On Beginnings: Part 22

This essay (serialized here across 24 separate posts) uses words and numbers to discuss the uses of words and numbers — particularly examining evaluations of university degrees that employ statistical data to substantiate competing claims. Statistical analyses are crudely introduced as the mode du jour of popular logic, but any ratiocinative technique could likely be inserted in this re-fillable space and applied to create and defend categories of meaning with or without quantitative support. Questions posed across the series include: Is the data informing or affirming what we believe? What are the implications of granting this approach broader authority? The author, Melanie Williams, graduated from UA in 2006, with a B.A. in Anthropology and Religious Studies.

 

In a side-effect sense, I can offer one abiding perquisite of a liberal arts degree:  the flexibility it gives you to respond to the unfair inquiry, “So what are you going to do with a degree in _______?”  Devise any occupation you please – I plan to: “pursue a Ph.D. in topology with a special focus on knot theory,” “write choose-your-own-adventure intergalactic erotica – I’ll post a link to my blog on your wall,” “become the CEO of Goldman Sachs then coast into the office of U.S. Treasury Secretary,” “invest in a crystal ball and tell my own future for $5 a reading.  You owe me $5.”  The nebulous aegis of the College of Arts and Sciences virtually guarantees that nothing will breach the bulwarks of tenability.  Like a brisk volley by liberal arts dropout Billie Jean King, your newly forged critical thinking skills and subtle finesse of plausible diversions will deliver an ersatz sense of authority that makes your “chosen” field seem respectable while marginalizing you just enough to abate any further lines of invasive questioning.  This will buy you some time while you wait to hear back about that incredible unpaid internship opportunity!

Game, set, match.

Godspeed, Civil Engineers.  I don’t know how to help you.

If my resumé is categorically non-traditional, I am curious to know from which “traditional career pathways” current struggling college majors are deviating.  What outcomes of “success” or “failure” are we assuming, and according to whom?  What is the unspoken destiny college grads are failing to fulfill when we don’t secure “jobs in our chosen fields?”  Or to frame the question differently, what not-so-subtle classism is implied by the expectation that college graduates won’t be carpenters, or plumbers, or welders, or the inventors of meat tea?  Who says the post-bacc lifestyle is the only variety worth aspiring to, making the choice before us merely college or not-college – disregarding all the rich and interesting things people do when they walk, apparently naked and unformed as a forgotten Hugga Bunch into the wild, wonderful, cruel void?  I would wager it’s as easy to predict the future value of a college degree in a changing economy as it is to predict the day-to-day performance of the stock market – not unpredictable exactly, but as far as I know, to the degree it may be deterministic, we do not flatter ourselves that we grasp its tangled workings.  At least, liberal arts major Robert Shiller and clarinetist Alan Greenspan seem to agree on this point.   So why spin these studies, and engage in a tautological, courtroom-like contest of spectacle?

Part 23 coming tomorrow morning…