Humanities Paradox
insidehighered.com
insidehighered.com
In my experience, that introductory course was key in convincing me to follow that path.
Now I work in IT ;)
There's a schism in philosophy between analytic - the more "logical" side, with rigorous proofs and arguments - and continental - the more "what is art/ethics/love" side. I was firmly interested in the continental side. Of those that left philosophy, I found that continental people would often end up in some kind of community-oriented area, like education or sociology or social work or the like, whereas on the analytic side, people tended to end up doing physics/maths/comp sci type stuff.
Obviously that's not a rule. When I left university, I worked in an industrial site, and a magazine, and at a Salesforce implementation company, and then at the industrial site again, teaching myself more and more programming at each. I got promoted to the IT department of the industrial site, and continued to learn, and then got a job doing ETL/Database/Automation stuff at a big telecom in the marketing department. I've been lucky, and I've known the right people, but I honestly would still be happy if I was working at that industrial site. There was a Theology graduate who also worked there, driving a forklift.
If people ask me, do I recommend getting a philosophy degree, I say I don't. That's like asking if I'd recommend that people get a tattoo. I'm very happy with mine, but its a decision that needs to be made by an individual. Like a tattoo, it reduces your job prospects, and there are no take-backsies.
Now comes my smug paragraph. Everyone in philosophy, and who even starts philosophy, hears the same jokes. Pretty much nobody is saying its a good idea to do a philosophy degree. To do philosophy, people have to overcome the societal expectation that they will die in a ditch, poor and unable to do anything "useful". To do philosophy, you really need to love that shit. I've honestly never heard someone speak with regret about completing a philosophy degree, whereas of the biologists, engineers and economists I know, some wish they'd done something different. If you read philosophy, and you love it, do what you love. Don't do something just because you think it'll make your life safer.
I'd rather live a happy "burger flipper" than discover I don't love what I do in 20 years.
Ironically, I'm a comp-sci/math type person, and I regard continental philosophy a bunch better than analytic. Continental philosophy usually considers matters inside their social and historical context, so at least sometimes, when they can be bothered to refer to the real world, they're referring to it with a solid context.
Whereas analytic philosophy often seems to me to suffer from math-envy, and to formalize too early and too often. The result is that analytic philosophers spend a lot of time debating over what they think are rigorous, scientifically-grounded concepts when in fact our best science says that things just don't work that way or the theories aren't "done cooking".
(I'm thinking of a Stanford Philosophy Encyclopedia page someone directed me to last night on "reductionism", which was given three definitions, none of which matched what a working scientist would usually call reductionism. Or of the very concept of supervenience, which needs less metaphysics and more information theory. Or of the perennial debates over the "Hard Problem" of consciousness.)
That doesn't mean I don't have immense respect for analytic philosophers, but I have the type of respect for them that I also have for fiction writers that create immensely consistent and engaging fantasy worlds. Zing!
Continental seemed to me to more generally have the view that all debates and philosophies were necessarily making ontological and epistemological claims. That immensely appeals to me.
The reason I asked about whether it was a rule or even common is I hear about it often that I wanted to believe it was true, so I wanted others' experience. Philosophy, hell, history is hard, at least it was for me, so I don't doubt people who think about such things are really intelligent...and that intelligence can't translate well to something like hacking of mathematics. It's good to hear it in your case it worked in your favor.
For the humanities, they claimed to teach about people, but at the time I couldn't see that they were doing at all well at that, and later I concluded that actually the humanities are not at all good about teaching about people, e.g., get as much that is wrong as right and, really, darned little good insight, but that parts of clinical psychology could teach some important and reasonably credible lessons about people.
I really liked music, and the record collection in the library was terrific, but I never took a course in music -- later started violin and made some okay progress eventually.
But for the humanities courses I took, i.e., was force fed, I came to hate as nonsense, misleading about people, and otherwise a waste of time.
E.g., history: I wanted to learn some about history, but the history course was absurd, from some pompous, pretentious text with no overview and otherwise nearly impenetrable. And the darned course took so much time before year 1 that it never got to the 20th or even the 19th centuries. Bummer. Finally I learned some about history from some books and some relatively serious TV documentaries, e.g., Victory at Sea, The Battle of Britain. The courses? Bummers.
In the history courses, I wanted to learn why, that is, the causes or at least the candidate causes -- metals, domesticated animals, open ocean sailing, relatively productive crops, etc., but the courses essentially ignored all concepts of causes. Bummer.
Overall, IMHO, the humanities are suffering from lack of good methodology. In particular, their results are open to a lot of individual interpretation and definite maybes, and it's tough to have the work be cumulative in any very useful sense.
Not only is stem widely considered harder and requires crazier time commitments, it also exacts a toll on your sex life. These are young people at the peak of their productive cycles and this is a very large consideration.
The reality is in the middle - majoring in a humanities subject can still work out just fine, but you have be a lot more careful about what you do in college and what skills you develop. This scares the shit out of the STEM folks, as their idea of "be careful about what they do in college" mostly appears to be "Oh, so I need to do an okay internship or two over the summer." The humanities kids have to do a lot more research and a lot more gumshoeing to figure out where they're going to go after they graduate.
Unfortunately, most kids aren't like that. They're going to college because Mommy and Daddy told them to do so, and they're majoring in History because it "sounded cool," not because it was their passion or because they decided that a History degree was the correct decision for achieving their goals in life. If you expect this apathetic kid to go out and look for himself to figure out exactly how his History degree can get him a job, you've got another thing coming. That's where we get the "barista with a master's degree" stereotype.
Basically, if your chosen major doesn't have a well-defined career path, (This includes biology, incidentally) you need to work harder and be even more proactive in figuring out where your next move is going to be. This bodes poorly for the average immature 19-year-old who has absolutely no idea what he's going to be doing.
I think this slippery-slope outcome of this is that children are funneled into early tutoring, academic kindergartens, etc. It seems absurd to do everything in life just to optimize for profit. Bye bye holidays???
It actually includes most of the pure natural sciences, and mathematics. Engineering is the track with the careers.
Personally, I like pure computer science and CS academia, but most of the undergrads taking CS degrees are trying to learn software engineering, and will object loudly if asked to take, for instance, type theory, topology, computability and automata theory, statistical learning theory (ML courses have massive drop rates), computational complexity, Kolmogorov complexity theory, how to build an operating system, compilers and optimization, abstract interpretation for static analysis, mathematical logic, etc.
That wasn't true in the 90s. The guidance counselors still pretended it was, in the 90s.
This is why it is common for someone to give up on Computer Science / Math / Physics / Chemistry / Engineering, but go on to graduate in History or English or Journalism.
Does anyone know a single person who tried and tried, but just couldn't manage a History degree, so they had to take the easy route and ended up majoring in Physics???? HA!
edit: Also what's your take on why Freshmen have diverged from high-school students in recent years? What changed?
I majored in comp. sci. minored in phil. I spent the majority of my time working through the technical classes, I kind of mailed it in for the philosophy classes, and got B's. I would have liked to spend more time 'trying' in the philosophy classes, but I really just didn't have it to spend. Some of them were really quite interesting.
I guess this doesn't really answer your question, because I know people got A's in the classes I got B's in, but it might provide perspective into why an engineering major didn't ace all their 400 level phil. classes.
At many engineering schools, the humanities are a joke.
They are often filled with engineering dropouts and students who couldn't get accepted into a more prestigious liberal-arts school.
Mix in the fact that the engineering schools often have a "wash out" course at the 100 level, while the liberal arts fields tend to not have this, and what you get is STEM students who take a few 100 level humanities classes, see nothing as rigorous as their 100 level engineering classes, and you get this perception.
I also can't stress enough that the rigor of any department is directly related to the quality of students the department attracts. No college will allow a department to fail 90% of the students (impacted course tracks notwitstanding) so poor students leads to low standards.
I went to Purdue, but have observed similar trends at other large engineering schools. I minored in philosophy, and anyone who tool philosophy at a liberal-arts school would likely not believe how low the standard for a B in the classes there was.
Even comparing stories with Indiana University students, (also a state school, in the same state, but not an engineering school) the classes were a joke.
I avoided doubling up in a humanities precisely because the course load seemed like it would be too much. Give me a differential equation or Lie algebra any day. Engaging human beings in complex arguments is exhausting. Mathematics studies concepts simple enough to compress to a few pages of symbols. The difference is, I am as in love with mathematics as I am with English, or history, or philosophy. I can imagine manifold ways for a person to be duped into a STEM program at first (most of them being kin to the threat of economic uncertainty without a highly paid professional job) only to abandon it when they could not engage with the work enough to do it well.
What might look to you like "giving up" often more closely resembles "finding one's strengths". Not everyone is good at STEM, true, but then again that's not the problem with your attitude. It's the implication that having an aptitude outside of STEM entails some kind of intellectual deficit.
Where in the hell did you go to school? I've never heard of science teaching being designed to make the subject easy.
The other challenge of deep humanities like philosophy is that college students simply don't have enough life experience to see value in what it provides. As a 40yr old adult (yesterday) I now understand the value, but no longer have the time for learning it all.
Do I wish I had double majored in college? No, simply because my own Computer Science degree was already way to much to complete in four years and I was eager to go build something. Now that I'm an adult and dad and have no time to read, I really wish I knew those things.
Mixed bag. In the end there's far more to learn than you can in a single lifetime.
Then blame common core, because... too many tests?
And the sad, sad conclusion: Of course the answer is for professors to insist that their institution force more students to take more humanities classes.
Because it would be a tragedy if you didn't make a future chemist sit through a semester of Introduction to Shakespeare and force them to write 3 essays that will be vaguely skimmed and returned. If they didn't have to do that, well, I think we all know you can't be a well rounded person without having to listen to a class discussion between a dozen borderline illiterate communication / journalism / criminology majors, and taking notes as they try to make a coherent point about Henry III.
The y-axis was explained in the text! Did you just give us all the perfect opportunity to draw some snarky conclusions about the difference between STEM and humanities students? :D
The second graph is especially weird, since it says 'number of college students is going up' but the graph goes from 0 to 0.18. I assumed it meant 'percent of college students who expressed an interest'?