A philosophy degree is useful

Leniency please on grammar and formatting, I only have 20 minutes or so to write this round. OVERVIEW Pro’s job in this round is to support the claim that philosophy is useful degree and he has attempted to do this by showing the usefulness of a philosophy degree in three areas- Career, Life Skills, and the Quest for Knowledge. As I refuted Pro’s contentions in these three areas and showed how a philosophy degree generally fell short of other alternatives, Pro consistently replied that each area on its own is not supposed to show a philosophy degree to be useful but is instead a component of a “cumulative case.” If the success of Pro’s case rests on all his points working together in concert, then if I win that philosophy is decidedly un-useful in any of the above mentioned points then I have successfully refuted Pro’s case as a whole. Since Pro concedes that none of the individual areas alone shows philosophy to be useless, as he does when he says “I am not trying to affirm the resolution based on this fact alone, but a number of other facts combined,” he must win in every area for his cumulative case to stand. Philosophy major and salary Pro fails to engage in my multi-layer argument by ignoring all my arguments that assume his payscale arguments are correct. I pointed out that even taking payscale data at face value, philosophy is still a middle of the pack degree made worse by its poor starting salary. Even if we ignore the Georgetown study, a philosophy degree vastly underperforms the majority of other degrees- such a performance could not be called useful in any meaningful sense. Pro also totally ignores my arguments that philosophy degree is useless because you will never USE it in your job. This point alone is totally ignored by Pro and disproves the resolution. How can a degree be useful if it is never used? 1) Pro ignores my analytic explaining how even accounting for the combination of philosophy and religious studies, the payscale data overestimates pay by AT LEAST 23%. Even under the best assumptions it is clear that payscale estimates are high, and this is exactly the results we would expect given the sample bias of the website. 2) Con offers no contradictory evidence to my unemployment rate evidence, so it is a fair stat to use. 3) I agree the VT study is not comprehensive- the only purpose was to show that other datasets agree closely with the Georgetown study. Only my data has any corroboration. 4) PRO DOES NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT A MARGIN OF ERROR IS. A margin of error just describes the inherent error in a given data set- it is a function of the raw data and nothing else. It explicitly does NOT account for sample bias! [1] 5) Nursing is just one example of how the majors Pro claims philosophy outperforms actually do much better than philosophy majors / 6) Payscale has admitted sample bias, clearly has self selection bias, and conflicts with other more reliable studies. The Georgetown study is universally more reliable. 7) Even if you only use payscale data, philosophy degree isn’t useful. Philosophy major and life skills 1,2,3) I stand by my Georgetown stats- Pro has no reliable source to refute them, given payscale is mute on the subject. The GRE issue collapses into an issue of how useful employers find the skills philosophy supposedly develops. Pro can make a probabilistic argument but has no hard evidence to support the claims that philosophy develops skills in a manner that is useful in life, especially in light of poor employment and salary stats. 4) Pro concedes/ignores my argument that relying on generic skills that are developed well by a broad range of activities makes the word “useless,” well, useless. Pro needs to defend the intrinsic usefulness of a philosophy degree without relying on meta-skills that can be developed across fields.Pro offers no response to my point that if philosophy is so great for developing these skills, there is no reason why individuals cant study philosophy independently and gain these skills. This is much more useful than spending thousands of dollars and 4 years on a degree. 5,6) PROS 5 PROVES THAT THIS ISUE COLLAPSES IN CAREER ISSUE. He justifies the practicality of philosophy by salary data. This is especially problematic because Pro is supposed to be building a cumulative case- but two of his arguments are identical! Philosophy major and the quest for knowledge Pro at no point offers concrete examples of how having a philosophy degree is useful in engaging real world philosophical examples. Every day experience shows that a degree is not useful- philosophical issues are almost universally dealt with by laypeople. Even the high profile issues that come up in politics are handled by people without philosophical training. Even if philosophy itself is useful, Pro does not offer any evidence that a degree in philosophy is useful. 1) People don’t find philosophy degrees useful, otherwise people would be seeking out the expertise of philosophy graduates on philosophical topics. This doesn’t happen- no one calls up their philosophy grad friends when contemplating whether their job is meaningful. 2) Pro claims a degree is important because employer want verification of your skills. This is true of actually useful degrees like physics and accounting, but as I showed earlier, most philosophy grads go into unrelated fields where they will never use their degree. Hence why philosophy is not useful. 4) I don’t disagree that philosophical reasoning might be a part of life every now and then, I disagree that a philosophy degree is needed to engage the occasional philosophical aspects of life. Pro hasn’t provided any evidence that a philosophy degree makes a meaningful impact on how people engage philosophical issues. Thus I contend that self study is more than adequate, especially considering the high financial and opportunity cost a philosophy degree represents. 5) I agree self study results in layman understanding. I claim layman understanding is generally adequate. References 1: http://en.wikipedia.org...