I'm surprised so many folks defend the university system for fine arts. It's a relatively modern notion, as in only a few decades! Historically, arts education is provided in museum, academy, apprentice, and/or community settings. Academic (as in the modern university system) art is still in its early stages and deserves criticism. I assume much of our cohort are in a worse position for their commitment to an art degree.
In the near term, AI will override any and all non-physical skills. However AI is not able to create or imagine, it can only mimic and regurgitate. Additionally, it cannot fix a leaking shower, and it cannot make your bed. Add in physical real-world limitations and complexities,(randomness and disorder), and you have a world where physical skills and artistic abilities will dominate.
People will value authenticity, human touch and the magic that is human creativity (love) more and more as the non-physical world becomes less and less real.
Makers, Do-ers, Designers and Caretakers will dominate the workforce in 25 years.
People do value human creativity, but why do you think that comes from the degree mills and monocultures of the humanities departments? I don't agree that these departments foster creativity, rather the opposite, they foster conformity. There are lots of concrete real life examples of this.
I think that creativity doesn't come from humanities departments, but more likely, organically from counter culture. Who doesn't know what a rick roll is? This did not come from a humanities department.
Edit:
Forgot to add my second point: AI is going to let people outside the mainstream produce genuinely credible, professional-level work without a massive budget.
That means further devaluing of establishment institutions like humanities departments. It strips away the gatekeeping power, deciding who gets to count as legit. AI blows that up.
I vaguely recall even creative art degrees as being looked down upon by artists as teaching you to conform to certain styles, essentially mimicry rather than creativity (though it has been some years since anyone in my network attended one).
In any case, despite the waxing philosophical of the personal growth value of a humanities degree, there's still the fact that every college and university also advertises job placement rates of their majors. Individual courses may focus on specific topics, but the people taking your money are promising job opportunities to parents and school councilors to convince them that the over inflated price tags are worth it.
Yes, they are.
> There are dedicated schools to go to for things like graphics design and other creative degree
Yes, there are dedicated trade schools for graphic design just like there are coding bootcamps.
There are also university degree programs designed for creative artists. (And yes, there are universities that specialize exclusively, or nearly so, in those degrees and are highly regarded within them, just as is the case in STEM.)
There are some art-adjacent degrees that aren't primarily focussed on doing art (Art History being the most common and well-known one) and some of the creative-focussed programs may have options to focus on more critical/analytical vs. practical concentrations available, as well.
But creative degrees focussed on actual creative output whether writing or film or theater or dance or music or photography or other visual art are a very big slice of the humanities.
But the result doesn't seem to be very creative, so what is the point?
At least that's my assumption from experience.
I am quite confident that not only is philosophy a waste when it comes to finding gainful employment, going to law school to put that philosophy to good use is just doubling down on the same bad gamble. Large fraction? What about the remainder?
You believe this to be the case, because you're relying on the statistics provided by the office I described.
>But going to a "third tier toilet" law school seldom pays off, at least not financially.
This is a solid T2 school. But if you were working at Subway whatever hours they'd give you, they marked you down as employed for the purposes of saying their graduates get jobs.
If you take the stance that education's function is to act like a feeder for business institutions; I guess? But that's only one byproduct of a strong education. Another is research; the other is critical thinking and civil productivity as a whole.
I'm as pro-capital as any private industry-focused tech worker is; but lets not pretend that's all the value we get out of the humanities.
Ever watch Netflix these days? Woof.
The fact is, the entire college/university system is outsized and wrong-fit for what most people actually need. And while I don't think humanities programs should be cut from universities, I also don't think that taxpayer backed student loans or payouts should be made for programs that have vastly more people enrolled in than the general economy has a demand/need for.
I'd like to see more accredited options for trade schools beyond what people currently think of as trades. From accounting, to software development. I know there are some schools that focus on these things, I just think they should be more at the forefront and higher profile options.
We don't need to have different institutions to grant different degrees with different levels of marketability. A college that only taught lucrative subjects and a college that taught non-lucrative subjects would both offer less educational value than a single college that offered the full range.
I'm fine with people choosing whatever they want... but then the question comes down to how/who pays for it... and I'm emphatically not in favor of public (taxpayer) funding for programs that don't have a direct need/demand in society or the economy in general.
You want to be a fine arts major.. go for it. It may be harder if you need student loans to pay for it, when there's a few thousand people working on that degree and a few hundred jobs in the world of demand.
A bachelor's degree is required to be a K-12 teacher, so if it's impossible for teachers to pay undergraduate student loans, the problem is not with the teacher or the degree they chose to get.
Your solution is like pointing out that the patient can't tolerate food anymore, so the solution is just not to feed them. It's all true! And also misses the fact that something is causing the patient to starve.
If the argument is that everyone should focus on the arts at the expense of everything else, it's hard to imagine that's an ideal outcome relative to alternatives. If we're not arguing that everyone should focus 100% on the arts (no other degrees should be available), then it's a matter of degree and certainly some outcomes might end up with more people pursuing the arts than what society needs.
Ironically, with chronic obesity and the related metabolic disorders becoming absolutely epidemic, people might do well to eat less. I can manage 48 hours at a stretch, it's only psychologically discomforting, I wish I could go 72 hours. It's like we have some sort of racial memory of the famines our ancestors suffered tens of thousands of years ago, and now we can't stop gorging ourselves.
>At the same time, a healthy society needs people who are trained in the arts and humanities.
Everyone thinks that the thing that they learned to do is what everyone should learn to do. Car mechanics think that people should be able to do repairs, at least know a little more about what goes wrong. And guess what? Our economy relies on them, and they're right... we do need people who can repair them. Janitors think that people should be able to clean things up. And guess what? We do need people who can clean things up. Shipbuilders, steelworkers, construction workers, farmers... we need people who can do those things.
No one was ever in danger and needed to be able to know Titian's third most famous painting. No one was ever rescued by liberal arts graduate's knowledge of third rate classical composers.
>I would also argue that, not coincidentally, our society is unhealthy, and getting more so.
I would agree. People need gainful employment opportunities, and the training to be able to take advantage of those. They need to enter adulthood debt free, and not just student debt, but to also know that the government isn't mortgaging their future paying for a bloated secondary education system today that is wasting years of their lives and hundreds of billions in fortune setting them up to fail. If academia doesn't want to be the vocational schools that it dreads to be associated with, then it should shut up and quit pretending that it has much to offer the vast majority of people. Maybe it didn't claim that these degrees would set everyone up for life, but it certainly didn't protest when others made that claim for it.
>despite being richer and more able to afford the arts than at any point in history.
We're all actually poor. As a country. (Other countries too, come to that.) We remember having once been rich, and we're in denial about it no longer being true. We can't even afford social security, old people will need to start dying sooner. Even the so-called billionaires for the most part just have a pile of stock certificates in the vault. Even on this very website, we see constant links about making people live in pods because it's no longer possible to build housing anyone can afford. You now rent the things your grandparents used to buy outright, and to buy seconds and thirds when they got bored with the first. You tell yourself it's because it's more convenient, but you couldn't afford to pay for it up front if you wanted.
We're that married couple swimming in credit card debt. They deny that it's a big deal, look here we can juggle this one and use that one to pay the minimum payment on the third card. And don't you think we can't keep doing that, we'll be able to do it next month too! But I'm not even allowed to talk about it, because a full 8 or 9 years ago the people on the left told everyone that credit card analogies don't work for a country as big and rich as the United States.
Fewer than 7% of all high school graduates should even go on to higher education. High school should become more strict, willing to flunk everyone who fails to meet rigorous standards. We need our government to make a true effort to reindustrialize.
At the minimum Calculus/Stats + a CS class + some kind of science should be the absolute bare minimum.
I think even the English majors should be required to take all 3 calculus courses to graduate.
Really? Hollywood operates on the efforts of screenwriters and digital rendering masters, both areas very informed by poetry and painting. Graphic design and quick language are the basis of online ads, which in turn are what supports the likes of Facebook and Google. If not for the wordsmiths and visual artists, the modern internet would be a very different place.
And without the DRM, lockdown and prosecution demands of Hollywood, the internet would indeed be a better, freer place.
I know people will push back and say that is not the point of the university. But it doesn't change the fact that our economy is not built on poetry and painting, but we educate large number of people to specialize as one. Those people are instead left in debt with no path forward in their chosen field.