I'm a second-generation immigrant to the Western world--my and seemingly most immigrant parents in the majority-minority community where I grew up were having "the conversation" with us as soon as we entered elementary school. There is unfortunately some truth to the racist stereotype of Asian parents who'll ground you for an A- in math …
I'm a second-generation immigrant to the Western world--my and seemingly most immigrant parents in the majority-minority community where I grew up were having "the conversation" with us as soon as we entered elementary school. There is unfortunately some truth to the racist stereotype of Asian parents who'll ground you for an A- in math but tolerate a B+ in social studies; I resented that messaging as a child just as I still do as an adult. Regardless of ethnicity, children should not be programmed to make decisions based on market optimality under capitalism, lest they learn that above all else they must maintain the status quo.
The knowledge gained through vocational training is only instrumentally valuable; a (quality) university education in the humanities, at the undergraduate or the graduate level, is intrinsically valuable. It feels like the most prestigious private undergraduate institutions meet full financial need these days (like AHP, even with a "full ride," as an undergrad I had to work multiple jobs for living costs and summer housing--but staying debt-free is key!), so IMO there's truly no hidden cost to college degrees in the humanities. That's not what this series is about.
That said, I left my undergraduate university after finishing my philosophy B.A., instead of staying for a coterminal master's degree like apparently 30% of my peers, as we learned on Sunday. Humanities coterms aren't funded, and I wasn't going to start indebting myself now. But until reading this series, and the genuinely life-changing "[these students] had never _really_ been acquainted with a time when meritocracy _hadn't_ worked for them," I felt fated to wear my B.A. as a consolatory badge of kinda-smart-but-not-grad-student-material? "Finishing School for well-resourced students who don’t know what else to do" is EXACTLY what coterming felt like, and it felt like everyone was doing it. That's the downside of private school ;)
Of course, I haven't had any kind of luck finding a job in philosophy without a graduate degree, but I ended up teaching myself computer science (vocational training for software engineers), which has been nigh-instantaneously lucrative and far more possible than teaching myself Kant would have been. I regret nothing, and the philosophy education has prepared me far better for e.g. questions of ethics in my new software engineering job than an undergrad computer science program would have.
I'm a second-generation immigrant to the Western world--my and seemingly most immigrant parents in the majority-minority community where I grew up were having "the conversation" with us as soon as we entered elementary school. There is unfortunately some truth to the racist stereotype of Asian parents who'll ground you for an A- in math but tolerate a B+ in social studies; I resented that messaging as a child just as I still do as an adult. Regardless of ethnicity, children should not be programmed to make decisions based on market optimality under capitalism, lest they learn that above all else they must maintain the status quo.
The knowledge gained through vocational training is only instrumentally valuable; a (quality) university education in the humanities, at the undergraduate or the graduate level, is intrinsically valuable. It feels like the most prestigious private undergraduate institutions meet full financial need these days (like AHP, even with a "full ride," as an undergrad I had to work multiple jobs for living costs and summer housing--but staying debt-free is key!), so IMO there's truly no hidden cost to college degrees in the humanities. That's not what this series is about.
That said, I left my undergraduate university after finishing my philosophy B.A., instead of staying for a coterminal master's degree like apparently 30% of my peers, as we learned on Sunday. Humanities coterms aren't funded, and I wasn't going to start indebting myself now. But until reading this series, and the genuinely life-changing "[these students] had never _really_ been acquainted with a time when meritocracy _hadn't_ worked for them," I felt fated to wear my B.A. as a consolatory badge of kinda-smart-but-not-grad-student-material? "Finishing School for well-resourced students who don’t know what else to do" is EXACTLY what coterming felt like, and it felt like everyone was doing it. That's the downside of private school ;)
Of course, I haven't had any kind of luck finding a job in philosophy without a graduate degree, but I ended up teaching myself computer science (vocational training for software engineers), which has been nigh-instantaneously lucrative and far more possible than teaching myself Kant would have been. I regret nothing, and the philosophy education has prepared me far better for e.g. questions of ethics in my new software engineering job than an undergrad computer science program would have.