The Useless College Degree

My wife got her BA in English and ended up getting her MA and PhD in Rhetoric and Composition, a field where there are a relatively high number of jobs compared to most english-related ones. Pretty much everyone we know from her school has a tenure track job somewhere and the academic job listings aren't anywhere near as sparse. Downsides include the aforementioned having to move to where the jobs are which kind of blows for me, but alas.

She's in an english department now with large number of lit people compared to the relatively small number of rhet-comp people, and they as a general rule don't really get what she which is seriously frustrating to her. A bunch of faculty were talking to the outgoing grad students about job applications this fall and the lit people were completely dire and depressing about everything, how nobody is going to get a tenure-track job, how you have to start somewhere tiny and work your way up, and how since this isn't Harvard you won't be taken seriously. She was kind of outraged because there are a decent number of rhet comp jobs out there and her department isn't exactly the Harvard equivalent (apparently that might be Purdue) but would probably be in the top ten.

yeah I saw Rhetcomp mentioned in a grad school forum as one of the few bright spots in terms of employment...but tbh I have no idea what it is

king's highway: I think Freud's ideas on human development and the mind are worth considering in some/many circumstances but i don't believe he's any type of Gold Standard OTM dude or anything.

don't see how that's relevant to the overall hilarity of this conversation.

"conversation"

joygoat, I didn't even know Rhetoric and Composition was a field before reading your post, but that's very interesting! I'm glad there's a field in the humanities that still has job openings.

i can hook u up with my ex xxxp

man that came out wrong

I just asked for a short definition of Rhetcomp and apparently that's pretty difficult to do. Basically it's a lot of teaching composition, writing, studying arguments and how language is used in day-to-day rather than literature settings, with some degree of crossover into philosophy.

omg this thread

all u english majors shld be usin yr skills to write sitcoms about barren yung women math majors work in finance until u hav enuff money to quit or your soul dies (worked for me) no1 with any curiosity abt the world doesnt sometimes think a different major wld have been rad ~ of course it wld be learning shit is awesome ~~~ im happy learning science fyi

Lamp OTM

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see ya guys, I'm gonna work on my screenplay @ some indie cafe

jaymc, what did your philosophy classes cover?

It was really just a single class in contemporary continental philosophy. But the head of the philosophy department was really into it, and my friends who were philosophy majors were conversant in names like Derrida and Foucault way more than anyone in my English classes was. The approach in most of my English classes was close reading and analysis; occasionally, we'd talk about a feminist interpretation or put a text into historical context, but knowing the names of literary critics would've been seen as pretty high-level stuff. I'm not saying this to complain about my major at all, just amused at the notion that English majors everywhere are knowledgeable about Lacan. In fact, I think that a lot of English grad-school programs offer a crash course in critical theory for first-year students simply because people's undergrad experiences are so varied.

Oh, that's really neat!

Yeah, I made the mistake of universalizing my experience, which consisted of taking a required(!) critical theory course as part of my major, which led to my eventually doing work on Zizek and Derrida in the department.

And that's great that your professors taught Derrida and Foucault in your philosophy department. Anything after Gadamer was more or less absent from mine, but I think that will change in time. It's a small department.

lol this thread devolving into this is how people talk at college

lols to the max when i read kshighway's posts

I should just drop out of college.

i would advise against that tbh

Not a kshighway fan, velko?

Real question: For all of you who got an English degree, what did you end up doing? Did you go to grad school? What (serious) advice would you give to someone who just graduated with an English degree? (Besides, you know, freak out.)

i mean, it has been sort of useless in terms of monetary gain. but:

1) i get much of my food from dumpsters. not lying. i only buy booze, meat on sale, and cheap vegetables (which is admittedly a CA-only phenomena)

2) i know a lot about music, architecture, film and (esp) poetry, which is useful to me in my everyday life. and my job.

3) i have made stupid amounts of connections through my college profs.

4) FRIENDS!!! SEX!!! DRUGS!!! i mean cmon, it isn't a total bummer unless one is looking at it through these 'i must be useful member of droning capitalist society' lenses. and let me tell you, those lenses are fogged, scratched, and in the fuckin dirt, bros.

i got an english degree and now i have a successful career modding I LOVE CRICKET: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX: THE CHINATOWN OF ILX

and tbh:

1) i gots me a lot of money for grad school.

2) i teach and write for magazines.

3) the problem is actually that so many kids today focus on one thing, imho. i'm all for studying contemporary poetry, experimental film, new music, etc., but so many kids i know (everywhere, not just from where i went undergrad) were dead-set on this one discipline. i wasn't, and while most of them work jobs that they hate, i'm like, 'dudes, i told you to take some other interesting classes because duh, everything informs everything else in the liberal arts.''

also i am drunk, editing my thesis and listening to David Lang on a Monday. so whatever. lolcollege.

and i forgot the oxford comma. fuck.

Are you in grad school for English?

nope. Poetry and Visual Criticism. lol.

Real question: For all of you who got an English degree, what did you end up doing? Did you go to grad school? What (serious) advice would you give to someone who just graduated with an English degree? (Besides, you know, freak out.)

in grad school now for library science, doing a job in an unrelated field where i write circles around most ppl and have always gotten what i consider to be a weird amount of praise for essentially being able to express myself clearly.

considered grad school in lit but don't have the love for it that you need to make that a viable path.

my honest advice would be--listen, if u don't want to teach or be an academic just find a job that you don't mind and use your writing, reasoning, and communication skills to SHINE at it. build yr skills, resume, and network. a lot of the good things that happen in life are unplanned.

or if you think you "didn't get anything" out of studying english--go spend some time in a job mostly NOT populated by college grads. think about how and why you are different.

one problem with recent college grads is they think everyone is or was a recent college grad.

I'm teaching right now, though to ESL learners, and while I love my students, the communication barrier can be a total drag. one of the reasons I considered a lit/Eng degree was to improve my employability down the line, should I choose to become a teacher...

my most brilliant professor and friend never finished college. she teaches courses on Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, and conceptual poetic practices now.

in other words, it is all what you make of yourself. some people (like me) need more networking and building in order to slip into their practice. i now know how i work, and what i need to work on, so that's good enough for me. my writing is the best it ever has been.

For all of you who got an English degree, what did you end up doing?

lolretail/sweatshop slave by day. small press publisher by night. guess which one pays better.

tabes is right about the focusing-on-one-thing thing: i didn't really want to go to uni, and the only thing i thought i'd be ok at was english lit, since i love to read. so i only took lit classes (with the exception of one reli class, one media studies class and one print culture class). so i didn't have much of a well-rounded education. but everyone told me i NEEDED a degree, any degree, so i went and struggled through one.

Got a Bachelor Of Arts, double major Middle English/American Studies, then a graduate Diploma in secondary teaching (English/History). Found that I was not cut out for teaching once I got my diploma...think I took it because it felt 'jobbish' and was trying to placate my parents that I wsn't going to become (gasp) 'perpetual student'. Did about 6 months hardknocks at a commercial laundry, then landed 5 years as a copyright permissions editor/photo researcher with an educational publisher...probably the best use of my 'degree' overall. Only got that from a desperate last-ditch letter writing campaign to all the publishers I could find in the phone book, because I madly wanted to get into publishing.

aaaaand then I moved to the US to get married, took the first job I could find and have been doing kind of salesy stuff ever since and freelance writing mostly garbage in my free time. have grown to enjoy the job somewhat, but do still find myself pining for the publishing days.

But I never really felt like my degree was a waste, especially not the arts degree part of it. learned about the world, finally got to wrestle with the art of independent study and somehow manage to enjoy it, learned a lot about critical thinking, and, I dunno, I guess it just made the world seem a lot bigger once I was there, and I liked that. I liked the possibilities. All very arty and airy fairy, I know.

man, you and justin3 need to get together.

or maybe...we could all get together? i live in the east bay! i bike everywhere! it is awesome here.

or if you think you "didn't get anything" out of studying english--go spend some time in a job mostly NOT populated by college grads. think about how and why you are different.

I have had a job like this, and the difference is basically that I lucked out and got to spend 4 years studying random interesting shit, while they didn't get a break from working. I wouldn't say we were very different in terms of our capacities or abilities though, and in terms of cultural literacy, mine is limited in its on ways.

it just made the world seem a lot bigger once I was there

yes yes this is a big deal! being a perpetual student nowadays, i still have "wow anthropology is so cool" moments almost every day for exactly this reason.

Real question: For all of you who got an English degree, what did you end up doing? Did you go to grad school? What (serious) advice would you give to someone who just graduated with an English degree? (Besides, you know, freak out.)

― kshighway1, Monday, October 12, 2009 11:43 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

lol i am in medical school

I did English for undergrad and now I make books. Admittedly, almost nothing of what I learned in the English prog bears any resemblance to what I do. You don't rly have to know shit about books, reading, or the English language to produce the things.

go spend some time in a job mostly NOT populated by college grads. think about how and why you are different.

I'm basically the only person that I work with or see socially on a regular basis who ONLY has a lowly Bachelor's degree - everyone else I know has a PhD or at least a Master's (the art and library people). It also feels strange at times but that might be me projecting a lot.

Real question: For all of you who got an English degree, what did you end up doing? Did you go to grad school? What (serious) advice would you give to someone who just graduated with an English degree? (Besides, you know, freak out.)

I got an English degree. I am a maths teacher, hopefully leaving soon to start own business. The advise I would give is "think about what you really like doing, which someone might conceivably pay you to do, and then build the best possible CV in order to do it" - that sounds totally obvious obv but most ppl don't.

When I started my English degree, I thought I would be a high school teacher. When I finished, I thought I would be a college professor. But somewhere along the line, I had become interested in cultural and media studies and other subjects that English departments were certainly receptive to but not founded upon, and even though I took the GRE Subject Test in English six months after I graduated, I wasn't sure I really wanted to study literature any more. And then, the longer I was out of school, the more insular the academic world seemed to me in general. I slowly began to realize, too, that smart people and interesting work were not confined to the academy, as I naively thought while I was there.

So now I'm a copy editor at an encyclopedia company. When I first started working in publishing, right after college, I was really just looking for a job that my English degree would qualify me for. And for most of my 20s, I approached my job merely as something that paid the bills while I pursued other activities (music, writing, arts management) on the side. But in the last couple of years, I've had some opportunities that have allowed me to feel more invested in my work and see it more as a career. I'm not teaching or analyzing texts, but I am doing research and occasionally writing articles, which I feel like my college education prepared me for.

Btw, I think the reason why people think English degrees are useless is that there are so few jobs that require the specific knowledge gained from the degree. Most likely, you're never going to need to be able to interpret the end of Kate Chopin's The Awakening after college, in the way that doctors or chemists or computer scientists will apply what they learned in school. But there are lots of jobs, from journalism to advertising to development, that require a skill set that the English major possesses: an ability to write well and to think critically.

But there are lots of jobs, from journalism to advertising to development, that require a skill set that the English major possesses: an ability to write well and to think critically.

OTM. this is kind of the whole point of a liberal arts degree - you get a basic set of communication/writing/critical thinking skills. it doesn't really have much to do w/ the content of the degree at all. rather, having a liberal arts degree just communicates to employers that you have a basic competency and set of communications skills that would allow you to do the job

btw i feel like we had almost this exact conversation maybe 6 months to a year ago on ilx?

haha yes:

also, college is not a trade school - sure, a philosophy or whatever degree is 'useless' in the sense that there are no jobs for philosophers w/ just a BA, but that's the same for just about any undergraduate major besides business, etc.

i think a liberal arts/sciences undergraduate degree is useful b/c it basically communicates that you have a basic competency in language, problem-solving, organizational and communication skills. whether or not that you really have those skills might vary, but in the job market that's basically what a BA does.

― mark cl, Monday, April 27, 2009 2:28 PM (5 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is why what you major is often irrelevent - w/ one exception, when i applied for jobs no one cared that my degree was in philosophy or what my knowledge was in that field - all they cared about was that i could demonstrate those basic problem-solving, communication, and quick-learning skills that a liberal arts degree can give you

― mark cl, Monday, April 27, 2009 2:30 PM (5 months ago) Bookmark

seriously dudez fuck college

drew had this really good post:

College is an institution and so are most workplace environments, and in a brutally reductive sense, undergraduate college education is basically just a "can you move more or less capably through an institution?" test. it's a pre-requisite not in the sense that it guarantees the knowledge of discipline x or y (though it is partially that)- it is also meant to just show that this person knows how to schedule themselves, meet demands, jump through hoops, be reasonably informed and articulate, not alienate or wildly infuriate others, not get tossed out for plagiarism or harassment or some other malfeasance, etc.- it is a test of one's capacity to function inside an institution, and it is not surprising that other institutions would want to see that you are already capable of being in one. So, again, it's not "sufficient", but many employers it is still "necessary" because it presumably demonstrates a set of personal qualities (ambition, work ethic, focus). The unfair fact is that lots of preparatory tutoring, smaller-class-size high school education, and lots of money and lots of grade inflation have reduced the value of this signifier, but that hasn't actually meant that it's not still necessary-yet-not-sufficient on the other side.

― Neotropical pygmy squirrel, Monday, April 27, 2009 2:39 PM (5 months ago) Bookmark

yeah except sometimes employers don't care about your skill set, or your capability, in general. they want to see that you've performed EXACTLY that job before, even at the entry level a lot of the time, or they think you're not committed or will require too much training or something.

yea, i think esp w/ undergrad internships being more and more common, there's definitely a degree to which employers expect you to have certain office skills that you wouldn't necessarily get unless you've worked before

i am also pretty cynical about internships though. i had a couple in college and they gave me way more responsibility and interesting work than my post-college jobs, but they didn't really "count" because they were internships, not long-term employment. hell, my part time receptionist job throughout college didn't even qualify me for admin assistant callbacks. but again, maybe this is just an "i/my timing/location sucked" issue, and this is generally not the case.