Why we undervalue the humanities
At some point in the junction between high school and university, we’re taught that a degree in social sciences is: I don’t know, shit?
It’s most clearly seen when the frosh chants of engineers and STEM students tend to center around devaluing, belittling, and degrading arts degrees, as a way of uplifting the value of their own degrees. Engineers work 16 hour school weeks, arts students 9. Engineers have higher fail rates, arts students less so. Arts students often can’t get away with complaining about their workloads without a STEM student interrupting to say how the work can’t really compare.
Though it’s often been said that such chants are just teasing in nature, I think it points to a much more insidious bias that persists long after graduation, and that has shaped the way we recruit and value people, in general. I don’t think it’s any secret that arts students have a far harder time marketing themselves after graduation for entry level roles, and that it’s a common joke that an arts degree is equivalent to a permanent job at Starbucks.
(I’m not saying, by the way, that the values of STEM degrees aren’t incredibly high. The majority of important advancements in medicine, technology, and education have been a direct result of the work of researchers, computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. We owe the Internet, our smartphones, cheaper drugs, and this laptop, that I’m writing on, to them.)
What I’m saying is that the valuation of a STEM degree cannot, and should not, be based on a comparison of the arts degree. Furthermore, we can’t allow a high valuation of a STEM degree allow us to discourage arts degrees. We’ve gotten so used to saying that girls should go into STEM, that we stop telling them that articulate female political leaders are just as necessary in an equitable society (can anyone name more than 5 female political figures under the age of 40?) We’re so used to saying that we should improve hard skills, like coding and math, that we stopped telling people to read books. Most people are incapable of reading long blocs of text, let alone writing them (I’m going to hazard that after looking at the statistics of this blog post, less than 50% of people will actually finish)
And so, perhaps as a protest against all the incessant pressure I get from STEM fields, and even more so against the recruiters who constantly assume I am a less intelligent, less competent, less mentally rigorous worker because I’ve studied economics and political science over engineering, I’d like to present a couple arguments for why you should value an arts degree, and what we can do to better value them in today’s society.
- STEM degrees shape the tools of society, arts degrees shape society altogether
It’s no secret that of the recent American election, education (and ignorance) were a huge factor in influencing people’s votes. How much you knew about what NAFTA influenced who you were going to vote for. How much you believed that the glass ceiling and racism exists influenced who you were going to vote for. How much you believed in automation taking jobs from the middle class influenced who you were going to vote for. How much you believed Russia and China were threats vs allies influenced who you were going to vote for.
The only way to build these political opinions, and to furthermore engage in any kind of cogent discussion on them, is to read. And not just to read once, but many times; reading many resources, many points of views, over and over again. It requires a constant breaking and rebuilding of belief, until we get to some kind of shaky middle ground that represents being ‘well-educated’.
I’m fortunate that most of my friends, STEM and arts alike, were well-educated on the subject. (Perhaps that’s my elite bubble talking.) I got to have lots of calm, polite discussion on sensitive issues, which is more than I can say for other people.
It got me thinking, though, that the only reason why any of us can claim to know anything about the election is because of stuff we read online. And that the stuff we read online is primarily written by people who have arts degrees.
The short articles we read from The New York Times, hell, even from freaking Buzzfeed, are primarily written by people who have arts degrees. Though the articles themselves may be short and to the point, we have to consider how much research and editing goes into making these articles factually correct, and furthermore marketable to an online audience that has an incredibly short attention span.
The challenge of modern journalism is telling a complete story, but telling that complete story to a public that is mostly biased, has the ability to selectively choose what they read, and that hates reading essays. Imagine trying to boil down the entire election into a series of three sentences, and then trying to explain that to a toddler. The toddler doesn’t give two shits what you have to say about taxation, it just wants to look at pretty pictures and videos. (Maybe explaining why, of all things, CNN and The Economist have Snapchat accounts.)
This job is not fucking easy.
And furthermore this job shapes the way that people come to view the world. It influences votes, it influences what people post online (which in turn influences the way people vote), it influences what jobs people take on, what they choose to invest in, and what neighbourhoods they choose to live in. It influences whether, after reading an update about crime in your local neighbourhood, whether you are going to call the police officer on a ‘suspicious black male’ walking around someone’s front porch.
That’s the challenge of social science. Learning to take all these complex factors and distilling them down into easy-to-understand sound bites for a population that doesn’t have the time to read and learn deeply. And furthermore, understanding that you have to impact and shape that audience through meaningful word choice, substantial edits, and careful and complete research.
So we do undervalue it. The average salary of a journalist is $43 000. The average salary of a developer is $84 000.
That also doesn’t include the fact that journalism grads often go to graduate school to pursue research degrees, or the fact that an entry-level journalism job doesn’t actually involve you writing anything that will be published, but editing over menial or secondary articles.
The argument has often gone, “Well, the developer pays more because it’s a job that no one else can do!”
Sure, that makes total sense. Developing is really fucking hard and I completely refuse to do it. I’m happy to pay a high salary to someone who can make me a more efficient version of an app, or design a better website, or implement better security measures on my online banking experiences.
But that doesn’t subtract from my willingness to pay a smart and articulate graduate to write influential publication that will shape how elections and societies organize themselves.
A few years ago, I read a famous article, titled “A Case for Reparations”, published in The Atlantic, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The essay is long, practically a small book, that explains the urgent need for affirmative action, and how anti-black racism in America isn’t just about Trayvon Martin or Freddie Gray, or about any one isolated incident: it’s about a continuous pattern of disadvantaging blacks in every imaginable way, from policing the way young children wear their hair (implicitly saying that natural black hair is the antithesis of professional or academic), from racializing ghetto speak (failing to understand that ‘ghetto’ talk is an evolution of traditional Caribbean and black languages), to denying blacks the opportunity to live in better neighbourhoods in Chicago by rejecting mortgage applications, despite them having perfectly acceptable income and credit levels to do so (and as such, directly trying to prevent the accumulation of black wealth.)
This was written by a man with an arts degree. It forever changed the way I view people of colour. It made me analyze my own complicity in anti-black racism, and furthermore provided me the opportunity to analyze how someone like myself (a person of colour, and a woman) might suffer from discrimination. It influences, and will continue to influence, the way I will vote forever, and it will influence what schools I send my kids to, the rallies I will attend, the causes I will donate to, and how actively I will defend other minorities.
So yeah, Ta-Nehisi Coates probably can’t make the next Uber. And Uber is helpful and makes my life easier. As are all the other technological achievements we’ve made recently.
But this essay, alongside the many political and social papers I’ve read in my life, have altered in what ways I will choose to use the tools STEM fields have given me. Fintech companies will make it easier for me to invest and profit off the stock market. But humanities and social sciences will influence who I will give the profits of that investing to.
It’s really unfortunate, because that influence is insanely large (has anyone bothered to quantify the impact that Buzzfeed, alone, has had on the outcome of the election?) and we’ve dwarfed it in comparison to technological achievements and shiny new apps.
Which leads to my next point.
2) We are absolute shit at quantifying the impact of humanities degrees
Practically every recruiter I have ever met has told me to quantify the impact of what I have done in my extracurriculars, and my jobs. I’ve been told to pepper my job applications with buzzwords, making it easy for a computer to parse through, rather than go for flowery words; use ‘communication skills’ in lieu of ‘storytelling’, for example.
The advice is good, and has been helpful in me receiving interviews. It does point to something shitty about the system of recruitment in general.
First of all, it makes the assumption that the only kinds of achievements that are worth celebrating are the ones that are directly related to numbers. Which, from a business perspective, makes sense; businesses care about the bottom line. What it fails to notice, however, is that it is substantially easier to quantify impacts in a STEM field than a humanities field.
It’s way easier to say how many lines of code you wrote, how many people used your app, or how much faster something works as a result of you doing it, than it is to argue how an article you wrote impacted other people. If my previous point had any impact on you, it should be clear why that’s not fair, and why both are important.
But the fact that we implicitly assume that STEM degrees are worth more means we have found ways to more accurately measure achievements in such fields, and have consequently neglected to innovate ways to measure impact in social science fields.
I’ve done a ton of extracurricular work, but so often those achievements turn into things that are related to technological work. I designed advertisements, but that just translates into Proficiency in Adobe Suite. I wrote blog posts and email advertisements, but that just translates into Experienced in providing high-impact written content to online audiences exceeding 300 people. I’ve written and logged, literally, over 500 000 words of written content, ranging from short stories to poems to this blog to online articles to research papers. That translates into Communication.
So yeah, no shit that gets dwarfed in comparison to Proficient in C++, Ruby, Javascript. In 5 words the developer already sounds like they have a bigger impact than me. The language of recruitment, and the way computer parsing currently works for entry-level recruitment, makes it way easier to reward hard-skilled individuals.
It also, ironically, forces humanities graduates (who are often experts in writing and language) to turn their skills into easy-to-understand buzzwords. I’ve often said I feel like my strength is storytelling; I feel like my writing is good at imparting emotional impact rather than intellectual. I think I am better at connecting to individual humans rather than writing on large, overall trends (hence why I prefer to blog rather than be a journalist). I think I’d be better suited to a role in film or advertising, consequentially, than one in traditional media or academia.
But because the dumbass first-round computer that parses through resumes doesn’t recognize ‘storytelling’ as a skill, I have to take all of that nuance and boil it down into the word ‘communication’. And because the business, being accustomed to undervaluing and oversimplifying humanities degrees, sees the word ‘communication’ as a catchall ‘anything involving words that doesn’t involve tech’, you see English majors and political science PhDs writing fucking email newsletters for large organizations.
So when people say that a humanities degree leads directly to a low-paying job, they’re right. But that’s no fault of the humanities degree, and no fault of the grad; it’s an implicit bias in recruiting, that forces humanities students to self-select out of difficult jobs, forces them to use simplified and non-descriptive language to quantify their skills, and consequently leads them into low-paying jobs as a result.
It doesn’t mean humanities graduates are stupid or are destined to take on these types of roles. Several of the people I look up to, are, in fact, humanities graduates who have taken on influential high-level roles in business (thereby showing humanities can give you a robust intellectual background necessary for impactful and senior employment). But it’s way harder to get there, because the STEM grad will find a far easier time navigating into a high-paying entry level role, in comparison to the humanities grad.
If we want to get to a more equitable society, and indeed a society that actually uses the the full mental capacity of its educated population, we need to start considering redesigning current methods of recruitment, and allowing humanities graduates better ways to quantify their achievements.
I was recently in a design session that focused specifically on this issue, and one of my proposed solutions was creating timed tests for humanities graduates in skills related to writing and extracting. The same way we do business cases for consultants, and coding tests for developers, why not introduce tests for humanities graduates? We could conceivably put a bloc of complex text in front of them and ask them to parse out the relevant information in 5 min, or ask them to write a short response to it. This way we could actually provide numerical results to humanities achievements (time taken to respond, quality of response, accuracy of information extraction) instead of vaguely calling an ability to read, write, and critically think, ‘communication skills’.
So that’s getting the job. There’s one more group to shit on, though.
3) A love letter to U of T
Well, not U of T specifically. But schools as a whole.
More or less, the way we teach social science and the humanities has not changed in 100 years. You take notes while an old white guy lectures for two hours, and try not to fall asleep in a hot classroom. You write essays and an overworked TA grades you according to a rubric from 35 years ago.
STEM fields still have lectures, but they’re accompanied by lab work. Or hackathons. Or competitions. Let me rephrase.
STEM fields still have lectures, but they’re accompanied by demonstrable examples of how to apply that knowledge to the real world.
Every computer scientist will tell you that you do not need a computer science degree to code. Because computer science is rooted in theory and algorithms, but coding can be self-taught and practiced on one’s own time. That doesn’t preclude computer scientists from competing in hackathons; ultimately the need for academia and real-life applications is necessary in being able to appreciate the full power of a computer.
So why in the fuck do we not give humanities grads the same opportunity?
Why are we stuck in hot libraries reading 80 year old texts instead of, I don’t know, going outside and actually interacting with political groups? Why, when tech companies debate the necessity of ethical limits in AI, are humanities grads not in the audience? (or perhaps rather why don’t universities subsidize humanities students’ attendance to such events) Why is a debate on liberalism not accompanied by a sponsored visit to Parliament? Why is a class debate on the Canadian governments’ recent policies not accompanied by an assignment to write letters to the government, or lobbying? Why, when the humanities are so deeply rooted in understanding people and movements, are humanities grads locked indoors in ivory towers, and never encouraged by academic institutions to interact with the real world?
It’s a huge reason why, I think, humanities graduates are so clueless on where to go after graduation. If you’ve been writing essays for four years, it can easily seem like the only path to take after graduation is to go into academic research, where jobs are competitive, not well-paying, and often require costly graduate degrees. The alternative is to head into other non-academic fields, but as my previous point will tell you, recruitment is so heavily stacked against humanities grads that it’s often impossible to get anything meaningful for the first few years.
And U of T, in particular, has to learn to address this. Earlier this year a notable psychology professor at U of T made some incendiary comments regarding trans students (his other works, which I’ve read, include some non-mainstream views on feminism and racial affirmative action). This was an incredible opportunity for humanities grads to take the lead in teaching fellow students how to politely and respectfully engage in debate on sensitive issues; it was an opportunity for STEM students to see how a humanities degree can teach respect and patience in debate.
Instead, U of T took weeks to respond, and allowed angry students to belittle each other online and in-person, at rallies that students themselves organized. U of T offered too few responses, far too late, by which point many feelings were hurt and many students were so angry over the tone of the discussion they decided thoughtful debate wasn’t useful anymore. Even non-affiliated U of T groups entered on campus (shoutout to you, Lauren Southern) and more extreme movements started attaching to all the drama. Instead of looking to U of T for a response, I looked to Reddit and op-eds from The Varsity, our student newspaper. U of T, by refusing to open a formal forum for discussion, not only allowed a sensitive debate to fester, and turn what was once a simple disagreement into a fucking cesspool of hurt feelings, other political and social movements, and flatout violence, but fundamentally showed how little regard they have for humanities departments to take the lead in formulating a cogent response.
Which is not to say, by the way, that me and my fellow students in humanities did not have a response. We totally did. On both sides of the debate. I managed to have lots of interesting discussion on the topic with tons of my friends, and many of us expressed a desire to share these viewpoints and findings with our fellow classmates. But given the cowardly response by U of T, and the angry nature of the discussion (plus a general belief that nobody cares what humanities grads have to say), my friends and I said nothing.
Schools have to modernize. They have to teach graduates, humanities and STEM alike, that the ability to engage in thoughtful and complex discussion on social topics is not only necessary, but a built skill that formal study in can benefit. Furthermore they need to show that humanities have a place in everyday discussion; humanities is more than dusty textbooks on a shelf. It’s learning to have compassion for groups that are not your own. It’s learning to understand the complex circumstances that lead to certain movements forming. It’s learning to withhold assumption, to analyze carefully, and to use history to help lead us into the future.
But in order to show that, schools have to provide avenues for humanities grads to show what they can do. And firms have to find ways to provide more meaningful, intellectually challenging employment for humanities grads, some of whom are the most intelligent people I know. And students themselves; STEM students, but particularly humanities grads themselves, need to rediscover the confidence that comes from rigorous analysis of political movements, and learn to reconsider the massively high value their degree can hold in a world that is increasingly divided and increasingly oversimplified.
