Dish alum Katie Zavadski recently reported on the bursting of the pharmacist bubble. Freddie sympathizes with students with “practical” degrees who end up unemployed:
This country graduates 350,000 business majors a year. The metrics for those degrees are generally awful. But nobody ever includes them in their arguments about impractical majors, despite those bad numbers. And if you’re some 19 year old, out to choose a career path, business sure sounds practical. So they graduate with those degrees and flood the market with identical resumes and nobody will hire them. Meanwhile, they lost the opportunity to explore fields that they might have enjoyed, that might have deepened the information acquisition and evaluation skills that would allow them to adapt to a whole host of jobs, and that might have provided a civic and moral education. All to satisfy a vision of practicality that has no connection to replicable, reliable economic advantage. …
Chasing a particular employment market, for an individual, can be a good or a bad bet. But treating skill chasing as a long-term economic solution on the societal level is insane. We’ve responded to unprecedented labor market swings, and to our incredible exposure to risk through our financial system, by dramatically narrowing our notion of what skills are valuable and who gets to be considered a practically educated person. That makes zero sense, particularly in a time when automation threatens to cut the legs out from more and more workers as we move forward. We are manically pursuing a far narrower vision of what human beings can call a vocation, treating any endeavor that does not involve numbers or digital technology as useless and old-fashioned, with nothing resembling a sound evidentiary basis for believing that this will deliver better labor outcomes. (The numbers-based fields are the ones that computers will be best equipped to take over!)
The Dish 