Well, to the degree that any course of study expands your understanding of the world and the universe, and gets you out of your limited experience, and keep you from ossifying into the presumption that what you know is the only thing worth knowing, then anthropology is as good as any. But of course, that’s the opposite of conservatives’ preferred insularity.
Washington Post, opinion by Thurka Sangaramoorthy (anthropology chair at American University), 27 Apr 2026: This degree changed my life. And it’s essential to a changing America., subtitled “Anthropology taught me how to translate human experience into knowledge institutions can act on.”
I am the daughter of immigrants who fled civil war in Sri Lanka and came to the United States with very little. They wanted one thing for me: economic security. They did not care what I studied, as long as it opened doors never available to them.
As a first-generation college student, I did not plan to major in anthropology. It was a course I took because it fit my schedule, not because I had any sense of where it might lead.
It changed everything.
What does one do with a degree in anthropology except teach anthropology at a university? Well, maybe making a living isn’t the point. But she does describe her various career successes.
Every spring, the same headlines reappear. This year, citing a Federal Reserve Bank of New York study, many news outlets reported that anthropology majors have the highest unemployment rate among recent college graduates — 7.9 percent — with more than half working in jobs that don’t typically require a college degree. The conclusion drawn is familiar: Anthropology is a poor investment, a degree that naive students pursue at their financial peril — and that universities can afford to eliminate.
This argument, however, rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the numbers mean — and it arrives at precisely the wrong moment.
Start with the unemployment rate. Computer engineering, routinely held up as the gold standard of employable majors, has a recent graduate unemployment rate of 7.8 percent — statistically indistinguishable from anthropology’s rate. No one is calling for the elimination of computer engineering programs.
And so on. The discussion that follows focuses on big data, and by implication the conservative principle that investments (in education) are about making money, because social and moral issues are solved, not by understanding the complexity of the modern world, but… by cherry-picking the Bible for relevant passages. The essay finishes:
When the University of Akron eliminates its anthropology department, or the University of North Carolina at Greensboro closes one that trained generations of students, they are dismantling the institutional space where students learn to interrogate the very systems — enrollment metrics, labor market data, return-on-investment calculations — being used to justify eliminating them.
My parents wanted economic security for me, and anthropology delivered it. It taught me how to think, how to listen, how to translate the complexity of human experience into knowledge that institutions could act on. That is an essential skill in the age of big data.
The students discovering anthropology in college today deserve the same chance I got. Every department that closes is a door that never opens for a student who, without it, may never find the tools to make sense of the world they’ve inherited.
In the big picture this is another example of the dumbing down of modern America, since somehow the simpletons and the capitalists have taken charge and are eliminating anything that conflicts with ancient virtues or the bottom line.
The modern world is complex. It’s an instantiation of the motivations of 8 billion people, many enacting traditional habits, a few advancing knowledge and building technology that the rest of the world takes advantage of without any kind of understanding.
Adjacent thought: There’s a sense, I suppose, that everything is about politics, that everything is about economics, and everything is about anthropology. And everything, including scientific understanding, is about psychology — what it’s possible for humans to understand, or whether some things will be forever beyond human understanding.
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Another batch of the usual sort of links:
- Salon, Garrett Owen, today: Trump’s latest science purge could bring major risks, experts say, subtitled “The abrupt firing of the board comes at a time of climate crisis and international competition”
- Again, no reason given. But the underlying motivation is obvious.
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- They’re increasingly explicit about their support for white supremacy.
- JMG, today: Trump Backs “It’s Okay To Be White” Rep For KY Senate
- And, JMG, today: GOP Rep Rages That Texas Kids Can Speak Spanish
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- Are MAGA folks somehow unable to assess other peoples’ personalities and motives? Are these people psychological simpletons?
- JMG, yesterday: Hair Furor Lies That He Caused “Gay National Anthem” YMCA To Go To #1 For Months (That Never Happened)
- He just makes things up!
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- This kind of corruption has been going on for years! And MAGA doesn’t care, or notice.
- JMG, yesterday: Financial Times: Trump Sons Take Stake In Kazakh Mining Outfit That Has $1.6 Billion Federal Contract
