What use is a B.A., anyway?

Today’s Tdj comes from Larry Willmore, formerly with the United Nations and now a Research Scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria.

“Economists have established beyond doubt that people with B.A.s earn more on average than people without them. But why does the B.A. produce that result? For whom does the B.A. produce that result? For some jobs, the economic premium for a degree is produced by the actual education that has gone into getting the degree. Lawyers, physicians, and engineers can earn their high incomes only by deploying knowledge and skills that take years to acquire, and degrees in law, medicine, and engineering still signify competence in those knowledges and skills. But for many other jobs, the economic premium for the B.A. is created by a brutal fact of life about the American job market: Employers do not even interview applicants who do not hold a B.A. Even more brutal, the advantage conferred by the B.A. often has nothing to do with the content of the education. Employers do not value what the student learned, just that the student has a degree.
…
Now the great majority of America's intellectually most able people do have a B.A. Along with that transformation has come a downside that few anticipated. The acceptable excuses for not going to college have dried up. The more people who go to college, the more stigmatizing the failure to complete college becomes. Today, if you do not get a B.A., many people assume it is because you are too dumb or too lazy. And all this because of a degree that seldom has an interpretable substantive meaning.”

Charles Murray, "Are Too Many People Going to College?", The American (September/October 2008).

http://www.american.com/archive/2008/september-october-magazine/

http://www.american.com/archive/2008/september-october-magazine/are-too-many-people-going-to-college


Charles Alan Murray (1943-) is an American libertarian political scientistcurrently working as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, DC.

Actually, this absurdity has progressed beyond the B.A. to the M.A. and beyond. More than 30 years ago, when I was employed by the Canadian government, I interviewed prospective candidates at Queen's University for economist positions. One candidate was by far the best of the lot, but he had only an undergraduate degree (B.A. honours). The personnel person with me explained that rules did not allow the federal government to hire an economist without at the minimum an M.A. or M.S. degree.

Today that requirement may have increased to a Ph.D., but I do not know. And what comes next? A post-doc requirement?

On the humble B.A., I am reminded of these lyrics from the Broadway musical "Avenue Q":

What do you do with a B.A. in English?
What is my life going to be?
4 years of college,
And plenty of knowledge,
Have earned me this useless degree!
I can't pay the bills yet,
'Cause I have no skills yet,
The world is a big scary place!
But somehow I can't shake,
The feeling I might make,
A difference to the human race!

Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, "What do you Do with a B.A. in English".

http://www.lyricsandsongs.com/song/601684.html