Post date: Aug 13, 2015 4:33:10 AM
Every now and then, professional philosophers I know get to thinking about how to market majoring in philosophy to undergraduates. One strategy is to identify correlations between majoring in philosophy and tending to do exceptionally well on various graduate-school admission tests (LSAT, GRE). I'm ambivalent about this strategy, because it's not clear what the correlation means: does majoring in philosophy give skills that enhance performance on these tests (even for students who otherwise would not have done so well on the tests)? or do people already likely to do well on the tests tend to be drawn to philosophy (even though majoring philosophy gives no skill benefit for test performance)? I don't know which answer is correct. So I tend not to use this strategy when people ask about majoring in philosophy (because I do not want to implicate a causal relation I'm not confident about); but I also don't mind if people with different confidence levels decide to use the strategy.
Another strategy, endorsed by the American Philosophical Association, is to identify extremely successful business people who were philosophy majors. This strategy has broader appeal than citing test performance correlations, because most undergraduates are not intending to pursue graduate-level studies. This strategy also isn't identifying a correlation: majoring in philosophy does not correlate with tending to be an exceptionally successful business person. But this strategy has all the flaws of the correlational appeal: it's not clear whether majoring in philosophy imparts skills that enhance chances for business success, or whether (instead) people already disposed to have business success tend to be drawn to philosophy. Again, I don't know which answer is correct, and so I tend not to use it.
What I'm going to do in this post is try to give some evidence to undermine people's confidence that it's the majoring in philosophy that imparts skills for the business success. Then I'll make a recommendation, on the basis of my evidence, that people consider not using this strategy anymore.
So suppose we have a list of very successful business people who also happen to have majored in philosophy. This would be relevant to students wondering whether to major in philosophy, because the list suggests that majoring in philosophy is at least partly responsible, in some significant manner, for the success of the people on the list. The inference to draw from this is that majoring in philosophy generally gives skills that facilitate, to some significant degree, succeeding in the business world. Whence the power of the strategy: it is designed to appeal to students for whom the point of an undergraduate education is getting a good job.
I want to argue that this list of successful philosophy majors does not suggest what the strategy above needs it to suggest. My argument is an inference to the best explanation: one explanation for why the people on the list succeeded in business is that their philosophy major contributed some skills relevant to their success, but a *better* explanation is that the people on the list typically come from middle- to upper-middle class families (or outright upper class families) and so were almost certain to be successful no matter their undergraduate major. If the alternative explanation is better, it follows that using the strategy carries with it the implication that majoring in philosophy is really just for privileged people who don't have to worry about getting a good job. But this is exactly *not* the target audience for the strategy. And so people should stop appealing to such lists as a way to market majoring in philosophy to undergraduates.
That's the structure of my argument. For the details, I'm going to use a list compiled by Rachel Sugar for Business Insider in August 2015. You can find the original here, which adds two names to a prior list. What I'll do is give the person's name (and a hyperlink on the name to their biographical information) and then list the profession of the person's typically affluently-employed father (with a hyperlink to the father's biographical info, if available). This isn't always easy to do, because many of the online biographies are "fluffy" or downplay prior advantage. Then I'll rely on background knowledge to support the claim that people with parents in those jobs typically don't need to worry about getting a good job, because people with parents in those jobs are people from very affluent families. (The Washington Post once talked about this under the label "opportunity hoarding.") Here's the list:
Carly Fiorina; father = law professor and member of U.S. Court of Appeals
Carl Icahn; father = lawyer (often misleadingly described as "school teacher")
Sheila Bair; father = surgeon
George Soros; father = lawyer; mother = from family of wealthy silk merchants
Herbert Allison, Jr.; father = FBI agent [not sure whether this gives an affluent lifestyle, but this sufficed to send Jr to Yale University]
Gerald Levin; father = owner of Levins' Butter & Eggs on S. Seventh St. in Philadelphia
Patrick Byrne; father = chairman of Berkshire Hathaway's GEICO subsidiary
Stewart Butterfield; (I can't find information beyond the vague "hippie" [did theses hippies have prior wealth?], but prior to college his parents sent him to a private day and boarding school with a hefty tuition)
Peter Thiel; father = chemical engineer
Reid Hoffman; father = real estate agent (grandfather = president of Indiana University)
Eva Chen; father = entrepreneur of some sort (wealthy enough to send her to an Upper East Side all-girls school in New York City)
I conclude with a hedge. Even if I'm wrong about the tendency of people with parents like those on the list to not worry about getting a good job, there remains a second unsavory feature to the strategy I'm criticizing. The feature is this: using the list shows that people who major in philosophy tend to have a certain kind of family background (upper-middle class affluence; college-educated parents with professional and well-respected jobs). This sends exactly the wrong message to undergraduates of the sort I tend to have: first-generation college students with lower-middle class to working class "wealth," working part-time jobs to pay the bills while also amassing student debt their parents are unable to afford. Because the message such lists of successful business people with philosophy majors sends is: philosophy isn't for you.
Recommendation 1: Rethink the message sent by compiling and circulating these lists, and think about better strategies for appealing to students who are not from well-to-do families and who do not already have an interest in going to graduate school.
Recommendation 2: Reconsider whether the not-even-correlational connections for which such lists provide evidence warrant suggesting to students that, on the basis of such lists, students have good reason to accept that majoring in philosophy would facilitate succeeding in business. If the answer is no, find a better way to articulate the connection between business success and philosophy skills (if you really think there is one), or find a better reason for why students might desire majoring in philosophy.
P.S. I think a similar argument can be run against other lists of business people who majored in philosophy (such as the ones here, here, here, here). As for the majors who got to be famous, I think it suffices to point out that a very small percentage of all people are ever going to become rich by being famous – and so odds are that majoring in philosophy won't help all that much at getting famous.