Valin Posted August 29, 2022 Share Posted August 29, 2022 Noahpinion Did America produce too many frustrated college graduates in the 2000s and 2010s? Noah Smith Aug. 25 2022 Here’s an eye-opening bit of data: The percent of U.S. college students majoring in the humanities has absolutely crashed since 2010. Quote @benmschmidt @ipeds_nces just released new data on degree completions for the 2021 class (the first class with a full semester during the pandemic.) History and Religion have both joined English in being down to half their 2000s peak; philosophy's rebound persists, while area studies falls. Aug 23 2022 Ben Schmidt has many more interesting data points in his Twitter thread. To me the most striking was that there are now almost as many people majoring in computer science as in all of the humanities put together: Quote @benmschmidt The downtick in humanities this year pushes up the ETA for when CS is larger than all humanities degrees together to one of the classes currently in college. Aug 23 2022 (Snip) (Snip) The government and universities have to be part of this too. Canceling student debt is fine, but long-term reforms to reduce the cost of college, and the debt burdens students incur, will reduce the stakes of the post-college job scramble. Universities should avoid marketing materials that depict them as a golden ticket to wealth and intellectual fulfillment, and should offer career counseling that prepare students for a realistic job market. And government should implement apprenticeships, vocational education, free community college, and other programs that make working-class life a decent bet — in addition to reducing inequality, this will make college graduates feel less “elite” relative to their non-college peers. Of course, an expectations reset isn’t permanent. If we manage to restore good times, future generations will get used to that upward escalator, and they’ll form extrapolative expectations for their own glide path to success. But that’s a worry for the future. If the Elite Overproduction Hypothesis is true, then our best bet to calm our age of unrest is to bring our dreams down to Earth. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Valin Posted August 29, 2022 Author Share Posted August 29, 2022 Thee is however some Bad News Maybe not ALL bad Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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