The Rise of Careerism in Higher Education: A Threat to the Humanities?

The growing emphasis on career preparation in higher education has sparked a debate about whether universities are betraying their mission of fostering intellectual exploration and critical thinking. While some argue that this "extreme careerism" undermines the value of a liberal arts education, others contend that it is a necessary response to economic realities and a way to make education more accessible and relevant for diverse student populations. This article explores the phenomenon of careerism in higher education, its impact on the humanities, and the challenges and opportunities it presents for students and institutions alike.

The Decline of the Humanities: A Symptom of Careerism?

One of the most visible consequences of the rise of careerism is the decline in interest in the humanities. According to the American Institute for Arts and Sciences, interest in humanities programs across college campuses has dropped by around half in the past two decades. This disinterest is evident even at institutions like Fordham, where required liberal arts courses are met with apathy or disdain.

Students are increasingly shifting to more "lucrative" majors that ostensibly secure job opportunities. For example, the number of computer science students has doubled in the past decade. At Fordham, finance holds the uncontested spot for the most popular field of study as of 2022. Across college campuses, English, history, and communications programs are being shut down and defunded.

This decline in the humanities is driven by several factors, including the rising cost of tuition, the increasing emphasis on STEM fields, and the perception that humanities degrees lead to financially unstable jobs. Students, especially those with significant student loan debt, are disincentivized from pursuing "useless degrees" and instead opt for academic careerism, prioritizing their future career and financial gain as the goal of their education.

The Misguided Disdain Towards the Humanities

The disdain towards the humanities caused by career pressure is more misguided than it seems. While non-liberal arts majors do generally outperform liberal arts majors in salary after graduation by a substantial amount, the liberal arts still have bright financial prospects. Employers often prefer students with a broader humanities background, as their soft skills (like communication and creativity) are extremely valuable in the workforce. A study by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences indicates that unemployment rates among humanities majors after college are virtually the same as those of students in any other major, at around 3%.

More importantly, it is critical to see outside of the careerist framework so common on college campuses. The world cannot run on investment bankers alone; the intellectual rigor cultivated by humanities programs is necessary for the future. As people become increasingly anti-intellectual, they tend to discount the liberal arts as frivolous. However, there is clear value in developing a more robust way of seeing the world and others through the humanities.

Defending the Humanities: A Necessary Task

As for preventing the humanities from dying out, I believe the best solution is also the most difficult one: lowering the financial barrier to entry. If students could explore liberal arts curricula further without feeling like they are risking their future, it could greatly benefit the liberal arts. It is not unreasonable for students to gravitate towards majors they think will set them up for success, given the steep investment college requires. For a less idealistic solution, simply defending the humanities against the misinformed scorn they receive is a start. The hostility towards the liberal arts - from students, parents and even the President of the United States - reveals the impact they have. While careerism will never fully leave universities, it is vital to redirect its encroachment on the humanities.

The Careerist Shift in Higher Education

The rise of careerism in higher education is also reflected in the increasing emphasis on internships, career-oriented curricula, and workforce readiness. Some faculty members view these developments as a betrayal of the traditional mission of higher education, which they believe should be focused on fostering intellectual exploration, creativity, and inquiry.

However, others argue that career preparation is not antithetical to exploration or personal growth. They contend that it makes education accessible and relevant for a diverse student population, particularly first-generation, low-income, and working professionals who view college as a pathway to economic stability and social mobility. For these students, career readiness isn't an optional bonus-it's the point. Their investment of time, money, and energy must pay off in tangible ways.

The Elitist Critique of Careerism

The critique of careerism is often rooted in an idealized vision of higher education that stems back to the earliest days of the American university system when the first colonial colleges served as finishing schools for the elite. These institutions weren't concerned with preparing students for jobs. They existed to turn boys into gentlemen and impart moral and intellectual growth. This model was built on privilege. These institutions served wealthy white men whose futures were secured by family wealth and connections. College wasn't about landing a job. It wasn't even about graduation.

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As higher education expanded by creating land-grant universities, community colleges, and public institutions, its mission evolved. These institutions were designed to serve a wider population by providing education and training that aligned with the needs of the societal workforce. Producing skilled workers was central to their purpose. Community colleges trained nurses and mechanics. Land-grant universities educated farmers and engineers. The system we know today was built on the idea that education should be a pathway to opportunity.

Labeling career preparation as "extreme careerism" is a profoundly elitist argument. It assumes that students should view college as a time of intellectual play and personal exploration. This idea only works for those who have financial safety nets or social capital to fall back on.

Dismissing this work as "extreme careerism" erases the progress higher education has made in becoming more inclusive, equitable, and student-centered. It suggests that colleges should revert to an outdated model of education that serves only the privileged few.

The Dangers of "Anti-Careerism"

The danger of the "anti-careerism" argument is that it risks taking higher education backward. By prioritizing intellectual exploration over career preparation, colleges risk alienating the very students they claim to serve. This is particularly true for first-generation students, low-income students, and students of color, who often view higher education as a pathway to economic stability and social mobility.

We must also acknowledge the historical context. Career preparation has been baked into the mission of American higher education since the expansion of access through land-grant universities and community colleges. To reject this focus now is to reject the progress we've made in making higher education accessible to all.

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Integrating Careerism Thoughtfully

Instead of critiquing career-focused curriculum, faculty should embrace it as part of a broader, student-centered mission. The challenge for higher education is not to reject careerism but to integrate it thoughtfully. We must design curricula that prepare students for the workforce while fostering critical thinking, creativity, and curiosity. We must ensure that career readiness is not just about technical skills but about developing the whole person.

Ultimately, the debate over "extreme careerism" reflects a tension between two visions of higher education: one that serves the few and one that serves the many.

The Consumeristic Approach to College

One of the main challenges in searching for a college is the approach taken by students and their parents, namely that of a consumeristic approach. They perceive that the only real value is the credential itself-and if it can be earned in a safe, Christian environment, well, all the better. Simply put, “college shoppers” tend to be concerned only about the degree to which a B.A. or a B.S. will help them in attaining that all-important first job. Careerism has, in a real sense, hijacked the deeper purposes of higher education. The age-old question that has been forgotten in this higher education buyer's market is "How will this four-year education form my character, as well as my intellect?"

The Importance of Character Formation

A liberal arts education, grounded in a biblical worldview answers this question by eschewing careerism and instead proceeds intentionally with new knowledge projects in all disciplines not just for the sake of preparing students for their first job, and not even for the sole purpose of the pursuit of truth (as important as that is). Christian faculty who have thought well about the deep purposes of higher education believe that these are worthy goals, but they are not goals in and of themselves…rather they are means toward the end of forming a student's character properly so that the student can discern God's call upon his or her life. As humans, we bear the imago dei-the image of God-and our education’s deepest purpose should be to cultivate and develop that image holistically in preparation for a life of service in His world. It is a kind of discipleship. More specifically, it is intellectual discipleship.

A college or university guided by the Christian world and life view holds that there ought to be no disparity between the formation of one's character and the formation of one's intellect and "skill set" for the sake of a profession.

The Teachings of Socrates and Schopenhauer

Academic careerism is the tendency of academics (professors specifically and intellectuals generally) to pursue their own enrichment and self-advancement at the expense of honest inquiry, unbiased research and dissemination of truth to their students and society.

In Xenophon's Memorabilia, Socrates draws a comparison between the proper and honorable way to bestow beauty and the proper and honorable way to bestow wisdom. Those who offer beauty for sale on the market are called prostitutes, and are held in disrepute by the Athenians. Those who offer wisdom for sale, on the other hand, are highly respected. Socrates believes this is an error. When we see a woman bartering beauty for gold, we look upon such a one as no other than a common prostitute; but she who rewards the passion of some worthy youth with it, gains at the same time our approbation and esteem.

In Plato's Protagoras, Socrates draws an analogy between peddlers of unhealthy food and peddlers of false and deceptive wisdom. Food peddlers advertise their wares as healthy without offering solid evidence to back up their claims, leading those who trust them to succumb to an unhealthy diet. Peddlers of knowledge try to persuade impressionable young minds that what they teach is salutary and true, again without offering solid arguments to back up their claims.

Nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer contrasts the genuine philosopher, who earnestly pursues truth and offers its fruits to all who will listen, to the "businessmen of the chair", the academics of his day who have debased the pursuit of knowledge into a means of livelihood no more dignified than the practice of business or law. The motto of the academic opportunists is "primum vivere deinde philosophari"-first live, afterwards philosophize. The bourgeois sentiment that someone who earns his living by profession must know something about it makes those who hold the academic chairs immune from criticism. They make their living from philosophy, the public reasons, so they must know philosophy. We should judge university philosophy … by its true and proper aim.

The Betrayal of Intellectuals

French scholar Julien Benda (1867-1956) observes that in the past intellectuals have adopted two poses toward politics. The first was Plato's doctrine that morality must decide politics. The second was Machiavelli's, which said that politics has nothing to do with morality. Benda accuses the generation of intellectuals influential in France in the 1920s of adopting a third, far more pernicious, pose: that politics must be allowed to decide morality.

The true clerc is Vauvenargues, Lamarck, Fresnel, Spinoza, Schiller, Baudelaire, César Franck, who were never diverted from single-hearted adoration of the beautiful and the divine by the necessity of earning their daily bread. But such clercs are inevitably rare.

The pursuit of personal advantage by purveying knowledge, Benda explains, has been held in disrepute since antiquity. Since the Greeks, the predominant attitude of thinkers towards intellectual activity was to glorify it insofar as (like aesthetic activity) it finds its satisfaction in itself, apart from any attention to the advantages it may procure. Most thinkers would have agreed with Renan's verdict that the man who loves science for its fruits commits the worst of blasphemies against that divinity.

The modern clercs have violently torn up this charter. Albert Einstein (1879 -1955) was a civil servant working in the Berne Swiss patent office (1902 - 1909). In 1905, a year sometimes described as his 'miracle year', Einstein published four groundbreaking papers. These outlined the theory of the photoelectric effect, explained Brownian motion, introduced special relativity, and demonstrated mass-energy equivalence. On his seventieth birthday Einstein wrote that in retrospect the formulation of patent statements had been a blessing. “It gave me the opportunity to think about physics.

The Rise of Professionalism in Literary Theory

Jacoby laments the demise of the radical critical theory of the previous generation, which sought to understand and articulate the contradictions inherent in bourgeois and liberal democratic ideologies. The new generation of theories, in contrast, seeks to allow the contradictory elements of the ideology to coexist by isolating them, assigning them to separate departments in the university.

Literature professor Edward Said, in his 1983 book The World, the Text, and the Critic, accuses literary theorists of his generation of succumbing to the free-market ideology of the Reagan era. The previous generation of critical theorists, Said explains, did not allow itself to be constrained by the conventional separation of academic fiefdoms. It maintained an insurrectionary relationship with the society in which it lived.

The intellectual origins of literary theory in Europe were, I think it is accurate to say, insurrectionary. The traditional university, the hegemony of determinism and positivism, the reification of ideological bourgeois "humanism," the rigid barriers between academic specialties: it was powerful responses to all these that linked together such influential progenitors of today's literary theorist as Saussure, Lukács, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx. Theory proposed itself as a synthesis overriding the petty fiefdoms within the world of intellectual production, and it was manifestly to be hoped as a result that all the domains of human activity could be seen, and lived, as a unity. … Literary theory, whether of the Left or the Right, has turned its back on these things. This can be considered, I think, the triumph of the ethic of professionalism.

Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders in Academe

Writing in 1991, "dissident feminist" scholar Camille Paglia finds in David Halperin's work a prototypical example of rampant careerism in the humanities. Paglia observes that Halperin's generation of academics is prone to a "contemporary parochialism" that eagerly cites hot-off-the-press articles without attempting to critically assess their objective merit in light of the intellectual tradition. Paglia accuses Halperin of assembling a pastiche of the latest faddish opinions and marketing it as a book, not for the sake of advancing the cause of truth, but with no other aim than career advancement. She compares such scholarship to junk bonds, a highly volatile investment. Never in my career have I seen a scholarly book of such naked worldly ambition, such lack of scruple about its methods or its claims to knowledge.

Paglia characterizes contemporary academic discourse, influenced by French theorists such as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, as the academic equivalent of name-brand consumerism. "Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault," she says, "are the academic equivalents of BMW, Rolex, and Cuisinart." Under the inspiration of the latest academic fashions, academics manufacture insipid prose with no objective merit for the same reason fashion designers come out with new fashions each season. Academics peddle the latest fashionable theories to replace perfectly good older theories, made obsolete not by genuine progress, but only by incessant changes in fashion, changes deliberately contrived to create consumer demand in a credulous public.

The self-seeking of the latest generation of scholars is, for Paglia, symptomatic of an era iconically represented by junk bond traders on Wall Street, concerned not with creating a quality product, but only with making a quick buck. Academe needs deprofessionalization and deyuppification. It has to recover its clerical or spiritual roots. Scholarship is an ideal and a calling, not merely a trade or living.

The Value of a Holistic Education

Despite the increasing pressure to focus on career preparation, it is important to remember that college is also a time for learning, questioning, and reflection. Higher education is not vocational training, but something almost ruthlessly opposed to it. College-at least the liberal arts model of it-is about pausing to reflect on how we got to where we are now, and contemplating where we might want to go from here. And if that’s not putting it audaciously enough, try this: it is about taking the space and time to think the unthinkable.

Truly well-rounded higher education, as opposed to the careerist model, better equips students for life beyond college. But this means supporting disciplines without easily identifiable career paths. It means letting students wander, and stumble into things from time to time. It ultimately means taking college seriously, not for what it delivers but for what it is in the process: a time that flies in the face of corporatization.

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