“There is, however, one determining factor that separates the wheat from the chaff. And that is whether you majored in STEM or the liberal arts.
Now, I know, I know. Some of you have taken offense. Some of you have liberal arts degrees and have “successful careers.” And no doubt I’m sure you know “this one liberal arts grad who was a ‘great’ employee.”
Take your umbrage and shove it. My pocket book and my company are too important to entertain your statistical outliers and anecdotes. The employee talent pool is already poor enough as it is that I’m not going to risk my livelihood and the livelihood of what employees I do have, all in a magnanimous effort to spare the feelings of America’s most educated, yet most worthless labor class.”
Kind of depends on what you are hiring them for doesn’t it? Who would hire a STEM for a marketing or communications position?
Yeah, I have a degree in English (70s vintage) and at the time cheating was frowned upon and hard work was respected. I don’t believe that the same conditions apply anymore. The education has served me well, but I am not sure I would recommend it to anybody now. Better to be an autodidact if that is your bent than waste your money.
BTW, how did the “quants” do in the early millennium?
More pointless “STEM-boosterism”.
Surely if liberal arts types really are such pathetic losers, why obsess over them if you’re such an all-conquering STEM hero of labour? I begin to wonder whether some form of inferiority complex might be involved here.
Revenge of the Nerds, perhaps?
No no no JJM. You are supposed to go hire a whole f**k-ton of recently gradded Lib Arts majors. We’ll take the nerdy STEMs, thanks…
When you are elbows deep in SJW pandering and temper tantrums, we come in, buy out your firm (all we want is the brand, rolodex, and your IP), lay off all the Lib Arts majors and replace them with bots and STEMs… Beautiful…
One thing I hope an educated person — any educated person, but especially a liberal arts graduate — will do is avoid ignorant over-generalization and stupid categorical statements, like, you know, Captain Capitalism.
JJM said: “More pointless “STEM-boosterism”. ”
No, he’s right. I graduated in the 1970’s. Anthropology. Took me ten years to shake off the indoctrination back then.
Now, they don’t even entertain a factual argument in Humanities classes. You have to be able to believe twelve impossible things before breakfast to get an English degree these days.
I’d hire a community college art grad over any Humanities BA, no problem. Community colleges are where kids go to learn art as a -trade-, not to learn how to be a good socialist.
STEM grad? Hell yes. Engineers -average- 90+ out of high school these days, that’s what it takes just to get in. The dumbest kid in first year Eng was the smartest kid in his/her grade 12 class, as measured by grades. Same for any science course. They understand time management, they know how to do hard intellectual work, and they can count.
Show me an English major who can balance their own checkbook without a calculator. Or even with one, these days.
While not as prevalent as the libarts, there are plenty of SJWs in the STEMs.
So, would that mean that no one should hire Clarry? After all, he’s just a dumb economist. Who would hire an economist consultant when you could hire a STEM consultant? Everyone knows if you want to hire a real consultant to turn around a failing business you hire a chemical engineer. No one is better at that than them. Or maybe geologists.
Well said Aaron. It would appear that a prospective employee’s resume should be gone over with a fine tooth comb accompanied by many questions as to attitude about and toward life.
I have both an Arts degree (in Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, archaeology, ancient history, and the like) and a degree in Electrical Engineering. The first I did for love, and the second I did for money. And in one third year lab, a signals professor asked me the following question: So, Doug, you were in Arts before? To which I responded: Yes, sir. And there was a followup question: Why are you here? And my answer (after all motion had ceased in the room and it was dead quiet): Because I use both sides of my brain, sir. That ended the discussion.
I agree with a lot of what Captain Capitalism says about modern education. But, and this is the most important point that he makes, critical thinking is invaluable, no matter where you get the knowledge. I am a Baptist by background, a Christian by faith, and my Hebrew training was taken at St. Andrews United Church College, my Old Testament survey class at St. Thomas More Catholic Seminary, my Syriac class from the Lutheran Seminary, and the rest from the standard college of Arts and Sciences. I was going to be a minister, but I wanted my credentials to be recognized outside of my denomination so I went to a university rather than a seminary. Hence the wide range of experiences and no, I didn’t become a minister because I am an introvert, I don’t like conflict and because I program for a living, I don’t tolerate bad logic.
And I didn’t agree with all of what I was taught, but there was a lot of discussion. And this is the dangerous part of modern political correctness – the idea that I am more virtuous, the rest of the world is dead wrong, and I can silence you if I disagree with you. That is the part that Captain Capitalism has difficulty with and I totally agree with him on that point as well.
in the aerospace industry many sales personnel are engineers. To sell a high cost, high investment item the rational thinking, knowledgeable engineer is a good fit!
Yes and I think some of the dumb stuff that many people believe and regurgitate with apparent ease isn’t just learned from Marxist professors but a lot of it comes from the popular culture we’re all exposed to.
And pray tell, nold, where did popular culture come from if not the propaganda propagated by our indoctrination centres euphemistically called schools?
When I was studying engineering some forty to fifty years ago, one of my professors (who had gained some of his education leading men up and down the hills of Korea), explained to us that there wasn’t time to teach us all we needed to know, so he tried to teach us how to learn things on our own. He taught us how to look things up in libraries and journals and reports, how to break a complex problem into a series of simpler problems, then reassemble the pieces of the puzzle. I referred to the notes I took in his class throughout my career, even as computers and the internet made much of the old days’ struggles a matter of a few (carefully chosen) keystrokes.
Liberal Arts, it seems to me, is learning to regurgitate the words of a social justice icon without really thinking about the meaning of those words, or what effect they might have. Then, when things don’t work out, they look for something to blame.
Clary is right. The arts graduates who argue against him, claiming that they have succeeded in life with their BA, would have done better for themselves and society if they had earned a BSc.
Once again you have put your Asshat right over the real shat. One other item and it may be a leap too high because the P.C. police have all kinds of muscle. Never higher more Females than Males.
The distaff side will need a queen for each grouping of more than Two. This establishes a need of Macho behaviour and will lead to intimidation of any group of males under two people.
The queen of the group of three will reach out and with a draft of wind bring the less than two Male group, under serious domination. This leads to the segregation of all such Male group leaders to either drink their coffee in your space, not productive, or huddle with the other less than two Male Group leaders using the “F” word to an extreme.
I was responding to the comment that SJW’s are everywhere now, even in fields once exempt from that kind of thinking. Here’s a question….why do so many people today harbor attitudes that are antithetical to laissez-faire, once the hallmark of any free democratic society?
“One thing I hope an educated person — any educated person, but especially a liberal arts graduate — will do is avoid ignorant over-generalization and stupid categorical statements, like, you know, Captain Capitalism.”
Amen to that.
“STEM grad? Hell yes. Engineers -average- 90+ out of high school these days, that’s what it takes just to get in. The dumbest kid in first year Eng was the smartest kid in his/her grade 12 class, as measured by grades. Same for any science course. They understand time management, they know how to do hard intellectual work, and they can count.
Show me an English major who can balance their own checkbook without a calculator. Or even with one, these days.”
All Hail Technocracy!
Amusing rant. A tad long-winded, and ultimately unproductive since I agree with everything said, considering that it is basically marketing for his book.
The upside is that, having read the rant, I don’t need to buy the book.
“Everyone knows if you want to hire a real consultant to turn around a failing business you hire a chemical engineer. No one is better at that than them. Or maybe geologists.”
Hey, you forgot computer scientists. Everyone knows IT can solve everything and put us all on a path to a brighter future.
All Hail Technocracy!
Sad to say, I agree. B.A. History (computer science minor), 1994; M.A. History, 1998. The good news is that I teach history at a community college.
First did a degree in political science and history. Then did a business degree. Years later did an MBA to fool people into thinking I was smart. Then did a Master of Religious Studies for personal interest. Worked on a business doctorate and another religious degree until I said, I’m too old for this shit and quit. I started with an arts degree but when I never got that dream job in foreign service, I realized I had to go on to other things.
I strongly agree there are plenty of worse-than-useless liberal arts graduates out there. However, I would rank a first-rate liberal arts degree above an engineering degree. I am in the legal profession and have worked with hundreds of young associate lawyers, seeing who falls by the wayside and who flourishes. I always ask the undergraduate degree of a young associate. I am always pleased to get a science major and even more pleased to get an insightful English major. Political science and economics much less so. In dealing with clients, engineers are among the worst. They often have no intuition for legal reasoning and their arrogance makes them comical. Accountants can be that way too, but they become more moderate with more experience with lawyers. They are not stupid, just too narrowly trained.
I sensed the sarcasm in Slaw’s remark about Chemical Engineers; being a Chemical Engineer, I am hurt and insulted by Slaw and I am now going to my safe place and suck my thumb.
All Hail Technocracy!
An MBA is mostly math. So’s economics.
The one thing I MOST agree with in this article/rant, is that liberal arts graduates from the 1970’s actually KNEW something, and were capable of work as opposed to the graduates of today. The root cause being the entire public school Cabal, from elementary school through college. The dumbing-down of our educational system is well understood and well documented. Add to that the fact that young people no longer take jobs before graduating college, never learning what it takes to be a productive WORKER, and we have created a recipie for robots. Yep … you lucky business owners get to give these college graduates the very FIRST jobs of their lives ! Lucky you. Yes, each and every employer knows that robots are cheaper to hire/buy and maintain than a human graduate of today. Robots are quasi-gendered, and NEVER sexually harass one another. Robots don’t require a useless non-productive HR staff. Robots don’t complain that a job is “below their dignity” or “below their job description”. Robots don’t spread office gossip making the entire workplace a toxic wasteland.
Your approach is the best one; get education in a field that you can make money in and study what you want out of personal interest. One of the reasons I decided to go into medicine was that it was a profession which allowed me to work where I wanted and the money was good enough that I was able to support my hobbies easily. I preferred doing neurophysiology research but this was grant supported with the risk that grants might not be renewed and I’d be out of a job.
Also, in medicine, one can easily move to a small town whereas this is difficult to do when one is working in a highly specialized profession where one is limited to living in a large city. For some strange reason, most doctors in BC want to be in Vancouver or Victoria and thus lots of work anywhere in the BC interior. Also fit in with my plan to get out of Vancouver to an environment free of moonbats.
Medicine (at least in the interior) is relatively free of SJW’s. Being a “rural” hospital, the residents we get rotating through for their training are those who want to do rural practice and thus quite practical and able to improvise well when they don’t have the full spectrum of subspecialists that large city trained residents assume are the norm. We had one resident briefly who put “social justice” as one of her interests on her brief description of herself and she was by far the worst resident we’ve ever had and there was considerable discussion of how she ever got into medical school. She did have the primary attribute that UBC looks for now (being female) but all other female residents we’ve had have actually been quite good.
When I was looking for programming jobs 35 years ago, the interviews were primarily an open ended discussion on how I would approach various problems and projects that I’d worked on. After a few interviews I finally got the hint when more than one of the interviewers I talked to mentioned “you do mainly scientific programming – why don’t you check out UBC?”. Took their advice and ended up working there for 8 years.
Ladies and gentlemen, we must all realize that these are the consequences of living in the pyramid scheme called government.
(Many of those universities and colleges are mostly, if not fully, funded by government.)
Just to give you an example, more and more people are doing the same thing, that is, paying more and more for a post-secondary education with the hope for a different result.
Those people were continually told that “education” was the true path to a good life.
Moreover, many of those people think themselves too smart to fall for the ruse.
The actual result is that those people are falling more and more deeply into debt (i.e., student debt), in particular, GOVERNMENT student loans.
Why?
Because it’s a pyramid scheme.
Guess who is laughing all the way to the bank? Hint: It isn’t the students.
I am glad to have logical, detailed, and intelligent thinkers … such as you … in medicine. Probably the reason why my recent hip replacement surgery … using the high-tech “anterior” approach, with no muscle cutting … resulted in a brief 30hour hospital stay, and left me walking (unaided) within a week. A relatively MAJOR surgery … yeah hacking-off the top of my femur, and grinding-out my pelvis qualifies as MAJOR surgery … and replacing with state of the art titanium, polyethylene, and ceramic parts pounded-into the hollow cavities of the largest bones in my body … qualifies as MAJOR surgery. Yet I am walking unaided, with only minor muscle soreness a week post-surgery. And I cannot tell the difference between my natural (left) hip and my artificial (right) hip. Both “feel” exactly alike. Yeah, not a single English major was involved in my surgery or post-surgical care. Every single “worker” involved in my care were top-quality, highly-educated, and simply fantastic people. God bless modern medicine and technology. God bless our STEM education institutions.
The ONLY weak link in my surgery, was Obamakkare. Obamakkare FORCED me to have the surgery NOW … before my wife and I get tossed-off our “Cadillac” health care plan. Her school district is cancelling all our Doctors and our Health Care plan on July 1. All because the Cadillac tax kicked-in. We are losing ALL our Doctors that we have seen for the last 25 years. ALL of them … gone. So, in order for me to retain access to my “best in the nation” orthopedic hip surgeon … I was forced to have the surgery NOW. The English and Poli-Sci. majors are the ones who dreamt-up the crap sandwich called Obamakkare. These idiot liberal arts majors are the ones who have separated my family from ALL our Doctors and Health Care Plan. The liberal arts majors are the ones who LIED to our faces to force this crap legislation down the gullets of an uninformed public. The liberal arts majors are the ones who determined that EVERYONE had to have equally mediocre medical care. All in the name of “equality”. All in the name of “fairness”. Next … these liberal arts majors will be coming for my house, and ALL the assets I have carefully, and conservatively built over a lifetime … all in the name of “fairness”
JJM said: “All Hail Technocracy!!”
Yeah sure. Are you in business to make money, or is it more of a social justice performance art thing?
A slightly different take on how you phrased it: if you know the lifestyle you want, try to pick a profession that will let you get there. (when talking to teens I add the line “and if you want to be rich and famous for doing nothing then get used to taking food orders and carrying dishes around”). A job is not supposed to be fun. They can be rewarding (in more than monetary ways), but what you choose to do with your life isn’t only defined by the job.
I’m a mining engineer that graduated in the worst mining job market in the last 50 years. I had a hobby of computers. My way to get a foot in the door at a mine was to come is as the IS department at a mine in bankruptcy protection. I did that for a year, and then was offered a transfer to engineering (or to go for more computer training to get the credentials I “needed”). Working at maintaining a computer network on a wing and a prayer killed my hobby. If I had “followed my passion” then I’d really be miserable now. Instead, I get to solve puzzles for a living and I love what I do.
Don’t know what is funnier. Cappy’s essay, or the umbrage from The Well and Truly Miffed.
My engineering class had a T-shirt with the Top 10 reasons I am in engineering school , no, 7 was I’m too smart for the school of Business—
As a former chemical engineer, I will say that there’s a real arrogance problem in engineering that can lead to severe Dunning-Kruger problems if it’s not dealt with.
The difference is that arrogant engineers can generally do something useful; arrogant liberal arts grads, not so much.
Oh man, I just GOTTA reply to this one…
“…I would rank a first-rate liberal arts degree above an engineering degree.”
1. “first-rate” and “liberal arts degree” are terms which don’t fit in the same sentence, much less using the former to describe the latter. IMHO, that’s about the same as using “intellectual” to describe a “tree stump”. The two terms just aren’t in the same frame of reference. Perhaps you could clarify by giving an example.
2. “rank”: what exactly do you mean? Obviously you are intending some sort of comparison, but what are you comparing? It’s like comparing, say, dinner theater to a motorcycle (examples pulled from random thoughts)- not a lot of common ground there.
“In dealing with clients, engineers are among the worst. They often have no intuition for legal reasoning and their arrogance makes them comical.”
1. Define “Dealing with” – engineers calculate, solve, design, illustrate, etc. Others “deal with” opinions, emotions, situations, etc.
2. “legal reasoning” is an oxymoron.
3. What you see as “arrogance” is probably “serenity” in the knowledge that your results can be mathematically proven to be right if your data is complete and correct, and can’t be challenged by every different opinion.
Cheers,
STEM or not – good looks an/or big tits help
… STEM or not … a mean face and clipped hair is no help. And a resting b*tch face is a complete deal breaker.
well now cold slaw, chem eng are better at turning around companies than poly sci type, butt what you really need is an industrial eng team, and an economics type on that team. The leaders should have marketing/sales knowledge, and a degree in human resources, or a psychology degree, would be nice. But the meat of the team are the IE people. Top dog keeps team on track, and gets the info out to the workers in a manner that brings them on board, rather than alienates them more. So, yah, STEM is critical. Sorry to piss on your parade, butt shit happens!
I almost forgot, when you say “I am in the legal profession and have worked with hundreds of young associate lawyers…”, does that mean that you actually have a degree in law? It seems to me that you could make that statement if you work in the HR department of a large law firm, with a degree in, oh I don’t know, maybe some kind of liberal arts?
Regardless, I am curious to know what a law degree is classified as (poor grammar, I know – so sue me, LOL). It for sure ain’t a S.T.E.M. degree – does that make law a LIBERAL ART???
The nice thing about being an economist is, with a little training, you could become a climate “scientist”.
Rocky there are different skills in thinking. A very important skill in legal reasoning and legal practice is skill in interpretation. The means skill in perception of causal nuances and moving from possibility to plausibility to probability. So yes, I might be an HR person as a possibility, but it is weak interpretation that generates wasteful possibilities to consider. Such poor interpretation would be counterproductive and less than worthless in a takeover or proxy battle or deciphering the motivating forces behind a court decision. A well-educated interpreter, for example, has trained intuition to perceive anomalous high-cost signalling behaviour. A well-educated interpreter and tactician will read and seek to manage emotional-social momentum in a matter. At an NCAA Frozen Four hockey banquet in Providence Rhode Island years back the feature speaker was a Classics professor from Brown. He related the emotional-social dynamics and codes of honour on the battlefield of the Trojan War to the hockey arena. He received s leap to the feet standing ovation from the players. He was probably one of Ted Turner’s professors at Brown, where Turner got his degree in Classics and for which he credits his success, not a business degree. Classical Greece was remarkable because of the large number of city states and the extremely complex dynamic via-a-vis the Persian invasion. The competing states had tentative alliances of necessity but some expected Persian victory by the manifestly superior forces and were double dealing. Each city state had therefore to bring canny interpretation skills, looking for signs such as anomalous high-cost signalling to negotiate the evolving situations. These are dynamics well-studied in the liberal arts classic tradition. These are skills entirely absent in a narrow engineering education. Even science involved deeper training in the art of interpretation. Indeed, my alma mater gives a Bachelor of Arts in fields such as undergraduate biology. The scientist who developed ketonebesters (as part of an illustrious career that included writing papers with Krebs and Cahill) credited his undegraduate majors in Classics and history as being most important to his achievements in science–the d velopment of skill in interpretating to discern causal nuance behind surface appearance under preestablished paradigms.
I have nothing against engineering. Our daughter just graduated with a disk major in biomedical and electrical engineering. Our son is going into mechanical and materials engineering, possible engineering physics. But we’ve been mindful to ensure they’ve developed other skills, including literature and debating.
As for legal reasoning, it’s good you see it as an oxymoron, as do many engineers. It generates lots of business for us as they continually get into troubles for lack of understanding legal reasoning.
*ketone esters
*dual major
Yes there is a place for liberal arts majors in the work place … they make great estheticians and pretty good baristas. They are not too bad at dog walking and call center work. :Some of them can sing and dance. That about covers it … they have no business doing adult work.
….In dealing with clients, engineers are among the worst….”
Funny that, my wife is Warranty Manager for a Calgary Developer….I hear that EXACT Sentiment daily…”its either pitch Black or Blindingly White….there is no in-between”.
And as to arrogance, as an Engineering Technology Grad from SAIT 30 yrs ago, I can attest to that…particularly in those significantly younger than I….
I have always maintained that ANY aspiring Engineer should/must have Journeyman Trades accreditation before being accepted to University…that, to me should be a Pre Requisite for entrance.
Clarey is an entertaining writer and I generally agree with his analysis. However he should use a somewhat narrower brush. I would be wary of hiring graduates of “angry studies”; particularly if there were signs of problems during the hiring process. However degrees in the more traditional liberal arts areas have some value. I know a number of people with such degrees who are not whining snowflakes,have clearly benefited from their education, and are working productively.
P.S. I hold a STEM degree and yes it has paid off handsomely.
“They are committed to, and acting consistently with, a philosophy that sees the purpose of education as therapeutic rather than transformative.”
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/06/in-defense-of-educational-administrators
You didn’t answer my question.
However, your lengthy and rambling discourse would seem to support the theory that you actually are a lawyer, with “undegraduate majors in Classics and history”. Still, just another possibility.
Calling something an oxymoron is my “tongue-in-cheek” way of saying it doesn’t fit my way of thinking. When I know I’m out of my area of expertise, I would hire someone who has the required expertise. When I need a skilled tradesman, I hire one. When I need a lawyer, I hire one. When someone needs an engineer with my background, they could hire me.
BTW, when I took engineering, we were required to take liberal arts courses to prevent us from becoming too “narrow”.
Oh, yeah, when I tried to look up “interpretating” Mirriam Webster wants to know: (copied directly from their website)
“What made you want to look up interpretate? Please tell us where you read or heard it (including the quote, if possible).”
Cheers,
David Suzuki has a Ph.D in Zoology.
An outstanding STEM graduate! He’d never utter any flaky nonsense, would he?
and AlBore, studied to be a preacher, and Jeem Cotta is now a sunday school teacha
Rocky, regarding “interpretating”, apologies for the typo. My iPhone typing on the micro-keyboard is erratic and autocorrect is sometimes bizarre.
I thought I had answered your questions, discursively to illustrate value in liberal arts training in sport, business, scientific research, law and strategic affairs. It is an ill-staffed C-suite or board of directors that doesn’t have at least one or two members with a strong liberal arts education. By that I don’t mean the current trend to cafeteria-style degrees featuring various greivance-based agendas. Chanting formulas for Feminist misreadings of Shakespeare doesn’t prepare one for a corporate boardrooms. Why, for example, has China been developing an independent GPS satellite system? No, colonialism theory gets one nowhere of value to real decision makers. One need look beyond surface rationalization, as it is an expensive, commercially unnecessary venture and high-cost anomalies are important features when interpreting. Another example was Soviet “foreign aid” to help Afghanistan build road infrastructure in the 1970s. Marxists in liberal arts, such as Sartre, touted Stalin in the early 1950s, so were blind to putative Soviet altruism in the 1970s. A liberal arts degree is no guarantee of a solid Liberal Arts education.
I have no antipathy to STEM fields. Indeed, my undergraduate major was an Artis Baccalaureate in pure math and computer science. I cut my teeth proving things like the inference ((not not p) implies p) [dubbed “magic”] is computationally intractable when using theorem-proving algorithms. I have a law degree and did a Ph.D in jurisprudence, exploring the application of AI to legal reasoning, notably common law. Would I classify law as a STEM field? No. Is law a liberal arts field? No. Common law grapples with the logical problem of incompleteness of the expressiveness and computational tractability of logic and language. As Nietzsche observed, logic is a scorpion that stings itself with its tail. Legal reasoning, like science, grapples with necessary incompleteness through case-based interpretation and reasoning from narrative experiences (precedents, experiments). It is no coincidence that the Francis Bacon was Chief Justice of England when he wrote Novum Organum, the beginning of the empirical experimental method of science. Where legal reasoning (in practice) differs is the absence of quantitative math, which is why I would not call legal reasoning a STEM field.