Shakespeare? That Will Be 40000 Dollars Please

This week’s Economist featured a leader on the indebtedness of American students and the grave implications this could have on society as rising unemployment persists. The article as a whole made many ingenious suggestions to reverse the trend of over-burdening students with debt, however from the last sentence it transpired that the newspaper holds a very commercial view of education. This is something I touched upon in a previous article, namely that education has become a mere variable in the job market, rather than being a function in itself. The Economist suggests that “those studying less lucrative subjects would have to pay more, or be subsidised more”, implying that the value of a degree can almost be quantified in crude numbers. This looks over the fact that the value of a degree is mostly qualitative, and that the future salary that a student can expect is but an infinitesimal percentage of the host of other benefits that accrue from pursuing education. The only reason for which a scientific degree (which usually is considered more employable than a humanities one) ought to benefit from more government funding is because it is usually more time-intensive and more expensive to teach because of the practical elements involved. An English degree does not involve all the experiments and labs which undoubtedly cost more money than simply lecturing for 9 hours a week. 

However, to render “more employable” degrees cheaper through greater government funding produces a distorting disincentive to pursue a humanities degree, something which would be regrettable for society as a whole. It reinforces the mistaken notion that education does not have any intrinsic value in itself, but that it ought to be pursued solely to land a lucrative job. This belief is in turn based on a fundamental flaw in society, namely that society benefits solely from money-making automatons and exhorts individuals to chart the course of their life accordingly. On a more banal level, it could be argued that Shakespeare did not find a cure for cancer nor contribute monetarily to the economy, but does it follow from this that the study of his work is any less important for society? Where would we be today without philosophy? A student with an in-depth knowledge of literature or philosophy may not have an identifiable price tag attached to his head, but the value he would bring to the intellectual and cultural facets of society would be priceless. Unhappy is the society that marginalises intellectual pursuit in favour of purely economic proclivities.