A Practical Education Read online




  Stanford University Press

  Stanford, California

  © 2017 by Randall Stross. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Stross, Randall E., author.

  Title: A practical education : why liberal arts majors make great employees / Randall Stross.

  Description: Stanford, California : Redwood Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017022289| ISBN 9780804797481 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503603790 (electronic)

  Subjects: LCSH: Education, Humanistic—United States. | College graduates—Employment—United States. | Employee selection—United States. | College majors—United States. | Stanford University—Alumni and alumnae—Employment.

  Classification: LCC LC1023 .S77 2017 | DDC 370.11/20973—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022289

  Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11.5/15 Baskerville

  A PRACTICAL EDUCATION

  WHY LIBERAL ARTS MAJORS MAKE GREAT EMPLOYEES

  RANDALL STROSS

  REDWOOD PRESS

  Stanford, California

  ALSO BY RANDALL STROSS

  The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator

  Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know

  The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World

  eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work

  The Microsoft Way: The Real Story of How the Company Outsmarts Its Competition

  Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing

  Bulls in the China Shop and Other Sino-American Business Encounters

  The Stubborn Earth: American Agriculturalists on Chinese Soil, 1898–1937

  To

  Emily, Hal, and Van

  CONTENTS

  1. The Major Decision

  2. The New Education

  3. Naturally Curious

  4. Proper Proportion

  5. A Foot in the Door

  6. Engineering Success

  7. The Different Perspective

  8. A General Understanding

  9. Underrepresented

  10. Normal

  11. Interesting Things Happen

  12. A Mania for Testing

  13. The Strength of Weak Ties

  14. The Shiny New Thing

  15. First Gen

  16. The Art of Living

  17. Bilingual

  18. A History of the Future

  19. Do-Over

  20. Liberal Education Is Vocational

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  CHAPTER 1

  THE MAJOR DECISION

  STANFORD UNIVERSITY’S UNDERGRADUATES are a most fortunate group. Having been admitted to the most selective undergraduate school in the country and installed on an Edenic campus, they could not be any closer to Silicon Valley. Only a stone’s throw or two beyond the edge of campus sit tech giants and tech adolescents and tech startups, which surveys anoint as the most desirable prospective employers in the world. Stanford undergraduates would seem perfectly positioned to approach their graduation without worry about what comes next.

  The most sought-after students are the engineering majors, whose ranks have grown significantly in recent decades. But this is a book about the students who did not choose an engineering major, who instead chose majors for the joy of studying a subject that does not lead to a well-marked occupational destination. Their majors belong to the university’s School of Humanities and Sciences, and many of these students face considerable uncertainty about their futures if they immediately seek professional positions without an advanced degree. For this book I have collected oral histories from their ranks, chronicles of the education, job searches, and initial work experiences of recent graduates. I’ve gathered enough of these histories to convince me and, I hope, convince others that graduates with these majors are well-equipped to land well and to thrive, if employers are willing to give them the chance.

  I grant that the students who are profiled here, for the most part, come from privilege. Their parents, many of whom went to Stanford themselves, are financially comfortable. They sent their children to excellent primary and secondary schools and permitted their children, when they got to Stanford, to follow their own interests when choosing their majors. I understand that these students are not a random sampling of college students: these graduates are exceptionally smart and, let us not forget, are the champion go-getters of their age cohort. But they are not the only college students who are smart strivers; every college and university has such students. Whatever claims I make about the quick-learning capabilities of the students I followed at Stanford would apply to these other students, too, the ones who defy the ambient advice to major in business or an applied technical field, who instead major in a field that they genuinely enjoy studying and who excel in their classes.

  I don’t make a blanket claim that every student, at every college or university, who elects a liberal arts major will, ipso facto, make an outstanding employee upon graduation by dint of enrolling in the courses and earning passing grades. But those students who do choose for a major an academic field that is not tightly connected with a particular career and who do well in those courses, who demonstrate a sponge-like capacity to absorb new knowledge, whose academic record shows drive and diligence and a capacity for thinking hard and communicating well, should be seen by prospective employers as the multicapable candidates that they are.

  If I am to persuade anyone of the practicality of the liberal arts, whether it be future employers, current college students, or the students’ anxious parents, I need to be able to show actual liberal arts majors who are doing well in the workplace. This is why I have chosen to focus on Stanford only. Silicon Valley employers love Stanford graduates, even to the extent that they have been willing to take a chance on liberal arts majors from Stanford. For the most part, the graduates are not hired because of their choice of major but despite it. They were hired in many cases with the help of Stanford alumni connections. But what matters is that they managed to get in the door. Once they did, they were able to demonstrate the broadly useful strengths that characterize those who choose the liberal arts. Their employers then recognized their contributions, which were concrete and not related to the alumni networking, and gave them increased responsibilities, and that led to more achievements. These stories would have remained nothing but wishful hopes had the employers turned away majors that on their face had no relevance to the business. The Stanford tie is what sets the stories in motion, but what transpires once the job is secured speaks to the skills that liberal arts majors bring to their employers, skills that are sharpened in the course of majoring in the liberal arts wherever one earns a bachelor’s degree.

  This book also includes an abridged, episodic history of Stanford University, focusing on the tension between vocational and nonvocational directions that was present at its founding, and on the evolution of career counseling and post-graduation job placement. Immersion in this history will reveal how employers have rather arbitrarily changed their minds, again and again, about how and when they would like students to specialize in their undergraduate studies. One field becomes hot, and then it falls out of favor, replaced by another. The employers’ message to undergr
aduate students is likely to continue to shift in the future, which suggests to me that the best preparation for an unknowable future is one that has been tested over time as universal preparation—that is, the liberal arts.

  It is difficult, to be sure, to make this case in the face of considerable evidence that prospective employers of new graduates are far more keen to hire those with majors that are infused with quantitative skills or constitute an occupation-specific field, consigning far more liberal arts majors than engineering majors to first jobs that fit the labor economists’ definition of “underemployed.”1 But not so visible is the way underemployment falls as the graduates spend time in the labor market. Also, lamentably, the casual observer or anxious parent cannot see that the initial earnings gap separating a baccalaureate degree with professional and preprofessional majors, the category that includes business degrees, from that composed of humanities and social sciences majors closes over time. By the peak earning ages, fifty-six to sixty, the humanities and social science majors earn $2,000 a year more, if those with advanced degrees in both categories are included.2

  In assembling the oral histories of liberal arts majors to hearten others who will follow, I am recycling an idea that Stanford itself had more than thirty-five years ago. The shaky futures of liberal arts majors were visible in the 1970s, when visitors strolling across campus in the late evening might have come across the sight of students sleeping outside the campus’s career center in tents or on uncovered beds.

  In those years, as now, engineering majors had no difficulty in finding prospective employers who were eager to speak with them. But liberal arts majors then, as now, faced challenges. The number of companies that even deigned to meet with them was small; the number of students seeking an audience was large. So the university set up a reservation system, permitting students to sign up in advance for one of the precious few time slots by coming in person to the Career Planning and Placement Center.

  On the day that sign-ups began, the more enterprising students arrived in the wee hours of the morning, long before the center opened, to be sure of snagging a slot. When those who arrived at 6 a.m. were too late to get one, students on later sign-up days began their vigils still earlier, at 4 a.m. and then even earlier, setting up tents or dragging their beds out of their dorm rooms.

  This conspicuous tableau of liberal arts students desperate to gain access to the more desirable employers was an embarrassment to the university.3 When a new university president, Donald Kennedy, was appointed in 1980, he faced sharp questions from a student reporter about the plight of liberal arts graduates who needed to be “prepared to go into the working world.” Kennedy, a biologist by training who had spent nearly two decades teaching at Stanford and had recently completed a two-year stint in Washington, DC, as Commissioner of Food and Drugs, could have advocated that more students head for STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. But instead he defended the across-the-board utility of liberal education. Kennedy said he believed that students’ interests were best served not by preparing them “for just one particular job or occupation” but rather by “making them exceptionally competent and capable people across the full range of activities.”4

  Kennedy took pains to show that he appreciated the need to strengthen, in particular, the humanities no less than had his predecessor, a historian. Speaking at a time when Stanford had become the third largest university recipient of federal funding for scientific research and development, he said, “We have to try in the 1980’s to get the humanities where the sciences have gotten.”5

  Within his own domain, the campus, Kennedy had the power to bolster the humanities faculty. What he could not do, however, was change the way that corporate employers eschewed students who were humanities majors when they combed through lists of seniors seeking post-graduation employment. In 1979, the number of Stanford students who sought jobs had recently spiked. Five years earlier, the university’s survey of seniors showed that only about one-quarter of the graduating class sought a job immediately after graduation. But the appeal of graduate school had diminished dramatically, and now more than half of the seniors were looking for work.6

  “We hear scare stories about humanities graduates busing dishes in restaurants for lack of occupational alternatives,” wrote sophomore Stan Young, in a column for the Stanford Daily titled “Pity the Fuzzy Study Major,” which referred to the campus vernacular that speaks of students either as “techies” or as “fuzzies.” Young was a history major, a choice that made his relatives “blanch.” He was neither the first nor the last Stanford student with a major in the humanities to remark on the strangeness of being surrounded by those preparing “for technological occupations” and continually reminded of “the relative unmarketability of the transcript with which I will leave Stanford.”7

  Kennedy understood that liberal arts majors like Young felt anxiety about their future, and he did not promise that a highly desirable job awaited them as soon as they stepped beyond the campus. “One can’t expect to walk into a prefixed kind of occupation,” he told the student reporter. “It’s going to take some experimenting and often that experimenting is going to be painful.” All the university could do, he said, was provide the graduates with “the tools ultimately to cope.”8

  Saying that pain lay ahead for those who elected a major in the liberal arts was admirable in its frankness. But it would not serve well in attracting leery students into these fields. In an attempt to send more students down the less-traveled roads that led to indistinct futures, the university’s School of Humanities and Sciences undertook a new initiative. The school, which was the center of liberal arts at the university, encompassing the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences, undertook a survey of a large swath of recent graduates, inquiring into the details of their employment. The next year, it published a brochure, The Major Decision, that drew from the survey and featured profiles of selected students with liberal arts majors, including photos in some cases. It was a showcase of graduates who had found interesting work in places impossible to predict at the time of their graduation.

  I was drawn to the students in the brochure who had elected the humanities, the majors that are seemingly most distant from the wish list of corporate recruiters. Students who were warily considering making the “major decision” in favor of the humanities could draw reassurance from the stories of actual graduates, and so, too, could their anxious parents.

  In the introduction to The Major Decision, an administrator painted a sanguine picture for liberal arts majors, but it was the students themselves who best articulated the case for their majors. Maryellie Moore, a history major who was the treasurer of Matson Navigation Company, spoke of the critical awareness that she had gained from studying history, which remained with her long after she forgot particular historical dates and events. Barbara Brown, a philosophy major, said she had never foreseen that she would become a manager for the San Francisco Municipal Railway, but

  I would almost be willing to go on a soapbox to sing the virtues of a good liberal education. At Stanford I learned how to think critically and in an organized fashion. It is only out in the “real world” that one can see the scarcity of that skill. Not a day goes by that I don’t recognize the value of writing well, thinking logically, and developing work plans in an organized way. A person who gets those abilities out of college is incredibly marketable.9

  The gallery of student profiles included an accountant, a writer, a doctor, a dentist, an attorney, and a student who had been a religious studies major who was now a programmer. Michael Crandell had graduated four years previously, and he was quoted in The Major Decision as saying, “I now have a job as a programmer only because I took one course in computer science at Stanford.” He enthusiastically recommended a major in the humanities to others as “general preparation for work in some field that you may not even know of now, and that perhaps no one knows of now.”10

  The profile of Cran
dell was brief and did not explain how he had managed to get that job in programming on the basis of a single course. What subsequently happened to him and his nascent career in programming? Had he stayed in the field, or had his failure to take a full menu of computer science coursework proven to be an insurmountable barrier to advancement? Did the lack of specific preparation trump the amorphous advantage of “general preparation” provided by religious studies in the years that followed?

  To find answers from the vantage point of the present, more than thirty-five years after Crandell graduated, I looked for his contact information and any public record of his professional experiences. He was not hard to find—and I immediately got the answer to one of my questions, whether he had stayed in the world of programming: he certainly had. Today, he is the cofounder and chief executive of a software company, RightScale, which offers management tools for cloud computing and has the backing of several prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firms. How had the religious studies major arrived at this destination, beginning with a single programming class while in college? I wrote Crandell to see if he would be willing to meet and supply a narrative of what had transpired after he graduated, and he obliged.

  His story begins in 1974, in orientation week, when he was newly arrived on the Stanford campus and sitting with his parents listening to welcoming speeches and advice dispensed by the university’s elders. Of all the inspirational wisdom and homilies that were offered that day, only one thing made an impression. One of the vice provosts predicted that computers would become an enormous presence in everyone’s lives, and that students who did not take at least one course in computer science during their time at Stanford would be effectively illiterate, unprepared for the modern world. It was as if he had distilled career advice for the future into a single word—not “plastics,”11 but software. It made an impression on Crandell, and he followed the advice.