough to get a place at a dot com startup, and went from there into development in the financial sector. At no time from that time on did anyone ever show any interest whatsoever in what I had studied at university, or what my grades were.
In retrospect what I "should" have done from a professional point of view was taken the Descartes scholarship the University of Waterloo was happy to offer me and, instead of taking pure math (which was my then current interest) should have taken a course in math and computer science. I would have taken a short cut of nearly 15 years to the same career with better credentials and a better choice of employers. I'm not sure that would have been my best choice otherwise; my collections of classics and mediaevalia argue otherwise. (Though there's certainly an argument to be made that taking a second bachelor's degree in Computer Science rather than going to law school would have been a better idea.)
So what was the economic value of the degrees I have? Relatively limited; indeed, a single four-year degree that I did not take would have almost certainly had a bigger impact than the three degrees I did take. Their benefit was not at the vocational level but at a purely intellectual level. Most of the skills I have I had when I graduated from high school, although with less practice (with the exception of software development, which I did not take up until after I had finished university entirely).
There is a frequently made case for abstract knowledge that it eventually turns out to be more useful than practically-directed research (a classic example is the applicability of Lie algebras to particle physics; or, a level down, of understanding of particle physics and quantum mechanics to the use of semiconductors in computing). I am more inclined to make the argument that abstract knowledge is a value in itself, and that the willingness to support the extension of abstract knowledge is one of the things society is judged on.
But what is the value of a university degree? In the STEM area, generally, the "useful" (engineering end of the scale) degrees apparently now have a genuinely useful life of about five years. If you have a degree in pure math, it doesn't age at all, but it is about as useful as a degree in philosophy (which also doesn't age at all, at least if it covered core subjects).
On the other hand, my current employer not only wanted proof of my degrees from the early 1980s in an unrelated field (well, two unrelated fields) but apparently had the same demand of a colleague whose degree is from the late 1970s. It didn't care what they were in - experience rendered that irrelevant - but they certainly wanted proof of graduation.
Whatever Sunak believes, most degrees which are not specialized professional degrees have about the same value: employers want "a degree" for a vast number of middle-class office jobs and don't particularly care what in. For all that university calendars pitch the practical application of the most abstract of disciplines to students, a course of studies spent studying Peter Abelard, Guido da Montefeltro, and Dante is generally just as useful as a credential as one spent studying the most "relevant" of subjects.
Not that the former is very likely, these days. Many if not most smaller universities have abandoned anything even loosely related to the kinds of education which would satisfy anyone with a real appetite for systematic or eccentric knowledge. (Larger universities retain them because they need to support schools of graduate studies across a full range of disciplines.)
I have three degrees, each with its own lesson in later years.
The first was a BA from Trent University. In those days - which are now, I gather, considered part of the "early days" despite my very clear sense that I was nearly a decade after the real early days - it was a reasonable place to go for a small-class humanities degree, even if its tutorial system did not approach real Oxbridge tutorials. I did a major in English Literature and minors in Mathematics and Classics. What I did would now be impossible; the calendar no longer supports the courses I took.
My second was an MA taken with the course work from a doctoral programme at The Johns Hopkins University. I got out because I disagreed with where the discipline (and the humanities in general) were going. I cannot say in retrospect that my assessment was mistaken.
I then proceeded to a law degree at the University of Toronto. I was really the only student in my year who approached it out of an interest in law as such, and got the greatest amount out of courses in jurisprudence and legal history, including a directed research course in legal history. I did not get an offer to article at any of the firms I interviewed at. However, the degree did give me the one actual "practical" use of any of my degrees: it gave me a foothold as a legal editor at a Toronto publishing firm.
While there, I eventually shifted function and became a software developer, which is a long and complex story in itself. By the end of the 1990s I was experienced enough to get a place at a dot com startup, and went from there into development in the financial sector. At no time from that time on did anyone ever show any interest whatsoever in what I had studied at university, or what my grades were.
In retrospect what I "should" have done from a professional point of view was taken the Descartes scholarship the University of Waterloo was happy to offer me and, instead of taking pure math (which was my then current interest) should have taken a course in math and computer science. I would have taken a short cut of nearly 15 years to the same career with better credentials and a better choice of employers. I'm not sure that would have been my best choice otherwise; my collections of classics and mediaevalia argue otherwise. (Though there's certainly an argument to be made that taking a second bachelor's degree in Computer Science rather than going to law school would have been a better idea.)
So what was the economic value of the degrees I have? Relatively limited; indeed, a single four-year degree that I did not take would have almost certainly had a bigger impact than the three degrees I did take. Their benefit was not at the vocational level but at a purely intellectual level. Most of the skills I have I had when I graduated from high school, although with less practice (with the exception of software development, which I did not take up until after I had finished university entirely).
There is a frequently made case for abstract knowledge that it eventually turns out to be more useful than practically-directed research (a classic example is the applicability of Lie algebras to particle physics; or, a level down, of understanding of particle physics and quantum mechanics to the use of semiconductors in computing). I am more inclined to make the argument that abstract knowledge is a value in itself, and that the willingness to support the extension of abstract knowledge is one of the things society is judged on.
