That NOS Guy wrote:For all the hemming and hawing about "omg liberal arts degrees" it's not as if people who pursue degrees like history are useless, they may just have different plans in life that don't involve being an engineer. Really, the amount of kneejerk around here swirling about that subject is just nauseating.
Hilariously, the National Science Foundation has statistics going back to 1966 on the numbers of science and engineering graduates as compared to the whole field, which indicate that the decline in percentage of science and engineering degrees dates back to the 1970s, which is too early for any Gen-Xers to be involved in the process. Further, the decline actually slows once Gen-X begins entering colleges in 1979, and it only begins to decline again in the 1990s.
The total decline is from 35.2% of bachelor degrees in '66 to 32.6% in '98, the tail end of Generation X. For master's, it declines from 29.2% in 1966 to 21.7% in 1998. Note that the total number of master's degrees tripled during this time period, whereas bachelor's degrees merely increased by 2.2 times. Doctorates remained far more steady, and went from 64.5% in 1966 to 64% in 1998, with a decline from '66 to '74, and an increase back from '77 on. The total number of doctorates increased by 2.36 times during this interval.
Really, the evidence itself doesn't support a massive decrease in scientific and engineering degrees. Now, statistical evidence that Gen-Xers are more lazy than Baby Boomers, Generation Y, the Silent Generation et al is rather lacking, but if you could provide some, I would be very grateful.
It's worth noting that doctorates remain majority science/engineering based, while master's degrees have somewhat declined in proportion, and bachelor's degrees have remained at about a third being science/engineering-related.
I will look over their data on the social sciences to see whether increases in that can account for some of the decline in bachelor's and master's degrees. The studies they have performed can be found
here, and include later years, but I wanted to cover Generation X specifically.
I agree with you that condemning people based on the toughness of their degree is pretty juvenile. Further, I thought Gen-X was supposed to be cynical, not credulous enough to believe that you should try for a degree and career that you enjoy. If you're going to condemn people for not choosing degrees based on utilitarian grounds, you might as well condemn the cultural background where people are led to believe that they should try for work that they enjoy, which I would argue leads to the "useless" degrees and oversaturation of certain markets (like the fine arts and music) far more than any "commonsense" generational malaise.
Back to the main subject of the thread:
Coyote wrote:If Americans were a "broken people", I doubt they'd be flocking to any degrees at all, whether they were "useful" or not. The high school drop-out rate would be skyrocketing instead. People who are graduating high school, and going on to college and getting a degree (even a "useless" one) obviously think they have some sort of future.
I think the article describes, accurately, a cultural malaise of some sort, but mis-attributes the causes, and also mis-attributes what actions would need to be taken to alleviate the problem. Like Shep implied, rioting and striking are not necessarily the best ways to deal with the situation.
I think that this malaise is simple, good old-fashioned voter apathy. Shep's comment strikes me as very illuminating. The very idea that someone would get angry enough about a political matter to strike or riot is foreign to a majority of Americans. For that matter, you can see this in the healthcare debacle. A consistent majority of Americans would prefer healthcare reform, yet reform is consistently blocked by the right-wing (this includes conservative Democrats and Lieberman) and the healthcare companies, yet nobody is willing to do anything about it beyond vote and participate in surveys. Protests, strikes, and other public efforts are restricted to a handful of people on the right and the left. Most people just don't seem to care.
The actions that need to be taken to alleviate the situation are to either reform our educational structure to create enthusiastic citizens and mandate voting by law, writing appropriate legislation to ensure that companies comply (hah) or to have the situation become so intolerable to Americans that they become willing to protest and write letters to congresspersons, et cetera. The first situation seems to require a population active enough to force this through an unwilling Congress and corporate lobbyists, and would no doubt create a storm of public opinion about being required to vote. The second requires a massive decline in the quality of life for many Americans, and that is something I think most people would prefer to avoid if possible, and is only likely, say, if the current behavior of corporate management and the upper class continues until a collapse is precipitated, with no one having a shred of intelligence, empathy, or class consciousness to override their greed.
In other words, things could well continue apace until a major collapse occurs, or something else happens to shake things up. Ideally, what would be a way to deal with this problem would be to convince the people around you to vote, to write to senators and representatives, and to make their voice known, essentially starting a grassroots democracy movement. At the same time, encourage them to become more educated about the world around them and happenings across the country. In other words, grassroots education reform as well. Thoughts?
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- PeZook
