Maybe he is the Republican Obama after all. Like the outgoing president, Florida senator Marco Rubio is charismatic, self-assured, and intelligent, as his performance in Tuesday night’s debate displayed. Alas, also like the president, Senator Rubio harbors an anti-intellectual streak, one that is both wrong in its premises, as well as on the facts.
In a riff that began with a discussion of the minimum wage, Rubio pivoted to praise vocational education. That’s fine; every country needs people in the skilled trades. But he then took an unnecessary foray into philistinism. “Welders make more money than philosophers,” he said, “we need more welders and less [sic] philosophers.” (Thereby becoming the first person to blame America’s economic woes on a surfeit of philosophers.)
There was far more wrong in Rubio’s assertion than the mangled grammar. For one, the idea that the only purpose of higher education is to make money is dangerously misguided. At its best, education makes us (as the term liberal arts implies) free men and women, and better citizens. And it’s bizarre, as Rubio seemed to suggest, to believe that anybody studies philosophy in order to get rich.
But maybe they should.
Because Rubio wasn’t just wrong in his first principles: He was wrong on the facts. For it turns out that philosophers, in fact, make significantly more money than welders.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median annual salary of a mid-career American welder is $37,000 a year. The median starting salary of a philosophy graduate, meanwhile, is $39,000 a year, according to Payscale. The mid-career median salary of a philosophy graduate, meanwhile, tops $80,000 annually. That’s right: Contrary to Rubio’s assertion, philosophy majors make twice as much as welders. That philosophy majors are poor must come as a shock to philosophy grads Peter Thiel, Carl Icahn, and . . . Carly Fiorina. (I’m hoping Fiorina took the opportunity to educate her opponent on the subject backstage after the debate.)
Rubio has elsewhere belittled philosophy, saying in Iowa recently, “You can decide if it’s worth borrowing $50,000 to major in Greek philosophy . . . because after all, the market for Greek philosophers has been very tight for 2,000 years.” (He also doesn’t know what a tight labor market is, apparently: Tight labor markets have more openings for jobs than workers to fill them.)
But then again, he should know something about entering a job market with bad prospects. Rubio, after all, is a lawyer.
