“College Student Goes for the Big Bucks”
LOS ANGELES — After dutifully considering post-graduation earnings, employment outcomes, and occupational prestige, college sophomore Garrett Fleischman has decided to major in English.
“I’ve never really known what I want to do, but I want to make lots of money, so English seemed like a good fit for me,” Fleischman explains. “Majoring in something like economics or computer science would be fun, but I don’t want to waste my tuition on stuff I could never apply in the real world”
“I respect Garrett’s decision,” added Sam Macleod, Garrett’s high-school friend, “but only if Garrett realizes there’s more to life than job security and earnings potential. In high school, we spent a lot of our time constructing derivative asset pricing models and dreaming of orchestrating the next great American Ponzi scheme, but now all Garrett does is read Infinite Jest and stress about the latest round of recruiting by Simon & Shuster or Penguin Books.”
“Sam’s an actuarial mathematics major. He can do all the soul-searching he wants in Microsoft excel under a bridge while I’m writing sonnets and making six figures after graduation” retorted Garrett before he donned a tweed blazer, adjusted his horned-rim glasses, and rushed off to a pre-professional club meeting for aspiring literary analysts.
It appears to be a growing trend. English departments all over the country can barely keep up with the rabid demand of students seeking coursework in Turgenev, Steinbeck, and Kafka that can make or break a résumé. This corresponds with fewer students submitting themselves each year to such morally edifying topics as financial arbitrage and the intricacies of sorting algorithms.
Yet, these developments are not without reason. As tuition increases, young people are drawn to majors that can financially justify the cost of college or university. The concurrent rise of income inequality has also done little to allay students’ economic anxieties, as they’ve seen it’s either editor at HarperCollins or the gutter.
“It’s a lot easier to look my parents in the eye when I tell them their $60,000 a year is going towards an English degree rather than electrical engineering” added Garrett, pensively. “It’s a tough world. I need to make a living before I can explore my life.”
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The above is satire. Garrett Fleischman and his horn-rimmed glasses are as fictional as his hippy banker friend Sam Macleod. However, I created these characters in an attempt to address a personally disheartening and entirely justifiable trend I’ve noticed on college campuses: ROI.
As mentioned above, the cost of higher education is exploding, meaning it makes little financial sense to go to a private four-year university and major in anything that doesn’t offer high-paying employment like computer science, economics, or engineering. Because the job market is so competitive, it’s also within students’ interest to submit themselves to a litany of pre-professional clubs and activities designed with the express purpose of giving them marketable skills and connecting them with those already in the workforce. With student loans and financial stress hovering over students’ heads, higher education transforms into a field to prove yourself a skilled and assiduous future employee. Engage in anything else, and your tuition goes down the drain.
As such, college is no longer a cerebral sanctuary designed to help you look critically at the real world and decide what role you will have in it, but an extension of the employment process with all of the narrowing careerism that comes with it. When you’re an adult, when you work 40 hours a week but leave the office one day 30 minutes late because a call went long, and you find your car has a parking ticket tucked under the right windshield wiper so you almost didn’t notice it, and now you start the car to find the gas light blinking frantically, but you have to floor it across town to drop off your computer for repairs before the store closes while the little yellow gas light blinks on and off almost taunting you the entire way before you stop, fill the car up with gas, drive home, and make a beef stir-fry with vegetables of suspicious age and inhale it because you’ve only had an apple since noon as you had a working lunch with Brandon from marketing fumbling your way through the labyrinth that is Salesforce’s user interface, you don’t have time to think about what an ideal society would look like, or what system of ethics you should abide by to ensure you are living a moral life.
Exploring these questions is an essential part of college, and it saddens me when people can’t address these fully or pursue what they’re actually interested in because they’re trying to pay for something that shouldn’t be that expensive in the first place. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with choosing to major in computer science, a form of engineering, or economics/finance if you’re genuinely interested in the subject, but to do so under any influence besides your own curiosity is to make an irreversible compromise.
Yet, economic reality persists. To travel where our curiosity leads us and hopefully be paid will always be a financial gamble that many are unable to take. My hope is that through a combination of cheaper college tuition, an increased appreciation of the humanities, and a stronger social safety net, the odds will slowly shift in our favor.
