What are you going to do with a degree in philosophy?
August 19th, 2008Since all of my time is currently free time, I’ve been spending a lot of it in parks and pubs, and “measuring out my life with coffee spoons” in cafes. Sometimes, I get to talk to strangers.
I was in the Crown and Anchor, writing in my journal, when I noticed a scruffy but pretty girl drinking a beer and reading Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. I assumed she was a philosophy student (as I was myself once). She asked me to watch her stuff for a minute, and when she got back I asked her if she was carrying that heavy tome for self-defense on the mean streets of London, or if it was for a course. It turns out she’s doing a philosophy degree at UCL.
It may be that reading technique has declined since I was a student: hers involved moving her head side-to-side as if she were watching a miniature tennis match taking place on the pages of her book. I got the impression from this that the book was a little bit for show, and that she was absorbing more Beck’s than Bertrand. Philosophy students weren’t pretentious back in my day, oh no.
For laughs, I was tempted to ask, “What are you going to do with a degree in philosophy?” I didn’t, as I know from experience how annoying that question can be. Instead, I confessed that I had done a degree in philosophy, followed shortly by another. I should have added, “And now I’m unemployed.”
I’m reading The Undercover Economist (which itself struggles with pretension); it had this analysis of the value of philosophy degrees:
Spence himself first used his insight to show why students might choose to pursue a degree in philosophy, which is difficult but does not lead to specific career opportunities, like an economics degree or a marketing degree. Assume that employers would like to hire smart, diligent workers but can’t tell from an interview who is smart or diligent. Assume also that everyone has to work hard to obtain a philosophy degree, but lazy, dumb people find it particularly troublesome.
Spence then shows that smart, diligent people can prove they’re smart and diligent by going to the trouble of getting a philosophy degree. It’s not that lazy, dumb people can’t get that degree but that they wouldn’t want to: employers will pay philosophy graduates enough to compensate them for the trouble but not enough to persuade lazy, dumb people to bother. The employers are willing to do this despite the fact that the philosophy degree itself does not improve the candidate’s productivity at all. It is merely a credible signal, because a philosophy degree is too much trouble for lazy, dumb people to acquire.
Is this an accurate analysis? A friend of mine was studying for a mid-term in a course called Gemstones and Gemology. I said, “Are you really going to get college credit for a course on jewelry?” She came back with, “What are you studying? Aristotle? What use is that to anybody?” So I bet her that I could take the practice exam she was working on and that Aristotle would help me do better than she had after three months of lectures on the subject.
I took the test. Not only did I beat my friend’s score, I got everything right. Why? Aristotle is the foundation of western science. If you understand Aristotle, you understand how scientific problems are formulated. In addition, since he started the tradition and his disciples continue it, much of scientific terminology is in Greek or Latin. I don’t have to take a class to tell me what “anisotropic” means — the word itself tells me, and I can guess from it (for example) that anisotropic gems split light in different directions. (This sort of thing is why it’s still worth studying Greek*, even for the pragmatically minded.) Finally, as the founder of syllogistic logic, Aristotle gives insight into contradictions that allow a test-taker to eliminate incorrect options and to see how questions later in the exam illuminate earlier ones.
This is a roundabout way of objecting to the assertion that philosophy “does not improve the candidate’s productivity”. I think philosophy, like mathematics or other problem-solving disciplines, does increase productivity by giving students tools to analyze problems and to accelerate learning. And I doubt that most students who study philosophy choose the degree to signal diligence and brains to potential employers — there are more direct ways of doing this, and most philosophy students don’t think about future employment at all**. Being able to do your coursework in the pub is probably a much more important factor.
* I was flipping through a book called something like The Smartest Guy in the World in an airport bookstore, about someone who read everything he could to be a success on the game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. I put it down when he confessed that the multiple-choice question he missed was, “What are red blood cells called?” One of the answers, erythrocyte, means “red cell” in Greek. Can’t be that smart.
** A friend of mine wrote a comic that I thought was funny at university: A guy is standing behind a cash register and the customer asks, “Where’s my change?” The guy answers, “True change comes from within.” The caption is, “Why philosophy majors have trouble finding a job.”