Useless degrees vs. practical skills

A couple of days ago, our friend and neighbor Enola Gay put up a blog post about her 17 year old son's ambition to become a butcher. As homesteaders who frequently call upon the services of butchers, I can think of no finer and more useful profession. This young man has a solid career path open to him which virtually guarantees employment no matter how dire the economy.

But someone, it seems, took exception to his path in life and wrote a comment on her blog post, to wit:

Why don't you get Mr. Dumb Ass, er, I mean, Mr. Hand Grenade into a college so that Mr. H.G. won't be yet another loser walking around armed waiting to go postal when the world, which he is not prepared for, overwhelms him and he realizes that he is a working class cog and will never get ahead or have anything on a butchers wages.

(Master Hand Grenade is Enola's nom de plume for her oldest son.)

The words were vile, of course, but Enola handled the snarker with her usual class and grace.

Now hold these thoughts in mind for a few moments while we switch to another scenario.

My husband brought to my attention a blog which mentioned a recent college graduate named Andria who has an “Honors BA in Social Justice and Peace Studies” and is pursuing a Master’s degree in Gender Studies.

And how are these lofty degrees serving her? She writes: "I have a honors BA and I’m defending my MA thesis in two weeks. I am also apply for jobs and I can only find stuff in the service industry. I applied for a Hotel Front Desk Clerk job today. My degrees mean NOTHING. I am at the end of my rope."

Andria may sneer at the service industry, but it begs the question: Where does she want to work? Or perhaps more pointedly, where does she EXPECT to work? Who hires Gender Studies majors?

I don't mean to be snarky or to denigrate certain areas of study; I genuinely want to know. Who hires Gender Studies majors?

It makes me wonder what on earth Andria was thinking when she decided to devote five or six years of her life and possibly acquire a heavy student loan debt in order to obtain degrees which are hard to utilize in the best of times but essentially become useless in a bad economy. Did she think through her career path ahead of time? Did she look into the number of paying jobs available to Social Justice, Peace Studies, and Gender Studies experts?

As Vox Day so cuttingly put it, "And she just figured this out NOW? She has a degree in 'Social Justice and Peace Studies.' She will soon have a second degree in 'Gender Studies.' She's very lucky the service industry will consider hiring anyone with a pulse, because any employer looking at those degrees has to knows she is a walking, talking, sexual harassment and/or discrimination lawsuit waiting to happen. In fact, a Gender Studies degree actually has negative value, given that credentialed feminists are considerably more likely to cause disruption in the workplace. It's bad enough to acquire garbage degrees in economic boom times. It's even worse to do so in the middle of a five-year depression."

This is harsh, yes, but I see his point. I don't know if I'd be inclined to hire her either.

All this makes Master Hand Grenade's choice to become a butcher seem wise, forward-thinking, and intelligent. Not incidentally, since I'm well acquainted with this young man's character, I'd hire him in a heartbeat for ANY job, including hotel front desk clerk.

For those who think Gender Studies majors are somehow morally superior to "working class cogs" like butchers, please check back in ten years and let's compare Master Hand Grenade's and Andria's career paths.

Something to think about for young people thinking about their futures. Think practical, folks. Think practical.

Letter from a young female engineer

Here's an interesting piece my husband picked up on the Vox Day blog. Vox Day, for those unfamiliar with him, is a Christian libertarian genius with a no-holds-barred attitude. He wrote for WND for many years.

In this piece, he is responding to a young female engineering student. I am reprinting this with permission from Mr. Day.

_____________________________

This is what the engineering student wrote:

Dear Sir,

I don't think you'll answer me, or read my message... But this is worth a try. I will try very hard to keep polite about all this. It will be difficult, but I'll try.

See, I'm a young woman. I'm currently 20 years old and a student in environmental engineering in one of the best engineering schools in the world. I got in fair and square. I didn't get a special grant for being female or any favors. I have to work my butt off to get good grades in fluid mechanics, calculus, environmental chemistry...

I have had the opportunity to read some of the posts you've written in your blog and I feel very insulted by them. What happened to you that made your brain go this wrong? How can you claim that women's rights are wrong? You defend forbidding abortion by claiming unborn children of rape merit all "the legal protections and rights afforded all other human beings", yet claim that women shouldn't have those same rights because we "ruin everything"?

I am working hard to be an engineer. My goal in life isn't to get married or to stay at home and take care of the children. I am not here on this planet to serve a man and raise his children. I have my own goals and my own motivations.

I would continue, but I have finals to prepare and I've lost enough of my time on you already.

I would wish you a nice day, but it would be a lie.

_____________________________

Here is Mr. Day's response:

Dear AA,

First of all, as a young woman studying engineering, you have very likely been granted special favors whether you know it or not. All those programs designed to encourage young women like you to pursue a career in engineering exist for a reason. And the reason is that most women just don't enjoy engineering the way men do. You're obviously smart, you can do the schoolwork, but it is unlikely that you will want to do the real thing for very long. Assuming you don't drop out in favor of an easier discipline before you graduate, the probabilities indicate that you won't spend much time actually working as an engineer; you'll soon be moved into some sort of management or marketing position. Whether you have been told as much or not, that is the conventional path for smart, educated women like you in the corporate world.

There is no shame in that. I started out in engineering myself. I had the ability, but not the aptitude, and quickly switched to a field I vastly preferred. If you're smart enough, you'll likely figure that out before long. Whatever you do, don't waste your life doing something you don't really enjoy simply because you are capable of doing it. Remember that actual engineering is very, very different than studying engineering, and being very good at the latter is not necessarily indicative of real interest in the former.

Now I'm going to teach you a hard, but very important lesson. You see, I don't care you how feel. I really don't. More importantly, neither does anyone else. Only about 200 people on a planet of 7 billion actually care about your feelings, and that's if you're lucky. The sooner you grasp this lesson, the better off you will be. And since almost no one gives a damn what you do, say, think, or feel, appealing to your feelings when you encounter differences of opinion is not only illogical, but useless.

What happened to me to make my brain go this wrong? The short answer is: living life with my eyes open. Keep in mind that I'm more intelligent than you are. The fact that you can't understand the way I think doesn't make my brain wrong, it merely means you aren't keeping up. But more important is the fact that I'm considerably more experienced than you are. I've had three decades to observe the differences between all those school lessons about valuing equality, diversity, and vibrancy and the way human beings actually behave. Equality is a myth; it doesn't exist anymore than fairies and unicorns do. As for women's rights, well, a young woman as intelligent as you should be able to handle the math that dictates what happens to a society when an insufficient number of young women marry and have children. Since women's rights are very strongly correlated with demographic decline, they are not sustainable and are, in fact, societally deleterious. They are not so much wrong as fatal when viewed from the macro perspective.

I do believe women should have the same legal rights and protections afforded to unborn children. There is no contradiction there. You see, I don't believe that unborn children should be given the right to vote or permitted to murder other unborn children either.

I understand you have your own goals. That's fine. The problem is that women are not only valuable to society, they are invaluable. They are necessary. The one and only thing both society and the human race actually need from you is for you to marry and raise children. If you're not going to do that, then it really doesn't matter if you're going to become a human resources manager with an engineering degree or drop out of school and become a stripper. If you're only going to do what any man of similar capabilities can do, then you are an evolutionary dead end and as unimportant to society as the average man is.

In the entire history of the human race, the actions of a few thousand men have actually made much of a difference one way or the other. If that. But without women deciding to marry and have children, the species would die out. Do you really want to limit yourself to the same sort of irrelevance as the average man?

Another thing you have no reason to know is that young women are reliably bad at foreseeing what they will want to do in the near future. I graduated with a number of women like you. None of them thought they were interested in marriage and children until they were about 27. Then they suddenly changed their minds and some of them were very upset that they had spent the previous ten years pursuing goals that were now unimportant to them. I even wrote a column about it called Spiting Their Pretty Faces back in 2003, you can google it. Think about 2003. You were ten. Are your goals the same now as they were then? If not, then how can you be certain that your goals, and your opinion about marriage and children, will be the same when you are 30?

In any event, I wish you good fortune regardless of what path you eventually choose.

Regards, etc.
Vox

_____________________________

I thought Mr. Day made some interesting, if harsh, observations.

Thoughts on this? Is he being unfair? Honest? Truthful? Hateful?

League of the Juvenile Godless

Vox Day is, among his many other remarkable writing credits, a columnist with WorldNetDaily. My husband is a faithful follower of his blog. Recently he had a post which Don found fascinating. Because we can't link to specific articles on his blog, Don emailed and asked permission to reprint the entire blog entry here. That permission was granted.

The neat thing about Vox Day is his ability to clearly articulate things that I simply cannot wrap words around. This is an excellent case in point.
__________________________

League of the Juvenile Godless

Despite their best efforts to conceal it under a facade of reason, they always eventually reveal the essential lack of intellectual and emotional development that underlies their social autism:

But nowhere has the reaction of believers been so forceful as in Fort Worth, to the delight of Fred Edwords, the national director of the United Coalition of Reason. The coalition’s local chapter spent only $2,400 for four bus ads, which will run through the month in a city with about 200 buses.

“That’s more brouhaha for the buck than we have seen anywhere,” Mr. Edwords said.

And thus are all the claims that their various ad campaigns are about anything but annoying Christians at Christmastime belied. Can you even imagine how upset Jews would be if Christians began running ads directly attacking Jewish beliefs during the high holidays in a similar manner? Or how ballistic Muslims would go if similarly attacked during Ramadan? Atheists constantly attempt to portray the public celebrations and positive assertions of Christian belief as some sort of attack on their non-belief, but that is nothing more than absurd and juvenile drama-queening. Consider the lack of equivalency here:

Christian: "God loves you."
Atheist: "You know it's [the Christmas story of the birth of Jesus Christ] a myth."

The Christian statement doesn't say anything about the atheist or his atheism. While one can correctly deduce that if it is true that God loves you, then he must exist and therefore contradict the atheist belief that he does not, it cannot possibly be considered an attack on atheism of any kind. The atheist statement, on the other hand, is nothing but an attack on a specific belief of a specific religion. This isn't to say all of the atheist ads are attacks; millions of people most certainly are good without God. They're simply not good enough to enter into His presence come Judgment Day.

Now, when Christians start running historically correct ads featuring quotes like "There is No God" and "Science is My Religion" along with pictures of notorious atheist murderers such as Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse-tung, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Timothy McVeigh standing red-handed over the stacked skulls of their many victims instead of "God loves You", atheists can legitimately complain that they're being attacked. (Not that such attacks are not merited; they would be provably accurate whereas the atheist "myth" ad is not.) Until then, they've got absolutely nothing to complain about except for being alone of their own choice at Christmastime because a statement that contradicts your beliefs without making any reference to them is not only not an attack, it's not even about them! And while it's true that atheists happen to be America's most-disliked minority, perhaps they should consider not behaving in such an annoying and thoroughly dislikable manner.