Fall and the High Holidays Moon

Saturday gratefuls: Tal. Georgeta. Nitya. The Importance of Being Earnest. Stagedoor Theater. A late Night. Gabe. This afternoon. Blue. Green. Gold. On Black Mountain. Solar panels soaking in the Sun. Boiler Medic. Geowater. Vince. Snowplowing set. Hawai’i. Minnesota. Adventure. Home. The housing market.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Nitya’s performance

On the subject of liberal arts. If you pay any attention at all to the world of higher education, you know that the liberal arts have been and are under heavy fire from pragmatists of all sorts. Lists of majors that “pay off” are common with Philosophy degrees and Anthropology degrees easily targeted as low earning degrees and not worth the investment. Usually here investment means amount of money for the degree. Guess who has a Philosophy and an Anthropology degree? Yep.

Or, the fabled English major. God help the education major, the arts major. Doomed to a lifetime of depressed financial potential. God better help them because no one in the STEM or Health fields will.

My own conjecture about the roots of this issue lies in the long ago days of decent vocational education, days when blue collar workers could learn welding, carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, auto body and mechanics, cosmetology, secretarial skills and expect to earn a decent living from those skills. By decent living I mean the ability to do three things: buy a house and a car, afford good medical care and food, and a good education for your children.

Three things happened to first confuse then demolish this route to the American dream. First, American manufacturers lost the will to compete with the cheaper labor and goods available in countries like Japan and China. Jobs, blue collar jobs, left the country. Second, foreign goods began to appear in the United States that were not only comparable to US made goods, but cheaper in price, and sometimes, especially in the unfortunate instance of vehicles, better. Third, the combination of one and two lead to the Rust Belt effect where factories closed and well-paying jobs available to persons with a high school degree or even less vanished. Almost overnight.

This is the story, writ large, of my hometown, Alexandria, Indiana. In postwar times, say 1950 to 1970 or so, Alexandria had a thriving main street, Harrison Avenue. On it were two movie theaters: The Town and The Alex. Two grocery stores, Kroger’s and Coxes. Two dime stores, Murphy’s and Danner’s. Broyles’  Furniture. Fermen’s Womens Wear and Baumgartner’s Mens Wear. Mahony’s Shoes. Guilkey’s shoe shop and newsstand. Rexall’s Drugs and Bailey Drugs. The Bakery. The Yankee Bar. Conway’s barbershop.

On Friday and Saturday nights kids from neighboring smaller towns would come to Alexandria to drag main, go to the Kid Canteen, bowl. Parades, big parades, happened on Decoration Day and at Homecoming. Sidewalk Sale days drew customers downtown like weekend food stalls in Bangkok’s Chinatown.

When the crash came, it came fast. By 1974 most of those businesses had altered or closed. In later years plywood fronts would replace plate glass windows. Whole families would leave town in the dead of night, closing the curtains before they left because they could no longer pay their mortgages. Detroit had lost the battle with Volkswagen and Toyota.

I know. You’re thinking, he’s lost the plot. What does this have to do with the liberal arts? Vocational education lead nowhere. Who needed welders? Electricians. Unions began to decline in influence, too, and as they did so did blue collar wages across the board.

It was in this time that the lie of college for everyone began its insidious infiltration into the American zeitgeist. Get a BA and you’ll be safe. College graduates out earn high school graduates. And, this is true. Read this: Do college grads really earn more than high school grads.

And this is the where the story takes its twist. With vocational education or factory union jobs no longer a safe bet for that house and car, good medical care and food, what was left for the blue collar worker? College for all. We’re a small d democratic country. We’re all equal. So it seemed to make sense.

Except it doesn’t. College education takes a certain set of skills and gifts not widely distributed in any population. First, a basic level of intellect. Then, reading and writing skills. A taste for the sort of work required to sit through lectures, study, and write papers or lab reports. This is not about the idea of equality before the law which Americans often confuse with a leveling equality of skills and talents.

Such a leveling does not exist in the US population or any other. I could post links to several articles about the benefits of a college education. You could search them for an admission of the basic requirements to thrive in college. And find nothing.

With the dollar value of blue collar work on the decline along with it went the pride that came with hard work and a decent income. Many blue collar workers used to earn as much liberal arts majors do now. Not anymore. Now the blue collar worker scans and palletizes objects in Amazon or UPS warehouses, sweeps the floors of elementary schools, works in the volatile construction industry. Barely earning a long ago out of date minimum wage.

It was in this transition to an economy with few well-paying lifetime jobs for high school grads that saw white supremacy once again more obvious in US culture. It never left, of course, but it now purported to explain the poor white males declining, even vanishing, prospects. See this recent article by Thomas Edsall, Two Americas.

When the notion of a college education for all began to gain traction in the US mindset, it triggered a concomitant expectation that a college education would deliver a financial reward for those who stuck it out. College education began to replace the old vocational education model where a specific career with specific financial expectations were the norm for students.

And finally we come to the point: In this climate focused on the dollar value of a college education, college education as vocational education, the liberal arts begin to look like a bad bet. Cue the lists of majors and their earning power.

See these four points from a Georgetown University article on the Economic Value of College:

Now we have this remarkable reality in our country. Blue collar workers have trouble, big trouble earning a decent income. Ironically, the communities of color who suffer along with the poor, white male high school grad, have developed ways of coping with economic hardships. See the Edsall article.

And, colleges and universities, stuffed into a false equivalency with vocational education, have cheapened the word value by taking up the talking point of the dollar value of a college education as a primary rationale for attendance.

The problem in other words is not with the liberal arts, but with the mindset that places money as the determiner of a good result in a post-high school education.

This is not only a travesty, it’s a tragedy. And how would you know this unless you had a liberal arts education?

Here’s a good example of what a liberal arts education can do and why it’s not only valuable (good value), but essential:

I don’t know whether the liberal arts in the college and university setting will survive the 21st century. But philosophy, theater, music, painting, sculpture, literature and the other liberal arts will survive. Why? Because we need critical thinking, effective communication, rational analysis, and ethical reasoning to understand and weigh the life or death choices facing humanity. We need them.