Comic Strips

I got a BS in a STEM field and a BA in the humanities. I think I was substantially benefited by both.

Even when I teach STEM - being able to draw on knowledge of Greek history and philosophy makes my lessons on the Pythagorean theorem more effective. When I talk about chemical equilibrium, I talk about the impact of climate changes on communities. When I talk about Newton’s laws, I talk about Newton context in scientific publishing of the time and some of his weird ideas about alchemy.

I get it the sciences are better paying ( or they use to be) but the humanities have a roll in creating well rounded and thoughtful people.

Plenty of people who graduate with a humanities degree make money. Sales and Marketing make tons of money. Lawyers make money. Linguists make money. PR and other Communications make money. Art and Design make money. Anyone who works for a sufficiently wealthy (and not particularly thrifty) client can make a ton of money in the humanities.

Unfortunately, the humanities majors who make the most money are often leveraging their skills for nefarious ends. Not unlike STEM in that regard.

but the humanities have a roll in creating well rounded and thoughtful people.

Definitely. I would have love do arts and humanities. But to be blunt, it would be hard to get a well paying job if one graduated with humanities degree.

Liberal arts and humanities initially started to provide well-rounded education to the privileged back then, to prepare and groom them as potential future leaders who need to be broadly knowledgeable and make well-informed and wise decision. And unfortunately that's the key word there: privileged. Education was reserved for the privileged and those who could pay. However, from what I can see, as education became more available to the public, the arts and humanities education lost its goal. Education as a whole really became a way to indoctrinate and condition children and young people on how to be obedient workers in the current capitalist system. Doing homework and projects after school, is really training for young people to bring their work to home when they finally enter the workforce.

Oh, for real! I went to school for pharmacobiology/biochemistry (very affordable in my country) and it changed my outlook on life, my thought process, my ideas, my horizons, etc. Even if I don't use any of it at my current job, I don't regret it one bit. Life is too big to live it in ignorance is my motto.

If I'm going to spend a few years of my life in full time study, I'd expect there to be a payoff in terms of future income.

Learning for the sake of learning is good fun, sure, but life is expensive.

The primary goal of a university is teaching the next generation of academics. That's it. The entire goal is teaching and research.

But like everything else in this society, it must become a profit-driven endeavour and if it doesn't contribute with the revenue of some company, it's not worth it.

Society prizes art above all else (its like 90% of what we remember about ancient cultures if you count stories as art) but hates artists with a passion.

Just wanting to point out the irony of making fun of artists' life choices… below a comic.

I live in Austria, where it's not even quite as nice (well, similar benefits, but no federal minimum wage). It's deeply engrained in our culture that education doesn't have to be prep for a job. I personally know many people who pursue or have completed uni education that's completely unrelated to their like of work. Some have degrees in other areas, some don't. We have some pretty 'bad' statistics for how long People take to finish their degrees because people are, like, full time kindergarten teachers and taking 10 years to do a political science degree on the side purely because it interests them. People value education for its own sake and I love it. Unfortunately though, capitalism has this culture on the decline, and not even that long after education became open to most people.

Lead poisoning damage to their brains has made them genuine psychopaths.

They are probably full of regret around their younger years and just projecting their own bullshit onto others.

But it highlights a societal problem. How supply and demand is put above everything. How people who work hard and could improve society end up in a place like that because society thinks supporting them and their fields that don't bring immediate profit is cOmMuNiSm somehow (if u think that, well you're the prime example of why we need to encourage college education in humanities specifically)

People say that because going to college is becoming exponentially expensive. It gets meaningfully worse year over year

Education is great, learning is more then half of the joy of life. The education system in our country is absolutely broken. Both these things are true

You can still come out on top in a broken system. I did. I have no regrets, no debt. But as a whole, it's just getting worse all the time

Same happened to my roommates. 1 had to get new completely degrees, second forced to get phd, and other works at local grocery. Took 6 years for my SO to find a job paying decent and its still pretty low.

I firmly believe we all should take turns doing the shit jobs so that some are spared from having to do it all the time.

The CEO should spend a few hours a week scrubbing toilets. Citizens should go on say, a two-year tour of duty in their young years to do the stuff depicted in the comic. A benefit is that they'll treat service workers better later in life.

And more importantly, we should question how much of this is actually necessary. It seems all most of it does is make a couple people rich beyond morality.

These people are the "peasants" or close enough the distinction doesn't matter. We were all told the way to move up was to go to college pay all that tuition and you'll more than make it up longterm. If you end up working min wage stuff anyway it's better to just do it out of high-school. The warehouse guy probably makes decent but is also working shit hours and slowly destroying his body, again something college is supposed to help you avoid.

More that these jobs do not pay enough to pay for the degree, or even enough to simply afford a place to live without a second job.

US millennials were told growing up that literally all you had to do was get a bachelors, because that’s how it worked in previous generations. We had to take out ridiculous loans to pay for this, because even in-state tuitions have been out of control for about two decades now. Now, the job market is shit (and really has been since we entered the job market.) It doesn’t matter how smart or capable you are. The US doesn’t want smart or capable right now.

I remember getting my first check as a teacher. When I calculated the amount of time I spent working, and my pay bump from being a fast food supervisor to yah know, a degreed professional expected to work 80+ hour weeks didn’t mean jack or shit, especially when I had to buy my own supplies.

It’s fucked up.

Yeah, they are. I don't think people understand the fiscal realities of living in America, but I'll tell you one thing. I just get gas at the gas station. Maybe some sigs. No Red Bull, no Monster, I go home and make instant coffee. If this is the nation of the lowest common denominator, then I'm gonna fucking lean into it. I don't eat fast food. I don't go to the movies. I don't go to the mall. I don't do any of this Yankee shit. I constantly educate myself 24 fuckin' 7. It's the only thing that keeps me sane. Relative to what I do mostly, the library is one of my frequent places though. No Coachella for me. No Disney land. No toys like Star Wars figures. Just integrated circuits, code, and knowledge. With some mathematics that I fucking stumble the fuck through. If something breaks, I learn how to fix it. I go outside and pick the weeds before I would ever spray. I plant food. I eat that food. I grow my own weed in a legal way. I cook my own food. I am 40 years old. The world just gets worse. And I feel it's because we feed the problem. No more fucking war. Israel is committing a genocide. Religion is for Idiots. If I buy music, I have to have a hard copy and I rip it to my devices. If I cannot do this, I will sit in fucking silence staring at the wall. For I am an unmovable object. I am not perfect. I don't want to be perfect, I also don't want to be a cuck. or an insensitive idiot. But I will tell you the truth.

Great jobs? Doing what? Licking boots?

Uprooting your entire life, saying goodbye to all of your friends, family, community, home, all for the pursuit of some dollars, that's insanity. Only in a sick world where money is our master is that viewed otherwise.

Uprooting for adventure is one thing, uprooting for work is not the same.

Your comment sounds like some AI generated LinkedIn status and it makes me feel sick.

Now there are way too many people with degrees competing for the few remaining jobs

That's honestly not the future I see going forward. The future I see is one where colleges begin to close en mass, foreign students stop coming to the US for high quality education, and educated professionals leave the country for lower cost of living and better amenities abroad.

Education, as an institution, becomes a series of high end social clubs on the high end and a bunch of debt-trap MLMs on the low end. Increasingly little is actually taught at any of these schools, and the only real purpose of the campuses is to organize upper-middle class failkids into the various regionalized ideological cults.

Meanwhile, the demand for real labor continues to decline with the falling birthrate and the enormous volume of legacy infrastructure that continues to need support. Efforts to extract labor by force, rather than by promise of higher quality of life, only result in deteriorating work quality. We become even more addicted to imports as our position as global financial hegemony melts away. And eventually, we go into the same kind of debt crisis that plagued Germany after WW1 and Russia after the collapse of the USSR.

All the immigrants have been rounded up and trafficked to El Salvador, so, who is left to act as the scapegoat for the ruling elite?

You're never going to get "all the immigrants" because we're a nation of immigrants.

The War on Immigration has better parallels with the War on Drugs. Lots of moving goalposts. Lots of propaganda as a stand in for policy. Lots of big splashy media pieces on how we're "Losing" or "Winning" in dramatic fashion.

But the economic incentives don't change. Consumer behaviors don't really change. And mostly we create a giant Make Work system for thugs to harass people of color.

The GI Bill allowed soldiers that fought Hitler the opportunity to obtain the same level of education previously reserved for generations of the ruling class.

That was the first real instance of DEI in America, and the ruling class has been doing everything in their power to take back their exclusive club ever since by dividing and conquering.

I know people think Russia is trying to infiltrate the U.S. because the cold war never really ended, but I'm pretty sure we've been thinking about it backwards. I'm starting to believe that our elite knew they couldn't topple American democracy to regain power from within without making it too obvious, so they purchased/privatized post Soviet Russia so they wouldn't have to say the quiet parts out loud.

electricians, plumbers

Doesn’t require a college degree. May require trade school or an apprenticeship.

math teachers

Requires multiple degrees but they are extremely underpaid and while I do think the US could use more and better teachers, the funding of the public school system does not reflect that.

chemists

Probably ok prospects right now but the job market in general kinda sucks right now so you still might have trouble.

etc etc etc.

Computer science was an extremely desirable degree from an employment perspective up until a couple years ago, but now the computer science bubble is popping. But also in general the job market is awful right now. A lot of people I know with “practical” degrees like computer science, business, physics, and engineering are struggling to get jobs in the fields they majored in. And that’s not even getting into how awful the US system for becoming a doctor is…