[lit-ideas] Re: education
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 06 Nov 2011 21:04:55 -0800
I wrote, in reply to Andy, earlier
You cannot have read any of the links I provided (I provided too
many, and apologize) without seeing
that my point was /not/ that there are fewer business majors than
in former years (I don't know if this is
universally true or not), but that 'businesses' themselves are
beginning to prefer, and to hire, liberal arts
majors over business majors who are increasingly less adaptable to
change in a 'corporate environment,'
/and/, that MBA programs—which are themselves becoming less
valued—are now urging those considering
studying for the MBA, to get a liberal arts education first.
then Andy wrote
I concede the issue. I'm sure you're right.
John McCreery thinks that Andy may have conceded too quickly, and wrote
I would not give up so quickly. Consider the possibility that what
businesses want in a workforce depends on the kind of business. Assume
for the sake of argument former Clinton administration Secretary of
Labor Robert Reich's classification of jobs in /The Work of Nations.
/Reich argues that there are, at the end of the day, only three broad
categories of jobs: repetitive physical labor, personal service, and
symbolic-analysts (knowledge workers). Repetitive physical labor is,
except for the fast food industry, truck drivers and other
geographically constrained segments, off-shored to where labor costs
are lowest. The predictable result is more people trying to move into
personal services, driving down wages in that segment as well. The
symbolic-analyst segment is where a few talented people can still make
out like bandits.
I'm not sure what 'personal service' means: language (mathematics)
tutors; copy-writers for hire; hotel clerks/maids; servers in
restaurants; interior decorators; personal shoppers...? Not all of these
things can be done offshore, granted, no more than working as a
long-haul truck driver or railroad engineer can be. I'd have thought
that as we were talking about the prospects of liberal arts graduates
outside of academia, it would have been fairly clear that we (originally
Andy and I) were talking about whether 'businesses' of the
symbolic-analyst sort were in search of people trained in accounting,
promotion, recruiting, 'office management,' and so on, and not in search
of liberal arts graduates. (I believe Andy also said that more
employers—of a certain sort—were increasingly looking for people with MBAs.)
I tried to show, with various references, that they were not, and that,
moreover, that these days, a number of MBA programs recommended that
potential applicants get a liberal arts degree before applying.
Clinching argument: two of my former thesis students are successful wine
makers, south of Portland, in the Willamette Valley
<http://www.winesnw.com/will.html>, and Richard Danzig, '61,
was Secretary of the Navy, under Clinton.
John concludes
My sense is that the case for businesses looking for liberal arts
instead of business majors is largely limited to the symbolic-analyst
segment. Liberal arts graduates of places like Reed (of which, by the
way, my ever so sagacious spouse is a graduate) do well in this
segment. Graduates of community college or second or third-tier state
university business programs don't.
The tricky bit these days for business majors is that while they fall
out of favor with businesses substituting automation for traditional
white-collar paper pushing, the alternatives in the repetitive
physical labor and personal service segments are largely what they
were trying to escape with their degrees. Their better options may
include, for example, military service and the acquisition of the
specialized skills required for health care, complex equipment
maintenance, or bodyguard personal service careers.
I've paid my manual labor dues with over four years of servitude at the
big Weyerhaeuser integrated (Kraft paper, finished lumber, plywood,
etc.) complex outside Springfield, Oregon. This mill closed in 1989,
because it was built for old-growth timber—gigantic logs—and not for
those attenuated sticks one sees nowadays.
Robert Paul,
signing off this topic
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