Using the R and R7 for shooting a conference

danferrin wrote:

Alastair Norcross wrote:

danferrin wrote:

Alastair Norcross wrote

No-one goes into philosophy for the money.

Perhaps they should. Quoting from five thirty eight.com, “And when it comes to earnings for people who only have undergraduate degrees, philosophy majors have the fourth-highest median earnings, $81,200 per year, out-ranking business and chemistry majors, according to the ETS. Bar none, philosophy majors have the highest salary growth trajectory from entry to mid-career.”

there are a number of other references to the career and earnings advantages of having an education in Philosophy. Seems that having an education that is strong in logic, reasoning and ethics has value in a lot of fields. My daughter, who made it to Within a final review of her Masters thesis in Philosophy (environmental Ethics) before being compelled to drop out of college because of a bitter custody fight for her son, is earning a comfortable salary working for a Swedish bank, working mostly from home. She had wanted to work in environmental ethics, but her exit from school coincided with the previous administration gutting the EPA, which flooded the market with experienced job candidates, but she is probably in a better financial situation than if she would have worked in the advocacy sector or stayed in college. Now, if only I could get her interested in photography, so I could see a few more photos of my grandson.

Yes, all good points, and ones we make to our philosophy majors all the time. What I meant was that no-one goes into academic philosophy for the money. The same goes for academics in most disciplines, with the exception of law school and business school professors, a few engineers, and maybe some in the hard sciences with massive outside grants. Many of my former students are earning far more money than I am.

My son did his BA in History, and an MA in Middle Eastern Studies (in Sweden), and is now making good money working in the tech industry, writing programs to analyze data. He taught himself all his computer skills, but his academic training certainly helped develop the intellectual skills that he uses.

I understand university presidents, athletic directors, football and basketball coaches make a pretty good living,

Yes they do. In fact, it's not uncommon for a football coach to make more than $1m a year for not coaching. A few years back at CU, the football coach had one good season, and was immediately offered a new five year contract for over a million a year. When it became obvious that the good season was just a fluke, the coach was fired, with three years left on his five year contract, which required the university to pay him the million per year for not coaching, while they were paying the new coach a similar sum at the same time. I went to my dean and offered to take a mere $500,000 per year for not teaching, which I explained to him was a real bargain for the university. He didn't go for it, even when I dropped my asking price to $250,000 per year. I guess he figured that my not teaching just wasn't as valuable to the university as the former coach not coaching. I didn't know whether to be flattered or insulted.

and with recent rule changes about athletes profiting off of their likenesses, a lot 0f them are getting rich while still in school.

Some of them are, but most are still being ruthlessly exploited by a system that makes money for colleges, while leaving many of them permanently brain damaged. A few years ago I was on a committee here that looked into the ethics of even having a football program, given the growing evidence of CTE in former athletes (not just football). It seemed absolutely clear to me that it was morally outrageous to continue our program, without giving the athletes themselves and their families some pretty stern warnings about the possible/probable long-term effects of constant blows to the head (the sub-concussive blows are actually more worrying than the concussions, because they don't require the player to be taken out of the game, or rested for a while). But the ethicists on the committee (me and a colleague) were outvoted by the athletic department shills, who sounded exactly like the former apologists for the tobacco industry in their claims that, because the connection between repeated blows to the head and CTE hadn't been proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, we shouldn't even be required to give strong warnings to prospective athletes before they committed themselves to us. The whole experience left me sickened and disillusioned.