[jimmywanger]

> This just seems so wrong.

Why? Out of all the things to think are wrong, inability to pick a useless major based on financial status is wrong? As opposed to pollution in East Asia, conflict minerals in our supply chain, or slavery in shrimp fisheries in Thailand?

> These fields don't usually/directly translate into a financial success, but they broaden our perspective and deepen our experience.

Yes. Those are luxuries. For most of history, middle class people couldn't afford to study those fields. Colleges used to have much smaller enrollments. They'd either by A&M schools, used to help train up mechanics and farmers or engineering schools where you need to learn the math to become an engineer. Only a few prestigious ones (Yale, Harvard, etc etc) offered humanities majors, for landed gentry. The kind of people who didn't really have to work for a living.

> And to a certain extent, "true" art is antithetical to capitalism

That is ridiculous. "True" art has to appeal to an audience, and if it appeals, it will sell. You can't just put our art and say "hey, it's true, support me". That's a dangerously naive view of the world.

[skwosh]

Yes, those things are also wrong. As are decreasing socioeconomic mobility, racially & religiously motivated violence, lack of code hygiene and unit testing, etc...

If you read my and other responses in this thread, the arts/humanities are far from useless (they just have a less direct economic effect).

Historically important art/music has often been ignored, ridiculed, censored, etc. To suggest that it only has social/cultural value if it appeals to a popular/paying audience is overly simplistic.

I'm not saying there's no overlap between capitalism and art in general, but if they're perfectly aligned then we miss the challenging, obscure, alternative, upsetting, disruptive, etc.

[jimmywanger]

> If you read my and other responses in this thread, the arts/humanities are far from useless (they just have a less direct economic effect).

I never said arts/humanities are useless. I said they are luxuries, and the fact that people are bemoaning that it costs so much money to enter a non-lucrative profession is the very definition of a first world problem.

> Historically important art/music has often been ignored, ridiculed, censored, etc. To suggest that it only has social/cultural value if it appeals to a popular/paying audience is overly simplistic.

It might very well have social/cultural value. If you're not independently wealthy, you'll want it to appeal to a popular and paying audience if you like having food and shelter and toys.

> I'm not saying there's no overlap between capitalism and art in general, but if they're perfectly aligned then we miss the challenging, obscure, alternative, upsetting, disruptive, etc.

They're not perfectly aligned. However, if your "art" doesn't align with a paying audience, be prepared to be a starving artist with huge student loans. Society is not beholden to you to help you self-actualize your life. Get a job that pays money, and then do your obscure art in your spare time.

[skwosh]

> I never said arts/humanities are useless.

>> inability to pick a useless major

I agree with the sentiment though, that (in general) an Arts degree (or whatever) alone it's not enough to sustain a career.

I just think it's an important part of a balanced education, and that overall society is better off having more engagement with the arts, language, history, philosophy, cosmology, theoretical physics, category theory, linguistics, anthropology, etc.

As I said elsewhere, prioritising vocational education is fine to some extent, but to do so by crippling participation in the Arts by making those qualifications prohibitively expensive (by not providing loans) is a mistake.

It is a luxury of sorts, but not in the frivolous sense. As I see it, it's not so much a problem of optimising higher education for career payoff, but restructuring/regulating education to make it more accessible (both to encourage participation in a wider range of subjects, and to facilitate career change).

[jimmywanger]

> I never said arts/humanities are useless. >> inability to pick a useless major

Note that I said the major was useless, not the area of study. Out of all the career areas in the world right now, the one that cares least about credentials seem to be the humanities, unless you want to go into academia (which is a whole new can of worms.)

> but to do so by crippling participation in the Arts by making those qualifications prohibitively expensive (by not providing loans) is a mistake.

No, the point is that these qualifications a) aren't inherently prohibitively expensive (a library card and or a paint set doesn't cost 30k a year) and b) make it easy for you to take out crippling amounts of loans you have very little chance of paying back. Nobody needs these qualifications you speak of.

[ud0]

no truer words have been spoken here.