Specifically, computer science majors who place disproportionate value in their “practical” majors compared to the other “impractical” and “useless” majors.
In this TikTok , the video that prompted this rant, the creator states, “I really don’t think we talk about this enough. Besides maybe CS — maybe engineering — the vast majority of people that I talk to, that have graduated from college and are at their professions, have not learned one thing from their college education that they’re using in their jobs.”
He, like many who fall within the archetypal “Tech Bro”, argues (1) that schooling is only valuable when one studies something “useful”, (2) that education is inversely invaluable when one studies something “useless”, and (3) that utility is determined by one’s technical abilities and employability.
Part 1: The plight of the Bro
Let’s first arrive on the same page. I feel for Tech Bro’s (I will continue to use “Bro” as a derogatory term). When I was in primary and secondary school, I often thought school was pointless. I wasn’t challenged, and I didn’t feel like I was learning much. There’s a shared sentiment among many students, especially Gen Z students who grew up in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, that school is not as important as finding a job. It doesn’t help that college attendance — one of life’s biggest financial decisions — is shoved down our throats starting as early as Kindergarten.
Education may primarily be a social institution but is treated more like a business. A recent analysis from Vantage Market Research values the current global US Education Market to be $1.5T USD. This valuation captures textbook publishers to universities to online platforms, such as SkillShare, and is most likely an underestimation of the true value of education. Education is, after all, an economic engine pushing the locomotive of human capital.
And because of the economics of education, schools are under immense scrutiny. K-12 teachers, for example, are judged far too heavily on test scores and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that have little to do with student achievement. Thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act, education and its constraints are forced to appeal to the lowest common denominator as opposed to maximizing potential.
So to a number of students, school is excruciatingly slow but that does not mean that it is pointless. See, what gets many of us to grow up from a cynical perspective of school is to stop focusing on the content and start focusing on the process. In other words, school was never about memorizing historical dates or chemical formulas — even though that’s what you’re tested on. School is about the process of learning.
And that’s what the Tech Bro’s, amongst similar STEM students and gifted kids who coast by school, fail to internalize. You get what you put in. Yes, you could get an A in your high school English course by skipping your pre-write, stringing together word vomit, and turning in a last minute paper but only because the rest of your classmates are still working on reading comprehension. Did you learn anything? Probably not.
When you get to college, and you repeat the same haphazard performance in your mandatory liberal arts courses, you may still receive an A because the professor, drowning in research or grant-writing, has no intention of messing up a student’s GPA in a mandatory class with a student-teacher-ratio of 100:1. Did you learn anything this time? Still no.
These grades reward the common Bro because of circumstance, not learnedness. And these sweeping generalizations may be exaggerated, but they are rooted in the countless essays I have revised and edited from STEM students — both high school and college — with abysmal writing skills and trite rhetorical analysis. Bro’s are notoriously poor writers because they fail to put in the effort necessary to learn the skills the assignments are meant to practice.
I should clarify that I also realize academic writing varies in form, function, and audience. The writing skills needed in scientific papers are vastly different from humanities journals. I also think the differences are negligible when one cannot communicate a simple idea effectively or convincingly.
In a similar vein, the Bro who cries out “why doth school wasteth me time?” is like the person who complains about never learning to file taxes (despite tax forms simply asking regular people to follow instructions with rudimentary reading comprehension skills). The answer is, they already have — you just have to apply what you learned.
Except in college and beyond, the Bro will stop asking the question of why school won’t teach a certain skill and will instead start to invalidate and undermine what they do not understand. “What are you going to do with a Women & Gender Studies major,” he condescends, as he lives in a country debating the rights of women and gender.
Part 2: Useless? Are you living under a rock?
It would be an understatement to say that the country is divided. The Supreme Court seems to be threatening the entire judicial system with biased politics and short-sighted rulings. And among the most impactful cases are ones surrounding civil rights.
Between the overturning of Roe V. Wade, the boogeyman of critical race theory, and insurrection of January 6th, have liberal arts majors not earned the right to be called relevant? Our world calls for sophisticated — albeit not too sophisticated— conversations about race, gender, and politics yet half the population can barely get past a Disney film starring a gay Black kid. I would argue this is the most crucial time for liberal arts majors — when the government is broken and the world is on fire.
Let us not forget about the war on information. Misinformation and disinformation are threatening our democracy, and our very own richest man (more or less) Elon Musk tweets conspiracy theories to adorning and impressionable fans. The skills necessary to succeed in the liberal arts — critical thinking, research and verifying sources, logical arguments — grow more and more important as the internet ages.
There are, of course, the soft skills one develops in the liberal arts, such as collaboration, empathizing with diverse peoples, and active listening. In a study from the American Association of Colleges and Universities, they found that the two most sought out skills by employers are (1) the ability to work in teams and (2) critical thinking. They also found that the two most preferred experiences are (1) internships and (2) an experience that involved working in community settings with people from diverse backgrounds or cultures.
Empathy and teamwork are indispensable in the workplace but even more so in our personal lives. Our relationships with our loved ones and kindness with strangers determine much of our realities, and these skills must be practiced else atrophy on an island of solitude.
Steps down from soap box.
Perhaps the political turmoil and learned soft skills are not convincing you that liberal arts majors are not useless. Let me then appropriate a common Tech Bro’s argument for computer science majors: the ability to solve problems. This may be a hot take. I believe computer science majors are not critical thinkers as much as they are problem solvers, and I believe liberal arts majors have them beat on both fronts.
Imagine you live in Los Angeles, and you are stuck in traffic, as one is. The blaring honks attacking your eardrums. The manufactured air blowing towards your face. You start to wonder how on God’s green Earth we can fix congestion. And Elon Musk, with his army of Tech Bro’s, announces that Boring Company will solve traffic through an undisrupted underground tunnel known as the Hyperloop. The only problem? He just described the subway and is charging the state $121 million per mile (Musk having sold the project by claiming a high speed rail system that costs $81 million per mile was astronomically expensive).
Tech Bro’s love to claim that they solve problems, that they’re innovators driving humanity forward. Yet, a lot of solutions are simply repackaging existing systems in nice, little, exploitable ideas with a profit incentive. If these disruptions were truly solving problems, why did Facebook’s mission of connecting people lead to abetting genocide in Myanmar? Why does Uber, whose mission is to help people go anywhere, make people dependent on car-oriented transit? Why does AirBnB incentivize affluent people to buy up homes and reduce the housing supply for local communities when their slogan is “Belong anywhere”?
The strength of the liberal arts major is the strength of any real problem solver: perspective. Historical context, geopolitical implications, race and gender theory, and all other tools in the shed help create a solution that’s grounded in reality. Knowing what’s been tried informs what to replicate or avoid. Accounting for regulations and policies help sustain the operation. Involving marginalized communities attempts to minimize harm that would be overlooked otherwise. For real problem solvers, these considerations are not nice-to-have’s but must-have’s. But how would the Tech Bro who barely shows up to his humanities classes know?
Part 3: Practicality is an elaborate guise
There has been a narrative that has been plaguing our education system since millennials were in school: learning STEM gets you ahead.
Perhaps twenty years ago, as the curriculum began steering towards math and science at 23 knots in the icy cold North Atlantic, this may have been true. After all, the US has never outperformed its peers in math or science and we were in a shortage of engineers during the dot-com bubble.
So all these bright-eyed kids went off to college to follow the American dream and major in STEM. For some, that looked like biology or chemistry. For others, it looked like math and engineering. And it would be remiss to put the two on equal playing field. Majoring in biology has no better job prospects than sociology, yet the system so heavily skews K-12 learning towards STEM as if there are more advancement opportunities than graduate or medical school. It may not even be a smart decision to major in biology as a pre-med student, let alone for the vast majority of people with no intention to pursue medicine.
The wise choice would clearly be to study engineering or computer science, instead. And you would have made big money back then, but now? I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but 1,000 firms laid off 150,000 tech workers just this year. The employability argument is being squeezed by an oversaturation of talented engineers and a shrinking job market. Even in 2018, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that computer and information science majors had higher unemployment rates than English majors. I mean, really. What are you going to do with a computer science degree if there aren’t any spots left?
I’m being a tad cheeky, but I also am being entirely honest. Job markets change. Skills in demand change. Going to university and paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a major without a real knack for learning is like buying a McLaren without a steering wheel. Where else are you gonna go but the direction you bought it? To base people’s and their education’s worth based on utility is premature to say the least — but I’m also not sure that’s the full story.
What I never understood about the notion that employability = good major is that the argument never applied to other practical majors, such as teaching or nursing. Surely with the national shortage of both professions, education and nursing majors are one of the most highly sought after graduates. States have lowered job requirements so those without a teaching certificate can teach, which screams employability to me. Why do the Bro’s not bring that same energy? Oh right. Teaching and nursing jobs are predominately women and do not rake in six figure salaries.
The Tech Bro is arguing not for practicality or pedagogy but for male-dominated, high earning fields. They are iterative of the Finance Bro, without the network or (limited) soft skills, yet the Tech Bro can claim to solve problems and work less — both of which are not always true. So the Bro’s are in unison about the patriarchy and classism. There’s one more thing: ego.
If we really wanted to look at employability and utility, we could stare into the gaping hole left in vocational skills. In 2022, the construction industry faced a 650,000 employee shortage, in part due to the demand of the housing market and in part due to the push towards universities these past few decades. There are millions of job openings for skilled laborers, but there is simply not the same supply of vocational students. This, too, is not met with the same vigor that Tech Bro’s have online, even the ones that claim school should teach real job skills. What’s more real than school that literally teaches you the trade?
None of that matters to the Tech Bro, concerned just as much with other men and compensation as they are with ego and exclusivity. The competitiveness of the job market and the unspoken rules of networking act as gates to keep out the riff raff — women, the poor, and the uneducated. They were never concerned with whether school was teaching them job skills or not. They weren’t concerned with school at all. The Tech Bro, like many other any other Bro, was looking for someone to feel better than.
