Why I Was Wrong About Liberal Arts Majors

I wager that a lot of people disagree with you here. There are definitely cheap tactics to dupe lazy teachers at both ends of the educational spectrum.

Example: Even if you don't know the answer, write as much work as possible to get partial credit. Look at backwork to learn the form of the exam, memorize the form of the solution and then just plug in the new numbers and calculate.

1) A chemistry class I took and

2) An art history class where we were given photos of pieces and asked to write in what culture and epoch produced them.

Although the art history tests were in the above format, that class also required us to go to the local art museum, find a relevant piece, and photograph it; then go to the library and research the piece developing a thesis and a ten page paper supporting that thesis.

Besides that all my coursework consisted of developing theses and then writing papers defending those theses with the grade being determined by how well we argued our point. Is this bullshit? I would say it's subjective, yes, but a part of a liberal arts education is learning to embrace the subjective nature of the human experience.

Much less dinging by proximity going on because of that, I think. It's generally accepted that studying philosophy is much more difficult than social sciences, for example. Of course, as a result we probably have a richer collection of more specific stereotypes for each field though.

It's almost like they went to school for something completely different ;)

I don't see why selection bias matters though, as it's not terribly relevant to the author's point that humanities students bring a different/valuable perspective to the table and shouldn't be written off as technical hires. To me, the real goal should be encouraging students from both STEM and humanities backgrounds to learn from each other and cross streams a bit. No more Physics for Poets or Shakespeare for sysadmins.

From my experience of college (and that of most people I know), especially in the social sciences, the degree itself was only worth it because studying is cheap here. About 1500 euro a year, and we received about 250 euro a month from the state, more if we lived in a dorm, and could top that off with a very, very friendly loan up to about 600 euro total.

The biggest value, aside from intrinsic interest in the topic and having mediocre-at-best lecturers provide us with reading suggestions, was indeed the connections we made during those years.

Most of the people I met in college now have interesting work or positions in their field (and often via said connections). I partied with them, hung out with them, had discussions with them, started book clubs with them, and became friends with them. If I need to talk to a good journalist, accountant, lawyer, entrepreneur about something, there's one from my network available. If I have questions related to philosophy, physics, literature, etc., well, that's just an appointment and a few beers away.

While it's possible to create these connections without going to college, it's much harder. By going to college it happens automatically, especially if you join some student organization.

Whether that's worth the insane student loans people have to burden themselves with in some countries is up for debate, but the value in the network is huge.

I'd also like to note that it doesn't feel like playing a social game and networking. It's making friends and acquaintances and sort of 'falling into' using the advantages. A bit like how I suppose most people who date other people are looking forward to getting laid, but it doesn't feel 'sleezy' because it's not your primary objective (of course, if it is and you're up-front or okay with that, that's fine too).

I have met very few people who look at either situation and see the breadth of information that exists and how valuable it can be to analyze and model.

Someone who has been working for years under the engineering culture and code review regime on an elite Google distributed systems team is probably going to write better code (at least in that domain) then someone who did a couple of side projects after reading the Rails tutorial.

At least that's how it seems whenever this comes up.

I wonder if this attitude is more prevalent in the US, where people routinely say "you can do anything with a law degree", viewing law as a generalist degree, while viewing engineering or math as a narrow, task-specific degree with no real use outside those subjects…

Although I double majored in English Literature and Math, I did notice the extent to which I would have been required to study humanities as a math major in college (UCSD) without the double major in lit. My general education requirements included a two year undergraduate survey course on world history, a required upper division sequence in a humanities field focusing on a specific region (such as a one year upper division sequence on European or Asian history), two years or proven competence in a foreign language, a year of arts (fine arts, art history, theater), and a minor in a humanities field.

That may be a bit heavier than usual, but in general, math and science majors are required to take a great deal of humanities. The humanities majors, by contrast, had to take two courses in "math" which could be fulfilled with symbolic logic in the philosophy dept and stats for the social sciences (no calculus or even a modicum of advanced math required). The science could be fulfilled through "physics for humanities majors" and bio classes not intended for science track students. Again, that may be a bit light, but it's pretty consistent in US universities - humanities majors get away with minimal math and science, whereas science, engineering, and math majors must take substantial humanities coursework.

One more thing - although the humanities were rigorous, the partiers were pretty much all humanities or social science majors. At least at UCSD, it was nearly impossible to survive in engineering or science as a "partier". Not to say these students were never at the parties, but they spent a lot more time in labs and the library, it was pretty clear. Those and the pre-meds. The humanities majors who got good grades were serious students, sure, but it's pretty clear to me that they didn't have to work anywhere near as hard for good grades (this was also my personal experience in upper division lit classes vs upper division math classes).

This is why I think the most well-rounded students tend to be the STEM students. Not all STEM students are well rounded, many resent and minimize their humanities coursework, but the well-roundedness tends to be more deeply built into the curriculum for STEM than for humanities.

I don't think that if your goal is to learn RoR, the best way to accomplish it is to learn French first. But if you take two programming newbies, and one of them knows a couple foreign languages and the other doesn't, the former will have an advantage.

The thing is, that was once thought a decade ago or so, was that a liberal arts degree did not qualify someone for a programming job as much as a computer science or engineering degree would.

Python and Ruby on Rails made it easier to program, when it was thought that a liberal arts major can't program we used C and Pascal, pointers, had to do garbage collection on our own, had to allocate and then free up memory, etc. Programming Languages evolved with Java and C# that did away with pointers, does garbage collection on their own, and allocates and frees up memory when an object is closed. Then Python and Ruby on Rails made it even easier.

Microsoft had to make a Express and then Community version of their Visual Studio Dotnet languages to compete with FOSS languages, Borland suffered and kept getting bought out, suddenly there FOSS languages got easier to use, understand, and program in.

I think every degree should have a Critical Thinking class and maybe a Small Business class to learn how to balance a checking account and learn to save money instead of living paycheck to paycheck. How to run your own business and make it a startup by bootstrapping what you saved working a job.

- prioritization of the ability to make a buck over all else. This is an old tendency, dating back to the early 1800s.

- Postmodernism ruined the general reputation of the fields it touched. The Sokal Hoax was very famous.

- Most liberal arts majors didn't seem to work hard, or to work on hard problems. This in contrast to the engineering major slaving away until midnight 6 hours per week.

- pg has an essay on this; I forget its name, but the "drop-out-to" lattice in college - people often drop out to easier majors. Psychology or English are roughly at the bottom of that lattice where I went to school; things like CS, Math, Chemical Engineering or Physics are near the top of the lattice. So... yeah. "Couldn't hack it, got a English degree, now serving coffee" stories show up enough to, at minimum, distort perception.

Add those together, and it's a pretty potent mix for looking coldly at the humanities as a useful thing.

Is this the result of independent study? ;)

In all seriousness, my linguistics degree was worth every penny. Spending that much time with incredibly bright people with broad perspectives focused solely on sharpening your understanding of the world is something that's very difficult to replicate independently.

I wanted a degree in physics but it doesn't pay as much as a programming job would. So I took computer science instead. Teacher/Education degrees are good to get because of a teacher shortage but don't get paid as well as most other jobs.

When I went to a university it was 1986, I learned Turbo Pascal which is nothing compared to modern IDEs now. I learned Turbo C in 1987 and that helped me learn Ada, COBOL, FORTRAN, Visual BASIC, and many others. Once you understand the concepts you can learn almost any other language.

What clouds the discussion even further is that many of the people involved are far enough removed from that time in their life that they can't remember what they knew or didn't know about anything. I look back and think about how much I could have learned if I had spent less time doing things like video games, or watching sports or whatever, without realizing that so much has changed in 15+ years that alot of what I find interesting may not have been invented then. Or if it was, it wasn't that important to me.

I do think there's a lot of value in studying non-technical, potentially useless, even esoteric things, but this argument is not extraordinarily convincing.