Worthless

In an undergraduate writing class, by means of feedback, a classmate sent me the meme “Arguing on the Internet is like running in the Special Olympics. Even if you win, you’re still retarded.”  As unbelievably offensive as that is and as irrelevant as it was to the piece I had actually written, the message did stick with me. There is generally very little to be gained from participating in the back-and-forth, my team vs. your team chest-thumping that passes for discussion on the Internet. That being said, one particular argument about “worthless degrees” keeps recurring on both Internet comment boards and dollar-per-paragraph “news” stories enough that I feel it must represent some portion of the populace’s genuine view. This argument is rarely effectively addressed, though I have seen some brief defenses pop up in comment threads since the adjunct issue started really gaining national attention in the last year or so.

The statement is always something along these lines: “Well, you got a worthless degree, so you have no right to complain about being on long-term unemployment/working at McDonald’s/having no real way to pay the bills much less contribute to the economy in any meaningful way, etc.”

Now, what exactly constitutes a “worthless degree” is completely in the mind of beholder as is what constitutes a worthwhile one. It generally falls along the lines of any degree in the humanities and most of the social sciences is worthless, and anything in one of the “hard sciences” or business is worthwhile. I can only conjecture that they get this idea from those same dollar-a-paragraph articles I mentioned before, and certainly, there is evidence to support this idea.

Here is where someone from the Humanities, probably one of those lucky few that have tenure due to their age or their wealth and thus their ability to go to an Ivy League school (though I must begrudgingly admit that even they do not have much advantage in this cesspool of a job market)  would step in and say “Oh, but college isn’t just job training.” They will then go on at length to discuss the virtues of being a well-rounded citizen and the “life of the mind.” This might even come from someone who is currently making poverty wages teaching hundreds of students at schools where their presidents and many of the administrative staff make hundreds of thousands of dollars. I can only assume this is a kind of defense mechanism, a way to assure themselves that they haven’t wasted their lives and are now in a pit they can never crawl out of. I understand this sentiment well. If they do address the issue of actual employment in these fields, they will usually vaguely refer to the idea that even if there are no stable academic jobs, the corporate world LOVES to hire humanities majors because they have “critical thinking skills” or “creativity.” This is, of course, a farce on two levels. First, again, the job numbers show this to be completely untrue post-2008, despite whatever anecdotal evidence might be provided, and second, those that majored in the sciences have critical thinking skills and creativity by the truckload along with a whole other attractive skill set. So, not only is this response completely inadequate, it is abstract, elitist, and arrogant, yet, it’s really all I ever see offered. Little wonder that these attitudes persist.

So, what should we say to this argument? Well, first there is the obvious callousness of thinking it is reasonable for anyone who is willing to work hard, degree or not, to not be able to get a job that actually pays a living wage  and *gasp* maybe even a little more so that they can spend money to get this slug of an economy moving again. This becomes even more absurd when you consider that, in this case, the person you are talking about, regardless of your opinion of the specific major, spent anywhere from four to ten years busting their ass to accomplish something that still very few people have. Regardless of the skill set, anyone who has worked that long is, at the very least, dedicated, hard-working, able to think critically, creative, and reasonably intelligent. I don’t say this as a way of “tooting my own horn” or putting people down that don’t have degrees. There are plenty of people without degrees that have all of these qualities and more. The point is that the piece of paper graduates have and the years they put into getting should at least give them the benefit of the doubt that they are competent people.

And this isn’t just my opinion. Years ago, it was fairly universally accepted that this is what it meant, and those with college degrees were virtually guaranteed (exceptions being the rule) a good job. When I was growing up, the one piece of advice I heard consistently, as did most my age I’m sure, was to go to college, that going to college would open doors. And for all I could see, that was true. Those without college degrees in my town were factory workers or workers in the service industry (both necessary, but back-breaking professions) while those that had college degrees, any college degree, had the good jobs. The man who ran the city’s juvenile detention center along with my father had a Bachelor’s in Physical Education, and there were a hundred other examples just like him to be found.  So, there was every reason to believe that a degree would at least land you squarely in the middle class, and at best, make all of your dreams come true.

Fast forward past the economic collapse, and we live in a world where this could not be farther from the truth. There’s a lot to be said about the effects of the collapse, the destruction of the middle class, the dearth of jobs and fair wages in general, more than I can even remotely scratch the surface of here, but I can say from experience that my degree is, at best, useless and at worst, a liability in terms of finding secure employment.  But here’s the rub: it’s not just me. It’s not even just humanities major; it’s everyone with a degree. Sure, things might be a little rosier for those in the sciences, but it’s a pale, pale rose with a hell of a lot of thorns. There are quite a few wonderful, in-depth articles on this subject, but in general, the point is that it’s no picnic for science majors to find work, yes even the beloved engineers who are always vaunted in these screeds against “worthless” degrees. We have a top-down system that keeps all the wealth concentrated in the hands of the few and the rest of us, regardless of who we are and how hard we work, begging for scraps.

Now, let’s turn to this idea of “worthless.” These people rarely provide any particular evidence that these majors are worthless aside from pointing to job market figures, and as I mentioned before,  my experience provides ample evidence of the severe problems existent in this current economic climate with trying to find decent work holding one of these degrees. Does that make them inherently worthless though? My Master’s in English, for example, is always  at the top of the lists and one of the first examples, if any are given, out of the mouths of those making these claims. However, I would argue that my skill set is more necessary now than ever. Maybe not my ability to talk about symbolism in “A Rose for Emily,” but my ability and my love of helping others to learn how to write and my own reasonable ability to string together coherent thoughts. In the digital age, writing is more critical than ever. In comparison to earlier times, we communicate exponentially more through writing – emails, memos, texts, comment threads, etc. It is absolutely crucial now to be able to present yourself in writing to the world. And because of failures in the K-12 system (another topic too broad to be dealt with here) and the influx of ELL learners, there is a never-ending flood of students who do not have the basic writing skills needed to be successful in life.

It is also crucial, given the massive and unprecedented amount of information produced daily, that we have tools to dig through that information to get to the truth or at least to some reasonable approximation thereof. Most of the students I’ve dealt with are drowning in information, completely incapable of discerning fluff from fact because on the Internet, fluff does a very good job of masquerading as fact, and I daresay the general populace has this same issue. I don’t think it is necessary for me to go into great detail about why it is important to be able to distinguish fact from fiction, but suffice to say that uninformed electorate is the path to tyranny (dramatic I know, but the truth nonetheless).

The idea that my skill set is necessary isn’t just my own. Look on most job boards, especially those in academia (Higheredjobs is one), and you will see that Composition/English/Writing is one of the largest categories. The problem is that the vast majority of them are adjunct jobs: vastly underpaid, temp work with no benefits and no security. So, we do recognize the value of this job, but we’re just not willing to pay for it. And so it goes with any number of these other “worthless” degrees and professions. Internet commentators and pundits will scream to the high heavens about “unskilled labor” when talking about food service or retail jobs and use this as an excuse to keep them in abject poverty, but when they want a burger or need a shirt, they are more than happy to, quietly, recognize the necessity and value of these services.

I ask, then, that we use the term “worthless” a little more carefully, and examine how the system we’re all caught in determines worth, how they convey worth, and the narratives that are being built to keep it that way.