Mourning the death ... of liberal education

 (The following essay has been rejected by two publications.  So ... time to self-publish!)
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Through the past pandemic year, I, like many, have had several Zoom meetings—with students, colleagues, relatives, and my physician too.  However, I wish I hadn’t had a recent Zoom meeting in which the college dean informed me that I was being laid off from my job as Professor of Geography at Western Oregon University (WOU.)

The two-page layoff letter that arrived via email during the Zoom firing included this line: “Please note that your layoff is not disciplinary in nature and does not reflect on your performance.”  But that provides no consolation.

Geography is not the only program that is being phased out.  Philosophy and anthropology will also not be available as majors or minors from fall 2021.  Students will no longer have an option to minor in physics either.  Many other programs are also being right sized, as the university president’s plan puts it.  As a result, a few tenured faculty, including me, have been issued layoff notices, some tenure-track lines will not be filled, contracts for quite a few adjunct faculty will not be renewed, and academic programs are being curtailed.

The American higher education landscape had been rapidly changing even in those halcyon days before we became familiar with the word “coronavirus.”  During the pandemic year, the rate of change reached unprecedented levels, with the result that tenured full professors are being laid off and academic programs are being shut down at WOU.  

The fashion over the years across higher education, and at WOU too, has been to promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and to gut anything that resembles traditional liberal education.  The logic has been that STEM graduates are more employable than are those who spent their college years studying subjects like geography, philosophy, and anthropology.  

This false impression persists despite the growing mountain of evidence that points to the value of liberal education for employment and also for our collective well-being.  The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) is one of the many groups that routinely make this point very clear.  In a recent research report that is based on surveys of employers, the AACU points out that a “liberal education provides the knowledge and skills employers view as important  for career success.”

In the vast world of employment in which specialized professional credentials are not required, employability is about skills, and not about whether a student can solve a linear algebra problem.  The preparation for productive employment is rarely about the major itself, and the skills are gained through a broad array of topics outside one’s major.  A few years ago, WOU developed undergraduate learning outcomes that make clear what the core of an undergraduate education is about: Quantitative literacy; Written Communication; Inquiry and Analysis; Integrative Learning; Diversity and Global Learning.  These are the essential outcomes that employers repeatedly cite as being important.

Unfortunately, politicians of all stripes have only made it worse for liberal education.  For instance, in 2014, President Obama mocked art history as an undergraduate major.  Senator Marco Rubio, during his failed run in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, claimed that we need more welders and fewer philosophers.  Obama and Rubio were not the only leaders trash-talking liberal education and calling for vocational versions of higher education.  Politicians have been virulently attacking various fields of inquiry that they deem wasteful.  The harsh sound bites quickly reverberated among the public and through the political world that determines funding for public universities like WOU.  Three years later, Rubio acknowledged the value of philosophy and philosophers.  Meanwhile, Obama sent a handwritten apology to a University of Texas art history professor regretting his glib remarks.   Their apologies were mere whispers that few heard.

All through my life in India, I didn't know that there was something out there called “liberal education,” but that's exactly what my heart had always been after.  In India, we kids who were good in school were compelled to think only about two options—engineering or medicine.  Rare was an academically talented kid who fought against the system in order to study literature or history.  That’s how I ended up earning an undergraduate degree in electrical and electronic engineering, even though my heart was never in it.

My intellectual world opened up when I came to the US for graduate schooling.  In 1987, I joined the urban planning program at the University of Southern California (USC) and, for the first time in my life, I had a formal and structured opportunity to study philosophy, political science, geography, and more.  It was liberal education on steroids!  I was in heaven.  I immediately fell in love with liberal education and latched on to it pretty strongly. 

When I accepted the employment offer from WOU, I told friends in California that the charming campus and the curriculum presented the university as a public version of a private liberal arts college.  In fact, for a while, WOU’s marketing materials included this tag line: "Steadily emerging as a leading public liberal arts institution.”  A few years later, that was replaced with "Providing an academically challenging and unique comprehensive public liberal arts education."  When I served as the Director of the university’s Honors Program, I was all too thrilled with providing college freshman what I wished I had in India—liberal education.

Over the recent years, WOU ceased to be a public version of a liberal arts college.  Programs that had the appearance of being professional and employable were increasingly favored over traditional disciplines.  The writing on the wall became clearer with each academic term that it was a liability for me to be associated with Geography.  I am, therefore, not at all surprised that I am being laid off.

The layoffs and program curtailment as a result of right sizing the university are evidence of the death of liberal education at WOU.    I mourn that death.   

Intellectual parochialism wins

In May 2018, which is nearly 3 years ago, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued a rare joint statement on "increasingly threatened" disciplines and approaches.

They noted in that statement:

we believe that institutions of higher education, if they are truly to serve as institutions of higher education, should provide more than narrow vocational training and should seek to enhance students’ capacities for lifelong learning. This is as true of open-access institutions as it is of highly selective elite colleges and universities. The disciplines of the liberal arts—and the overall benefit of a liberal education--are exemplary in this regard, for they foster intellectual curiosity about questions that will never be definitively settled—questions about justice, about community, about politics and culture, about difference in every sense of the word. All college students and not solely a privileged few should have opportunities to address such questions as a critical part of their educational experience.

Indeed!

Through my years in higher ed, and over the past almost 20 years at WOU, I have been fighting nothing but losing battles defending liberal education.  The war has now ended.

I worry that instead of broadening the reach of liberal education, universities like WOU are rapidly moving in the other direction of further limiting the horizons of less-privileged students. We seem to be well on our way to re-creating the huge divide that has always existed between the privileged few and the overwhelming rest--a divide that public higher education was designed to address.  

Students have always been shocked when I tell them, for instance, that Harvard does not even offer an undergraduate major in "criminal justice," which is one of our high enrollment programs.  They seemed genuinely puzzled about students majoring in English or philosophy at these expensive schools like Harvard.

Over the years, we have hyped up these high enrolling majors, and actively invested them, as if we know something that the privileged few do not.  Universities like WOU systematically, intentionally, and strategically create and market academic programs, often by vocationalizing it, even when the links to gainful employment are dubious, as this 2013 report shows, and there's nothing to convince me that things have changed. 

The academic environment at WOU is a contrast to how the privileged students are treated at the elite schools.  And even after they declare their majors, Stanford notes that "to avoid intellectual parochialism, a major program should not require a student to take more than about one-third of his or her courses from within a single department."  We, on the other hand, actively promote intellectual parochialism.

The joint statement concludes with this:

Higher education’s contributions to the common good and to the functioning of our democracy are severely compromised when universities eliminate and diminish the liberal arts.

The liberal arts will live on at the elite institutions.  But, democracy is not by the elite, for the elite.  The death of liberal education at the institutions that educate the masses does not bode well for the health of democracy :(

Ding-dong! Philosophy is dead!

It happened.

At my university, the provost followed up on the president's plan to eliminate athletics a few academic programs, including philosophy, by formally submitting the paperwork to the campus curriculum committee.

What good does philosophy serve in a university anyway, right?  For that matter, who cares for philosophy in the real world outside the ivory towers!  It is not as if philosophy provides any kind of guidance to one of most pressing questions that people wrestle with: What is a "good life" to live?

I am sure the favored academic disciplines of criminal justice, business, computer science, and the like, provide clear and concise answers to students to the question, "what is a "good life" to live?"  So, when those programs provide all those clear answers, why duplicate the effort through a philosophy program?  It is an enormous waste of taxpayer money and the tuition that students pay.

Of course, I am being sarcastic!

The sciences, business, and criminal justice, do not address the questions that overwhelm most of us, which (from my post in 2015) Tolstoy articulated so well:

The question is this: What will come from what I do and from what I will do tomorrow--what will come from my whole life? Expressed differently, the question would be this: Why should I live, why should I wish for anything, why should I do anything?  One can put the question differently again: Is there any meaning in my life that wouldn't be destroyed by the death that inevitably awaits me? ...

These sciences directly ignore the questions of life.  They say, "We have no answers to 'What are you?' and 'Why do you live?' and are not concerned with this; but if you need to know the laws of light, of chemical compounds, the laws of the development of organisms, if you need to know the laws of bodies and their forms and the relation of numbers and quantities, if you need to know the laws of your own mind, to all that we have clear, precise, and unquestionable answers."

These questions and more suddenly became painfully important in the age of Covid-19.  When friends, family, and neighbors, were all kept apart by an invisible virus that killed people, many of us were compelled to consider the questions that Tolstoy brought to our attention.

Later as the vaccine distribution began, we were forced to think about questions that are philosophical, like how do we prioritize who gets the vaccines first and who should go to the end of the queue.  But, of course, it is during these Covid times that my university is axing the philosophy program!

But we knew this was coming.

In this post in May 2020, I quoted Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote:

The present crisis might indeed make many individuals more aware of the impermanent nature of human life and human achievements. Nevertheless, our modern civilisation as a whole will most probably go in the opposite direction. Reminded of its fragility, it will react by building stronger defences. When the present crisis is over, I don’t expect we will see a significant increase in the budgets of philosophy departments. But I bet we will see a massive increase in the budgets of medical schools and healthcare systems.

It is a shame of the nth order that an undergraduate university is getting rid of its philosophy program.  And, oh, the geography program, too, is gone.

What does it all mean?

The random readings and the resulting ramblings here are not merely therapeutic.  It is not to merely ease my anxieties about the world and the panic attacks that result.  There is a great deal of practical use too, though they are not always immediate.  It might be years before I find "use" for my rant.

I might as well be channeling a pedestrian and secular interpretation of the famous line from The Bhagavad Gita, in which the god Krishna advises Arjuna to keep doing his duty.  

Krishna tells Arjuna:

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन।

मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि॥

(Karmanyevadhikaraste Ma Phaleshu Kadachana,

Ma Karmaphalaheturbhurma Te Sangostvakarmani)

Through that couplet, Krishna says that we need to carry on with our duties without thinking about the rewards.  He goes one step more by cautioning that we shouldn't be motivated because of the potential fruits of the action, nor be tempted to inaction.

This is absolutely contrary to the incentive-driven world in which we operate, right? 

Over the years, researchers and policymakers have come up with various incentive schemes in order to nudge people towards action.  They even reward elementary school kids if they read books!  At home, parents reward kids for doing household chores.

"Do your damn duty" apparently doesn't work in this modern world in which kids and adults alike ask "what's in it for ME?"

I read, rant, blog, because ... that's is it.  There is no because!

But, yes, the rewards always arrive.  (And so will the layoff notice, I fear!)

In November 2014, in those peaceful and joyous days before the twin pandemic of tRump and Covid, my post began with these lines:

All of man's troubles have arisen from the fact that we do not know what we are and do not agree on what we want to be.

I had completely forgotten about those wonderful lines from E.O. Wilson.  Until a couple of days ago.

In an email conversation, I wrote to a colleague:

[You] will also appreciate this from E.O. Wilson, from The Meaning of Human Existence:

All of man's troubles have arisen from the fact that we do not know what we are and do not agree on what we want to be.

I continued that email with this:

It is unfortunate that an undergrad education is no longer about helping students understand the bigger picture: Who we are as individuals, as societies; how we came to be who we are; and where we might end up.  That is what a traditional liberal education was about, whatever the major was.  Now, undergrad education is nothing but a transaction: Students pay $$$ and the university issues a piece of paper :(

If students were given an opportunity to inquire into the big picture questions, then they might also think a lot about another observation of Wilson's:

We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.

Plumbers, not philosophers?

Many people are asking themselves and others how an insurrection could have happened.  To which I feel like reminding them what Voltaire said quite a while ago: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

If you can make them believe that the President is actually a Muslim who was born in Kenya and that he forged his birth certificate, well, you can certainly make them commit atrocities.

Of course, such a situation does not arise every day.  Thankfully!

But, the absurdities come in all types.

Claims like how the Hindu god Ganesha is evidence of cosmetic surgery in ancient India. Or that Karna in Mahabharata was a result of advanced genetic science and technology. Or, absurdities like how wind turbines cause cancer, or about building a wall at the Mexico border as a solar wall so it creates energy and pays for itself. Or drinking bleach to cure Covid-19!

Those were absurdities, yes.  But, the believers were ready to commit atrocities like lynching non-Hindus for eating beef, or even for expressing love across religions.  Atrocities like caging mothers and separating their children from them; refugees turned away; pregnant mothers facing the possibility of prosecuted as criminal killers if they aborted their fetuses; white supremacists marching with flaming torches; ...

How did Voltaire know as truth that if you can make enough people believe in absurdities, you can make them commit atrocities too?

Of course, Voltaire did not make that observation in the context of "democratic" politics.  It was against blind faith. He ranted about organized religion.  Voltaire argued in favor of logic and reason.

One would argue that this is all the more the reason that we should teach logic and reason, and bring in Voltaire and Socrates and more in higher education.

One could.

Some of us did.

The result?

The philosophy department at our university is on death row now, and will be gone in December.  While I am no philosopher, I, too, might be exiled for life!

Kill the liberal arts already!

As the doomsday clock ticks down to the appointed hour, as one can imagine, I have been thinking a lot more about education and the miserable state of affairs that contemporary higher education has become.  One thing is for certain, however: I am certainly not thinking if only ...!

In my case, misery does not mean drowning in alcohol, though I wonder if that might help!  Instead all I know is to drink coffee and then read essays that really smart people have authored.

As comforting as this exercise is, well, it is equally depressing that the issues that I worry about now were the same set of issues that were talked and written about even a few years ago, and the situation has only worsened.

For instance, in this essay from 20 years ago (!) Jackson Lears writes:

The contemporary academic crisis is not about job security any more than it is about how many classes are online or which departments get the most resources. It is about the attitudes we take to our most important audience, a non-academic audience. Professors are constantly berating themselves and being berated for withdrawing into the insular  world of scholarship, for not connecting with the real world. The real world is right in front of us, in the classroom; it is composed of students, 99 percent of whom have no intention of entering the academy themselves. They are a non-academic audience; they require us, however implicitly and imperfectly, to become public intellectuals.

The attitude towards students and their learning is appalling, to put it mildly.  Increasingly, colleges see students as nothing more than warm bodies who bring in monies, which they can use to build Taj Mahals and create more "student-services" administrative positions.  Faculty, too, are only happy to be active participants in fashioning revenue-maximizing strategies.  Thus, the higher education industry keeps charging ahead at full speed, consuming the monies students, taxpayers, and philanthropists keep throwing its way.  Are we surprised then at all with the following sentences from Jackson Lears?

Prussian productivism melded with American vocationalism and anti-intellectualism–the love of the practical, the demand for cash value now. The result was the accentuation of a fundamental conflict in the university’s mission, between furthering the pursuit of truth and serving the needs of established power. 

In that same issue of the Hedgehog Review, Russell Jacoby writes:

Driven by academic discontent and boredom, professors might want to reinvent themselves as public writers. ... 

But, simultaneously recognizes the challenge when we have:

institutional imperatives that reward technical rather than public contributions. Will they be successful? It is not clear.

It is a lot clearer now; only technical contributions matter, even if they are less than third-rate.  Public contributions, well, who cares!

Jacoby worried then about specialization, well before the introduction of gerontology as a major in a small time public university where I teach!  Jacoby wrote:

it should be possible to raise the issue of insular specialization without pledging fealty to progress and industrial society. The incarceration of specialists and a return to bloodletting or phrenology is hardly the goal; nor is the point to foster anti-intellectual populism or half-educated generalists. Specialization inheres in industrial society. We need specialists. No one wants to hear a cheery announcement that today your airline pilot will be a family therapist. Nevertheless this truth does not justify every micro-field or subdiscipline or new jargon. Specialization can also be obscurantism, turf building, careerism, and regression, as well as a simple waste of talent and resources.

All that was from 20 years ago. 

At the rate at which universities were changing for the worse, I figured that the worst might happen only after my retirement.  Covid-19 and the resulting economic crisis have accelerated the decline by more than a decade.  I suppose I will soon have to literally utter that cliched line about what students supposedly say after studying the liberal arts: Would you like fries with that?

The code to losing one's job?

As you read this post, chances are good that you will think this: No wonder this guy is about to be fired from his job!

If you don't think that, well, then you are as much as "loser" as I am, and you need to be worried about your job too ;)

My first day at the university where I have been teaching for 19 years, I met others who were also joining that same year.  One of them, about my age, was a physicist, with what seemed like an intense New York way of speaking.  When talking with him, I found out that he was the physics department--there was no other physics faculty at the university.  I was shocked, of course, especially when that was my first ever intellectual love.

At small universities like ours, physics is not one that we care to educate students about.  For that matter, even at big time universities, physics does not attract students.  As with many aspects of higher education, this too is something that disappoints and depresses me.  Whatever happened to the old-fashioned notion of exploration of ideas in a liberal education setting?

We have moved far, far away from exploration.  The excitement that we could be exploring the universe forever apparently is not easy to monetize within a few years; ergo, those are not worth studying!  Despite the number of studies about the benefits and tangible returns over the long-term, people are obsessed with short-term ROI.

This approach is rapidly filtering down to the high school level where, for instance, even learning a foreign language is now considered to be wasteful compared to learning a programming language! 

Should we wonder then that right from when they are kids, there is a push to teach them how to code! Yes, kids are being pushed to code!

WhiteHat Jr., which operates in India and the United States, mounted an advertising blitzkrieg in India telling parents that our children need to learn coding from the age of 4, 5 or 6 — or they will fall behind in life. Indian celebrities promoted the brand and spread the fear of losing out among families.

How terrible!

Hrithik Roshan, one of the most prominent Bollywood actors and the father of two boys, endorsed the brand in a television campaign, where he was anxious about the utility of the skills Indian children are learning today and saw hope and promise for their future in learning coding on WhiteHat Jr.

Although numerous experts advise against teaching children to code, a skill that will soon become redundant, the WhiteHat Jr. campaign taps into a parent’s deepest fear: Will my child be left behind?

Fire me already for I am simply unfit for this new world :(

Such a contemporary approach to education and knowing, and the push for specialization in order to "grow the economy," cannot possibly help us in the long-run.    Buckminster Fuller said it best:

Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which in turn leads to war.

Right from when we are kids, we need to understand how we relate to other humans, to other life forms, to rocks and rivers, and to outer space.  But, we cannot expect all these to miraculously happen if we take away exploration from education.  With a singular focus on various aspects of computing, we are only educating to create a society of automatons!

Was I ready for an unscripted future?

Continuing with the series that started here, I am amazed that I lasted this long in higher education while writing commentaries in which I was championing the ultimate loser--liberal education.  All through my life in India, I didn't know that there was something out there called liberal education, but that's exactly what my heart had always been after.  Once I found it, I latched on to it pretty strongly.

Now, liberal education at my university is rapidly sinking and there is no flotation device for me who doesn't know how to swim!

The following commentary of mine was published in March 2016.
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The price of crude oil and of gasoline have been tumbling to levels that most of us would not have thought possible. Eight years ago, a barrel of petroleum was selling for $147 and “experts” predicted that soon it would reach a stratospheric price of $200. Now some of those same “experts” are wondering whether it might get closer to $20. There is also a strong feeling that when the prices climb again, $50 might be the ceiling.

A belief that oil prices would climb forever propelled large enrollment increases in petroleum engineering programs. The near-guarantee of well-paying jobs lured young people to the discipline.

But over the past few months, news reports have been less than encouraging. “Petroleum engineering degrees seen going from boom to bust” was CNBC’s report. The Wall Street Journal asked, “Who will hire a petroleum engineer now?” Oil and Gas Investor, a trade publication, discussed enrollment declines in U.S. programs offering degrees in petroleum engineering.

This is not new. The oil price crash of the 1980s led to significant enrollment declines in those degree programs. By the end of the 1980s, only about 1,400 students were majoring in petroleum engineering programs across the country. As the price of oil rose, and as it stayed in the $100 range, enrollment soared to more than 11,000. But with the recent oil price collapse, “petroleum engineering degrees will lose attractiveness in the years to come” said Penn State University’s Turgay Ertekin, according to Oil and Gas Investor.

There is an important lesson here, above and beyond oil prices and enrollment in petroleum engineering. We live in a world where economic activities cannot be predicted. As Yogi Berra said, it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. What might be the price of oil a few months from now, leave alone a few years from now, is unknown.

It is not merely about a particular resource. We need to think about technological change, geopolitical issues, the health of the global economy and more, all of which make predictions highly suspect.

Students pursuing any field of study, including petroleum engineering, need to understand that the economic conditions of today and their implications for employment are not the best indicators to prepare for the economic conditions and the jobs that lie a few years down the road. Even a few years make a huge difference -- the freshmen who began studying petroleum engineering four years ago face the reality that perhaps half of them might not find jobs in the oil and natural gas industry.

Students and universities betting on “employable” majors based on the economy’s current characteristics are betting against the only thing that we know for sure -- the future will not be the same as today. The bets get riskier as we head into the distant future. From steel workers to office secretaries and engineers, the experience of the past years has been that jobs can disappear in a hurry, leaving people worrying about their futures.

What, then, can young people do? And what should universities do for the young? As the American Association of Colleges and Universities wonderfully put it, the challenge is “educating for a world of unscripted problems.” They’re unscripted because we do not know what the future holds.

But we do have a sense of how we might be able to reasonably prepare for that future: We can do it by developing skills that will help people to constructively engage with the unscripted problems.

Yet contemporary public policy discussions on higher education and workforce preparation rarely involve serious and sustained thinking about the “world of unscripted problems.” When, for instance, a semiconductor manufacturing company comes to town, we conclude that we need more engineers and materials scientists, only to realize a few years later -- as was the case with Hynix in Eugene -- that the entire factory could close down. We seem to consider only the latest fad, without preparing for the longer-term uncertain future.

It is not that petroleum engineering graduates will be jobless and unemployable. If their universities have educated them well for a “world of unscripted problems,” those students will have skills that they will be able to apply in industries completely different from those they had originally aimed for. If only we can use this example to understand that higher education is about more than a major. It is, instead, about preparing for a “world of unscripted problems.”

Learn. Think. Repeat.

Engaged students in my intro class have often told me that my class almost always overturned many of the ideas that they had.  And they had believed many of those ideas to be established truths.  Some of my favorites include these:

• Students came into class believing that human population growth would continue forever and lead to huge problems, and in my class they had to think through the fact that women are having fewer children than ever before and, therefore, population growth is slowing down.
• Students would passionately defend the importance of buying locally, and then through the materials they had to think through the complex global interdependence and how we benefit from trade.

The second one--buying locally--is one that I had to even explicitly explain to, and argue with, a few Berniacs, who, like tRump supporters, parroted the rhetoric of how we in the US do not manufacture stuff anymore and how we, therefore, need to do something.

Both the examples clearly conveyed the link between content knowledge and critical thinking.  One has to know something in order to think through that content.  Critical thinking is not something as a standalone skill.  Critical thinking requires asking a lot of questions, which we cannot intelligently do unless we know about the content to even phrase a question or two.  I often tell students that in this age of access to information right from the small little device that fits into the palm of one's hands, we are only as smart as how smart we are in asking questions.  The ability to ask interesting and meaningful questions is, I believe, more important than before.

Typically, some time in the term, when a context comes up, I quickly slip in my advice to students that they need to seriously think about what they want from their four or five or six years of college.  I suggest to them that a broad introduction to as many ways of understanding the world will serve them well.  And, if they combined that with thinking and communication skills, they will be set for the rest of their lives.  Content plus skills.  Never about the skills alone.  And never about the content alone.

Johann Neem writes along these lines in his essay.

Cognitive science demonstrates that if we want critical thinkers, we need to ensure that they have knowledge. Thinking cannot be separated from knowledge. Instead, critical thinking is learning to use our knowledge.

Neem adds:

We can only think critically about things about which we have knowledge, and we can only make use of facts if we know how to think about them. As James Lang writes in Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning, “knowledge is foundational: we won’t have the structures in place to do deep thinking if we haven’t spent time mastering a body of knowledge related to that thinking.”

Indeed!

Neem echoes my thoughts here:

One has to know things to answer things. This is true even in the age of Google. If one looks up something online, one needs to know a lot of background information to make sense of the definition and explanation—and given how unreliable many online sources are, without that background knowledge, one might be led astray. But perhaps most surprising, those with more knowledge can learn more when they look something up on Google. That’s because if they already have background knowledge, they can add to it the new information and insights from what they are learning. This means that someone who understands political science and has some knowledge of how parties function will learn more from an online news story about elections than someone lacking that knowledge. Those who know more learn more than those who do not.
In other words, intellectual skills and knowledge are not two distinct things. They must work together to produce critical thinkers.

A mighty challenge it will be to get these ideas across when we live in an era of a President who prides himself on his gut instinct and with his party on an anti-intellectual crusade.  Think about that, too!

The inglorious anti-intellectualism

Consider this:

[Folks] can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree

If you are nodding in agreement, then chances are that you are a tRump supporter thinking that your Dear Leader said this.  I am  also surprised you are here at this blog!

On the other hand, if you feel outraged by that statement, and are ready to fire off yet another Facebook post on how stupid tRump is, well, chances are that you were so maniacally supportive of Bernie Sanders that you still don't understand how you were a part of the reasons why tRump and not Hillary Clinton is the President.

tRump didn't say that about art history.  He cannot be bothered about it.  Right now, he is more concerned about how nasty Meghan Markle is!

It was Obama who dissed art history.

Beating up on liberal education is awesome bipartisanship!  Soon after Obama's remark, the editor of Inside Higher Ed even provided a chart on such bipartisan statements!

But, yes, Obama is no tRump.  He immediately realized his error and then even sent a handwritten apology.

However, the bipartisan beating up of liberal education continues.

Little defense of liberal education for an enlightened citizenry has been heard from any prominent political leader — even Democrats such as Barack Obama, whose education, two books written before his presidency and speeches were more steeped in liberal arts than any president in memory, but who as president caved in to lobbies for STEM education and school privatizers.

Take Mayor Pete, for instance.  With his awesome resume and accomplishments, he is a perfect example of what liberal education can do.  At Harvard, he majored in history and literature.  Kamala Harris majored in political science and economics.  Do I expect them to go rah-rah about the importance and value of liberal education? Nope.  Because it will be a vote-losing "elite" talk, in contrast to the lessons from the Coriolanus story--his life became a mess because he thought he was too good to seek approval from the masses.

So, everybody gangs up to beat up on liberal education. It is not good for democracy, and not good for progress.  It is already getting to be late for any course correction; RMS Titanic meets a white floating thing :(

"True joy is a serious thing"

I came across "true joy is a serious thing" in this wonderful essay on higher education.  On redeeming the liberal arts.

I became a huge fan of the author, Leon Botstein, after reading an essay in The New Yorker that was about him and Bard College that he presides over.  Quite a force he is!

In this recent essay, Botstein writes:

Students entering college ask basic questions about life. They are in search of ways to define their place in the world. They are concerned about their own lives and are curious about large problems in the world—matters of justice, the nature and possibilities of work and employment, the future of the planet, the construction of meaning, the nature of knowledge and belief, and the understanding of nature. These grand, wide-ranging concerns are not mirrored by the professional or disciplinary divisions of a university. The proper response is not old-fashioned survey courses; rather, courses on issues and problems that probe deeply and draw from more than one discipline are needed. So too are curricular structures that develop, from the first year, a common ground for all students that can enable serious conversation and debate among them. Finally, the sense of excitement and satisfaction derived from the active life of the mind must be nurtured. As Seneca put it, “True joy is a serious thing.” Cultivating that recognition ought to be a basic goal of the liberal arts.

And this exactly what we do not do.  In fact, we do everything possible to kill any innate student interest into inquiring about their place in this world and how to make meaning of their lives.

Higher education has been reduced to a glorified trade school. 

Now, there is nothing wrong with trade schools.  There is a place for trade schools that teach skills, and there is a place for universities that go beyond trade skills.  Trade schools, to their credit, do not suffer from any mission drift and stay focused on the trade.  Universities, on the other hand, have completely lost sight of their mission.  Increasingly, universities even go one step more and systematically transform themselves into becoming glorified trade schools.

Earlier this week, as we engaged in discussions in the classroom, I told students that I want them to  consider learning as personal.  It is not about something in the abstract; instead, it is about them, their lives, their communities, and their country.  I was telling them, without telling them, that education helps them with what Botstein refers to: Find their own answers to in their "search of ways to define their place in the world. They are concerned about their own lives and are curious about large problems in the world—matters of justice, the nature and possibilities of work and employment, the future of the planet, the construction of meaning, the nature of knowledge and belief, and the understanding of nature."

But then ... yes, you have heard me say this before, nobody listens to me!  When even Botstein has very little influence over all these issues, what chance do I have of being heard!

The end of history

Nope, I am not referring to Francis Fukuyama's best seller from nearly three decades ago.  it is the end of History as a subject that we study that I am worried about now.

Back in the old country, if ever a 18-year old said that she was studying history, well, the immediate--and only--interpretation was that she was an academic weakling who could not get into anything better and so was stuck in the condemned majors like history.

Whatever history I have learnt about India or anything has been despite the virulent anti-history educational framework back there.  It has been quite a struggle to learn history on my own, to learn to write on my own, to appreciate poetry on my own, to read up on philosophy on my own, to appreciate the arts on my own ... This listing adds up to something, right?  That something is liberal education, dear reader!

Liberal education is under attack on all fronts, and all over the world.  In this attack, even history is rapidly bleeding students.  As I noted in my reply there, the story is not just about history, but about liberal education.  Apparently, we, too, want to become like China, where higher education is not about the dangerously subversive liberal education.

My, and our collective, failure in understanding history came about in a rather interesting way last night when we watched a Netflix show.  Yes, a show on Netflix.  It was about the history of the people in the present Americas and the Caribbean: John Leguizamo's Latin History for Morons

There were lots that I was already familiar with.  But plenty that I had no idea about.  Especially these two: The repatriation of Mexican-Americans when Hoover was the President, and the lynching of hundreds of Mexican-Americans.

This was a well-prepared one-man show.  I was, therefore, confident that he was not making things up.  How come I never knew about those two things, which are not trivial footnotes by any means?

Late into the night, I read up.  I was shocked.  Mitt Romney's comment during his presidential campaign that the undocumented should self-deport took on a new meaning.

This essay begins with an eerie comparison of the current President with Hoover:

It was a time of economic struggle, racial resentment and increasing xenophobia. Installed in the White House was a president who had never before held elected office. A moderately successful businessman, he promised American jobs for Americans—and made good on that promise by slashing immigration by nearly 90 percent.
He wore his hair parted down the middle, rather than elaborately piled on top, and his name was Herbert Hoover, not Donald Trump. But in the late 1920s and early 1930s, under the president’s watch, a wave of illegal and unconstitutional raids and deportations would alter the lives of as many as 1.8 million men, women and children—a threat that would seem to loom just as large in 2017 as it did back in 1929.

And that is just the beginning!

Now to understand the lynching of Mexican Americans.

Americans are largely unaware that Mexicans were frequently the targets of lynch mobs, from the mid-19th century until well into the 20th century, second only to African-Americans in the scale and scope of the crimes.

I was one those unaware.  Not anymore.

From 1848 to 1928, mobs murdered thousands of Mexicans, though surviving records allowed us to clearly document only about 547 cases. These lynchings occurred not only in the southwestern states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, but also in states far from the border, like Nebraska and Wyoming. 

Who cares about history, right?  Close down all the history departments, and put an end to liberal education.  Teach students programming and be done!

Develop your passion

When we were kids, my sister was a picky eater who said no a number of vegetables.  The elders almost always had the same advice: By refusing to even taste those dishes, she had no idea what she was missing.

Decades later, she talks about some of those tasty dishes that she has now discovered.  "Remember that amma used to make it?" I have asked her more than once.

We do not know what we are missing out on. It is one thing to reject tasty veggie dishes, but another to make decisions on choices that will have implications for the rest of our lives.

I have forever complained about forcing 17 and 18 year olds to commit to studying fill-in-the-blank in college.  What the hell do we know at that age, and what the hell are we missing out on when we make those decisions?

Except for a tiny percentage, the overwhelming majority of kids in their late-teens have no idea what they want to do.  They don't know what their "passion" in life is.  Well, ok, for most boys there is only one passion ;)  Kidding aside, how do we know what we are passionate about when we have not even tasted the dishes that the academic and the professional worlds offer?

From a Stanford study:

Mantras like “find your passion” carry hidden implications, the researchers say. They imply that once an interest resonates, pursuing it will be easy. But, the research found that when people encounter inevitable challenges, that mindset makes it more likely people will surrender their newfound interest.
And the idea that passions are found fully formed implies that the number of interests a person has is limited. That can cause people to narrow their focus and neglect other areas.

Exactly!

Being narrowly focused on one area could prevent individuals from developing knowledge in other areas that could be important to their field at a later time

Seriously, don't people ever find out anything contrary to what I have been ranting about for years?

[After] reading a challenging scientific article on the same topic, students’ excitement dissipated within minutes. The researchers found that the drop was greatest for students with a fixed mindset about interests.

I have seen this over and over with many students.  They think they know about a field of study, which they think they are passionate about, and when they start getting into it, they begin to quickly lose interest in that field.

So, what is a better route?  The title of this post says it all.

How does a 18-year old develop their passions?  A two-word phrase that will be familiar to even a casual reader of this blog: Liberal Education.  Students get to taste the awesome dishes and then they figure out what their interests are, and how they can be productive members of society.

Doctor of humanity

A few years ago, a physician, who is a few years older than me, mentioned during a conversation that his four years of undergraduate studies were a waste, and that he could have directly gone to medical school.  He was especially critical of the general education that he was compelled to take.

I was his house-guest. The protocols required me to stay away from picking a fight with the host.  And that is what I did.

We rarely ask ourselves what makes a good doctor.  Of course, we want them to know the tools of the trade, so to speak.  We want doctors to be knowledgeable, just like we would want any professional to be.  But, is it merely about the technical proficiency?  If so, why should we require the 18-year old coming to college with plans to become a doctor to take philosophy and religion classes, among other such "waste"?

medical students who are exposed to the humanities demonstrate higher levels of positive skills and qualities such as empathy, tolerance for ambiguity, wisdom, emotional appraisal, self-efficacy, and spatial reasoning—all important in being a competent, good doctor.
The same study found that humanities exposure is inversely correlated with negative qualities that can be detrimental to physician well-being, such as intolerance to ambiguity, physical fatigue, emotional exhaustion, and cognitive weariness.
Humanities majors may be more likely to pursue residencies in primary care and psychiatry—both areas where there is tremendous need.
Humanities exposure can arguably benefit patients by making better doctors and it may also be beneficial for the individual physician.

There's quite a bit to being a good doctor, eh!

Humanities exposure can arguably benefit patients by making better doctors and it may also be beneficial for the individual physician.
In this era of increasing dissatisfaction within the medical profession, a doctor also needs the tools to develop and nurture her own humanity so that she can continue her work, healthy in mind and body. Patients deserve a doctor who is thoughtful, professional, compassionate, understanding, humble, collaborative, wise, and knowledgeable. And while there are many factors in the development of a physician, humanities education is one important avenue toward making better doctors.

Ah, yes, but we need more welders than philosophers, right? Shut down those philosophy departments!

Life is meaningless. Deal with it!

It is bright, sunny, and warm as I blog about the meaningless life.  That perhaps says something to you. To me, it says nothing. I blog about the meaningless life on sunny days and on dark nights too.  Because, well, life is meaningless. It is absurd!

To me, that is a given. The task is, therefore, to make it worthwhile. It is up to me, up to you, to make life enjoyable. To make us excited to get out of our beds in the morning and let the sunshine in.

The traditional ways of making it worthwhile are rapidly disappearing. Religion. Communities. Children and family. Marriage. Which means, it is increasingly up to individuals to make their lives worth it and enjoyable.  In this, there is only approach--to get out there and do it.  Whatever it is, well, it does not happen by itself.

Two years ago, when my daughter was graduating from college, I asked her if her friends who had not yet found jobs were concerned. “No,” she replied, “they’re not concerned about not having a job, they’re concerned about not having a narrative.”
Here’s the trick. The impressive narratives you see in the lives of the adults you admire emerge only in retrospect. Somehow, each one of them got from twenty, to thirty, to forty, to fifty, to sixty, and whatever the twists and turns of their chosen paths, they, by definition, emerge with a narrative that, looking backwards, connects the dots. More often than not, the narrative has a strong sense of coherence, sometimes, even, an aura of inevitability.

Exactly!  In my teens I had ideas on what would make my life worthwhile. It changed as the years rolled on.  But, I kept doing whatever it was that I did. And, looking back, the dots do connect to a neat narrative. It would be foolish of me to think that where I am today and what I am doing now to make it all worthwhile and enjoyable was exactly what I set out to do when I was in my undergraduate program or even when I joined graduate school.

 So the question is, how do you square the arbitrariness of your first step — or for that matter any given next step you may take along the way — with the goal of finding work over a lifetime that aligns with your deepest interests, brings you joy, and allows you to contribute to purposes larger than yourself?

And the answer is ...?

if you approach whatever work you have chosen with focus and diligence and reflection, you will advance along a path — and it will be one that is authentically yours, not because of the specific steps you have chosen, but because of the way you are making the choices and processing the experiences.

Sincere reflections and conscious decisions. I am confident enough that--and a whole lot of luck--is how I ended up where I am today.  "E.E. Cummings once said, “It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.”  Traveling the life of a Tamil Brahmin engineer in America would have been incredibly "safer" path.  But, that would never have been "who you really are."

Philosophers wanted?

Senator Marco Rubio has done a 180.  Yet again.  The guy reverses his positions on so many issues that I can't understand how he is not a prize-winning contortionist!

This time, it is about philosophers.

In 2015, Marco Rubio decisively alienated the philosopher voting base by suggesting that philosophers would be better off as welders.
“Welders make more money than philosophers,” the Florida senator claimed during a Republican presidential debate. “We need more welders and less philosophers.”
...
Now, it seems, Rubio has flip-flopped on his assessment. He is in favor of philosophical thinking, he announced to Twitter.

I made fun of philosophy 3 years ago but then I was challenged to study it, so I started reading the stoics. I’ve changed my view on philosophy. But not on welders. We need both! Vocational training for workers & philosophers to make sense of the world. https://t.co/ahww7lxN8p

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) March 28, 2018

All these remind me of my op-ed from two years ago, which was a slightly edited version of this blog-post:

“School teaches you only to be better at school” said a student who is graduating in June, in response to my question to the class on whether they thought they were ready for the world of employment. The other students immediately and unhesitatingly agreed with her.

In a highly entertaining and sarcastic TED talk back in 2006—way before “TED talk” became a part of the common regular vocabulary—Sir Ken Robinson noted that “you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors.” The student, too, was channeling Robinson’s point. Psychology professors are keen on creating more psychology professors and biology professors want to make biologists out of students, so to speak.

I will be at least a tad happy if that student’s statement were true. I am not convinced that school is teaching students to be better at school. An increasing body of research questions the value-added over the four-plus years of undergraduate schooling.

But, even more do I worry that higher education has become a diluted and credential-chasing process that it is falling way short when it comes to preparing students for employment.

It begins when graduating high school seniors and college freshmen are bombarded about their academic majors. This is where the machinery of school teaching students to be better at school does a tremendous disservice because college is really not about the major.

The myth persists, despite all the research, that there are some academic majors that are more geared for employment than others are. That is, of course, the case if students are in professional undergraduate programs—like elementary school teaching. But, otherwise, the link between a college major and productive employment is nebulous at best—unless one wants to be a college professor.

Even the composition of the academic credits towards a college degree gives this away—for instance, while a minimum of 180 credits are required to graduate from Western Oregon University, a majority of those credits will not be in the major. Or, to rephrase it differently, if college education is only about a major, then an undergraduate experience can be easily wrapped up within a year and a half.

Preparation for productive employment is rarely about the major itself. The skills that employers repeatedly cite as important—skills like writing, thinking, researching, and more—are gained through a broad array of topics outside of one’s major, and that is what most of the undergraduate education is all about as well.

If we are truly interested in how higher education is serving the young—and, hence, the country’s future—the debate we ought to be engaged in is not about whether majoring in science, technology, engineering, and math (often grouped as STEM) is better than a geography major, or whether we need philosophers or plumbers . Instead, society—especially the faculty and administrators across Oregon’s colleges and universities—needs to carefully monitor whether students are mastering those skills that are prized by employers. Else, it will continue to be the case that the only thing that school teaches the young is to be better at school.

Thank you for automating!

In high school, the language classes and discussions with friends on all things that really mattered helped me situate the math and physics that I loved in an appropriate context--humanity.  Had I known back then what I now know, and had I lived in the US, I would have pursued liberal education in my undergraduate studies.  But, all those ifs there are just that--ifs. It is like saying that if my aunt had balls, she would be my uncle!

The disconnect between engineering and the real world all around me was deeply troubling.  It was flawed.  It was messed up.  It continues to be messed up; that is what I was reminded when I read this essay in The New Yorker.  It is about automation, robots, and impact on jobs, with side notes on how they affected the elections that gave us the fascist.

Consider this excerpt about Stefanie Tellex, the roboticist at Brown University:

Tellex was admitted to M.I.T. and planned to pursue a liberal-arts degree, but her mother told her that liberal-arts graduates didn’t make any money. (“One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten.”) She completed her computer-science Ph.D. there in 2010. ...
She told me that she had never thought about the political implications of her field until the tense months leading up to the 2016 Presidential election. Her parents were Trump voters, and she found herself disagreeing with them about what the causes of society’s ills were, and what the best solutions might be. She was alarmed by the anti-immigrant sentiment emanating from Trump’s rallies, especially having spent her adult life surrounded by researchers from all over the world. Economic inequality was a driving theme of the election, and Tellex began to see that automation was a contributing factor.

Until about a year ago, the roboticist had not thought about the political implications of her field--robots/automation!  And, she is one of the better ones, given that she started with a real interest in the liberal arts.  There are hundreds of thousands of scientists and programmers who even now do not see how their field has such startling political implications.  How can one bring these to their attention?

I do not, cannot, understand how any professional can go about doing whatever it is that they do without systematically thinking about the larger societal implications.  Heck, there are hundreds of thousands who work in the cigarette industry, even after decades of our understanding about how tobacco kills.  I have no idea how all these professionals, with or without Ivy League credentials, make their peace.

I made mine years ago by quitting that career path, and doing what I now do.  I try my best to convey to students, readers, anybody who wants to listen to me, about the importance of thinking about what it means to be human and to feel that we are contributing towards securing a better future for the people of tomorrow.

The answer is blowing in ... liberal education

It was nearing bed time, but I decided to check my news-feed anyway.  I am glad I did.

I spotted one that referred to Bob Dylan's Nobel lecture.

I pulled up the text that kept my attention focused as I listened to him with the jazzy piano in the background.  It was a delight, as he talked about things that were familiar to me, and to many that were alien to me.  Many that I had no idea about; like this:

John Donne as well, the poet-priest who lived in the time of Shakespeare, wrote these words, "The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts. Not of two lovers, but two loves, the nests."

Sestos? Abydos?

I suppose Dylan knew that there would be blokes like me listening.  Which is why adds there:

I don't know what it means, either. But it sounds good. And you want your songs to sound good.

Dylan then talked about Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey.

I had principals and sensibilities and an informed view of the world. And I had had that for a while. Learned it all in grammar school. Don Quixote, Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Tale of Two Cities, all the rest – typical grammar school reading that gave you a way of looking at life, an understanding of human nature, and a standard to measure things by. I took all that with me when I started composing lyrics. And the themes from those books worked their way into many of my songs, either knowingly or unintentionally.

In grammar school? We don't do those books, or their equivalents, even in college level these days.  If the learning material is more than two screens of scrolling, well, forget it!

I love how Dylan talks about those classics.  Not merely his interpretations, which are wonderful by themselves.  But, more importantly, about how those classics provided him with "an understanding of human nature, and a standard to measure things by."  Which is also what I often I blog about--how short-stories and full-length fiction help me understand the human condition, and how they give me a frame of reference.  And, yes, "either knowingly or unintentionally" those awesome works find their way into my own teaching and writing.

Instead of grounding ourselves on such a broad understanding, which is what liberal education is all about, we increasingly focus on the tricks of the trade.  We train programmers.  We train statisticians, lab technicians, graphic designers, ... We do not educate anymore, it seems.

Fuck the welders and philosophers. We need entertainment, dammit!

(Am debating within myself whether I should send this to the editor, and make more enemies when published!)

Recall the sound bite "we need more welders and less philosophers" from back when it was the season of the Republican primaries? I wish we had engaged in a whole lot of discussion regarding that statement from Senator Marco Rubio. Instead, we collectively shrugged and moved on.

We could, and should, have used that opportunity to engage in discussions on what education ought to accomplish. If we had, then we would have agreed that we need both welders and philosophers, and that higher education is failing to deliver them.

Public higher educational institutions have suffered from extensive mission creep over the years. It is best (worst?) seen in how sports-oriented the taxpayer subsidized colleges and universities have become. Welders and philosophers are apparently way less important than athletics in the mission of higher education!

Countries where people are far more sports-crazy than we are do not waste their taxpayer monies like we do here in the US. Europeans, for instance, are maniacal about soccer, but they know well that sports is sports, and education is education. Or, consider my old country, India, where cricket is practically a religion. Colleges do not waste enormous resources on cricket and its gods.

If only we had continued to engage with the welders/philosophers soundbite, then we would have ended up talking about the wasteful practices in higher education, with athletics as perhaps the foremost waste of taxpayer money. But, of course, public institutions do not want us to talk about this, and the sports-addicted taxpayers are even less interested it seems.

A year ago, journalists in Michigan attempted to understand how much taxpayer money is spent on athletics by public institutions in their state. It was not an easy project. They “obtained through the Freedom of Information Act the financial disclosure statements provided to the NCAA from Michigan's 13 public universities that offer NCAA-level athletics.” Yes, through the Freedom of Information Act!

What they found did not surprise any of us who have been critical of this unholy mix of sports and academics in public higher education. Not only did the public institutions spend gazillions on athletics, “students are often "kept in the dark" when it comes to how universities fund college athletics and the degree to which colleges are subsidizing sports.”

Yet, whenever they cry funding shortage, universities are ready to ax philosophy before they even think of reducing the sports subsidies. I wish that legislatures, including here in Oregon with our huge budget deficit, would question the wisdom of public colleges as entertainment arenas.

The university where I have been teaching for fifteen years is no exception. A decade ago, a 25-million dollar facility was built primarily to meet the NCAA Division II requirements. Such an outrageous expense would not have been incurred if sports were played at the lower tier National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA,) in which the university participated until the year 2000.

America is exceptional indeed—when it comes to diverting taxpayer money on entertainment, when that could be spent instead on welders and philosophers. This taxpayer-supported entertainment is what the Declaration of Independence meant by "the pursuit of happiness.”

College is to prepare for a world of unscripted problems

I have sent a slightly edited version of this to the newspaper editor .. maybe it will be published, maybe not ;)

The price of crude oil and of gasoline at the pump have been tumbling down to levels that most of us would not have thought possible. Eight years ago, a barrel of petroleum was selling in the global marketplace at $147 and experts predicted that soon it would reach a stratospheric $200 per barrel. Yet, since the new year dawned, it has been a story of how low can you go, with experts wondering whether it might even get closer to $20, and when it eventually goes up if $50 might become the ceiling price.

A belief that oil prices would only climb forever also propelled large enrollment increases in petroleum engineering. The near-guarantee of well-paying jobs lured young people to the discipline. But, over the past few months, the news reports have been less than encouraging. “Petroleum engineering degrees seen going from boom to bust” was CNBC’s report. The Wall Street Journal asked, “Who Will Hire a Petroleum Engineer Now?” The trade publication, Oil and Gas Investor, discussed enrollment declines in US petroleum engineering degree programs.

Of course, this is not new, but is a repetition. The oil price crash of the 1980s led to significant enrollment declines in those degree programs. By the end of the 1980s, only about 1,400 students were majoring in petroleum engineering programs across the country. As oil price rose, and as it stayed in the hundred-dollar range, enrollment soared to more than 11,000. But, with the recent oil price collapse, “petroleum engineering degrees will lose attractiveness in the years to come" said Penn State University’s Turgay Ertekin, according to Oil and Gas Investor.

There is an important lesson here, above and beyond oil price and enrollment in petroleum engineering. We live in a world where economic activities cannot be predicted with any sense of accuracy. As Yogi Berra said, it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. What might be the price of oil a few months from now, leave alone a few years from now, is unknown. It is not merely about the resource. We need to think about the technological changes that the future will bring, the geopolitical issues, the overall health of the global economy, and more, which make predictions highly suspect.

Students pursuing any field of study, including petroleum engineering, need to understand that the economic conditions of today and, therefore, the implications for jobs, is not the best indicator to prepare for the economic conditions and jobs for a few years down the road. Even four years make a huge difference—the freshman students who started on petroleum engineering four years ago face a reality now that is very different, a reality where perhaps half of them might not find jobs in the oil and natural gas industry.

Students and universities betting on “employable” majors based on current characteristics of the economy are betting against the only thing that we know for sure—the future will not be the same as today. The bets get riskier as we head into the future years. From steel workers to office secretaries and engineers, the experience of the past years has been that jobs can disappear in a hurry, leaving them worrying about their futures.

What can the young do then, and what should the universities do for the young? As the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) wonderfully put it, the challenge is “Educating for a World of Unscripted Problems.” Unscripted because we do not know what the future holds. But, we do have a sense of how we might be able to reasonably prepare for that future, by developing skills that will help people to constructively engage with the unscripted problems.

Yet, contemporary public policy discussions on higher education and workforce preparation rarely ever go into serious and sustained thinking about the “world of unscripted problems.” When, for instance, a semiconductor manufacturing company comes to town, we incorrectly believe we need more engineers and material scientists, only to realize a few years later—as was the case with Hynix—that the entire factory could close down. We seem to only consider the latest fad, without preparing for the longer-term uncertain future.

It is not that the petroleum engineering graduates will be jobless and unemployable. If their universities have educated them well for a “world of unscripted problems,” then those students will have skill sets that they will be able to apply but in industries completely different from what they had originally aimed for. If only we can use this example to understand that higher education is more than about a major and is, instead, about preparing for a “world of unscripted problems.”