There is a tendency to want the university to be a trade school rather than a place to cultivate analytic competency.
Parents who usually accompany their high school juniors or seniors on a campus tour are quick to seek reassurance that a given degree will lead to a job. It’s a natural concern. No parent wants their teen to follow a dead-end career path. There are reasonable estimates that perhaps as many as one-third of college graduates start their working lives in jobs that do not use what a good BA or BS degree would allow.
The standard parental hedge against under-employment is to usually steer high school graduates toward professional majors in college that sound like job categories: for example, a marketing major rather than a history major, accounting rather than art history, finance rather than philosophy. There is a tendency to want the university to be a trade school rather than a place to expand intellectual competence.
In my own field of Communication Studies its a virtual given that visiting parents will want to see our campus television studio. No one bothers to ask about the library. The reason is obvious. The studio seems like a workplace; parents are reassured. By contrast, the library looks less useful as a space where one simply “studies,” whatever that is. Nice, but less tangible.
A door at Oxford University representing Astronomy and Rhetoric, two of the seven original Liberal Arts.
My own view is that parents could better help their teens by flipping these priorities over, for several reasons. One is that the job a young student imagines today is not likely to exist in the same form in five or ten years. The title may be similar, but the intellectual skills will change. We still have librarians. But if they are going to assist patrons, they now need to be creative users of digital media. In addition, the nature of information is less linear; library staffers need to have minds that will bend in different ways. And, for the record, film and television majors do not spend most of their time inside a studio. They are usually out in the community shooting material.
Choosing a brand of soap may be easy, choosing a path for oneself and a family needs the advantage of high and wide horizons.
Parents are too quick to dismiss the value of a liberal arts degree. The widespread view is that it is a kind of intellectual smorgasbord focused on disciplines the faculty may like to teach, but have less relevance to the “real world.” They are wrong for a couple of reasons.
First, the original and still relevant meaning of a “liberal arts education” is the education of a free person. Even in these days of fraught politics, many if not enough students are fortunate to have the resources to construct a life for themselves that will open up their options. American life presents a huge ranges of potential choices. And while choosing a brand of soap may be easy, choosing a path for oneself needs the advantage of high and wide horizons. It makes sense to enlarge the circumference of the area of what we know. This also has the subtle but real advantage of enlarging the circumference of the expanding borderlands of the unknown. We are actually smarter for knowing the limits of our knowledge. Probes that have led a person to explore everything from logic to anthropology make us more empathetic and curious partners, parents, consumers and citizens.
I recently listened to the recorded rants of David Koresh, the Waco, Texas religious leader who sacrificed the lives of 79 members of his sect to the bullets and fire of federal ATF agents. His failed life is an extreme case. Even so, it seems likely that this high school dropout with a primitive theology would have been less lethal had he possessed the wider parameters of a decent education.
Second, the processes learned when studying sociology, psychology, reasoning, human communication or music are eminently practical in increasing a person’s choices later on. For example, most students who get undergraduate degrees in philosophy do not wither away, as some might think, nor do they typically become professional philosophers. My experience is that they tend to be whip-smart analysts of data and trends. The same could be said for a host of people trained in the fields of American literature, contemporary American history or interpersonal communication. These days, education is more about understanding systems and processes than static facts. So analysis and criticism—the essence of most Liberal Arts disciplines—is the perfect match for fields that want innovators, creative disruptors, and problem-solvers. The most evident self-starters I see on my own campus seem to be writing for the campus paper, producing plays and videos, or organizing special-interest clubs. They are not intimidated by engagement with members of a diverse community.
The value of these analytical skills was affirmed in a conversation with the parent of an applicant a few months ago. At an open house she mentioned that she worked on wall street for an investment firm, noting that they were especially interested in hiring people whose paths through college didn’t necessarily include majors in a business curriculum. She was suggesting that her firm wanted people who understood human and organizational problems, not just economic equations.
Blame our desire for simple cause and effect reasoning.
Anyone who spends a lot of time thinking about how Americans are persuaded will have no shortage of suggested strategies for particular situations. “Strategic Communication” is its own distinct sub-area of the communication field, mostly predicated on the idea that certain rhetorical inputs are likely to lead to particular effects. Most of us employ some version of this model. For example, you may be confident about predicting what will happen when you push Uncle Fred’s hot buttons.
Researchers in the 1930’s looking at the effects of film content on audiences similarly assumed large and uniform results: “magic bullets” that would work on most members in the same way. In our time, we may think that reminding a supporter that Trump’s actions offend the norms of the office will soften their enthusiasm. For example, he recently decided he would comment on Federal Reserve policy: a line no modern president has crossed. One model for the prediction is “dissonance theory.” You might assume that Donald Trump’s behavior is at odds with the supporter’s core values. Pointing that out ought to create mental stress and, therefore, the supporter’s reassessment. That’s one strategic equation. Yet, the attitudes of supporters seem reasonably resilient. Indeed, there is usually no “magic bullet” for producing change. Those 30’s researchers were surprised by the non-uniform responses their received. And it’s clear that attacks on the President frequently have the reverse of their intended effects. His supporters have dug in.
The reasons we don’t get straight line effects are numerous, but mostly cluster around some version of what psychologists used to call “selective perception” and what communication people call “motivated reasoning.” In both cases we look for alternative stories or accounts that can mitigate another’s assertion that we hold inconsistent views. We find ways to dismiss the world we don’t want to see.
What we are missing in this straight-line sequence is the serendipity of individual initiative.
In addition, blame our desire for simple cause and effect reasoning. A common social science paradigm usually has us looking for first causes and subsequent effects. Ostensibly, these chains offer a straight line of actions and subsequent behavioral results. But what we are missing in this view is the serendipity of individual initiative: what sociologist Robert Merton partly meant by the familiar idea of “unintended consequences.” It asks us to make generous allowances for human u-turns, wrong turns, delays, and alternate routes. Indeed, some of us are world-class deniers.
When I entered into study of persuasion years ago I was certain that first causes could be identified with some reliability. But years of study have moved me closer to a model that gives much wider latitude to the possibilities of disruption and denial. This is a kind of ‘pattern of no patterns’ that seems built into the American character and is easily obscured in social science reporting that needs to show clear effects.
It is human nature to be unpredictable. Sometimes even Uncle Fred may surprise us.
