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G. M. (Mark) Baker's avatar

Part of the problem for arts degrees is their low credentialing value. My two degrees in history provided a sound base for the work I did in my career, but they were never a required credential for any job I ever had, and the number of jobs for which a history or English degree is a hard credential are very few. Thus there is little external pressure on what the arts faculties teach.

Another part of the problem is that, back in my day at least, the arts, English and sociology in particular, were considered the "bird courses" -- the degrees you took if you were not particularly interested in anything and just wanted an easy path to a degree. You certainly could get a good education in the arts in those days, but you could also avoid getting one while still taking home a degree.

And this, of course, only served to further weaken the value of an arts degree as a credential. And today, of course, an arts degree is an even easier path to a degree, as all you have to do is express the correct opinions, and you are through. Which has brought us to the point that an arts degree has perhaps become a negative credential.

So, yes, Ben Shapiro is probably right that an arts degree today is useless *as a credential*. This is a very different question from whether a good arts education is useful, if you can get one. Clearly, it is useful. The challenge, more than ever, is to demonstrate it.

And it is because of this difficulty in demonstrating the value of arts instruction that the field was wide open to takeover by the left. On what basis could their credentials to teach be questioned if their own degrees had no credentialing value? If there were a way to make an arts degree a genuine functional credential, the leftist lightweights would swiftly be driven out. But how you determine or measure the value of an arts education for specific social roles remains a problem. The connection is there indisputably, but it is only demonstrated by success. The degree in itself is no predictor of success, which is what we want from a credential, and it is hard to see how to make it so.

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Liz LaSorte's avatar

Pell grants are not going away and should be housed in a more appropriate place like the Dept. of Treasury.

While I agree that degrees in English, history, et. al. are important for a number of reasons, the question we need to ask is, what is the role of the federal government v state government, esp. as the USA is headed towards bankruptcy with 36+ trillion dollar debt, surpassing our GDP.

After squandering over a trillion dollars on the DOE, we must admit that the DOE has been an utter failure and America’s children have become dumber and more brainwashed with each decade since the creation of DOE in 1980. The DOE needs to go: https://open.substack.com/pub/lizlasorte/p/government-too-big-will-fail-part?r=76q58&utm_medium=ios

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