10 'Useless' Degrees (Bullshit)

My friend Zak is a master of the thought-provoking rant. He posted this quite awhile ago but it’s really stuck with me in this tricky post-graduation transition.

zakzawaduk:

Okay, I need to rant a bit.

The understanding that a degree is only worth the job it gets you afterwards is extremely problematic. It creates an influx of students at universities, negatively influencing the teacher-student ratio. It also perpetuates the notion that being in university is merely a necessary step to something better and not an amazing experience in and of itself.

Most importantly, this understanding perpetuates the notion that certain degrees are “worthless”: the idea that if you don’t have a job because you have an art history degree, then it’s your own damn fault. Unemployment is a problem of choice then: why the hell didn’t you just do engineering? There’s tons of jobs in biochemistry, why didn’t you study that?

Typically, it is arts degrees that are constructed as ‘worthless’. Proponents of this view clearly have things backwards. It’s not an art student’s fault that she can’t get a job. We live in a philistine world where the arts are completely undervalued; that is, they are considered useless only because we live in a world that values profit, overproduction, and globalization. Art does not lend itself to these capitalist processes; hence, it’s apparent ‘uselessness’. The art history major is unemployed not because of her skills, personal qualities, professionalism, ingenuity, or level of knowledge. The art history major is unemployed because people don’t give a shit about museums, art, or creative processes. They don’t mesh well with the capitalist paradigm we find ourselves in.

So again, I turn back to the concept of ‘uselessness’. Is the argument here really that the art history grad should have done engineering because they could have gotten a societally valued job? I believe the argument needs to be shifted: everyone else needs to get their shit together and recognize the value in these professional areas. Our world is seriously lacking.

The Philistine not only ignores all conditions of life which are not his own but also demands that the rest of mankind should fashion its mode of existence after his own.

-Goethe

4 months ago