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I admit to getting a kick out of Josh Kim’s response to my piece earlier this week about epistemic humility. He put himself out there by making one clear prediction with two clear justifications; if he turns out to be wrong, well, at least he’s saying something.
His prediction is that the cost of graduate school will go down. (More precisely, the cost of master’s degree programs will go down. All his examples are at the master’s level.) The justifications are the rise of online learning and the related rise of massively scaled programs.
Kudos to Josh for staking a claim. I don’t know if he’s right—I sometimes suspect that many master’s degree programs are really cash cows for their institutions, and cost-cutting isn’t really what cash cows are about—but the argument is plausible. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more company-specific postbachelor’s credentials develop over time. They’d provide control and relevance to the company and low cost to the employee. The catch is that they might not be terribly transferable between companies. They would be a sort of educational scrip.
These predictions aren’t mutually exclusive, of course. And they don’t address doctoral education, which is another animal altogether. I don’t know if they’ll prove correct over time, but it’s great fun to trace the arguments. And in a few years, we’ll either get to celebrate our prescience or write columns with titles like “oops!”
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My thanks to the wise and worldly readers who responded to yesterday’s reveal about The Girl’s college choice with well-wishes. She’s excited to go, and I’m excited for her.
Now that the decision is made, and with her permission granted, I can finally share one of her application essays with the world. The prompt and the piece are below. She admits going a bit over the top, but the humor and voice are utterly her own, and the penultimate paragraph slays me. Happy reading!
In lieu of an essay or personal statement, we ask interested applicants to answer a short answer question. The Admissions Committee reviews responses for quality rather than length. However, the most effective responses typically range from 200-300 words per question. Responses that are longer or shorter are acceptable.
If you could change anything in the world, what would it be? Explain why and how you would change it.
If I could change anything in the world, I’d make it a trapezoidal prism. Or a cube, or a cylinder, or a triangle. Maybe a hexagon or a pentagon, though I’d draw the line at pentagonal trapezohedron.
I can hear you already, complaining about the scientific impossibilities of such shapes, the problems it would pose on the seasons and length of days, how we’d probably fall into the sun as a result of our warped orbit and die hot, painful deaths. How the oceans would wax and wane with apocalyptic extremity, how we would beg for the rapture to an empty sky as God and Satan alike hid from their creations.
To that, I say: no fun.
If we ignore science for a second and allow ourselves to consider the implications of a three-faced (or six-faced, or seven-faced) planet, things get a lot more interesting. How would cultures divide themselves along each vertex? Would race be defined no longer by skin color but by which face people came from? Would Columbus, for a moment, think he was wrong as his three famous ships slid over the edge of the Earth?
All those questions have the same implication: “the world” is not defined by its shape or scientific properties, but by humanity, by those who populate it. The pursuit of scientific knowledge is valuable, but not superior to the pursuit of humanistic knowledge.
The STEM obsession that has recently flooded academia isn’t entirely unjustified; doctors and engineers have always and will always be invaluable to an efficient society. But to assume that this inherently makes everyone else—the poets, artists, musicians, and writers—inferior is not only inaccurate but actively harmful, not to mention the patriarchal implications of such mindsets (is it really any wonder that academia worships the field that happens to be male-dominated while invalidating the more female-leaning humanities?).
After all, what is science for but understanding the very people who pursue it? How they love and live and write and dance and laugh and cry and burn their leaders when they fail them and deify them when they don’t, and all the million reasons any one person does any one thing and all the million consequences to that thing that they’ll never see.
No matter which corner of the planet they’re from.
Program Note: Next week’s schedule is the busiest of the semester, so the blog will take a brief pause. It will be back for Monday, May 2.
