Hacker News Reader

> Essentially, a good liberal arts education transforms your world-view of those subjects the same way a good engineering education does.

I think most people agree with that, they just disagree that it's worth paying $50/hour to get. Go into any high end coffee place and you'll find someone you can have a good discussion with about liberal arts-related topics. I was talking about Jeffersonian vs. Hamiltonian democracy with a member of the U.S. Foreign Service at a coffee place a couple months ago. Talked for two hours - cost was $5 for an iced tea. Sure beats paying $150 for a three hour lecture and getting assigned some busywork essay at the end of it.

Isn't that like arguing that you can pick up programming knowledge on internet discussion boards cheaper than a degree program?

In theory, sure, you can. In your spare time you might run into someone who really knows his shit and enlightens you.

But, just as with the coffee shop, more times than not you run into people whose facade of knowledge would shatter the first time you ask a question. Trick being, if you barely understand the topic yourself, you'll only stumble onto a question that exposes their ignorance by chance. You're as likely to be led completely astray and have your time wasted as not.

Further, the chance that a given discussion board or coffee shop will contain someone interested and educated in the particular concepts you care to discuss when you care to discuss them gets pretty damn small beyond trivial depth.

The reasonable component in the price of higher education is about the quality of the interpretation and dialogue between yourself, the professor and the other students.

In short, you're paying to have some assurance that the discussion and/or lecture will be of a higher quality than you would find elsewhere and some assurance the discussion will occur and be relevant at a given time.

> Isn't that like arguing that you can pick up programming knowledge on internet discussion boards cheaper than a degree program?

Nah, it's more arguing that you'd be better off learning by contributing to Open Source - then you'd get lessons and contacts for free instead of paying a lot of money to get.

> The reasonable component in the price of higher education is about the quality of the interpretation and dialogue between yourself, the professor and the other students.

$150 per class is a lot man, you can't just brush that aside. You can live on $150 for a whole week if you're frugal and live with roommates. And that's just one class. A day with four classes = $600 you're now in debt. That's a month of rent and cooked food if you're willing to slum it. Work on OSS, freelance, connect with people from the community - I say a month's worth of "living time" is worth a hell of a lot more than four classes.

Agreed. Hard to argue that price inflation in education hasn't reduced its value.

Not its worth -- that's remained or even increased. But its value.

I don't understand the distinction you're making. Did you mean "marginal value" instead of "value"?

No, Value.

What? In normal English, value and worth are nearly the same thing. In economic English, value is worth, usually spoken of relative to other worthwhile things, but not relative to price. So I don't understand you at all.

I interpreted that to mean

  value = worth - price

So as the price goes up, the value you get goes down.

So, define "value" in the context of an education.

There are other options. For example you can get a huge number of humanities lectures from good universities online. Try out "iTunes U" sometime if you haven't seen it already; it's got top-quality lectures, but not the discussion. (This discussion component should be cheaper to provide than the whole package. There's probably a startup opportunity here. I don't know where you can get such discussion now, though.)

Anyway, it's a large part of what you'd get in college, free. All you have to do is make a commitment to watch some lectures and study supplementary material if you don't understand something. It's a hell of a bargain.

Agreed 100%. I have a BA in history & religious studies from UVA -- I had intentions of becoming a museum curator -- but decided to follow a career path in technology instead. I parlayed my hobby & part time job into a Manpower temp-to-hire gig and, courtesy of a couple of tremendous bosses, was empowered to further my education on the job (trial by fire style). Now I direct a full stack (analysis, design, dev, ops, support, administration) of ~60 great folks and love my job. And it pays quite a bit better than $40k/yr....

I stopped trying to write code back around 2004. It's not my forté. I excel at dataset analysis & pattern recognition, and communication/soft skills. While it does not apply so much to the startup scene and bleeding edge tech companies, the corporate world has a dearth of competent technical managers, not being technicians are hard to find, but because it tends to be a lot easier for liberal arts majors to acquire a working competency of tech knowledge than it is for hardcore geeks to learn people skills.

As am I. A liberal arts education makes you better able to understand and explain the world around you. The notion that every moment of college must be teaching you a skill that you will directly apply in your future career is positively stifling.

Strawman. Very few people are saying that, not enough to worry about. The claim is not that 100% of college should be about teaching useful skills, the claim is that if you're going to be put into tens of thousands of dollars of debt that can not be removed by bankruptcy it should probably be the case that more than zero percent of your college time should be spent on a directly-salable skill.

Many people are really misunderstanding the argument here. It is not that liberal arts are bad. It is that it is basically large-scale fraud to sell a college degree as best way to a well-paying job and worth the massive undischargable-debt without explaining that the promise really only applies to practical degrees.

You are free to complain about how the market only values degrees that produce marketable skills (and I've deliberately phrased it a bit tautologically to make it obvious that it's not really a very compelling complaint), but I still say that if you want people to pursue impractical degrees you need to be doing it by telling them the truth about what they are doing. I will not deny anybody their right to go into tens of thousands of dollars of debt chasing their dream, I just want them to do it with eyes wide open.

>As am I. A liberal arts education makes you better able to understand and explain the world around you. The notion that every moment of college must be teaching you a skill that you will directly apply in your future career is positively stifling.

A computer science education is not merely vocational training, as you imply. But theoretical CS is still a hell of a lot more meaningful than postmodern literary theory.

By what standard? And to whom?

There was an article in the NY Times a couple of weeks back describing all these students are getting into tons of debt, graduating private colleges, and expecting to leave college and get some high paying salary because they went to Harvard or Columbia. The article at followed one girl in particular, showing examples from her life how tragic the situation was for these college grads. It wasn't until the end of the article that her major was mentioned: Womans Studies.

A liberal arts education can only be supported by an economy that that is strong enough to allow it. Thats just not the case anymore. At least not for people to spend 4 years on; not to mention the negative cash flow. Its not that Liberal Arts is inherently bad, it is just unsustainable as it exists right now.

Maybe, maybe not, but for the time and cost investment, it's not a good proposition if you aren't going to make money off of it. And, at any rate, if you're not going to use the qualification bestowed, why not simply take part time classes and take on the subjects that interest you most as oppossed to taking the curriculum mandated for a degree?

Just a reminder but Hard Science degrees also make you take some general education requirements, for instance my Computer Science degree came with courses such as:

* 4 Semesters of Latin

* Chinese Mythology

* History

* Linguistics

* Entomology

* Sociology

* Macro Economics

Not always. I went through an engineering degree and took exactly two non-engineering courses in my 4.5 years - and that was only because I loaded one of them on as an extra credit (damn near killed myself doing it too).

The way the college system works today, the "well roundedness" aspects are disappearing, and quickly. Don't blame the schools, blame ourselves - we're the ones balking at paying top-dollar for a hard science degree and then being forced to take "useless" liberal arts courses.

Whoa! really? Which school?

University of Waterloo, in Canada.

Brown?

Same here, we had to take eight 3-credit humanities courses to graduate. I ended up taking history, literature, and some sociology. We even had to take physical education for 4 or 6 (I forget) semesters at 1 credit a pop.

heh. One of the things I found most amusing on applying to college was how my military service filled all my physical education requirements.

I would personally find it a sad, sad day if enrollment in liberal arts rapidly declined. People that major in liberal arts bring great joys to our world. Film, music, art, dance, and great books are all things that truly enhance life, and honestly, is also the cultural force that makes the United States so great.

One of my biggest regrets of my collegiate education was not making a conscious effort to expand my curriculum by taking courses in the humanities department.

how many great filmmakers went to film school, though?

Most of them.

I think the question you want to ask is "What proportion of film school graduates become great filmmakers?"

No, you want to compare that proportion with the proportion of amateur filmmakers who never went to school and became great filmmakers. In other words, does film school increase your chances?

The point is, there is a shortage of engineers, doctors and lawyers. This is why the market pays them higher starting salaries and higher salaries overall. There will forever be a shortage in my field, as current graduation rates go.

On the other hand, there are a glut of "enhanced worldview" liberal arts majors applying for jobs with little to no experience or day 1 vocational skills. They are not failures or cogs -- but from a hiring perspective there is little to distinguish one from another when sorting through resumes.

A liberal arts degree, from an employment perspective, is ubiquitous and a commodity. Specialization is worth more.

If I told members of my generation they could get a job in Pittsburgh, PA starting at $55,000, requiring 36-hour work weeks in 12 hour shifts, with city benefits and pension, and that it started 15K higher than my first job out of college, most would be interested.

When I told them it was working as a Pittsburgh Waste Disposal job (aka Garbage man), most would tell me to kindly fuck off. Their "degree status" is insulted that a starting garbage man will make 20-25K more than them, despite the fact I could never pay them enough to do the job themselves.

Getting a Bachelor's degree is more about proving you are educable than proving you are educated.

A history degree is just as applicable to this mindset of educability as a computer science degree. The only difference between the two is that a computer science degree offers its bearer some amount of vocational skills.

I got CS degree from a liberal arts school. I really considered it the best of both worlds. I enjoyed the art, music, and other arts classes I had to take, and I think they kept me from getting burned out on math/science.

I feel that I received a very good education for the money I paid.

The folks here are knocking liberal arts degrees because they don't believe that there are any worthwhile careers outside of hacking.

That's obviously false -- there are quite a few non-technical professions out there that are perfectly viable for careers beyond teaching.

For this forum, non-IT related degrees don't mean much, but that doesn't mean that they don't have value in one of the legion of other fields out there.

"I did go to a school with a reputation for having a hard liberal arts core education, and it turned out to be a great decision. (In retrospect, I now wish I had gone to a different school, but the one I chose wasn't bad at all.)"

I knew a fellow maroon before I clicked the profile.