A.I. Smackdown — English Major vs. ChatGPT - Part 2

Introduction

In my last post, I considered the writing prowess of ChatGPT, the A.I. text generation platform powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3 engine. A professor quoted in Vice magazine said GPT-3 could get a B or B- on an MBA final exam, which I figured had to be an exaggeration. So, I put ChatGPT through its paces, having it write paragraphs in the style of a scholastic essay, a magazine article, and a blog post. In this essay, I’ll tackle a final writing category: poetry. At least when it comes to very logical matters such as rhyme and meter, A.I. ought to do really well … right? Well, let’s see how it does. (Hint: very poorly. And, I suppose I owe you a trigger warning: ChatGPT seems to think violence to one’s genitals is funny.)

But before I get to all that, I will address a pressing question: who cares about any of this? And why should we? I’ll also address a few follow-up questions from the friend who prompted my last post.

Who cares? And why should we?

In response to my previous post, my software maven friend suggested that A.I. could be used effectively for composition if the user (i.e., the person who’s tasked ChatGPT with responding to a query) has enough expertise to evaluate the response and wisely choose what to use from it, and what to discard. In this way, my friend suggests, “this version [of ChatGPT] could make someone who knows what they’re doing more productive.” He continued, “I wonder if for your next blog you might consider how you might use it? Would you be willing to use it as a first draft in responding to a low performing colleague who asks trivial questions?”

I have two responses to this: a practical one and an ideological one. On the practical side, I can’t imagine starting a work email, proposal, or report with ChatGPT because in my experience so far, most of what the A.I. does is apply window dressing and rhetorical flourishes to the ideas I feed it, along with vague assertions that aren’t backed up (e.g., “[Dura-Ace’s] sleek and understated style has been well-received by riders and industry experts alike”). ChatGPT builds repetitive, junior-high-grade essays that fill out the page but don’t add much value to the original prompt. If I were to obtain my rough drafts from ChatGPT, I would have to prune most of the text to end up with something reasonably concise. It would be faster just to write my own missive from scratch.

I realize this may not be true for everyone, and I’ll grant that I have developed, through decades of practice, uncommon facility with writing (having composed over 1.5 million words for albertnet alone). Nevertheless, the ability to quickly draft a work email or brief report is, I believe, a capability that any adult ought to have, just like being able to fry an egg, drive a car, or brew a good cup of coffee. To my mind, increased efficiency should be a matter of personal development, not outsourcing.

The ideological matter is more complicated. If we decide that producing a work document is the kind of hassle that should be dispatched with as little time and energy as possible, like submitting an expense report or making travel arrangements, we are diminishing the assumed value of that activity. As we prepare the next generation for the workforce, this sense of diminishment would trickle down to our schools. We would be sending students a message that writing is a job for A.I. and that the higher-value human thought lies elsewhere.

Having majored in English in college, I naturally bristle at this idea. I believe that reading and writing, more than so perhaps any other endeavor, teach us how to think. I’ve blogged before (e.g., here) about how strongly I disagree with American society’s obsession with STEM, as opposed to the traditional liberal arts that are all but dismissed in modern education. To those who promote STEM, I’d like to ask, what would you think about discontinuing most math classes in school, since we have calculators and spreadsheets to do that crap for us? Of course you wouldn’t support this, and neither do I. (I took a Calculus class in college just for the hell of it.) Studying math is good for your brain, even though most of the specific math skills you learn will never be used. Studying the craft of writing is also good for your brain, and using words well is a skill we can use every day of our professional and personal lives. Writing is hard, and takes time, sure. But when we strive to write well, we understand better, and we think more deeply.

Here is an interesting quotation from the American philosopher Alasdair Macintyre, quoted in the New Yorker, describing his misgivings about the Enlightenment:

It becomes impossible to settle moral questions or to enforce moral rules; the best we can do is agree to disagree. Such a world falls into the hands of managers and technocrats, who excel at the perfection of means but lack the tools with which to think deeply about ends.

I don’t have strong opinions about the Enlightenment, and MacIntyre was writing in the ‘80s, but I think that last sentence fits modern tech companies, particularly in the realm of A.I. development, rather well. What we see in tech is a lot of people asking “how.” How do we monetize Internet traffic, how do we create algorithms that increase this traffic, how do we increase platform dwell time, how do we make people forward more stuff, how do we make social media products more addictive. I don’t see a lot of people asking “why” or, crucially, “why not.” If we outsource writing to A.I., how will people learn to think more deeply and broadly, a capacity we may need now more than ever?

Okay, on to my main topic now. As you shall see, ChatGPT’s attempts at poetry show, in a particularly stark way, just how totally overrated this platform is today.

Shakespearean sonnet

When poetry is good, it can be transporting (think Shakespeare, Dickinson, and Eminem). But when it’s bad, it can be appalling (think Vogon poetry, the feared method of torture described in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). Obviously this is largely a subjective matter, so in my analysis I’ll look mainly at what can be objectively measured: proper execution of meter and rhyme. This is highly logical stuff, almost mathematical, so it ought to be right up A.I.’s alley. I started with a classic form: the Shakespearean sonnet.

Now, in case you’re not familiar with that poetic form, A.I. is here to help. At least, it’s supposed to be. I asked ChatGPT, “What is a Shakespearean sonnet?” It replied:

A Shakespearean sonnet … consists of 14 lines and follows a specific rhyme scheme and meter... The structure of a Shakespearean sonnet is as follows:

• Three quatrains (four-line stanzas) with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF
• A final couplet (two-line stanza) with a rhyme scheme of GG
• Iambic pentameter meter, which means each line has ten syllables with a pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables

This description is pretty good (after I truncated it), though ChatGPT doesn’t get any special points for providing this, since any Google search could lead to you such an explanation, or a far better one such as this. What was missing from ChatGPT’s definition is a more specific explanation of which syllables are stressed vs. unstressed. (Get this backwards and you’ve got trochaic pentameter, which is totally different.)

So next I asked ChatGPT, “Please explain to me how to write a poem in iambic pentameter.” It came back with this:

[Misc. prelude omitted here for brevity.] An iambic foot is a set of two syllables where the first syllable is unstressed, and the second syllable is stressed. Here's an example of a line in iambic pentameter:

“To be or not to be, that is the question.”

[Misc. pointless repetition omitted.] Count the syllables in each line. Each line should have exactly ten syllables. Vary the stress pattern slightly to avoid a monotonous rhythm. [More BS omitted.]

Here, ChatGPT presents probably the most famous line from Shakespeare, rather than a really appropriate one. The line above is a poor example because if you count the syllables, you’ll see there are actually eleven, not the “exactly ten” ChatGPT correctly said there should be. In that line, Shakespeare broke the rules on purpose, to cause the reader and/or theater audience to stumble. This was to draw attention to the word “question,” which in the context of existence is the whole point of the soliloquy. Great writing, but not a great example if you’re really trying to understand iambic pentameter. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” would be a far better choice.

Okay, sure, that’s a bit nitpicky, but the instruction to “vary the stress pattern slightly to avoid a monotonous rhythm” is completely wrong. If you vary the stress pattern, it’s no longer iambic pentameter! And the notion of monotonous rhythm? Total bullshit! Consider Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, here. It is absolutely flawless iambic pentameter—not a single syllable out of place—and it’s brilliant throughout, not monotonous whatsoever.

Now, you might wonder what ChatGPT meant about “ABAB” (etc.) rhyme scheme, so I asked it, “What is an ABAB rhyme scheme?” It replied:

An ABAB rhyme scheme is a specific pattern of rhyming words in a poem or song. It indicates that the last word in the first line of the poem or stanza rhymes with the last word in the third line, while the last word in the second line rhymes with the last word in the fourth line, and so on. In this rhyme scheme, the letters “A” and “B” represent different rhyming sounds. For example, in the following stanza:

I walked along the beach in the bright sun,
And listened to the waves as they did run.
The sand was warm and soft beneath my feet,
And seagulls flew overhead in the heat.

The words “sun” and “run” rhyme, so they are represented by the letter “A”, while the words “feet” and “heat” rhyme, so they are represented by the letter “B”. This pattern continues throughout the poem or stanza, creating a consistent and pleasing rhyme scheme.

Did you catch that? How full of crap ChatGPT was just there? If not, let me make it a little clearer: let’s take those A and B labels and apply them to the four lines: you’d have A for “sun,” and A for “run,” and B for “feet,” and B for “heat.” It’s AABB. It’s not ABAB. It doesn’t match the first paragraph of ChatGPT’s response. And it’s not the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet. (It’s not even the rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet, which is ABBA. It’s just a rhyme scheme ChatGPT kind of made up, which it uses for every poem I’ve seen it write.)

We have established that ChatGPT totally blew it at describing a Shakespearean sonnet. So how does it do when actually writing one? I told it, “Write a quatrain in iambic pentameter, with an ABAB rhyme scheme, followed by a rhyming couplet, also in iambic pentameter, about post-urinal drip. Try to make it funny.” Here’s its response.

Inevitable, yet always a surprise,
Post-urinal drip can make one despise
The feeling of wetness that lingers on,
A sensation that’s not easily gone.
It’s a cruel trick of the human form,
To leave us damp after we perform.
But fear not, my friends, for there’s a way out,
Just shake it off and give it a good clout!

Oh. My. God. Is this the same priggish ChatGPT that, as mentioned in my last post, balked at writing humorously about how bad a laxative drink tastes, claiming “I cannot provide humorous anecdotes about sensitive medical procedures” and “I do not generate inappropriate or insensitive content”? It’s talking about violence to one’s genitals! I had to look up “clout” just to make sure there isn’t some alternate meaning that wouldn’t be this awful. A.I. is advocating, albeit jocularly, giving one’s penis “a heavy blow with the hand or a hard object.” WTF?! That’s not funny at all!

Meanwhile, ChatGPT simply didn’t follow my instructions. I asked for a quatrain followed by a couplet. That’s six lines total; it gave me eight (i.e., two quatrains). The rhyme scheme is also not what I asked for. As for iambic pentameter, this poem is a train wreck. Certain brief phrases (e.g., “To leave us damp,” “Just shake it off”) are iambic, but not a single line of the poem achieves this meter consistently. The very first word, “inevitable,” is fundamentally incompatible with iambic pentameter. Chat GPT just wrote whatever the hell it felt like in a very loosey-goosey meter of its own design. If you’re not getting my point, read the above poem aloud and see how hung up you get. Then compare it to this example of an actual iambic pentameter quatrain and couplet, penned by a human:

Relax, because you’ve earned your potty break;
Unburden your poor bladder of its pee.
And when you’re done you’ll shake and shake and shake;
An effort all in vain, it seems to me.
     For urine flow can never really stop,
     Until your undies drink the final drop.

Note that this second example doesn’t resort to crude ideas like clouting your penis. And note how naturally the poem gallops along because it truly follows the meter. Also notice that it doesn’t have vague throwaway notions like “A sensation that’s not easily gone.” Then consider that I wrote those lines (full poem is here) when I was only seventeen. I guess someone accustomed to the crap poems printed on Hallmark cards might be impressed at ChatGPT’s effort, but I’m not. It’s almost cynical how casually it breaks all the rules, including that of decency.

Dactylic trimeter

A.I. learns through being fed “training data” from the Internet. In case its struggle with the sonnet was based on bad information, the Shakespearean form being a very popular one, I decided to give it another shot, with dactylic trimeter, a much rarer form I have come to enjoy. I asked ChatGPT, “Please explain how to write in dactylic trimeter.” It responded:

Dactylic trimeter … consists of three dactyls, or three stressed syllables, followed by an unstressed syllable, in each line… Count the syllables in each line. Each line should have exactly three dactyls, or three stressed syllables, followed by an unstressed syllable. This means the line should contain a total of seven syllables. 

The description above is completely wrong. A dactyl is not a stressed syllable. It is a three-syllable foot in which the first syllable is stressed and the second two are not. A line of dactylic trimeter has three feet, with three syllables per foot, for nine syllables total, not seven. And even if a line did have three stressed syllables followed by an unstressed syllable, that would be four, not seven. Is ChatGPT just stupid? If I have to start reading work emails written by ChatGPT, I think I’ll just blow my brains out.

Okay, let’s see how A.I. did at actually composing this type of poem. I told it, “Please write a 10-line poem in dactylic trimeter about bike riding up two very difficult climbs, called El Toyonal and Lomas Cantadas, celebrating caprice and radical freedom.” It produced this:

Pedaling up Toyonal, heart pumping fast
My mind is clear, free from the world’s contrast
With caprice and freedom, I take each turn
Pushing through pain, for what I will earn
Onward I climb, up Lomas Cantadas
My legs scream out, but my spirit never fades
The wind in my hair, the world fades away
A moment of peace, that I long to stay
And at last I reach the summit high
A sense of triumph, that no words can deny

You can see right away what an awful poem this is. It’s what Thomas Kincade would produce if he were a writer instead of an “artist.” I mean, “free from the word’s contrast”—what does that even mean? And “the wind in my hair”—seriously? What is this, a Harlequin romance novel? Lomas is a 10% grade, and I’m wearing a helmet! But what particularly stands out is that again, ChatGPT didn’t follow my prompt whatsoever. In the entire poem, only two of the feet are proper dactylic trimeter (“pushing through” and the first three syllables of “Lomas Cantadas”), which is surely just luck. As it did with the sonnet, ChatGPT just wrote whatever the hell it felt like. So why does everybody praise ChatGPT so much? It sucks! (For a proper poem on this topic, with actual dactylic trimeter, click here.)

One more thing

Okay, I can almost hear you now: “Oh, this particular chatbot is just using GPT-3! The technology getting better all the time! All the glitches you’ve found will soon be fixed! The next version’s gonna be amazing!”

Well, maybe GPT-4 (etc.) will get better at poetic meter, and maybe it’ll learn how to be more concise. But I could also imagine its errors getting propagated further. Remember, GTP-3 learned mostly from training on massive amounts of human output from across the Internet, and (as I learned from my software maven friend) has over 100 billion parameters allowing it in some sense to memorize an enormous portion of its training set. Over time, as more people outsource their writing to A.I., its errors could be added to the pile of training data, and thus reinforced. Meanwhile, the content may stray ever further from that created by humans. The growing body of text on the Internet may come to have less and less to do with us—that is, with creators who have a soul, and a conscience. It’s tempting to hope that somehow the works of great writers will one day be scored higher somehow, to help the A.I., but why would we expect this when politicians, the media, and academia are kicking liberal arts to the curb? Meanwhile, most social media platforms today seem to prize forwards and re-posts as the most valuable Internet currency, so if any scoring were to be applied to A.I.’s learning, it’s probably more likely to be whatever gets a rise out of people—i.e., trolling and other bombastic vitriol.

As ChatGPT and its ilk gain ever more traction, what passes for writing could become, to borrow a phrase from Nabokov, the “copulation of clichés.” (He was talking about pornography, but the metaphor holds here, too.) As the data set A.I. uses becomes more and more generic, while the tool gets used by more and more people seeking to avoid engagement with the craft of writing, most real insight and individuality might gradually vanish from written correspondence. O brave new world!

Other albertnet posts on A.I. 

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Stop Pushing STEM!

Introduction

From time to time in these pages, I’ve scoffed at the idea that American students need to focus more on STEM. It’s time I tackled this topic head-on.

The rhetoric

Perhaps I don’t even need to establish that there’s a huge push in this country for more students to pursue STEM. I hear it constantly: from my neighbors, from politicians, from fellow parents, from my employer, and from the mass media. But just to substantiate the prevalence of this idea, here are some glib quotes from our nation’s leaders:

• “One of the things that I’ve been focused on as President is how we create an all-hands-on-deck approach to science, technology, engineering, and math… We need to make this a priority.” –President Barack Obama
• “This bipartisan [Building Blocks of STEM] legislation will help ensure that our children are prepared with the education necessary to succeed in a 21st-century economy.” –Senator Jacky Rosen
• “There will be more incentives to electrical engineers than French literature majors. There just will … All the people in the world that want to study French literature can do so, they are just not going to be subsidized by the taxpayer.” –Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin
• “In order to be competitive internationally, we must focus on creating successful schools with an emphasis on science, technology, engineering and mathematics.” –Senator Mark Kirk
• “Our [higher education system] is outdated [and] doesn’t teach 21st century skills … The market for Greek philosophers is tight.” –Senator Marco Rubio
• “If I’m going to take money from a citizen to put into education, then I’m going to take that money to create jobs … Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so.” –Florida Governor Rick Scott

Do these politicos speak from personal experience? Of course not. Obama majored in Political Science with a specialty in International Relations and English Literature. Senator Rosen got her degree in Psychology. Senator Rubio studied Political Science. Governor Scott studied Business. Senator Kirk studied History. Governor Bevin majored in East Asian Studies. What a bunch of hypocrites! Do they think they’re special—that they alone can be gainfully employed with a liberal arts degree, while our kids will be doomed if they aren’t suckled on the breast of high tech? Or do these politicians think the job market has fundamentally and permanently changed?

The flaw in this STEM-or-else idea is that it simply isn’t substantiated historically. For most of its history, America has seen most of its people gainfully employed, and only a minority have worked in tech. According to this analysis by the United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1996 just under 10% of US employment was in high-tech industries. Twenty years later, in 2016, the percentage of tech jobs was—guess what?—still about 10%. The BLS’s projection for the tech sector’s percentage of jobs in 2026? Wait for it … about 10%. Sure, there are spectacular instances of people making a killing in this realm, but that’s not the same thing as a new status quo. Meanwhile, plenty of people work in tech who don’t have STEM degrees. (More on this later.)

So where are these politicians getting their information? Probably from one another. Or maybe it’s their perception of what the voters are thinking, and they’re simply pandering. Who knows. The only thing that’s obvious to me is a serious lack of skepticism about STEM’s applicability to the majority of our students.

The earnings myth

A prevalent idea in my community is that unless our kids study STEM and get the kickass tech jobs, they won’t be able to afford to live here. True, real estate is famously expensive in the Bay Area, but I object to this chicken-little thinking. For one thing, my neighbors aren’t all (or even mostly) STEM types themselves, yet they do manage to afford their mortgages. And when it comes to their kids, they seem to automatically accept the widespread belief that STEM fields actually assure higher earnings. In fact they don’t.

I’m basing this bold statement on real data you can see for yourself here. This website enables you to see earnings over time across a huge spectrum of college majors. You don’t just see the median income, but how the income range varies according to how well the worker is doing in his or her field.

At first glance, the graphs generated by this website do support the idea that STEM fields pay better. Here’s how all the majors play out over time:

Zoom in. You’ll see that Chemical Engineering clearly pays better than any of the other majors; the lack of a college degree brings up the rear in earnings; and the lowest-earning college degree (the grey line) is Theology. When we use the handy-dandy filtering feature to look at just two majors, we see an apparently similar story:

I picked Computer Science because it seems to be the darling of STEM proponents, and I chose English because it’s what I studied in college. It’s plain to see that on average, the middle-of-the-road (50th percentile) Comp Sci grad does earn more: $3.3 million over his or her career, vs. the roughly $2.5 million an English grad would earn. But this comparison assumes that all humans are equally good at everything, which is patently false. Ask yourself: are you equally good at analyzing literature and programming a computer? Is your appreciation of fine art equal to your math ability? It seems obvious that when choosing a major, a person should factor in his or her interests and capabilities.

That’s where the graphs get very interesting. Let’s say you’re a bookish type and consider yourself smarter than the average bear at appreciating a work of literature. And let’s say you struggle just a bit with math. Should you still pursue STEM? Well, let’s ask the question this way: how much better would you have to be at English to break even on this presumably less lucrative choice of major?

The answer would probably surprise the STEMsters. An English lit major at the 70th percentile will make, on average, $3.1 million over his or her career, which is more than the slightly-below-par Computer Science major; at the 40th percentile, the Comp Sci major makes only $3 million. In other words, if liberal arts are your thing, sticking with them will make you more money than working your ass off trying to fake it in STEM.

Consider now that for the example above, I cherry-picked one of the most lucrative STEM majors. Consider the spread when we compare English to Chemistry:

In this case, you only have to be slightly better than average—55th percentile—in English to make more money than a somewhat substandard—40th percentile—Chem major. (The former would make $2.61 million over his or her career; the latter, $2.58 million.) Comparing English to Biology, the gap is even smaller: you’d only have to be at 55th percentile for English to make more than a 50th-percentile Bio major. To reiterate: the STEM fields are only more lucrative to those who are particularly suited to them.

(I was turned on to this website by this slide deck, put together by the UC Santa Barbara Associate Vice Chancellor, who is also a math professor, to promote liberal arts. This same data set is cited by The New York Times in this article, which declares it a myth that “for the big money, STEM always delivers.”)

Job security

Now, the STEM-pushers might naturally reply, “Great, fine, those who manage to find work in non-STEM fields do okay. But all the modern jobs are in tech! Do you want to work as a barista because your liberal arts degree didn’t equip you for the modern workforce?”

The short answer is what I already showed: tech doesn’t actually employ more of the workforce than it did twenty years ago, and that’s not expected to change. The long answer, meanwhile, looks even worse for STEM. When we compare the number of STEM jobs available to the number of students majoring in STEM subjects, we discover a frightening gap. To put it bluntly, the widespread promotion of STEM has already produced a glut of majors in those subjects. Check out this article in The New York Times, and particularly the graph at the top. It shows that there were 169,000 Engineering degrees (undergrad & graduate) awarded in 2015-2016, while that field only expects 51,000 job openings for 2014 through 2024. Life Sciences is even worse, with 183,000 degrees awarded and only  12,000 openings for those grads. Math isn’t much better, with 7,000 jobs forecast and 33,000 degrees awarded.

With this in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising that studying STEM doesn’t guarantee getting a STEM-related job. Far from it, in fact. “Unemployment rates for STEM majors may be low,” the Times article states, “but not all of those with undergraduate degrees end up in their field of study — only 13 percent in life sciences and 17 percent in physical sciences, according to a 2013 National Science Foundation survey. Computer Science is the only STEM field where more than half of graduates are employed in their field.”

According to an expert quoted in the Times article, STEM advocates are “often executives and lobbyists for technology companies,” which makes sense. I can’t blame a tech company for wanting to have more graduates to choose from, and for wanting the best and brightest of our youth to be added to that pool. But this doesn’t mean America’s tech companies have room for all these people, and they certainly feel no responsibility to hire all of them. So who’s looking out for all the STEM grads whose résumés end up in the recycling?

The biggest myth

I hope I’ve helped you realize that a) studying STEM doesn’t necessarily lead to greater income, and 2) studying STEM doesn’t increase the likelihood of finding a job. But those are the easier cases to make. I have a more fundamental bone to pick: even if STEM were more lucrative and reliable, that doesn’t mean we should push it on our kids. To me, the greatest myth of all is an implicit one: that job security and income are the most important factors in a person’s happiness.

I won’t deny that job stability and wealth are great things to have. Frankly, I love money, and I’d be thrilled if I could relax a bit more about my own job security. But I naturally bristle at the pressure our kids are getting—from their peers, their parents, pundits, and the media—to pursue STEM regardless of their natural inclinations. The FUD being sowed here really bothers me, when you consider how hard it already is to be a teenager. I’m also irked by the idea that we parents know what’s best for our youth, when most of us—raised in the “Me Generation” of the ‘70s, with an abundance of laissez-faire parents—got to chart our own course, and most of us are doing just fine.

I think the external pressure put on our kids is inherently malignant. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to do as they please? Parents are saying, “Follow this path” instead of “Find your own path,” and I take this as a vote of no-confidence.

“Be realistic,” the STEMist might say. “All this follow-your-dream ideology just isn’t practical.” I beg to differ. How practical is it to add extra stress to a teenager’s life by saying “You’d better do X-Y-Z or you’ll never be able to afford to [live here] [buy a home] [have a family] [pay off your loans] [be financially secure]”? Consider how rampant mental health issues are across our society: according to this article, more than 44 million American adults (almost one in five) suffer from a mental health condition. That’s a hell of a lot higher than our nation’s rate of unemployment.

I read a fascinating but sobering book, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids by Madeline Levine, a child psychologist in nearby Marin County. She describes the often disastrous results of affluent parents pressuring their kids to achieve a certain standard of worldly success:

As long as kids are not afforded the opportunity to craft a sense of self that feels authentic, a sense of self that truly comes from within, psychologists like myself will continue to see more and more youngsters at risk for profound feelings of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and emptiness.

The authentic self

Let’s examine what a truly authentic STEM kid might look like. A generation ago, only oddball nerds dug computers. Consider my brother Bryan, for example. He naturally gravitated toward programming and in junior high spent countless hours in front of a teletype, which was a type of primitive computer that didn’t even have a monitor: it was connected to a printer and to a mainframe somewhere. Nobody knows what the hell he and his rare ilk were actually doing with these machines. Baseline Junior High had exactly two teletypes, and Bryan didn’t have to compete with very many others for access. (He did, however, have to talk his teachers into letting him cut typing class and study hall to get that precious computer time.) He was a dyed-in-the-wool computer geek, who loved the pure logic of programming, and that was that.

And now we have politicians, corporate spokespeople, the media, and parents saying everybody should be diving into technology, engineering, and such. Sure, everybody uses computers and smartphones now, but does that mean everyone should be designing, building, or programming them? Does the idea (however exaggerated) that all the good jobs are in STEM fields suddenly mean this is what actually ought to interest your typical kid? Is everybody a tech-geek now, just because society has decided we need more of them?

Allow me a playful analogy: what if the experts determined that, as far as pets go, dogs had a brighter future than cats? What if we decided that it just wasn’t practical, in the 21st century, to behave in a feline fashion? Would anybody try to teach a housecat to tolerate a leash, to ride in the car, to bark, and to wag its tail to show happiness? Of course this would be decried as nonsense: nobody could ask a cat to change its very nature. But how are humans any different?

And yet, there’s this widespread idea that everybody now ought to be immersed in this specialized world of bits and bytes, vectors and trajectories, atoms and angles. The profit motive seems to have warped everybody’s sensibility here. Let’s face it: kids throughout time have had plenty of math and science instruction in school … those subjects were never really neglected. What’s changed is this idea, suddenly, that what schools have been offering isn’t enough and we should all have our knickers in a twist about it, with new programs, new legislation, and budget cuts for the liberal arts.

My community’s progressive and well-run school district provides plenty of opportunities in STEM. A year or so ago, my older daughter even signed up for a high school Computer Science course, and I was all for it—because it was her idea. I even offered to help her mess around with our family’s Arduino programmable microcontroller when the time came. However, a couple weeks into the term my daughter decided that she just didn’t dig the class, and ultimately dropped it. (She was sad about this, since she really liked the teacher, but knew herself well enough to recognize a bad fit. Not that she’s anti-STEM; she’s in college now, majoring in Psychological & Brain Sciences.)

Looking at the wider realm of STEM—the non-T, non-E part—certainly the realms of science and math are capacious enough to accommodate a wide variety of interests. But the decline in Humanities majors deserves to be wondered about. How much of this can be chalked up to parental influence around what our kids pursue, and why?

My own story

I couldn’t blame you for assuming that my skepticism toward STEM is a case of sour grapes, or a defensive crouch based on my own (supposedly) humble liberal arts education. But in fact, I’ve worked in STEM for my whole career. (Though I didn’t set out to be an engineer, my dormant technical ability was discovered when I took a programming aptitude test during recruitment by an Internet company.) I was able to learn Internet routing, shell scripting, network troubleshooting, traffic shaping, access control, and network design on the job, but my career growth has been largely based on so-called “soft skills”—including the ability to communicate, write, negotiate, and imagine others’ points of view—which all came from my liberal education. As my work has evolved, what I learned in college has only become more important. I am truly grateful I didn’t “play it safe” by studying Computer Science, Engineering, or Math (like my dad, ahead of his time in Humanities-bashing, exhorted me to).

What employers really want

So your next question might be, isn’t my case kind of an anomaly? Not necessarily. Certain fields, like Chemical Engineering, do require specific credentials. But high tech seems to prioritize the ability to learn above having specific credentials, and employs a wide variety of people. As described in this article, featured in the UCSB Vice Chancellor’s pro-liberal-arts presentation, Google appreciates many capabilities typically associated with a liberal education:

In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring hypothesis by crunching every bit and byte of hiring, firing, and promotion data accumulated since the company’s incorporation in 1998. Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others’ different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.

This Forbes article, also cited by the UCSB Vice Chancellor, declares that “That ‘useless’ liberal arts education has become tech’s hottest ticket.” It goes on to say:

Software companies are discovering that liberal arts thinking makes them stronger… At disruptive juggernauts such as Facebook and Uber, the war for talent has moved to nontechnical jobs, particularly sales and marketing. The more that audacious coders dream of changing the world, the more they need to fill their companies with social alchemists who can connect with customers—and make progress seem pleasant.

Conclusion: what is to be done?

I hope that I’ve made a compelling case here that the widespread effort to push more kids into STEM is myopic at best. STEM doesn’t guarantee a higher income; doesn’t increase the likelihood of gainful employment; and, moreover, doesn’t support our kids and their need for a true sense of self. Ultimately, where a young person lands isn’t a simple plug-and-play matter of what degree he or she earned. I truly believe that when it comes to the next generation, all of us—the parents, the politicians, and the pundits—would do well to just shut up and stand aside. Let’s let our kids follow their own interests, trusting in themselves, in higher education, and in the vast and varied job market.

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Ask an English Major

Dear English Major,

Why don’t they call it Literature Major? I mean, it’s not like you’re learning to speak the language or something.

Brandy F, Phoenix, AZ

Dear Brandy,

That seems like a fair question. Of course, “literature” could be in any language, so at least “English” makes it clear. “English literature” was probably the full name of the major and was it eventually shortened. If it had been shortened to “literature,” people would further shorten it to “lit,” and there would be terrible puns around drunkenness. But the truth is, I just don’t know. The origin of “English” as the name of the major isn’t something they taught us in the major.

Dear English Major,

I have this uppity English-major friend who insists the name of the Lolita author is pronounced Nuh-BOH-kov, but we all know from the Police song that it’s NAH-bah-kov. Is my friend just putting on airs?

Jack H, Buffalo, NY

Dear Jack,

I hate to break it to you, but your friend is right. The author himself, when asked in an interview, explained that the accent falls in the middle, and says of the English pronunciation, with the accent on the first syllable, “The awful ‘Na-bah-kov’ is a despicable gutterism.” When I get the Police song in my head, I can’t resist changing it from “It’s no use/ He sees her/ He starts to shake and cough/ Just like the/ Old man in/ That book by Nabokov” to “It’s no use/ He sees her/ He’s really acting queer/ Just like the / Old man in/ That book by Vladimir.” Of course, this only works with the English pronunciation of “Vladimir.” Nabokov says it should rhyme with “redeemer.”

Dear English Major,

Why are you always correcting people’s grammar? It’s really annoying.

Lisa M, Seattle, WA

Dear Lisa,

Why do I always get accused of that? I never correct people’s grammar. People seem to lay that on me for no good reason. Maybe they’re afraid that I will correct them, because they know I could. But I don’t, and I don’t think many English majors do. Truth be told, we aren’t taught much, if any, grammar in this major. I happen to have impeccable grammar because I care about it, but that was true before I went to college.

Dear English Major,

How do you hide your smugness and air of intellectual superiority when thrown in with a bunch of Business majors?

Paul B, Iowa City, IA

Dear Paul,

I sense that your question is either sarcastic, or some kind of trap. Let’s talk about this face to face over a beer sometime.

Dear English Major,

I was a panelist at a workshop recently on building executive function in teenagers. During the meet-and-greet I introduced myself as John Morse, and then the next panelist glared at me and introduced himself as “Joe Blow, he/him/his.” What the hell was that all about?

John Morse, Oakland, CA

Dear John,

Joe Blow was surely using a shorthand for the more complete introduction, “My name is Joe Blow and my gender pronouns are he/him/his.” He was conveying his Preferred Gender Pronouns (PGPs) as described here. It is becoming more common, particularly in progressive communities, to provide these in advance so nobody needs to worry about offending you by getting your pronouns wrong due to an automatic assumption about your chosen gender identity.

I have no problem with the embrace of PGPs in language, as it’s a movement that means well, but I do think it rude of Joe Blow to glare at you. Setting somebody up to guess wrong about your chosen gender identity seems like a victimless crime to me, since it’s still statistically unlikely this panelist would need to employ a pronoun at all when referring to you. I mean, how long does the panel discussion last? Couldn’t he just say “I think John’s point is that…” rather than “I think his point is that…”? Also, is it the end of the world if he guesses wrong about your pronoun and you have to gently correct him?

Personally, I’m tempted to say, next time I’m introducing myself, “My name is Dana and my personal pronouns are she/him/their.” But of course I wouldn’t actually do this. I’d hate to offend anybody.

Dear English Major,

A degree in English? What are you going to do with that?”

Ken S, Broomfield, CO

Dear Ken,

Your question would be much more appropriate if I were still in college and my future were a great unknown. But actually, I graduated long ago, but still use the label “English major.” To say “English graduate” just sounds weird, doesn’t it? Funny, isn’t it, how a law student graduates and becomes a lawyer, and a medical student graduates and becomes a doctor, but an English major graduates and doesn’t really get to call himself anything? I guess that’s kind of your point.

Anyway, I fielded this question a lot back in college, and it’s a pity the movie “Napoleon Dynamite” hadn’t come out yet because then I could have answered, “Whatever I feel like. Gosh!” Anyway, you need to learn not to ask English majors this question, because you’ll probably work for one of us someday. Myself, I own a home and drive a pretty cool car. So lay off.

Dear English Major,

What do you do when somebody corrects your grammar?

Kathleen Templeton, NYC

Dear Kathleen,

I don’t know, because that has never happened. Some advice columnists seem to enjoy falling on their swords as a show of humility, but that strikes me as irresponsible. I don’t get corrected because I don’t make mistakes. That’s why I get to dispense advice.

That being said, I have been put on the defensive by someone claiming I’ve made an error when I actually haven’t. For example, my dad was once emailing a friend of his about my blog, explaining that he (my dad) didn’t tend to read it because my posts are too long. (He reckoned that the post I was running that week would, if printed, comprise 29.3 pages.) In his email he pointed out something he construed as an error on my blog: “It would be fun to tease [Dana] about ‘That’s me’ as opposed to the grammatically correct ‘That’s I’ [in the sentence ‘That’s me with my friend Dan.’]”

Right off the bat, I have to question my dad’s use of the hypothetical subjunctive—“It would be fun”—when in fact he clearly was teasing me by copying me on this email. But my main issue was his simpleminded assumption that punctiliously correct grammar is always appropriate when communicating informally with a specific audience. I replied as follows: “Rest assured that what you took for a grammatical error was a conscious stylistic decision to use the colloquial ‘that’s me.’ I figured that particular post would get a lot of pageviews from dumb jocks, who would not realize that ‘That’s I’ is actually correct, and would be distracted by the correct construction. If you look at some of the comments readers posted, you'll see I likely guessed right.” I went on to correct my dad’s math about the length of the post. It actually ran only 6½ printed pages, not the 29.3 he erroneously calculated. Take that, Dad!

Dear English Major,

With all this emphasis on STEM, I don’t think there’s any way to convince my kid to pursue a Liberal Arts degree. When people, particularly the STEM types, ask you why you majored in English, what do you tell them?

Monique R, Portland, OR

Dear Monique,

Honestly, when faced with this question, my stock reply is, “Well, frankly, I knew it would be an easy major for me. You see, I grew up speaking English at home.”

I know this isn’t that funny, and it’s certainly evasive, but I just don’t think the STEM types can be easily convinced. You either grasp the value of the Liberal Arts, or you don’t. I feel bad for those who head for these dependably lucrative fields because they’re afraid of ending up poor and miserable. To me this indicates a pitiable lack of swagger.

If pressed on this topic, I’ll sometimes quote from the commencement address delivered by a former professor of mine, the bestselling writer Maxine Hong Kingston. (Because I went through the ceremony in May, but actually finished up that December, I was able to get a copy of the speech from Maxine herself—with her own handwritten notes in the margin.) When hassled by others for her choice of English as a major, she said something to the effect of, “Look, I didn’t treat college like a vocational school. I got the degree of an aristocrat.” (I don’t have the transcript handy so I can’t quote her directly, but you get the idea.)

I won’t deny that there are people who truly love math, engineering, or writing software. My brother was one of them, and he dove headfirst into programming because he just loved it. This was in junior high when he surely wasn’t thinking whatsoever about his future. But you’d never have had a conversation with him about STEM vs. English; he would have been too busy coding. But for those who don’t truly love math and science, to pursue a “practical” major that will “set them up to thrive in the new information economy” etc. seems like a recipe for frustration and unhappiness.

Dear English Major,

Can you recommend ten great novels for me?

Sarah Winslow, Minneapolis, MN

Dear Sarah,

I’m flattered you would ask me that, when the Internet is replete with recommended reading lists. But this is a tough request because I don’t even know you, so it’s hard to guess at what you’d enjoy. My wife, who is (well, was) also an English major, loves a lot of the same books I do, but would also hate a number of my favorites. For example, I love the relaxed pace and meandering style of T.R. Pearson’s Off for the Sweet Hereafter, but I know it would try my wife’s patience.

So, with that lengthy caveat, I will try to cobble together a list, knowing that as soon as this goes to press I’ll think of ten more books that are more deserving. I see that I already gave you one title, so here are nine others in no particular order. 

• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
• Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
• A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov
• My Antonia by Willa Cather
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
• Kim by Rudyard Kipling

It seems ridiculous not to include Anna Karenina in that list, but it’s almost 900 pages long. Are you really going to read anything that thick?

An English Major is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask an English Major,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

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College Application Frequently Asked Questions

Introduction

I have a teenager who is a junior in high school and will apply to colleges this fall. Through her advance work and the helpful advice I have received from other parents, teachers, articles, and the community at large, I have learned a lot about the modern admissions process, and want to pass this information on to you. Even if you don’t have a teenager applying for colleges any time soon (or at all) you should read this anyway, for the schadenfreude.

Note: the beer in the photo above was mine, not my daughter’s. I want to be very clear on that.

College Application Frequently Asked Questions

Is it harder to get into college now?

Yes, it absolutely is. Your child is way, way smarter, more industrious, and more resourceful than you, and yet won’t be able to sail through the process and attend a top college like you did. In case you were feeling pretty good about graduating summa cum laude from a great school, just stop. You really achieved nothing. They were practically giving degrees away back then and you know it.

Is college more expensive now?

Of course it is. By way of illustration, tuition at UC Berkeley—which cost about $2,000 a year in 1992—now costs about $14,000. But that’s probably not a good example because there’s no way your kid will get in there. Nobody gets in there anymore, except a few insanely successful students.

Your kid will probably need to go to a private university, even if it’s not a very good one. It’s unlikely she’ll get a scholarship anywhere because all the kids are so much smarter now—smarter than you, smarter than your spouse, and smarter than your kid.

Is it important to tour the colleges my child is planning to apply to?

The conventional wisdom is that it’s pointless to tour a college that probably won’t accept your kid anyway. After all, this will only increase your kid’s heartbreak, while wasting your valuable time and money. But let’s be real here. College tours are important for two reasons. One, the college wants to see that your kid is serious about attending (in the event they’re even considering her). Two, you need to prove to your kid that you’re serious about parenting. She probably already resents you for having had it so easy, the way you soared effortlessly through the admissions process all those years ago. Don’t make things worse by being a cheapskate.

There’s a silver lining to the college tour, though: you get to brag about it. “Yes, we took our Priscilla to tour M.I.T. last weekend. She thinks it will be a great fit.” This might be as close as you get to being able to brag about anything college-related.

Is there any chance that my child will qualify for financial aid?

No. None.

 Is there any hope at all for a good college, or is my child doomed?

That depends on what you mean by “doomed.” If you mean she won’t be able to get into a good college, then yes, she’s doomed. If you mean she won’t be able to get a good job without a degree from a good college, then yes, she’s doomed. If you mean her friends will be disgraced by her failure to launch, then yes, she’s doomed. If you mean that she will resent you for her failure, and that it’s all your fault, then yes, she’s doomed, and so are you … this will haunt you for the rest of your life. Huh, come to think of it, this question doesn’t actually depend on what you mean by “doomed.”

You claim that nobody can get into the top colleges anymore, but several of my child’s friends’ siblings got into the Ivy League. Perhaps you’re exaggerating?

No, those students are the exceptions that prove the rule. And their grades were of course much better than your kid’s.

Is there anything my child can do, beyond straight As and stellar SAT/ACT scores, to improve his college prospects?

Yes, if your child chases after every activity that could (say this with me) “look good on a college application,” and manages to gain entry into programs like digging latrines in Ecuador, enduring an unpaid internship at an important-sounding company, launching a startup, and/or paying lots of money for college summer programs, his application will be more competitive.

Does this actually help?

Probably not. But he has to do it anyway.

Is there any value in my child having fun, enjoying her summer, trying to relax, and basically being a kid while she still can, knowing that adulthood is forever?

Of course not. How could you be so naïve?

Do I need to remind my child how much harder it is to get into college nowadays?

No, pretty much every single one of her friends, along with her friends’ parents, her teachers, and her counselors are telling her this every single day. So, if you don’t feel like rubbing it in, you don’t have to. However, it’s important never to contradict your child when she reminds you of all this. Don’t you dare say anything absurdly false like “top colleges have always been difficult to get into.” This just undermines your student’s ability to blame the system for the cesspool of failure that she is currently wading into.

Should my child be talking all kinds of AP classes and exams?

Yes. These will (say it with me) “look good on a college application”—but only if your child scores high on the exams. If your child does poorly—which is probably a given, since the AP curriculum doesn’t match the Common Core, and because you’re probably raising your child in an inferior school district—then the AP strategy will backfire and make your child toxic to all good colleges. The good news is that the experience of taking these courses and exams will be really stressful, which is good practice for the rest of your child’s life.

I’m concerned about all the debt my child will take on, even if he goes to a mediocre college. Is the cost of tuition really a good investment?

Probably not. The only people making any money anymore are genius coders who launch tech startups. But since your kid isn’t going to be one of those, you kind of have to toss the dice on an expensive education.

Okay, I suppose there’s still money to be made in law and medicine. But don’t get me started on the ruinous amount of debt grad school involves.

Is there any benefit to going to college other than the possibility of realizing a fiscal return on your tuition investment?

Of course not.

It seems intuitively obvious to me that only STEM curriculums have any value, since the entire point of a college degree is to increase your income potential. And yet, some students do still pursue liberal arts programs. Why is this?

It’s because they’re idiots, married to antiquated notions like there being value in understanding and appreciating literature, nurturing curiosity around abstract ideas, knowing arcane things like the plural of curriculum actually being “curricula,” and so forth. Don’t worry, society will soon be rid of these helplessly impractical people.

My child slaves over his schoolwork, is preparing tirelessly for his SAT exams, is involved in multiple extracurricular activities, and has digested enough information about the college application process to write a thick book on the topic … and yet he is still totally stressed out about the process, with little hope for a positive outcome. Is there anything else he can do?

Yes, he should continue to worry as much as possible. This will drive him to unturn even more stones, because there must be some way to break through this impossible college entry barrier.

You just used the word “unturn.” Is that even a word? And if so, will it be on the SAT?

In fact, it is not a word. “Unturned” is a gerund adjective, but this is one of those weird cases of a gerund that cannot be used as a verb. And while “unturn” isn’t on the SAT, your child better know what a gerund is, even though he’s pursuing STEM, because that’s just how this game works. Your poor kid. You better go give him a hug.

Can things like hugs make my child less anxious about college applications?

No, I was kidding. Hugging your kid is just wasting his time. Don’t be so ignorant and sentimental.

Is there any silver lining to my child ending up at an inferior school?

Yes: the coursework might be manageable. At the top universities, where every single student admitted has an absolutely perfect track record, there will be professors who give Bs and even Cs, which these students have never received in their lives. The shock of this “failure” could cause major angst, even complete nervous breakdowns. But your kid, who has already learned to deal with blemishes on her record, can finally relax a bit once she is actually in college. Which brings us to our next question:

Are there good career prospects for college grads these days?

No. Getting a good job was so much easier back in our day. In case you were feeling pretty good about being gainfully employed, just stop.

Related reading

• The Truth About Elite College Admissions
• Is It Harder to Get Into a Top College Now?
• How to Choose a Major 
• The Best Advice I’ve Received
• Going Broke at College
• The Importance of Goals - Debunked!
• Parables from the Rooster Father

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