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November 14th 2023
Dear Daily Titan,
With things being what they are and unrest on college campuses across the world, I had an inkling to look in on my alma mater and found the article ‘Useless College Degrees do Not Exist’ by Diana Michelle Robles. This opinion piece detailed a TikTok video about what degree has the lease value and went on to say that there were other merits to obtaining a degree than monetary gain.
This is where my many years as a college graduate kicked in, and I need to point out a few flaws in the logic of Robles here. First, in the video the question was “What is the most useless major”. You can rephrase this as “which degree has the least value”. If you asked “which painting by Picasso is the most worthless” there is a right answer for this, and the painting in question could still be worth millions of dollars.
You can argue for some kind of value in some situation for any degree if you like. This would hold true for a degree from the now defunct Trump University or a degree in fairy hunting. Yes, that’s a thing. Any blanket statement being false, you can literally print a degree on your computer and find some situation where it is a use to someone.
So let us ask, ‘are there degrees of negligible value?’ and the answer to that is ‘yes’. I can say that as a theater arts student I had a Cal State Fullerton professor tell me that I would never make a penny in theater, because he had lost his retirement in the economic crisis of two thousand eight. He was going to blacklist me, and theater is mostly a word of mouth occupation.
Henry David Thoreau refused to pay the five-dollar fee to obtain his Harvard degree. Paying that fee, about a hundred and sixty dollars in twenty-twenty-three money, he would still be one of America’s best-known philosophers. This leads us to Robles’s second major problem, as Thoreau had gotten an education his degree was of no value.
It is the scholastic education experience that builds character. If character building is a reasonable measure of value, it can be said that all the education up to the last test is as good as all the education and the last test to graduate. The degree is of no consequence to character building, but can there be an educational experience that is of negligible or of no value?
I would say the answer to that is ‘yes’ as well. As a general point, teachers can be wrong. The Nazis educated people, but I don’t believe the character built by this education would be of value. ‘Better untaught than ill taught’ is a saying for good reason.
If I may push this point, when I came to Cal State Fullerton as a theater arts major, I was enthusiastic. I had done exceptionally well as a playwright at the City College and was looking forward to a bigger and better program. What I ran into then was the old guard of teachers past their mandatory retirement but still in classes because there were too many to replace.
At the state college in playwriting, I had readings almost every session which went very well, but at CSUF I had a handful of readings, most of which the professor stopped halfway through. She would then throw a temper tantrum, demand I be in her class the next semester, and cry about how I wasn’t following the course textbook. The class text had been written by a friend of hers and she wanted it to sell well.
This professor harassed me until I dropped the major twelve units from graduation in favor of Psychology. She did at one point offer to permit me to take part in the playwriting program for free, but she demanded I write plays that adhered to her political beliefs and were perverted. This is against the law, if you didn’t know, but when I reported it I was either dismissed out of hand or worse laughed at.
This education left me bitter and angry. It took something I loved and turned it into something I hated. Worst of all, I don’t believe I could come back today and start over. If I did, what would I accomplish?
Yes, a degree can be worthless, and an education can be as well. Even if you thought of all degrees as free some can still be far from worth obtaining. Then you look at student loans, and remember that some people spend the rest of their lives paying for an education that may have done nothing but build their character, or in my case, wound my soul.
Chew on that,
Richard Leland Neal
With things being what they are and unrest on college campuses across the world, I had an inkling to look in on my alma mater and found the article ‘Useless College Degrees do Not Exist’ by Diana Michelle Robles. This opinion piece detailed a TikTok video about what degree has the lease value and went on to say that there were other merits to obtaining a degree than monetary gain.
This is where my many years as a college graduate kicked in, and I need to point out a few flaws in the logic of Robles here. First, in the video the question was “What is the most useless major”. You can rephrase this as “which degree has the least value”. If you asked “which painting by Picasso is the most worthless” there is a right answer for this, and the painting in question could still be worth millions of dollars.
You can argue for some kind of value in some situation for any degree if you like. This would hold true for a degree from the now defunct Trump University or a degree in fairy hunting. Yes, that’s a thing. Any blanket statement being false, you can literally print a degree on your computer and find some situation where it is a use to someone.
So let us ask, ‘are there degrees of negligible value?’ and the answer to that is ‘yes’. I can say that as a theater arts student I had a Cal State Fullerton professor tell me that I would never make a penny in theater, because he had lost his retirement in the economic crisis of two thousand eight. He was going to blacklist me, and theater is mostly a word of mouth occupation.
Henry David Thoreau refused to pay the five-dollar fee to obtain his Harvard degree. Paying that fee, about a hundred and sixty dollars in twenty-twenty-three money, he would still be one of America’s best-known philosophers. This leads us to Robles’s second major problem, as Thoreau had gotten an education his degree was of no value.
It is the scholastic education experience that builds character. If character building is a reasonable measure of value, it can be said that all the education up to the last test is as good as all the education and the last test to graduate. The degree is of no consequence to character building, but can there be an educational experience that is of negligible or of no value?
I would say the answer to that is ‘yes’ as well. As a general point, teachers can be wrong. The Nazis educated people, but I don’t believe the character built by this education would be of value. ‘Better untaught than ill taught’ is a saying for good reason.
If I may push this point, when I came to Cal State Fullerton as a theater arts major, I was enthusiastic. I had done exceptionally well as a playwright at the City College and was looking forward to a bigger and better program. What I ran into then was the old guard of teachers past their mandatory retirement but still in classes because there were too many to replace.
At the state college in playwriting, I had readings almost every session which went very well, but at CSUF I had a handful of readings, most of which the professor stopped halfway through. She would then throw a temper tantrum, demand I be in her class the next semester, and cry about how I wasn’t following the course textbook. The class text had been written by a friend of hers and she wanted it to sell well.
This professor harassed me until I dropped the major twelve units from graduation in favor of Psychology. She did at one point offer to permit me to take part in the playwriting program for free, but she demanded I write plays that adhered to her political beliefs and were perverted. This is against the law, if you didn’t know, but when I reported it I was either dismissed out of hand or worse laughed at.
This education left me bitter and angry. It took something I loved and turned it into something I hated. Worst of all, I don’t believe I could come back today and start over. If I did, what would I accomplish?
Yes, a degree can be worthless, and an education can be as well. Even if you thought of all degrees as free some can still be far from worth obtaining. Then you look at student loans, and remember that some people spend the rest of their lives paying for an education that may have done nothing but build their character, or in my case, wound my soul.
Chew on that,
Richard Leland Neal
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