Freddie Gets Practical, As In “Practical Majors”

Writing in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, OT Alum Freddie deBoer takes up the often said but little thought matter of having a “Practical Major.”

You can read the whole piece here, excerpt to follow:

The first and most basic problem with the notion of the practical major is that practicality is not a static, timeless quality. Consider the story of the pharmacy major in the mid 2010s. As a very telling New Republic story from 2014 spells out, the popularity of pharmaceutical studies could stand as a cautionary tale when it comes to the very concept of the practical major, of the educational “safe haven.” In the 2000s and 2010s, dozens of new schools of pharmacy were opened thanks to the perception that pharmacy was a safe field for young graduates. Thousands of newly minted pharmacists flooded the market. Somehow, administrators in higher education were surprised to find that these new graduates had a harder time finding a good job than previous generations. But this is an inevitable outcome of telling young people an academic field is a practical choice, since you’re making that field more attractive and thus increasing the competition they have to face in the labor market.

The point isn’t that the pharmaceutical industry became a uniquely bad field to be in — it wasn’t. The point is that a supposedly safe field became less friendly to new entrants over time. And it happened fairly quickly, in a world where economic data is often lagging and where it can take four or more years to get credentialed into a given field. What were the current pharmacy majors supposed to do when it became clear there would be a lot of competition for jobs after all? Quit halfway through their majors, after investing years and tens of thousands of dollars?

For another example of the folly of practicality, look at the major of business, a serious field for serious people — or maybe not. People are often surprised when I tell them that many of the career-outcome metrics for business majors are middling at best. After all, what could be a more intuitively practical major than business? The problem is that business is by far the most popular major in American higher education; each year, we graduate something like 350,000 students with bachelor’s degrees in the field. That means that, if you’re one of those students, you’re graduating into a labor market where you have an immense amount of competition. That inevitably depresses your career prospects. (Supply and demand applies to educated labor.) “Practicality” has nothing to do with it.

Or we might look at petrochemical engineering, where the job market tracks the notoriously volatile price of oil. Sample 2015 headline: “Petroleum engineering degrees seen going from boom to bust.” Working for oil companies seems like the definition of a practical, even mercenary ambition to me. And yet that superficial practicality is no match for macroeconomic conditions individuals can’t control.

The height of this style of thinking lies in the expression learn to code. Learn to code has been shouted at everyone who’s suffered in the job market for decades. “Hey, if you wanted financial security, you should have just learned to code!” But there are some glaring problems here. First, not everybody is going to be good at coding. All human beings have skills and abilities, but not all human beings have the same skills and abilities. Learn to code and the broader genre of blaming people for their job prospects depend upon the false notion that everyone is equally gifted in remunerative skills like programming. More to the point, even the mighty computer-science degree is not immune to the forces of industry contraction and fierce competition. Major technology firms have made huge job cuts in the face of rising interest rates and shrinking pools of loose cash, and the number of computer-science majors has grown substantially in the past decade. A New York Times article from December of last year laid out the inevitable consequences: an increasingly difficult job market for recent graduates.

Again, the point is not that computer science is suddenly a bad field to be in. The point is that programming, like all skills, is subject to the simple constraints of supply and demand, and thus the practicality of studying the major is a moving target.