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Senator Marco Rubio sent fact-checkers aflutter when he said at the Republican presidential debate on Tuesday that philosophy majors would be better off going into welding. The value of a vocational degree, he argued, was greater than the payoff that comes with contemplating the cosmos.

“Welders make more money than philosophers,” Mr. Rubio said. “We need more welders and less philosophers.”

What do philosophers think? Unsurprisingly, they see some fallacies in Mr. Rubio’s theory.

“It’s certainly valuable to get a vocational degree, but I think there is sort of a misperception of the value of getting a philosophy degree or a humanities degree in general,” said Cheshire Calhoun, a philosophy professor at Arizona State University and chairwoman of the American Philosophical Association.

Ms. Calhoun notes that philosophy is not about toga-wearing thinkers who stroke big beards these days. Rather, she says, the degree denotes skills in critical thinking and writing that are valuable in a variety of fields that can pay extremely well.

While some universities have cut back or eliminated their philosophy departments, and the job prospects for academic philosophers are notoriously bad, Ms. Calhoun argues that students who pursue undergraduate philosophy degrees tend to have a leg up when applying to graduate school. The notion that philosophy means “pre-poverty” is a misnomer, she said.

Wage data from sources such as the Labor Department and Payscale.com show that it’s pretty much a wash between welders and philosophy graduates, and that over time, people with philosophy degrees tend to do just fine financially. The average annual salary of “welders, cutters, solderers and brazers” was $40,040 in 2014, in line with the $39,900 median salary of newly graduated philosophy majors.

As for welders, Mr. Rubio was correct in pointing out that they are in demand, and his “help wanted” advertisement was appreciated within the industry.

“We have a shortage of skills that are needed in the manufacturing sector and the construction sector, because we’ve trained our children that the only way to get a good job is to go to a four-year university,” said David Landon, president of the American Welding Society.

Mr. Landon estimates that the United States currently faces a shortage of more than 200,000 professional welders and that there is, indeed, good money to be made by learning the trade. He claims that a stigma against learning such skills has developed over the years, but that welding is needed in sectors that touch most parts of the economy.

For some, the distinction between craftsmanship and deep thinking represents a false dichotomy (as a logician might say).

Matthew B. Crawford earned his Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago but failed to find a job as an academic and ultimately landed a position at a think tank. Unhappy with the work, he quit and became a mechanic in Virginia, using online tutorials to learn how to weld and make motorcycle parts.

He has also continued to write and has published books about his career transition. One of his books, “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” is devoted to debunking the notion that manual trades are mindless. “The division between knowledge work and manual work is kind of dubious, because there is so much thinking that goes on in skilled trades,” Mr. Crawford said.

As for the payoff, Mr. Crawford rejects the idea that philosophers cannot figure out how to earn a living.

“It’s obviously kind of a reductive approach to think of your course of study in college as merely a means to a paycheck,” Mr. Crawford said, suggesting the study of things like happiness can be enriching in ways that are hard to measure. “And nobody goes into philosophy because they think it’s going to make them rich.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Rubio doubled down on his assertion, sending out a fund-raising email with the subject line “more welders” and calling for the overpriced higher education system to be dismantled. The argument echoed one he makes frequently on the stump, which the senator admits probably irks some intellectuals: “You deserve to know that the market for Greek philosophers has tightened over the last 2,000 years.”

Check out all the fact checks from Tuesday’s debate, including this one below on Mr. Rubio.



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