This is a false or at least deeply misleading statistic. But the transactional assumptions of the entire report --which treats advanced education like a widget, ignores concepts of civic life and society & calculates human good in cash terms-- are sincerely perverse. + https://twitter.com/GeorgetownCEW/status/1264248481734164481

The report opens with a claim that looks & sounds like a cliche, referring w/ apparently boilerplate grandeur to the "mission" of higher education. In fact it's a cynical and (I think) antidemocratic talking point, corrosive to the very concept of civil society:

No report on higher education that begins from this fully sociopathic premise could possibly reflect with responsibility on the questions of common good and human growth that must be considered alongside any evaluation of higher ed's individualized cost-benefit outlook.

But it goes on, painting a world of rational-choice free agents making calculations abt future earnings and current outlays. A contradiction is that students, 'dependent adolescents,' are nevertheless made responsible to 'shop around' & 'learn the new rules of the college game'

But even beyond these truly weird & contradictory presumptions, the "hard data" invoked to justify the report's anti-humanities conclusions, while arranged in very colorful charts, are in fact -- not accurate?

The report describes no methodology beyond the center's own "analysis of American Community Survey (ACS): 2009-2016 pooled one-year person level microdata files." But these alleged findings are contradicted everywhere --& using the same data set (!): https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/business/liberal-arts-stem-salaries.html

In fact there's an entire genre of articles that cite entire genres of studies showing how humanities majors may start lower but --because of flexibility, creativity, & problem-solving, etc-- catch up & even pass their peers. As the @chronicle said in 2018

Of course none of this is mentioned. [One issue seems to be that in its zeal to prove corporate cliches, the GU report used "pooled one-year individual" data instead of longitudinal #s gathered over (any amount of) time? But we can't know bc methodology is not described.]

We do know that nowhere in the report does the term 'value' refer to anything beyond simple cash money. On the website, an earnings infographic invites students to "Find out how much your college major is worth using this interactive tool." https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/5rules/#resources

I struggle to see how this notion of value relates to a mission of social justice, the pursuit of truth, or an ethic of care for the whole person. Nor yet to any concept of social life where value is construed beyond the single individual.

So much of what Georgetown does is to help educate students away from glib falsehoods like this &, instead, to think w/ consequence. So to see plainly ideological corporate spin pushed into the world with my employer's name on it, dressed up as knowledge -- well it's a bummer.

Doubly so now, when forces are moving to use a real crisis to continue reshaping higher ed into a system that offers an ornamental truth and beauty for some, but is (for the rest) a skill factory whose furnace is fed by cheap & disposable labor.

At least in my classes, part of our work is to track the emergence of these systems of thinking & material relation, inventory the forms of life they snuffed out or excluded, & imagine how life might be, and has been, otherwise. Happy to talk w @GeorgetownCEW abt this anytime.//