From Merrill Lynch’s “Investment Doctor”, under the heading ” the 11 worst degrees if you want a job in today’s job market”:
“Surveys of hiring managers have found that having no degree may be better than getting a liberal arts degree. One survey question asked hiring managers what degrees they preferred, and just 1.6 percent said liberal arts. A whopping 64 percent, on the other hand, said they’d hire someone with no college degree. The problem? It’s not specialized enough to prepare you for a specific career. That’s why most liberal arts majors end up working in an entirely different field, such as real estate, business, finance, or sales. While it might make you a more well-rounded person, it probably won’t help you get a decent job.”
Makes you despair, doesn’t it? One shouldn’t shoot the messenger; whoever wrote this was reporting a total misunderstanding of the point of education.
Or have they misunderstood it? Undoubtedly, the idea that college/university is a training ground for the benefit of particular types of profession and business has been fostered by business itself. An education should teach you to think for yourself, look at things broadly and comprehensively, be able to problem-solve, and to understand human motivations. Could it be that executives don’t want smart arts graduates who can think for themselves and have the impertinence to second- guess the boss. Maybe they want, say, accountants who can keep the books quietly and obediently from day one. Of course, they may not even be aware that this is their motivation. Cocky youngsters can be a pain.
There is another aspect of this – resentment. When I was looking for a younger person to potentially succeed me as managing director, I recruited a very intelligent and personable female graduate with a good (arts) degree from Edinburgh University. This went down like a lead balloon with the employees. To start with, she was female, and they were not comforatable about the idea of a female telling them what to do. Secondly, she did what I wanted her to do – question what we were doing and why. Some of her ideas probably did arise out of ignorance of the market, and these were short-term learning problems. But the staff simply made it impossible for her to operate, in a collective passive-aggressive refusal to cooperate. I supported her, but in the end I had to give in – she left the company, a rather humiliating failure on my part. But in a society that is still class-conscious and resentful of privilege I guess I mis- judged the willingness of the employees to accept intelligence and creativity of ideas as one way of keeping them in their jobs. I don’t know whether this would happen in the US, but given the resentment of “us against them” at the moment, it wouldn’t surprise me. Emotion and fear of the different can colour everything.
First of all, I’m appalled by the blatant sexist discrimination displayed in this story. I don’t know how long ago this is, but when feminists talk about a ‘glass ceiling’, they’re not wrong if people don’t like being told what to do by a woman. When I worked for a clothes retailer, my head manager was a woman, as was the assistant manager and the recruiting officer. There were only two men on the management team, and both of them were gay. I thought that was the norm. Apparently I’m wrong.
Secondly, I know a lot of women doing arts degrees from places like Edinburgh. They’re very hard working and competent people. Sure they think for themselves, but in the long term that raises productivity. I was approached by a recruiter from Bank of America, who said they were looking for a wider variety of graduates (not just finance and business) to boost profits. In a workplace, it benefits from having a variety of perspectives. If your employees couldn’t see that then that’s their loss.
Ah, to be fair, I was talking about the beginning of the 1980s, a very different time. I’m sure it would be different now. At that time it was still expected that most women would be at home, or doing relatively low grade jobs. I was trying to do something very surprising in an environment that was working class and conservative ( small ‘ c’). Good people, really, butcouldn’t get their heads round it. It was only in the 1990s that big companies started to activlely look for females executives and managers and promote them, but I’m sure the old habits did die hard. ‘M glad we have come a long way, and will not go back now.