Low value degrees

/rant

Are we ever going to get tired of the cheap shots at Social Sciences and Humanities programs? Everybody from politicians to university administrators seems to have an opinion on just how worthless those degrees are. The latest round of this sordid story is playing itself out in all the predictable ways in the UK right now. I mean it makes sense. After screwing themselves over with Brexit, going after higher ed is a logical next step in how-to-tank-your-society project - I am assuming that’s the goal - it’s either deliberate or just unbelievably, monumentally, mindbogglingly stupid. Which is definitely an option here.

And there is no better explanation of how idiotic these discussions are than this long story on the Puppetry Major at the University of West Virginia. It’s a lovely program that, as you would expect, has a very small number of students because, let’s face it, we don’t need a thousand puppet grads every year, we need just a few. Here is where administrative logic breaks down. If the program attracted a thousand students instead of a dozen, it would be safe because it would be a high-value program. The fact that we would have extra 988 puppeteers doesn’t matter (incidentally, this feeds directly into the narrative of useless degrees) because what matters is bums in seats, which gets interpreted as responding to some mystical market forces. But that is not the value of programs like that at all. Those metrics (at the university I work at we call them KPIs - Key Performance Indicators) are completely pointless because they measure wrong things. The value of programs like that, programs like Folklore and Creative Writing here in Newfoundland, for example, is that they quite literally keep, propagate and nurture cultural expression of the entire society. They actually help us deal with the thorniest social problems we are facing today. These programs are not some sort of a charity we extend to a few struggling artists and academics, but an investment in expanding our own way of understanding what is happening to us as a people, as a society, and as individuals and developing new ways to translate that understanding into a broader societal narrative. Instead of figuring out how to help STEM folks take advantage of that enormous creativity and expertise down the hall or in the building across the street so that they can gain better understanding of what is that they are doing and why it matters, we are closing those discussions down precisely when we need them the most.

/end rant

I made the photograph above some time ago at Memorial’s fabulous QEII Library - my favourite part of this university.