Season 1: Episode 15 Transcript
Junior Kickoff Part 2
Lee Coffin:
I love words. I read them, write them, speak them, play with them. I love a good pun. I'm intrigued by the origin of a word, the way words arrange themselves into ideas, sentences, stories, songs, slogans, podcasts. I keep a note on my phone that keeps track of new words I discover. The note is called Wordplay, and "quinquennial" is its most recent edition. If you're curious, it means every five years, kind of like a school reunion. So I'm a vocabulary collector, a wordsmith, a word nerd. I often think I should have studied linguistics, and I might have if that had been a major at my college, but I'm not sure it was even a class I could have taken.
And then I wonder if my college-era self would have allowed my curiosity to wander towards linguistics, even if I could have. I'd never heard of it back then, and what would I have done with that kind of a degree? My dad was puzzled enough when I declared my major in history. "What the hell will you do with a degree in that?" he grumbled. And then he added, "And why am I paying for it?" And I reminded him, well I was on financial aid, so he wasn't paying that much for it, but I digress. I told him I studied it because I loved it, and I think my career has turned out pretty well, and my life has been informed by my journey through that humanities discipline trinity in the 1980s.
But my dad's reaction is not uncommon. Over the years, I've heard many students wrestle with this same question to themselves, and also as they negotiate college admissions with their parents. I was in London a few years ago, and a student came up to me and asked me about our Italian program, and said, "I really love the idea of studying Italian," at which point his mom swatted him in the shoulder and said, "You're such a romantic. You're going to study physics, and you'll like it." And then she walked away, and I said to him, "Study Italian. Follow your heart."
A little while later, I was in another presentation, and I told the story I just shared about my dad's interaction with my choice of major, and a young man came up to me afterwards, and he said, "Thank you for saying that, because I've been struggling to figure out how to tell my parents that I want to study art history, and as a first-gen family, they don't understand why that's practical."
So this week, my guests and I will ponder this nagging question: "What is the enduring value of the liberal arts?" And specifically the value of the humanities as a course of study in the 2020s, and we'll answer a question that dances around this topic: What are you going to do with that? The quick answer, almost anything you want. So this week, we welcome Charlotte Albright as always, who in her own right is a humanities person with a PhD in literature. So hello, Charlotte.
Charlotte Albright:
Hello.
Lee Coffin:
Our guests today are Barbara Will, the Newberry Professor of English at Dartmouth College, where she is a specialist in 20th-century literature, culture, and history, with a comparative emphasis on Anglo-American and French modernism, and Scott Muir, who's Dartmouth Class of 2008, and he is the project director for Study the Humanities at the National Humanities Alliance in Washington, DC. Let me start with a really foundational first question for Barbara and Scott. What are the humanities?
Barbara Will:
The humanities are basically the study of culture, so the study of art, literature, music, philosophy, religion, media, film, foreign languages, history, all of the good topics that ask questions about our culture, about our world, about our past, and about our future. It's about people in their cultures, who are producing artifacts, so it's also people who made pots in Ancient Rome, or a present-day filmmaker in China. It's people who are making things that they've left to future generations to think about, to understand, to analyze, and to appreciate.
Lee Coffin:
That's really helpful, and I started with that question to both of you because as an admission officer, I'm very mindful of the need to translate academia to high school ears, you know? A student moves through 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th grade, and the word "humanities" may never have landed in a course description they take. They take English, and they take social studies, and they take languages, but perhaps they've never heard someone call those "the humanities". And I think that's part of the challenge of this topic we're engaged in too, is you know, when you say "science," people get it. When you say "engineering," people understand it. Humanities has a less direct journey through your ears to your understand. Does that sound right, Scott?
Scott Muir:
Absolutely, yeah, and I'll just add, in this work at the National Humanities Alliance, I've come to also know the humanities as a network of institutions, such as libraries, museums, historical societies, archives, all kinds of cultural institutions, and also to think about it in terms of activities, so all of those disciplines that Barbara just listed. You know, you're doing these types of activities, but they're also things that you as a high school student are familiar with. You know, when you start to analyze a cultural artifact, even if it's a TV show, in a critical and thoughtful way, you're starting to kind of do the humanities. Listening to podcasts, learning about music, film, visual arts, food ways. All these things can be ways of doing the humanities as well.
Lee Coffin:
And Scott, just as we start, what is the National Humanities Alliance?
Scott Muir:
The National Humanities Alliance is an advocacy organization, and we were founded to advocate for federal funding for the humanities, so the National Endowment for the Humanities, and there's also a National Endowment for the Arts, exists to support humanities work across the country, and programming, so we advocate for that, along with the National Archives and a lot of other things in the federal government. I don't work at all on that side of the house. I work purely in higher ed, and advocating for humanities education, primarily at the undergraduate level, and supporting faculty and administrators in doing so.
Lee Coffin:
Okay, so that's very helpful. For the three of you, so Charlotte, Scott, and Barbara, you're all humanists. You've all studied the humanities. Some of you teach it. Let's go back to high school, and I'd like each of you to share kind of with our listeners, were you focused on humanities as part of your college search in your respective high school moments, or did this come to you a bit more serendipitously when you were in college? I'll start with Barbara.
Barbara Will:
Yeah, sure. I'm actually the child of two professors of the humanities, so it wasn't a huge stretch for me. My father, who's still alive, is a classics professor and a literature professor, and my mother also was a classics professor, so I grew up in a very college-type environment. A lot of students were coming through the house all the time. My parents were very interested in teaching, and there were books everywhere, so it was not really hard for me to imagine going to college and studying the humanities, because I loved to read. I mean, I have to say, when you were introducing this podcast, Lee, I recognized myself immediately in what you said. I just love language. I love words. I like the origins of words. I like doing Wordle. I like crossword puzzles. I could spend a lot of time dissecting language, and I really just love doing that, so reading has always been a huge part of my life.
The other piece of my life that's important is music, so I was trained as a classical violinist. I almost went to conservatory, and then decided, you know, I want a liberal arts education. I want to be able to study things outside of music, and outside of literature. I wanted to study science, and even thought I might want to be a doctor eventually. So yeah, I had a strong humanities kind of background from my family and my innate interest, but I also was curious about other things too, so I didn't necessarily know I wanted to major in the humanities. Once I got to college and started taking English classes at a higher level, you know? With really great professors, I sort of realized this is what I really love, so yeah.
Lee Coffin:
Were you an English major?
Barbara Will:
I was an English major.
Lee Coffin:
Okay. Charlotte?
Charlotte Albright:
Well, Barbara, I was an English major too, Bennington College class of 1972, and I also was a kid who was always being told to turn out the light, and go to bed, and stop reading. Then I would get the flashlight and go under the covers. And then, I have to say, all of my best teachers happened to be English teachers. I mean, I was diagramming sentences, and I still teach that to some of my students, and then I went to graduate school, because I hadn't really read enough, I felt, in undergraduate school, because I had spent a little time wonking around on the stage and taking parts, and not going to every single class every single day. But anyway, I ended up getting a PhD in literature, and while I was doing that, I needed to make some money, so I started freelance writing for The Boston Phoenix, and then ended up in public radio.
It was seamless. It was a seamless transition, because I always think of journalism as a teaching profession. It's just that I don't have to grade all of the people that are listening to me, which is a boon from my point of view. But I've always gone back and forth between teaching and broadcasting, and now I'm podcasting, which feels like a blend, so that's my story. But honestly, as a journalist, I am now watching some of these news stories that I'm sure Scott will talk more about later, about the humanities themselves, and it's dizzying, so let me just say journalism about academia is something that needs to be decoded, so we'll do that. Right, Scott?
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Scott Muir:
Sure.
Lee Coffin:
So Scott, where did you start?
Scott Muir:
Well, I'd always loved history, especially as I loved historical fiction. When I first started reading, I was reading historical novels about the American Revolution and things, as like an eight-year-old, and loved that, and I had these amazing history teachers in high school, so that just kind of reinforced that. So I arrived on campus knowing that I loved history, and that was kind of in my back pocket, but I also really wanted to explore everything that was available to me. I spent my first... I said, "You know, I know I love history. Let's take two years to sort of explore all the things that I don't know anything about." I wanted to really learn what was the best fit for me in an informed way, by really kind of taking the tour on what's going to motivate me and propel me forward, and that's what I did.
I signed up for courses in philosophy, anthropology, astronomy, music, environmental science, economics, Spanish, et cetera. I remember getting that print copy of the courses that were going to be offered next term, and it was like I was a kid in a candy store, you know? I just loved choosing based on what the most compelling course was, regardless of what discipline it was in. And it was actually social psychological that grabbed me first, so I have a strong social science orientation as well. And then religious studies really grabbed me, and I spent basically my entire senior year studying, taking religious studies courses, picked up a very late minor and eventually a PhD. So, it just felt like after all the things that I'd studied, it really kind of put a lot of the things I was interested in and a lot of the disciplines that I was interested in in conversation with one another, and that really sealed the deal for me.
Lee Coffin:
What I love about the three of your stories is that you followed your intellectual curiosity. You know, your love of books, and reading, and learning, and asking questions kind of guided you into parts of the curriculum that you might not have known a lot about. I think if you jump ahead of the admissions story into first-year advising, you know, when I've done that over the years, I often say to students, "Be open to exploring. Don't just lock yourself into some narrow understanding of, 'Well, I'm good at this, so I'm going to study that,' because you don't know." I mean, like my linguistics example in the intro. You might not have ever heard of the discipline, because that wasn't a high school word, but the content of that is exactly what you'd like to study.
So part of what we're talking about is the humanities as this really rich part of the curriculum, and Barbara, I'm reminded of a comment you made one year at an open house, where you talked about the geography of Dartmouth College, and you said the academic departments that circle the Green are the arts, and humanities, and languages, and you said, you know, "These classic components of the curriculum sit at the heart of our geography," and that really stuck with me as kind of a metaphor for the way the curriculum plays out around the campus. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Barbara Will:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean, I think where I would go with that is to first disentangle the humanities and the liberal arts, because I think a lot of people think... When they hear the word the liberal arts, they think we're talking about the humanities or the fields of study in the humanities, but actually, the liberal arts is an entire broad range of subjects offered at an undergraduate college like Dartmouth. And in the past, most students would have focused their liberal arts study on the humanities. That's changed somewhat now, where students are not necessarily focused as much on the humanities, and maybe are more interested in majoring in fields like STEM, or economics, government, that kind of thing.
And that's all fine. It's just the history of a school like Dartmouth is very much embedded in the heart of the campus around the humanities, and I think it still is, because what the humanities teach you is a way of looking at the world, questioning the world, criticizing the world, and appreciating the world, and those skills are all things that students take into their other classes, whether they're studying engineering or Earth sciences, but these are like these fundamental intellectual skills that the humanities really, really focuses on in our small classes, and very, very close work with professors, which is a feature of humanities classes, and those skills are things that transfer into all parts of the rest of the campus. So the heart of the campus, I think, really is the humanities, and then as people develop other interests, they take those skills that they've learned in humanities classes into other parts of the campus.
Lee Coffin:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Charlotte Albright:
Well, Barbara, you talked about how there's a shift from humanities into STEM courses occasionally, and that gets a lot of headlines when that happens, so Hechinger Report, end of November, reports that the number of college graduates in the humanities drops for the eighth consecutive year, subtitle, "A Puzzling Decline of More Than 30% in English and History Majors," but on the other hand, there's a counter story that came out within a week of that one, in Forbes Magazine, and Forbes is reporting just the opposite, that during COVID, and nobody knows quite how to explain this, so maybe you could, but during COVID, the time of economic upheaval, you might expect that there would be an even bigger decline in humanities degrees and an increase in STEM, but the opposite happened. Four in 10 of the class of '21 said the pandemic influenced their choice of a college major, and a lot of them chose humanities. So, Scott, as I said, decode please.
Scott Muir:
Yeah, and you see this all the time in the editorial page as well, in terms of counter-narratives. You know, that data that Forbes is reporting on is more recent, but it's also more contained. I think they're reporting on UVM, University of Vermont College of Arts and Sciences data, because to get data that quickly, it kind of has to be on a smaller scale, whereas the Hechinger Report is referring back to pre-pandemic data, because that's what we actually have a national sense of at this point. We don't have a national sense of the trends of the last year or two. That's my understanding of why you have people citing two different stories, and I think the impact of the pandemic... You know, time will tell, but I think there's a lot of great reasons to think that everything that we've gone through with the pandemic, with the national reckoning with racial injustice, with everything we're dealing with, with our democracy, that all of these things that we've experienced in the past year, climate change, et cetera, that there's a lot of reasons to think that these are pointing students towards wanting to study the humanities and delve into the questions that we're all asking ourselves right now.
Charlotte Albright:
But honestly, Scott, when I see that pendulum swinging from one year to the next, it makes me pose a question to Lee, to any admissions dean. Isn't there then a case to be made for choosing a school in which you as the pendulum can swing yourself, right? You know, you could decide on English and later end up in engineering, and those are not mutually exclusive intellectual exercises anymore. There's so much interdisciplinary teaching, there's so much double and triple majors, so isn't that an argument, Lee, for a school that offers a place for this pendulum to swing as much as it wants?
Lee Coffin:
Yes. You know, I've been a student of the liberal arts, a resident of the liberal arts, since 1981, and I've never left, and I 100% see this curriculum as the best training for a life of inquiry, and engagement, and being ready to interpret what comes next by having understood where we've been. You know, and I would describe myself as a humanities-positive dean. You know, and Barbara as the former dean of the arts and humanities at Dartmouth, I mean, we were administrative pals in championing the promotion of this part of the curriculum to prospective students and parents. So having said that, I wanted to bring some data into this, so I'll call it quantitative humanities for just a second.
I was looking at our applicant pool, with the representation of the humanities or interest in the humanities in our applicant pool, so to Scott and Barbara, love your thoughts, so I did a query of any applicant who listed one of our humanities disciplines as a potential major, so we asked them, "What's your primary? What's your secondary? What's your tertiary?" So you have three choices. 9% of the applicants listed one of the humanities as an interest. And to scale that, that adds up to about 2,500 students in a pool of 28,000.
In contrast, biology, computer science, engineering, and economics each, on their own, have more intended majors than the humanities combined, so I think it speaks to this conundrum that Charlotte was poking at, which is there's a lot of interest in STEM, broadly, and fields that are perceived as being pragmatic. I think that's where my dad would have landed when he was counseling me towards a major. So it's a conundrum, because while we are championing them, and we are celebrating them in the curriculum and in the admission process, the volume to date flows the other way, and I think that's part of the challenge, is how do we become kind of the evangelists for the humanities, if you will? I mean, that would be religion example there, but like how do we tell this story in a way that gets prospective students and their parents to sit up and say, "Yeah, that's me"?
Barbara Will:
Well, can I jump in, because I think-
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Barbara Will:
Scott is the person who really can speak to this, because I mean, he just produces these amazing rationales for why one should study the humanities, but I do want to say, Lee, that I think that number of 9% interest is actually pretty stable. I mean, it maybe has gone up and down, but it's pretty stable in the last, let's say, maybe 10, 15 years. When I first came to Dartmouth, which was in 1994, there were many, many students who wanted to major in the humanities. That fell off after the financial crisis of 2008, and since then, there's been a marked decline, but it's now, sort of I would say, stabilized at that level of incoming interest, which is, yeah, very low, but it also doesn't say what happens once a student arrives on campus and starts taking some of these great philosophy courses, or classics courses, or art history classes, and thinks like, "This is what I want to do with my time."
So, again, I'm not too worried about that number, because I've been riding this wave for 10 to 15 years, but it still raises a lot of questions about what's happening largely in society, that might be causing those numbers to be so low.
Lee Coffin:
And what my hypothesis, as I've started to play with the numbers last year or this year, you know, the pools are growing across our peer group and at Dartmouth, and what's interesting to me is much of the growth comes in communities that have low understanding of the humanities. We've talked on this podcast about globalism and internationalism, so of these humanities, students with a humanities interest, only 23% of them are international citizens.
You know, when I look at the first-gen pool, it's only 17% of this group are the first in their families to go to college, and as you map it against... There's a huge female majority in this pool too, so you know, I think about the demographics, and I start to overlap these two things, and then I guess the question to the two of you is how do you get ahead of the demographic curve? If the international pool continues to grow and there's lower recognition of these disciplines as opportunities in college, for our international listeners, how do we have a conversation with you about this piece of the curriculum and why it's applicable to your life?
Scott Muir:
Well yeah, I mean, there are certain cultures that have always had a sort of a bias towards engineering, and medicine, and things like that as sort of seen as the path to professional stability and sort of maybe some of the more venerated professions in those cultures. You know, that 9% figure, I would make a very... I'd be very confident in a wager that more than 9% of those applicants have enjoyed their experiences with the humanities before college, and actually do have a genuine interest in them, and they're counting them out as majors for other reasons. It's not that they're not interested in them. It's that they think that they don't have permission to study them as majors. And I would also wager that there's going to be people who are not in that 9%, who find their way to the humanities once they get to campus and see what's actually going on at the college level.
Lee Coffin:
Well, I think that's part of the misleading narrative in the Admissions Beat. You know, you've got Forbes and Hechinger writing about declines, when in fact the interest is still there. People are taking these classes, and loving them, and thriving in them, but maybe choosing a major outside of the humanities. It doesn't mean they're dismissing the humanities as an essential part of their curriculum. So I think it's how do you measure success? Is it the number of majors or the number of people taking courses in these disciplines, that enrich the other parts of their curriculum? And you're all nodding as I say that.
Scott Muir:
Yeah, so it's undeniable that there has been a decline in humanities majors and enrollment since 2008, the great recession being the real kind of pivotal turning point. But that was not a response to poor outcomes of humanities majors on the job market, or is it an accurate representation of kind of where our economy is headed. Now, some people may feel that with the ascendance of technology, that things have changed in such a way that a humanities background is no longer the strong foundation for success that it has always been. Maybe they think everyone should be a computer science major now, so they learn how to code or something like that, but if you read the forecasts of labor market experts, that is not at all what they say. They say human skills, like communication and critical thinking will be more important as more and more technical tasks are automated. They note that business leaders, more than ever before, need to be able to navigate sensitive social and cultural issues deftly. They predict that coding will continue to be valuable for the kinds of jobs it is already important for, but that most workers will rely more heavily on their interpersonal and uniquely human skills.
The other thing they note, which I think is really important, is just how diversified and niche-y the workforce is now. Doctor, lawyer, businessman may be the familiar types, but the reality is that you can make money doing just about anything now. Now, these are not humanities people or educators pointing these things out. This is what Deloitte is saying. This is what World Economic Forum has been saying about the future of work, and I think the events of the last couple years really bear all this out.
Lee Coffin:
Well, it gets to a podcast that Scott's about to launch. On March 10th, his podcast, What Are You Going to Do With That, launches, and you wrote to me, "It will illustrate the notoriously fuzzy connection between undergraduate education in the humanities and the wide range of exciting careers through the personal stories of people who have explored them." To Charlotte's point, you can major in any of these disciplines and interpret them into these broad opportunities, but tell us about your podcast as a way of segueing into this, I think, conundrum that nags at people like my dad, which is this belief that you study something, and then that's who you are when you're done, as opposed to the discipline is a foundation that sets you up for a wide range of careers, so my new podcasting colleague, tell us about it.
Scott Muir:
Sure. It's called What Are You Going to Do With That, which is a familiar question for college students, and humanities majors in particular. It basically challenges all the biases that are often implied in that question, through stories of everyday folks who studied the humanities on their way to fulfilling careers. These stories are not unique. The data does not support the notion that humanities majors struggle to make ends meet. It shows them employed, making competitive salaries, satisfied with their careers. So these trends of decline aren't responding to things happening on the job market where humanities majors are struggling, and they're not responding to trends where the value of humanities skills on the job market are diminishing.
But what we've found is that showing people the data doesn't necessarily replace that false narrative with a more accurate understanding of how a humanities background provides a strong foundation for your career. The stories really help to illustrate that more clearly. Part of how they do that is that you get to hear folks who have applied these different humanities majors in a variety of career fields, but there's then the more particular stories about marrying humanities knowledge and skills with technological and scientific capacities, about humanities offering the perfect on-ramp to a legal career, about applying the passion for humanities through a career in museums, about the ability to navigate challenging issues in business, and finding creative solutions to problems. So there's a consistent message that if you trust yourself and focus your efforts where you feel yourself growing, and getting excited to do more, you're putting yourself in a great position for success wherever your path leads from there.
Lee Coffin:
And I think that's the key thing. I think part of the storytelling in the admissions space, particularly for families like mine, for whom college is a new adventure, it's debunking this idea that the career and the major are inextricably connected. Scott, can you give us a preview of maybe one of the stories you told? Like, someone who studied a humanities discipline and landed in a really unexpected role afterwards?
Scott Muir:
Yeah, so I'll sort of... There was a little bit of a pattern, in that we had multiple... There's multiple stories of folks who thought they were going to be doctors, and then ended up taking a different path, and there's multiple who thought they were going to be lawyers, that ended up taking a different path, and one who did become a lawyer, and that was kind of the plan all along. So, in terms of those who took this kind of unexpected journey, one was a communications specialist, first in government, then in the private sector, now in nonprofits, and is now a candidate for the chief executive position at her nonprofit foundation, where she's been working for a number of years.
Another one who thought she was going to be a lawyer ended up pursuing her passion for fine food, and actually built a really wonderful career on the foundation of waiting tables at really nice restaurants right out of college, and is now working for a seed company that provides heirloom seeds through seed breeding. It's a partnership between chefs, and scientists, and humanities folks, and it's wild. And there's all kinds of-
Lee Coffin:
That's cool.
Scott Muir:
... jobs like that, that nobody knows about, and you can't know about until you go on a journey that brings you to somewhere like that.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Barbara Will:
Well, and then can I just add, I mean, at Dartmouth, there's some really famous stories. Timothy Geithner, who was the treasury secretary under Obama, was an East Asian studies major. And actually, he was a classmate, I believe, of Connie Britton's, who was also a Dartmouth alum, also an East Asian studies major, who ended up becoming an actress. So I think there's a lot of stories at all of these colleges we're talking about, of people who have taken humanities paths in undergraduate years and then gone off and done really amazing things that are very different from humanities majors.
Charlotte Albright:
Well, as my fellow English major, Barbara, you know, the other thing that occurs to me is that when we teach the novel, and everybody reads novels. I don't care whether you're going to major in engineering or not, at some point, you're going to read a novel in college. A lot of these novels, especially 19th-century novels, my favorite period, are about up-and-comers.
Barbara Will:
Yeah.
Charlotte Albright:
You know? They really are. They kind of map out a Becky Thatcher, or some Dickens character like Great Expectations, making their way, because of their own wit and grit, and so when I teach those novels, I try to get students to identify with them.
Barbara Will:
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I think... I don't know, Lee, if you want to move into the part of the discussion about the skills that you learn-
Lee Coffin:
Go for it.
Barbara Will:
... through studying the humanities, but I think, for example, the skills that you learn from studying a novel are so interesting to me. Like, what is it that you really are learning when you read, study, discuss, and write about a novel in an undergraduate classroom? It's very hard to really put your finger on what you're learning, but somehow, what you're learning is allowing you to develop yourself in these really interesting ways, that are then going to have sort of transferable effects onto your future. For example, if you're learning how to analyze a character, you're learning a ton about human psychological, and you're learning a lot about motivation, and about counter-motivations. These are all skills that you're actually learning, and these are things that you can actually apply to jobs that you get after college. I think Scott, you've done an incredible job sort of mapping the way in which these sort of intangible things that happen in a humanities classroom are actually producing these skills in young people that are going to have enormous effects on their future careers.
Lee Coffin:
Storytelling, narrative. You know, I was thinking as I was listening to the two of you just share those thoughts, you know, "What's the root of humanities?" Like, diagram the words, human. You know, I think that's not accidental, that these disciplines connect to each of us as a person.
Charlotte Albright:
But there is a counter-narrative, isn't there?
Lee Coffin:
Go ahead.
Charlotte Albright:
That is a pet peeve of mine, those articles that come out, Scott, and you sent me one. I think it was a Washington Post one, that equates... It matches up how much it costs to get a degree, let's say from Oberlin. This was one of them in the Washington Post. "Philosophy degree from Oberlin costs 142 grand, and two years later, graduates are making, from that program, $18,000." Drives me nuts. For one thing, my daughter went to Oberlin. She's doing very well with her art degree. But the idea that you could create a narrative around those numbers seems odd to me, because number one, a lot of people don't pay that sticker price for the college degree, and I'm not sure how to read those numbers. Are they only looking at people who are making a living as a philosopher? Are those the two people that are making $18,000? I mean, what do those numbers mean? And why….
Lee Coffin:
And this is the-
Charlotte Albright:
... even look at them?
Lee Coffin:
This is the issue, Charlotte, that I live as an admission officer, where there's a ROI component to this admission conversation.
Charlotte Albright:
What's ROI mean?
Lee Coffin:
Return on investment-
Charlotte Albright:
Return on investment. Okay.
Lee Coffin:
But it's very present today, and I think it's a function of what we all cost now. Adding up one year times four, and saying, "Is this degree worth it?" Is this very pragmatic consumerist perspective. It's not illegitimate, but it misses the point sometimes.
Scott Muir:
So, what those numbers show you... The way to interpret those numbers is like, "Okay, if I know that I immediately need to be making a very lucrative salary, immediately, right out of college, then these are the majors that can do that for me," and the problem with that Washington Post piece and some of the reporters on this, is that people have been taking those numbers and tried to extrapolate out from two years, and project that out onto someone's entire career, and measure long-term ROI from this major, which doesn't work. I mean, the numbers just don't work. It's a lot of projection. The college scorecard is not built to determine whether a program is functioning well, whether it's giving their students valuable skills, you know, the long-term value of that degree, any of those things. It's only built to measure and identify the programs that immediately lead to lucrative employment.
So I understand that certain students are going to be coming from a place where that feels really important to them, but I think it's being overblown to point it in a negative direction, to say, "Well, these programs have poor ROI," when the numbers actually don't really support that conclusion.
Barbara Will:
There was a New York Times article, I want to say two years ago. I wrote about it. I can find the data, which suggests that by the age of 40, people who majored in the humanities are making as much as, if not more than, people who had more quote-unquote "professional" majors. So it's really going back to your point, Scott, that we may not be measuring... If we really want to think about long-term financial success, whatever that means, and we're not even talking about life satisfaction and all of the other things that you get from a humanities major. When we're simply talking about like how much money are you making at the age of 40, it looks like the humanities folks are not really doing that poorly.
Lee Coffin:
I come right back to my own kitchen as a teenager, where my dad was saying like, "You know, you got to get a good job. You're going to college, and this is going to lead you to something," and it of course did, so for those of you listening, and by those of you, I'm talking to high school seniors, and juniors, and maybe sophomores, who are looking forward and getting that question posed to you, like, "So what will you major in? What do you want to study?"
My best advice as an admission officer and as a humanities student myself is follow your passion. Be true to that intellectual compass that makes you giddy to go to class, that makes you excited to put your flashlight, or probably your cell phone under the sheets to read the book after you're supposed to be asleep, and to honor that part of your personhood that makes you excited to explore, and to learn about people, and to find yourself in words, like I do, and in music, and in the arts, and in museums, and in libraries, and in conversation, and know that when you come to college, you will find kindred spirits as you take up that course of study and then run from there when you get to college. So Barbara, Scott, Charlotte, thanks so much for joining us on the Admission Beat this week.
Barbara Will:
Thanks.
Scott Muir:
Absolutely, thanks for having me.
Charlotte Albright:
It was fun.
Lee Coffin:
You're welcome. As always, if you have questions, please send them to us at admissionsbeat@dartmouth.edu. If you like what you heard, please subscribe to the Admission Beat wherever you find your podcasts, and if you like the idea of What Are You Going to Do With That, Scott Muir's new podcast, please find it on your pod platforms, and subscribe to Scott, so that as he starts evangelizing about the humanities and life with them, you've got him in your earbuds too. For now, this is Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College. We'll see you next week.