Why Did I Study What I Studied?
Recent travel, reading, and conversations are making me think about college
In the last few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about the subjects I studied in college.
I graduated over ten years ago with a joint degree in Modern History and International Relations from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Since I donned the cap and gown in 2010 no one has made a big deal about where I went to school. To be honest at this point my memories from college are far more about partying than what I learned academically.
In the last few weeks, from unexpected places, I’ve been reminded of what I was in fact studying. I’m currently in Finland, a country fond of hierarchies and education. It’s the first time in a while someone asked what I studied and, more importantly, why I studied it. It doesn’t help that my major is as exotic and impractical as a pink Lamborghini to the ultra realist Finns. No humanities majors here.
There’s also, for whatever reason, a lot of navel gazing going on among some of my favorite authors. In his Substack, Arbitrage Andy feels compelled to explain his International Relations major before giving his views on Ukraine. Writing coach James Perrel ties the decline of the history major to the rise of modern design and the Bauhaus movement. Boomer columnists complain about the decline of the humanities in general. Some say they have gone too far left, other blame students for being too commercially minded.
The final reminder, and by far what piqued my attention the most, is the current state of my peer group. Like attracts like and many of my friends studied similar subjects. We did this out of interest, because we thought it was what we’re supposed to do, and perhaps because we lacked better ideas.
The group seems to be at a crossroads. No one turned into a drug addicted wastrel, no one joined a cult, everyone more or less has willingly signed up for bourgeois society with all the sacrifices to conformity with which that entails. They do not, however, seem particularly happy.
In 2022 there’s a sense of nostalgia for a world gone by, and resentment that things haven’t worked out as they should have. Maybe it was hubris to think that we were training to join an elite group, destined to rule the world, only to find ourselves in Kafkaesque email chains.
I am partially a member of this group. Life has not gone as I planned. In my imagination, I would complete education and would easily slide into fulfilling, prestigious, and remunerative work. I would only have to jump through show dog hoops to eventually become a leader of society, smuggly humble bragging over a whiskey at a local golf club.
In the last couple years I feel like I personally left a lot of these notions behind. That doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes feel an ache, a sense of loss, for the life I never had but expected. It’s hard to feel bad for us, and I don’t expect sympathy, but I feel like there are a lot of people like us out there in similar situations. This hidden resentment in the belly fat of consumer society will have big consequences in the coming years.
How did we choose this life path? Let me tell the story from my perspective.
Why I Made My Choice
In 2022 a history degree is an anachronism. When you tell people about it they charitably see it as a youthful folly, and judgmentally they see it as a sign of moral and intellectual weakness.
That was not always so. I was encouraged by my parents and my school to pursue history because it was a respected discipline where you learned to “read, write and analyze: (I think this was in the department's brochure). Six U.S. presidents studied history. Corporate CEOs and financial Titans did the same.
History was my best subject in high school, and with societal approval I pursued it because I felt I was doing the right thing and I lacked any other clear direction.
International Relations was an ad on and a supposed nod to practicality. At the time economics was king, but I lacked the math skills. In my slightly convoluted thinking I believed doing a social science based in the present tense would make me appear more practical and more employable.
I don’t think it worked out that way. Arbitrage Andy says he studies International Relations because he was “looking for a blend of history and applicable theory to apply to the world I saw”. In the end it was more broad political philosophy, learning about Morgenthau, Waltz, and St. Augustine, than anything to do with the real world. Not that it wasn’t interesting, but it felt decidedly ungrounded.
Looking back on my four years in St. Andrews, I enjoyed my studies like a form of passive entertainment, which were vaguely interesting while I pursued parties, travel, and hobbies. For me I learned more from my fellow students who did a better job explaining the material than the lecturers did. At this point I actively recall and use maybe 5-10% of what I learned in class.
But I, and most of my classmates, did not really intend to “use” any of it. We were told to chase prestige, essentially make ourselves look cool, and eventually we would find a place in a large organization ruled by people like us. Direct utility was far less important than signaling value. In the meantime enjoy the university country club lifestyle.
We learned to value signaling from Boomer parents. In their defense, they grew up in a different time where information was scarce and signals more important. You needed a degree, could not just start a blog to showcase your knowledge. Also in general I think fewer people went to college and college was a lot tougher, giving it greater value.
My cohort of millennials inhabited a gap between the paradigm of 20th Century managerial office culture and whatever the 21st century is becoming. Gap might not even be right, it often feels more like a cliff that we had to jump off.
What happened next
Now it was time to face the real world. I had degrees that conferred no tangible skill and it was 2010 when the world was still deep in recession. My degree was also foreign, not easily recognizable in the United States.
Furiously I applied to jobs, hearing only crickets in response. Leaving Scotland I tried my own version of the California dream followed by a brief stint as ski lift operator in Colorado. Eventually I ended up in NYC crashing on my Aunt’s Gramercy Park couch.
On the surface it seemed like fun, but deep down I felt an uneasy social vertigo that’s, to a certain extent, still with me. On one hand I had almost unlimited freedom to pursue pleasure, on the other hand the life as part of the broader system and economy I had imagined seemed almost unattainable.
Like a lot of my group, I doubled down on my previous decisions with more school. Pursuing an MA in International Relations at NYU I followed a touching the void strategy, cut the rope and hope to climb out under the glacier.
At NYU I began to live another psychological state that stayed with me for years, the sense that life is somehow a shadow. The buildings were grand, the professors and courses had fancy titles, but somehow it just felt like a shadow of what it should be. Most of the other students were lost like me, clinging to school as a life raft of emotional stability, but deep down realizing the absurdity of it all. There were no jobs at the end of the rainbow, the faculty didn’t believe in us and gave us grades to get rid of us. We did what we “should” without really believing in it.
From here I slide almost at random into the media, working for various TV channels. Again this felt like a shadow of what I really wanted. On the surface it sounded impressive and delivered truly unique life experiences. On the other hand it just didn’t feel like a real career. Legacy media was dying, and like the cold water around the Titanic only a few people could find debris to cling to.
During this period I often felt like I was living a lie. Publicly I used the fancy brand name to sound cool. Privately I felt a sense of hopelessness around it and used family money to make myself feel better and prop up this shadow persona.
This seemed like what I should expect from life, but somehow it just wasn’t it. Everything came tumbling down at some point, and to be honest I feel much happier inhabiting the rubble of this life than the fake facade.
Many people I know are still in the Facade, but I have the feeling they may soon face their very own structural collapse.
Why It All Matters
I think a lot of people are going through a similar crisis. It manifests differently but many millennials are trapped in this limbo between the 20th century and the 21st.
Gen Z might be getting wise. In 1967, history degrees accounted for 5.7% of all bachelor degrees, today they are around 1%. This decline has been on par with other traditional humanities disciplines like English.
Education has gotten a lot more expensive, and most students need to find something that offers a financial return. Many will argue that these degrees do pay, just not in a way that’s immediately apparent. The thing is, if you owe the bank a new Porsche that you have to finance at exorbitant rates, you want your source of cash flow to be pretty evident.
More broadly than just degrees, we’re facing a crisis of the educated upper middle class. This class has done what it was told, and is not getting the rewards it expected. Any mainstream media outlet brims with opinion pieces and reporting saying as much.
These are the people that are urbanized, organized, and ready to promote revolution. Peasants don’t lead to the overthrow of systems, Mao and Lenin both looked down on farm labor. It’s educated people who do not see a better life for themselves who are most dangerous.
People are choosing more practical subjects because life has become much harder and more competitive. Some business majors, engineers, Data scientists are making it, but they’re not the story. The Starbucks barista with a philosophy degree and the bartender with a history diploma are. They seeth with resentment and make up the woke mob.
50 years ago they would be prosperous adults. They did everything right. Now they are stuck with the lifestyle of their parents seeming painfully out of reach.
In many ways they are like rural Americans who are left behind by the Costal Technocracy. While drawing different conclusions about the source of their troubles, they both have a tingling on the back of their neck that this isn’t all its cracked up to be.
If we reduce our education to only that which can be exchanged for money (or some money stand-in perk) we become nothing more than a cog of capitalism, no better than the latest robot. I know, I know, it's fashionable to think every skill which isn't directly marketable is seen as a "luxury" (god forbid!) In fact, we need MORE diverse education, more experience learning about and playing in the fields of "useless" disciplines. Those experiences build the competencies we need for life - no, they permit the experiences we WANT for life. History and philosophy and literature and yes statistics and economics and geography are essential. Without them we have weaker architecture for life-building in all its forms: relationships, parenting, politics, feeding ourselves, the technology of the 21st Century, aging, you name it.