Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities | Hacker News Reader

Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

sappingattention.blogspot.com

153 pointsbenbreen236 comments

I was a double major in CS and Latin, and once I asked my Latin advisor about grad school for Latin. I didn’t intend on going, I was just curious about what she would say as a tenured Latin professor at a good university.

The look on her face when I asked was complete shock and she went on a rant about how it was the dumbest idea ever. She told me how she was going on sabbatical to write a book that only 30 people would read if she was lucky, but was essentially required to do it. And how ignoring my CS degree for Latin was insanity, and her money problems, and on and on.

Additionally, I had a young associate professor who I became close with, had a degree from Harvard, and was essentially the definition of the future of Latin instruction. She told me she was going to leave the university to go to law school because she made basically nothing and had to work crazy hours.

When the professors themselves tell you not to bother, you know it’s a terrible idea!

Which is a shame, because I would happily teach Latin for a guaranteed $18,000 a year.

Latin is an amazing language that has a lot of tangential applications. At the very least, Latin shouldn't go extinct.

Hard to live and work around Boston on $18,000 salary

Hard to be human and get sick on $18k a year.

One good thing about university employment is that the health benefits are usually very good, even if the salary isn't.

Till you get laid off and get sick with no savings :)

Adjuncts aren’t employees.

The new trend in university employment is hiring adjuncts at <$20k/yr without benefits.

Don't bin us all in together. Most of the modern world it's really not that expensive to go get real sick.

It's expensive to get sick everywhere nowadays, it's just that the cost is spread out in most Western countries.

Though socialized medicine countries have much less per-capita medical spending, it's still quite a lot.

Or rather ... maybe getting sick is not so expensive. But getting sick and old is ...

I see what you're saying, but I think it's safe to say they were suggesting it is expensive to the individual if they get sick, not to their entire society. The two are very different problems.

Yes, the burden of healthcare costs in places with universal healthcare are spread across all taxpayers, but for that you get a society that can be reasonably confident that getting sick won't bankrupt them (especially if your socialised healthcare nation also has good welfare).

It's easy to dismiss as a "won't happen to me" kind of thing, but in reality it can happen to anyone. A couple of years ago my wife was suddenly admitted to hospital for a couple of weeks and then physical therapy for 6+ months and it didn't cost us anything except her lost income. In the US that could've easily run us several hundred thousand dollars with bad or no insurance. There's a reason medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the USA.[0]

[0] https://www.fool.com/retirement/2017/05/01/this-is-the-no-1-...

My rent and food in NYC are less than $14,000 with roommates. I have a savings if something goes wrong.

Take out taxes, transportation, entertainment, medical expenses, etc. Living off of savings for emergencies is inherently not sustainable. Setting aside retirement entirely.

Taxes on $18,000 is $800 in usa. Entertainment we just do for free through torrenting and walking.

Medical expenses, well, we live in the Usa. You just find a way to skate by until you don't. Obviously the political solution needs to be "Medicare for all", but I don't have the power to fight the multi billion dollar insurance lobby :)

Living off of savings is sustainable if you have $50,000 saved and only $1,000 a year in excess spending.

I currently make $50,000 a year. But, I usually get laid off, because I am precariously employed. So, after taxes, I usually only take home about $25,000 a year.

I would be much happier with a guaranteed $17,000 a year instead.

Just a nitpick, but medicare for all is not necessarily an obvious solution for those who want universal healthcare

I can see where you are coming from. Ironically I have been working as a group health broker for 6 months now and I can tell you that at least from my inside view, this industry is incredibly, incredibly broken. The incentive structure is perverse.

There is no reason why losing your job should mean the choice between paying $800 a month for Cobra or going uninsured. Medicaid fills this problem ($30 in NY state for those who make I believe below $19,000 a year), but many doctors do not accept it.

So I think it's time to either force doctors to work for less or to force the rich to pay for Medicare for all. Because right now prices are inflated and only the rich/employed can afford relatively accetable care.

And no, even I don't have coverage in this job! XD

Where do you live to have 25% loss to taxes from the state + City? Your marginal is 25% to fed... Is this those weird PA taxes? 50% is lol material or you are getting scammed by your accountant.

On a $50,000 salary, I'm keeping $36,000 post tax. But, at least in my personal situation/industry, we face seasonal and unpredictable layoffs.

So the annual rate of $50,000 is inaccurate (Americans always boast about their annual pretax salary). I face usually 3 months of unemployment every year, so 9 x $3,000 post tax per month = $27,000 a year

Sorry if that wasn't clear. I would really prefer to have guaranteed but lower income.

The majority of people want to buy homes and start families at some point, and you can’t do that on $18k per year.

The ”why did I do this” crisis of the middle-aged academiac often goes hand-in-hand with this realization. It’s fun to be frugal in your 20s though.

Part of me thinks it might be difficult for a well documented language to go extinct today.

I was going to disagree, but looks like language is considered extinct when it has no speakers left, including second-language speakers. [1] The total loss of native speakers is called "language death" instead. So yes, Latin will likely never be extinct.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death

Sed ubi tum id faciens illo pretio habites?

“But where then will you have those doing... something something...”

In 10 years it has left me, but a few hours with Wheelock and I’m sure I’d get it back!

What is Wheelock?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheelock%27s_Latin

In Germany they pay teachers way more than that and some high schools teach Latin.

Indeed. Teachers in Germany earn more than many, if not most, software engineers. Then again, IIRC Germany has the third-highest teacher salaries after South Korea and Luxembourg.

You probably can. I had a (public) high school teacher who was a Latin BA, and when he was hired at our school he taught English, then started a Latin club where he taught it to maybe 10 students the first year, several more the next. He also worked a lot of Latin into his English curriculum.

Now, if you want to be paid to teach only Latin, that's a harder sell.

I received the same rant/incredulity from several of my own professors (in Philosophy). It was incredibly disheartening to see academics essentially give up on any sort of robust future for their field.

Isn't it better they are honest rather than set unrealistic expectations that students will regret years later.

It's one thing to be realistic about the economics of pursuing a field, and another to be defeatist or outright dismissive of the idea itself.

Edit: I should say that my professors came off more as defeatist than dismissive. I was never told that I couldn't study Philosophy at the graduate level.

The thing is, when you are young and idealistic, you will say to yourself things like "I don't care about the money!", which is probably what these people told themselves.

These people are disillusioned and so will the future you be, but your present you has to make the decision. It's incredibly valuable that they're being honest to you and to themselves.

I know people that were enthusiastically encouraged to continue, and completely wrecked their lives.

I think that it is good thing that they talk openly with students who are deciding about their future. It was way more respectable then pretending everything is cool in order to sell you some unlikely dream.

It's not about whether the academics give up or not. It's about whether they get funding or not. No funding, no future.

Basically the philosophy profession has given up on trying to persuade students and society as a whole of its value.

I think to a great extent this is due to the logical-positivism and Russellian analytic focus that took over the profession after WWII. Before that American philosophers focused on classical philosophy, Hegelianism, and Pragmatism, all of which could be related to the realities of contemporary life and society.

But then, as Rorty has explained, philosophers got the idea of turning their field into an exact science that would be the handmaiden of the natural and social sciences. This made philosophy inaccessible to non-specialists, and furthermore was a gigantic intellectual failure. One result was the profession came to be populated by several generations of teachers who have no idea about how to talk to non-philosophers. Hence you get people like Steven Hawking and Neil Degrasse Tyson arguing that philosophy is irrelevant. And the only other group is the postmodernists, who tend to be marxists who turn off most Americans.

All this is quite unfortunate, in part because liberal democracy is based to a great extent on philosophical ideas that go back to the Greeks, and hence philosophy has a great deal to say that is relevant today.

Same here. Apparently the job market for philosophers, especially in academia, is terrible because there is a glut of philosophy PhDs and tenured philosophy professors stick around for decades. So most philosophy professors are associate professors who get paid a couple of thousand per semester. Can't imagine living on that in NY. Imagine having a doctorate and making $6K per year.

So I double majored in computer science and philosophy like a lot of my class mates.

> law school

Technically still part of the humanities :)

I majored in math and history and my history adviser made it very clear to us how brutal the job market for history phd's was, although he did that in the context of how great the people they were hiring were (compared to the old guard). Basically there were so few tenure track positions open in the whole country that every open position would get world class applicants (or at least close).

> > law school

> Technically still part of the humanities :)

Law is usually considered part of the social sciences rather than the humanities (outside of the law schools that offer BSL as well as JD degrees, undergraduate study of law is often within political science departments.)

Law School for a JD is a vocational/trade school.

Yeah, it might fall under a "science", but that is Job Training, and a whole other thing.

Law, political science and history all fall in the sizable overlap between the humanities and social sciences:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanities

I wise likewise told by my advisor that any sort of post-degree work in History would be futile. My chance of getting hired as "a white male" in a history department was not good, and frankly "there is not a lot of future in history" (which we laughed at).

Futile is much too strong of a word. I'm a white male, got a PhD in history, and ended up getting a good TT job in my first year on the market. Was I lucky? Undoubtedly. But some of the pessimism about history phds really is unwarranted in my view, for the reason the author mentions toward the end. I think the field has a strong future personally. It is just looking like the 80s through '00s was an enrollment high point. Doesn't mean there are no jobs left, or good work isn't being done.

On the other hand, I fully concede that, for my history and CS dual major students, I'd agree that it's be a bad idea to get a PhD in history if you have the skills and inclination to get a CS degree or a job at FB/Google/etc instead.

What's your sample size? One?

Objectively speaking, if you spend five to six figures on a degree with a 10% chance of landing a job through it, that's not an attractive proposition.

"Futile" may be the wrong word, a better word would be "foolish".

If you're paying tuition to do a PhD instead of receiving a stipend, you are being scammed.

Exactly, it's a common misconception that people go into debts for PhDs. The stipends are low, but being paid to learn, travel and do research is not a bad choice for some people.

And yet you're paying five to six figures in opportunity cost either way.

Let's hold on a sec because the discussion glossed over this. Are we all just accepting that it's normal for it to be harder for you to get a job because of your skin and gender? That's pretty outrageous and sad.

are you serious.... welcome to the world for literally every era other than hopefully 100 years from now for black people and women

The thing about reverse discrimination that makes it particularly egregious is that on some level people view it as more socially acceptable than traditional discrimination. Discrimination based on superficial characteristics is always, and equally wrong in all cases. Furthermore, reverse discrimination actually perpetuates the very rift that its proponents decry.

>socially acceptable

what you fail to realize is that this is manifestly a contradiction: by definition if it were more socially acceptable to discriminate against "white males" then white males would be the marginalized class. that's why claims like this are farcical; of course more people are fine discriminating against black people and women!

I don't want to argue the merits, but I do want to point out where the argument is. What you consider "reverse discrimination" I consider attempts to change the result of centuries of oppression. Such attempts take many forms. I do not think such attempts perpetuates the problem, but rather are attempts to rectify it.

Again, I'm not trying to argue this on its merits. I just was surprised by your wording, because I got the impression that you took the matter as settled, when it is very contested.

What point are you trying to make to me?

My conversation with two of my professors pretty much sealed my future as far as getting away from a history PhD. I did a Master's, and I'm glad I tried it, but when I asked the two profs I was closest with whether it was worth continuing with all of the negative things I had read and experienced, they both gave a very clear "we aren't supposed to say this, but get the fuck out while you still can." It's really unfortunate. I love history, I love teaching, but the market is just a meat grinder these days. A few years after I had quit, I was working for the back office at a bank doing anti-fraud work. A guy who had been a sociology professor for about fifteen years had just left academia to join us. I asked him, "Do you miss it?" He said, "I miss the idea of it, but that's not what it is." It's a shame, but there you go.

>"Do you miss it?" He said, "I miss the idea of it, but that's not what it is."

I... Wow.

when I asked the two profs I was closest with whether it was worth continuing with all of the negative things I had read and experienced, they both gave a very clear "we aren't supposed to say this, but get the fuck out while you still can."

Ditto for English: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befo....

I get impression that people who are not that wealthy try to get into things that should be reserved for "high society". With Pareto distribution of wealth, most of us are just plebs. Of course we are not as poor as plebs in medieval but still we are vulnerable, one bad accident and professor is out of money and in debt.

If you are millionaire or from rich family you can spend all day reading ancient philosophers. That was what high society was doing in earlier days, they had money so they could "waste" time being unproductive.

Then you get all those kids and their parents who want to study something like philosophy. They feel like they are rich and their kids deserve degree. But brutal truth is if you are making $50k a year you might feel comfortable but it is still far from being rich. There are people who buy cars each year for that amount of money.

In the end it is not all about money as people say, but stories like parent comment shows the truth, first make your money and then if you have time and possibility follow your passion. Which is easier for rich because they already have money.

You'll notice the tag-line for the blog is “Digital Humanities: Using tools from the 1990s to answer questions from the 1960s about 19th century America.”

That's what I've been doing for the last half a decade, Digital Humanities (DH). DH is what you get when you ask yourself, “What happens when you add computational methods to the scholar's toolkit? What kind of questions can you ask? What does it imply for scholarship in the Humanities?”

That's one thing that's happening. And it's a good thing. At my uni (a second-tier uni in Western Europe) we have an undergrad program four years old which combines elements of CS (mainly the non-theoretical stuff) with subjects of the students own choosing from the Arts. I believe that within a decade all higher-level institutions will offers programs like this. The Arts & Humanities is undergoing a paradigm shift the likes of which it hasn't experienced in decades, perhaps even centuries. Only those with backgrounds in the humanities are going to be able to write this new chapter in the story of human learning and understanding.

Another thing that's happening. The economy. That's maybe not an unrelated issue. Are there going to be jobs that people will be rewarded for if they get degrees in the humanities? Not in this economic climate. I don't know if people recognise my handle here (probably not) but my area is philosophy. I can see that people are crying out for philosophical instruction. I just attended a Jordan B. Peterson / Sam Harris live event where 8,500 eager souls turned up. You know what a tenured philosopher of a decent institution said when I enquired of a table of philosophers about Peterson, “Oh, that idiot from Toronto.” Academic philosophy is failing philosophy. Could the same be true of other arts and humanities subjects?

Academic institutions are as politically biased if not more so as the rest of society. And these are the people we are looking to for direction in our lives? I've been saying this for the last while but it is my conjecture that the humanities is broken to exactly the same extent and the same degree that philosophy has lost its way in the last century.

What I'm trying to say is, the crisis in the humanities is deep problem. It is related to the current economic situation, to the current political situation, it's an institutional problem, it's an epistemological problem, it's related to the current cultural climate – ultimately it's a philosophical problem.

Final note (though I could write a lot more) – the culture war between the arts and the sciences goes back nearly 150 years (I've researched this) so this has been brewing for an extremely long time. There have been multiple times in the past when the humanities were in the dominant position and the sciences the reverse so make of that what you will.

Peterson is telling people what they want to hear, which is why he has an audience. He's not carrying out a sincere inquiry into philosophical truth.

Same difference as why newspapers have an astrology column not an astronomy one.

That's off-topic so I'm not responding.

Peterson is telling people what they want to hear, which is why he has an audience. He's not carrying out a sincere inquiry into philosophical truth.

What people want to hear is condemnation of de-platforming, shouting down and other behaviors new to the last decade or two in academia. He's also not a philosopher, he's a psychiatrist. His comments around the postmodernist influence in the Humanities and the cultural effects - right or wrong - are a fascinating topic of debate quite relevant to this thread.

I am doing a PhD in natural language processing coming from an undergrad study Literature and Linguistics, and I can relate. I gave up on the humanities very early on because of the blind activism in research and the classroom at the cost of methodology. I moved into NLP and ML research.

One literary history professor put it blatantly and honestly when talking about teaching in the humanities: "Academia for us is a way to instill our ideology in the elite of society." More propaganda than science. I too hope the appreciation of empiricism gets better with the (re-)introduction of data-driven and computational methods.

I was a hard Classics major, Latin and Greek, devoted almost 10 years of my life to it, and I just had to walk away. I'm going back for CS, and this touches my soul. I'm glad I tried for it, but I need to sustain myself and feel like I am worth something at my job. You are not alone, friend.

It’s ok, life is long. Contact me if you ever want to chat, email in profile

You know what's funny is how many topics on 'hacker news' are basically questions of sociology or anthropology or economics or psychology. If you could make some kind of AI that would color the comments here based on what academic discipline they were most closely linked to, I think it would just be a sea of colors that fall under the 'humanities' or 'liberal arts' umbrella.

It's not that people aren't deeply interested in these topics. It's just.... maybe academia's current model doesn't work so well anymore. Woudln't be the first time scholarship as a profession adapted to changing society. I hate that it will happen, I hate what we are losing... but I feel like the fundamentals are strong in the long term. You can go to a book store or library ... the books that have staying power represent the ideas that have staying power, and software products that have a life time of 7 years (which is what a lot of classes selling themselves as STEM actually teach) do not make the long term cut in the marketplace of important ideas.

Those topics are intrinsically harder and more intractable. They deal with far more complex and chaotic systems. This is the fundamental issue.

Looking at it this way, it isn't surprising that humanity has a much less productive grasp of such subjects. The topics are of great interest, but it is difficult to make substantial, concrete progress.

This doesn't mean we should give up. It just means we should expect to struggle greatly as we seek to move forward in these areas.

Another important lesson is the value of the indirect approach. Progress and changes from other domains can have a massive impact in the long run, sometimes even dwarfing the majority of efforts from those who are working directly on the thing. I think we need to study these dynamics more.

It's also important to remember that fundamentally, humanities are a part of cultural production and reproduction. Anything that can be rigorously proven migrates to the realm of science. Humanities are by definition supposed to construct knowledge that guides our decision-making about issues where no certainty is possible.

The biggest difference between STEM and everything else is the issue of externalities. Heck, even within STEM you see a spectrum based on externalities.

What do I mean? Major in biology and do life-saving research. Unless you can translate that into a biotech patent (or better yet, a biotech company) you won't see much in the way of compensation. The same goes for the humanities and much of the social sciences. Unless the work you do can be directly captured and used to generate profit, you won't be compensated adequately. The positive externalities you produce that benefit society come right out of your own pocket.

On the opposite end of the spectrum you have people doing CS and mathematical finance working as quants for banks like Goldman Sachs or people studying geo engineering and working in oil/gas/mineral exploration. There you are capturing everything for your employer and pushing the negative externalities on society. Little wonder that those happen to be some of the most lucrative opportunities for STEM grads.

Are you saying that engineering has no benefit to society?

> Are you saying that engineering has no benefit to society?

Surely it has. But you are compensated for it, because it has a financial benefit for some company.

I think every engineer or applied scientists should be expected to take a reasonable "liberal" education subset - including history, literature and law. I know that this is very much not in vogue with the latest group-think in college, but I also believe that humanities should master at least basic calculus. Not because you may need to do a differential or integral, but rather because it teaches you to think differently.

The thing that scares me more then anything else is that my view is that The anti-intellectual authoritarianism has spread even to college campuses, where liberal educations are now viewed as tools of oppression rather then as the minimum expectation for a well-informed citizen.

There needs to be at least a solid understanding of the trivium along with ethics before anyone should be allowed to graduate with any degree (whether for arts, humanities, or STEM). And yes, I think that basic calculus might be a good thing to add to that as well.

The problem with a liberal education doesn't lie so much with the subjects of curriculum as much as how leaders in the humanities abuse their knowledge and positions for their own authoritarian leanings. This is what fuels the anti-intellectualism of today which has lead to the latest wave of populist authoritarianism. An educational system geared towards making money off of sheepskin instead of actually enlightening people doesn't help either.

I'd say the anti-intellectual authoritarianism has emanated from campuses. That being said when I first went to college I also held the view that mandating some level of humanities was important to be "well-rounded", and on some level still think this is true, but I've since soured on the people who say we need more B-school & Engineering schools students taking these classes to promote so called "critical thinking" as I've felt that "skill" is more a personal mentality than any thing taught in a class. That and I think it is rent seeking by the schools who have less economic resources. Also part of my souring is, which I think you are alluding to, that it seems to be more about indoctrination than anything else.

No... “rounding” is mostly about being able to coherently think and write, which requires structured practice to achieve competence or mastery. The median engineer is awful at both.

I do agree that the dumbing down of universities comes from universities, and the prominence and political power of nonsensical areas of study drags everyone down.

The median engineer is not able to coherently think and write? Is the median humanities grad better able to do this?

I don't see much of a difference. The majority of engineers I've interacted with have actually been well adjusted people who can coherently think and write.

You probably work with a lot of engineers.

The time a CS graduate spends learning algorithms and honing fluency in computer languages is spent by a history major reading, analysis and writing papers. On average you tend to be better at things you do a lot. It’s not to say the average engineer cannot think and write, but those aren’t skills you select for. In some cases, you may need engineering talent who can not communicate in your language!

Engineers write less and for a different purpose. A technical writer, newspaper journalist and novelist approach a similar action (writing) with a different approach and methodology.

There’s a reason why you see attorneys in leadership roles outside of their domain than other professions that attract smart, diligent workers. (There are few doctors in politics or non-medical corporate leadership positions, for example.) They tend to be better at broad-scope analysis and zoom in a deeply technical area with consultative assistance, and they tend to be better able to communicate the outcome of that analysis. They tend to be humanities or social science majors.

Median any position is probably not terribly great at it. Agnostic of engineering imo. I do think you need structured practice to get good at anything but I don't necessarily believe that needs to come from a mandated class, i.e. structured self study, nor do I think mandating the class would actually get people to absorb the material. I'd imagine you probably attended some liberal arts classes that had a subset, if not majority, of people who were there simply because it was mandated. Those persons aren't necessarily interested and because of that won't put forth the effort so why waste the teachers time or the students through coercion? Does one really need to master any given skill to "succeed" in life? I think simply being good enough at any given thing you live a good life is a fine bar to set.

I actually think that my writing improved more during my CS degree than my history degree.

In CS there was an emphasis on clarity, succinctness, and thinking about how well you've communicated your ideas to your intended audience.

Having said that, maybe the large volumes of writing practice from history made me receptive to those lessons.

There were also a couple of history professors who were very good at cutting through overly flowery and insufficiently meaningful writing with comments like "where is your evidence for this?".

I haven't the slightest idea of what "Critical Thinking" is; the term seems more cant of the education decryer than anything else.

However, I will say that the apprehension of works of beauty and the development of abstract thinking patterns with regards to ethics, anthropology, and metaphysics are valuable, for reasons I'm not certain how to articulate. I might only say that I would not wish to live in a world without them, and would consider anyone who--having the means to appreciate them and the requisite intellectual ability--found them simply unnecesary or undesirable, to simply lack som essential form of humanity.

>I also believe that humanities should master at least basic calculus.

I agree that mathematics is underappreciated by most people who work in the humanities. But I strongly disagree that they should learn calculus.

In fact, I would argue that calculus is the problem with the perception of math in the social sciences. There are plenty of types of math that could potentially be applied in sociology and its variants, particularly mathematical logic and graph theory. Statistics needs no introduction. Calculus by contrast deals with continuous changes in well-defined quantities, which are not like anything a sociologist encounters.

I suspect that the reason that many sociologists believe that most of mathematics is basically an extended version of calculus -- as seen in this essay:

https://www.edge.org/conversation/rory_sutherland-this-thing...

-- is because a social scientist's primary interaction from math is by way of economics, who do use calculus to track nearly-continuous changes in well-defined quantities.

However, economics is unique among the social sciences in that the phenomena it seeks to describe can be readily quantified. This leads to the mistaken belief, evident in the article, that mathematics is only able to contribute to the study of things which are easily quantifiable, which is not true at all!

Students in sociology should really be taught statistics and discrete math, with special attention to any techniques that may be useful in describing human behavior.

agree re: econ's use of calculus (at the undergrad level), since everything gets reduced to a constrained optimisation problem (with potentially slack constraints that require use of Kuhn-Tucker, if one gets fancy). But at the graduate level and beyond, it goes way beyond that. one essentially cannot get into a good phd programme in economics without having done at least up to real analysis as an undergrad. my ugrad profs used to say it is easier to get into grad school in econ with a math ugrad than an econ one.

game theory, information economics, social choice theory all make use of lots of pure math. e.g. you have to understand brouwer and kakutani before you understand nash's proofs.

discrete math, functional analysis, topology could be useful for 'formal modelling' (which is what the other social sciences call econ-style theorising).

Statistics needs no introduction. Calculus by contrast deals with continuous changes in well-defined quantities, which are not like anything a sociologist encounters.

Calculus comprises the foundation of statistics. Without calculus you can learn to apply statistical experiments, but you can’t really understand what’s going on. That makes for brittle insight. Just because the set of all humans is strictly finite doesn’t mean the underlying continuity in statistical theory ceases to exist.

A two semester sequence of single and multivariable calculus is really not a lot to ask in return for delivering a robust understanding of statistics. It’s not like demanding knowledge of analysis, topology, and measure theory before learning rigorous probability theory.

I feel like I would have been a lot more interested in calculus in high school if I had first understood how statistics could be used for inference, and how calculus was vital for understanding statistics.

As someone who struggled with the "engineering calculus" track and switched to the "humanities calculus" track to do an economics major, I don't think the problem is with the material. I think it's a combination of poor teaching and overemphasis on computing results as if it were "fancy arithmetic" to be used daily.

It's worth being made aware of calc so that you can seek it out. It has applications aplenty. But that's a different role than the one it's presently in. For many calculus problems encountered in the real world, you can hand your data set over to the computer and get a numerical approximation back. For the ones that don't respond to that treatment, you can, most likely, look up tables of identities and find the ones you need to get the analytic solution.

There's some pedagogical idea that you can build your math intuition from working calculus problem sets, but that really isn't what happens in most classes. It's done by rote to keep continuity with high school math - the students because it's what they know, and the professors because it eases their lives. And so they struggle through a few semesters, and then some students go on to try advanced mathematics and encounter a completely different universe where math becomes proof-centric and they have to engage a different skillset that is more reminiscent of philosophical reasoning than anything they have probably encountered in prior math courses.

So it's a charade. You could spend much less time on any one field as a single topic, approaching higher math from an information-sciences perspective where you learn to seek out the forms of mathematics you need, engage in some inductive and deductive reasoning, and learn study techniques for math texts and papers(and hence, how to really gain insight on advanced math topics) to supplement your primary field - and not make any of it a bogeyman of higher education.

I agree very much. It has always stung a nerve with me, the fact that if you are a scientist with no interest or knowledge in humanities or arts you get (rightfully) labeled an ignorant and a reductionist obsessed solely with his science; yet the reverse, if you have a background in the humanities and know nothing about science or mathematics, is somehow okay or even celebrated in certain circles. You can proudly declare you "understand nothing of that horrible complicated maths and physics". Boggles the mind. Many lawyers, artists, literature scholars, historians, philosophers, etc, simply don't mind being stuck inside a bubble and inside a myopic way to see the world. A different perspective, such as that offered by mathematics, of rigour and analysis, would do them a world of good, so as not to be stuck inside a bubble/echo chamber.

One of the things that drove me nuts at university is how much some STEM students mocked a particular set of "...for humanities" math classes without knowing their content. There were some great applications of mathematical thinking that people were shamed about taking.

Can you give an example?

I'm not who you are asking, but this book https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Experience-Phillip-J-Dav... hits some of the philosophy of math. It's been a long time since I've dipped into it, but IIRC, it puts mathematical discoveries and exploration into more of a cultural and philosophical context. I could see this being sampled for a good crossover course that would cover humanities requirements for STEM, and STEM requirements for humanities.

There's a course called "Math for Social Choice", for example, that focused on how voting works from a mathematical sense in one section, for example.

> liberal educations are now viewed as tools of oppression rather then as the minimum expectation for a well-informed citizen.

I often hear people say that a college education is about opening the mind, being able to think critically, being able to challenge one's own beliefs, etc. But then I often find the people make those claims not even able to consider the possibility that many people people achieve that without a college education. We should consider that there might be a certain amount of group think and signaling involved, and that a college education might not improve one's critical thinking skills as much as is often assumed.

I've never understood how a liberal education was supposed to enable critical thinking. In my experience, a STEM education enabled it, because while you can argue any point of view in liberal arts, you cannot pretend that the bridge you designed didn't fall down when it did. You're forced to deal with reality which doesn't care about your biases, fallacies, and dearly held misconceptions.

> I think every engineer or applied scientists should be expected to take a reasonable "liberal" education subset - including history, literature and law. I know that this is very much not in vogue with the latest group-think in college, but I also believe that humanities should master at least basic calculus

That can work. I believe that because you've just described MIT and Caltech.

MIT requires everyone to take at least 8 semesters of arts, social science, or humanities course per semester, which works out to on average one such course per semester over the course of their degree. This must include at least one from each of those groups. They must also pick one from a list of several available "fields of concentration" in the arts, social science, or humanities, and take 3 or 4 courses in that field of concentration.

Caltech requires 108 units of humanities or social sciences, at least 27 of which must be humanities and 27 of which must be humanities. Caltech has 3 terms per academic year, so that works out on average to 9 units a term. A Caltech unit corresponds to the number of hours a course is expected to take a week (lectures + labs + homework and reading), and 9 units is about an average course. In other words, it is similar to MIT: you are taking at least one such class a term, and it takes about as much time as your typical engineering or science class.

On the calculus front, MIT requires everyone to take single and multivariable calculus. Same at Caltech. Both also require everyone to take physics through most of what is covered in, say, the Feynman Lectures, and chemistry.

Harvey Mudd College has a similar requirement for STEM majors to take a range of humanities courses.

In addition to the study requirements you mention the MIT Hayden Library is one of the best 'small' humanities libraries I have ever visited. I did a lot of homework there for a summer class in technical Japanese in 1990.

You can take study breaks by wandering around the stacks, which not large but amazingly well selected. Virtually every book you put your finger on is something worth reading. The Hayden Library opened up a whole world of biblical studies through the works of Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, which were sitting in the shelves a few feet away from my table. It's colored my impression of MIT ever since.

> but I also believe that humanities should master at least basic calculus.

I always manage to astound people by mentioning that Marx independently developed foundations of differential calculus[1].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_manuscripts_of_Ka...

Honestly, the majority of humanities students I've interacted with have been uninspired and unmotivated. I took a good deal of humanities classes and more often than not comments were uninformed and presentations poor quality.

And what do you expect? These students come in at 18 years old, straight out of high school. You put them in college and they want to do the least work possible. And since it's all papers, there is not an objective minimum for the work. With grade inflation, a poor quality paper can still pass you. By contrast, with engineering there are objective minimums. The program has to compile and tests have to pass. You have the structure that a young person needs out of high school, and the work ethic develops during this time.

Maybe about 1% of the humanities students actually cared about what they studied, their output reflected that in the form of papers and internships...when it came time to graduate a couple of the motivated students were Rhodes scholars or otherwise working in their field of study. Everyone else was either not doing much or working in another area.

Most of the time a degree is just a necessity to go into the workforce for whatever field, and those in humanities couldn't give less of a shit about what they're studying as long as there's a degree at the end.

> the majority of humanities students I've interacted with have been uninspired and unmotivated. I took a good deal of humanities classes and more often than not comments were uninformed and presentations poor quality.

> These students come in at 18 years old, straight out of high school. You put them in college and they want to do the least work possible.

> Most of the time a degree is just a necessity to go into the workforce for whatever field

I don't think your critique of undergraduate education is limited to the humanities. In my experience (I graduated two years ago from a top 10 school where I double majored in CS and history), students were there to have a good time and get a degree by the end of their four years. And, to be fair, I had a good time and didn't have to work nearly as hard as I do now.

However, I saw little difference between the character of history students and CS students overall. There were exceptional people in both departments (top ~5%), a larger percentage of people who generally worked hard and were competent (~60%), and a population that didn't take it seriously and sometimes wasn't above cheating (there was a non-zero population of CS majors who graduated with next to no programming skills).

My school's history department was relatively renowned, though the assignments didn't take nearly as long as CS/math labs. Still, many history profs were doing their best to fight grade inflation and had reasonable minimum standards.

At the end of my spring history seminar, I asked my professor (_the_ expert in a relatively large field) what he thought about going to grad school and strongly advised against it, saying it was a bad idea except for maybe one or two students every year: it is just too competitive to get a good job. So, a ton of history majors went into consulting and will probably go back to school for their MBAs; a smaller group is going (or planning on going) to law school if they can get into a top school; others are grinding in the entertainment industry trying to get their foot in the door. I don't think this is evidence of "uninspired" or "unmotivated" humanities students.

Nor do I think the fact that many history students go on to work in unrelated fields reflects poorly on the discipline: they learned about things they were interested in, improved their writing skills, critical thinking skills, etc.

The fact that their [liberal arts] education was a bad value -- in terms of both time and money -- is less endemic to their chosen major, but to the educational system as a whole.

You are right about there not being opportunities for work in some of these fields, but I just don't think the humanities foster creativity or critical thinking more than CS and I didn't see much interest from the students at a same tier school. If the interest was there it was not reflected in the effort exerted.

I taught an engineering course for one semester at a Big Ten university with a prestigious engineering school, many years ago. And I also work with young engineers who have recently graduated from college.

I'm not sure that all of my students and / or colleagues cared very much about the actual subject matter that they were studying, e.g., the math and theory. There was a conventional wisdom shared amongst students, that those topics were just a hoop to jump through, that they would never need in the "real world."

When they do arrive in the "real world," they get so busy with CAD, trial-and-error design, troubleshooting, and bureaucracy, that they forget most of their math and theory within a few months. I'm not sure if this is voluntary or not: Had they been given a work environment with more time to think and to continue learning, would they have retained their interest?

The few who keep those skills are the ones who are devious enough to guard their time, effectively giving themselves time to think. And they volunteer for the jobs that involve theory, which nobody else wants.

Another factor that may affect humanities students is the fact that some majors are harder to get into, and to stay in, than others. Nobody changes majors from <redacted> to chemical engineering because <redacted> is too hard. ;-) And it's a one way street too. Once you interrupt the train of prerequisites in most STEM majors, it's very hard to get back on your horse.

I agree that most engineering students don't care much either, but they generally have to put more work in and leave with some practical skills as well as a nice signing bonus + job at the end of the program. Humanities majors can just end up lost, no better off than after high school, and spending their 20s 'exploring.'

Take this with a grain of salt, I recently graduated so these are just my thoughts. Maybe in 10 years when I'm 30 I will say it's better to spend your 20s exploring. But probably not :)

I think there are a couple things happening here. First, "everybody graduates." There has to be a path to graduation for everybody, or the parents, donors, and policy makers get quite annoyed. For this reason, there have to be "fluff" majors at every college.

Second, engineering has always had a public mission that is not shared by the humanities. Employability, and providing a minimal level of skill, are the purpose of engineering. Engineering says: "We will make you employable in spite of yourselves."

The humanities have not adopted that mission, and say: "You will make yourself employable if you take full advantage of what we offer here." You end up with a mixture of students, some are working barely hard enough to graduate, and a few are turning themselves into the next generation of thinkers.

Of course every field wants to sell itself as a gateway to employment: The world still needs "critical thinkers" and all that.

You can always tell a loser EE grad - he carries around one of those cards that has these formulae on it:

    V = I * R
    I = V / R
    R = V / I

I.e. they don't understand the most basic equation in electronics, nor algebra. But they have EE degrees! Don't ask me how this is possible, I'm as baffled as you are.

When they "design" a circuit, they pull it out of a book. If it doesn't work right, they try randomly varying the values of the components until it sort of works. (Instead of calculating what the correct values should be.)

In countries like India you would be laughed at if you aren't rich and take an arts degree. It is because in a country with limited earning opportunities, it doesn't make any sense to invest in a degree that has virtually non-existent employment opportunities.

Seems like the majority of US population has now become poor enough that taking getting a humanities degree is risky.

The cause is probably the other way around: college has become a necessary (but not always sufficient) ticket to the middle class, and so (by this calculation) is no longer valuable for its own sake.

I agree. In the past, there were fewer people with university degrees so they were worth more. Humanities degrees were seen as a indicator of intelligence and accomplishment. Now they are seen as an indicator of someone who went to university but had no real idea of what he wanted to major in.

To the extent that you have to go into debt...our nation's taxpayers (imo) are subsidizing for profit schools (with manipulative advertising on MTV and the Maury Show). Can we be that surprised when uninspired students getting an underwater basket weaving degree come out with 30k in debt?

> In countries like India ...

I thought India was pretty unique for its culture that values so highly engineering and as a result has the highest rates of engineering graduates. When you say other countries like India, which countries are you thinking of and what about them brings them to mind?

> I thought India [...] has the highest rates of engineering graduates.

Where did you see this? Weirdly enough it doesn't even seem to make the top 10 in the stats I can find, though they say "engineering/manufacturing/construction", and I'm not really sure we should be separating them for the purposes of the current discussion. (Though this is a bit weird considering how big India and China are? Not sure what's going on.)

[Edit: Seems they're not part of the World Economic Forum, and hence they lack data on India and China.]

But to address the question of what other such countries might be: the top 3 seem to be Russia, USA, Iran: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-most-...

Oh, that's an interesting point. Universities have increased their student body share from foreign countries. And from the same source, only 2% study humanities.

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/international-studen...

There's a spike from 3% to 5% of the total college population, so that doesn't account for the whole story. But the makeup of their elite school demographics might also differ from average.

That's because rich foreign students pay full price, as public schools cut funding and raise spending on educationally-worthless perks to raise their USNews rankings.

USNews has done grievous injury to tertiary education in USA.

And some would argue the same for hospitals.

Given that an arts degree in the US easily costs a quarter million (at least at a decent art school) these days, I think "poor" isn't the word I'd use for people who don't take it.

Just "not willing to be in debt for the rest of their lives".

https://www.campusexplorer.com/college-advice-tips/E58F762A/...

says $160K including residential living expenses (which you'd pay even if you weren't at scool.). $80K for the education part.

That example they chose is Pratt. IIRC, Pratt has a BA, not a BFA. It's also not even in the top20 art colleges.

And you know, $160k debt in a profession that has $35k salaries... paying that off will easily take 20-30 years. How's that not indentured servitude?

You're implying that's universally true, but it's not even close. Even places where tuition is that high (which is not all "decent" places), scholarships and financial aid can completely change the equation.

I think the 'crisis' can be distilled to a simple concept - with rising costs of living not many people want to invest in a degree which has relatively few options for comfortable living compared to other options. If the humanities are really so important for our culture, then the public needs to invest in making them practical options for someone to invest in. Otherwise, why bother lamenting about the lack of people studying humanities when there are limited job options in the humanities? Can you really blame them?

I think what's changed is that the humanities have become so easy to access that degreess are no longer required for people with just a passing interest and since the degree itself isn't worth as much as the skills it develops; is more effective to get a higher value degrees and persue those interests in other ways.

"Liberal education" originally meant the education appropriate for free people, as opposed to education in a trade, which was for slaves. Translating that into the modern day, if you have to work for a living, a liberal education probably isn't going to pay.

Indeed. Instead of seeking a broader understanding of the world and a greater ability to question and think critically about it, more students are seeking knowledge of a more practical nature that can lead to better employment opportunities in the near term. It's understandable.

On the whole, I don't think this is good... but this has been coming for a long time, due to many reasons, including:

* a broken funding system that saddles a majority of students with life-altering debt, effectively keeping many of them from studying what they love and forcing them instead to study what will land them a decent job;

* the slow-motion takeover at many universities and colleges by professional managers who use financial and other metrics to measure the "success" of and decide on the funding for different academic departments;

and last but not least,

* the gradual takeover of liberal arts faculties at many colleges and universities by individuals whom I can only describe as very ignorant -- uneducated, really -- in mathematics, the hard sciences, modern technologies, and the ways of business.[a] Perhaps the smart kids don't want to study with these ignorant individuals?

[a] As C. P. Snow wrote about these people in 1959 in his famous Two Cultures lecture: "A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of Have you read a work of Shakespare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question—such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read?—not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures)

> It's understandable.

And, in my opinion, it's a shame it's happening at universities and not being built up in trade schools for various subjects. Likewise, though, I do agree that it's not a good thing.

> [a]

It is interesting to see the divide. It really does go both ways between the two, though I think the issue lies more on the focus on focused-specialization over a well-roundedness. Obviously, you're going to have to be specialized for your job, but there's still room for a well-rounded individual. I think part of the problem goes back to secondary schools, and how many just push through them instead of actually learning to become well-rounded and find other things interesting.

> Instead of seeking a broader understanding of the world and a greater ability to question and think critically about it

I would argue that education in Math, Physics, Science, Engineering, etc, give you this ability far better than humanities do.

I would argue that without both, one is crippled in their ability to do so. Both are needed, but most people are sadly lacking in one or the other.

I agree

This is too bad. There used to be a much greater cross pollination between the sciences and humanities. One of the most interesting discussion about the 1st (not 2nd) law of thermodynamics came from one of my philosophy classes.

A society whose middle class is becoming cash-starved is not going to have enough time to engage in both a technical vocation and auxiliary reading. No cash is what's getting in the way of me pursuing the humanities more even though it's my preferred mode of thought. Although being distracted all the time might also have something to do with it.

I majored in History in university. I graduated, was discouraged from grad school by my professors (one of my professors stressed that when he was doing his PhD probably ten years before our conversation, he was so poor he had to literally fish to feed himself), and went back to school for accounting. As someone who went through it and can honestly evaluate the return on investment for my history degree, I don't believe it has paid back yet five years out. I did not learn practical skills, which are important for getting a career after exiting school. That's why my accounting degree was necessary. I will say though that I believe I learned a lot of important soft skills in the humanities, which I believe make me 1) a better person in general and 2) a more attractive candidate for jobs, since the skills I have (critical thinking, writing, etc) are not learned in business. They try to teach it in some courses, but it takes the leisure of taking a full humanities degree to properly learn it. It put this into perspective, writing an essay is taking a firehose of data, analyzing it and presenting a critical opinion on it. Most people who I was in business school with struggled because there is no right answer, and there is no answer key. A well reasoned argument based on the data given makes a good essay and good grades.

I will also say that in the professional accounting designation program, they are emphasizing that these are necessary skills for accountants to have now. I watch people studying for exams worrying about the same things. The exams are graded based on giving a 'competent' (their buzzword) answer based on the information given, which many people struggle with. I, on the other hand, find it very easy and do not have to study nearly as hard as my peers to succeed on the exams.

I don't mean to toot my own horn, and I do not think I am better than everyone else. I think that my time spent in the humanities has really benefited me in my career, but only after learning practical, 'hard' skills. Would I do it this way again, if I had the chance to start over? Probably not. Would I recommend someone going back to school for a humanities degree, after taking business/STEM? Maybe not, but there is definitely value in them.

This topic is fairly personal to me, since - after I got bitten hard by the continental philosophy bug at the age of 18 - I really did aspire to go into academia and teach it. But I got to the point of applying for PhDs and something of the reality started to dawn, not least that there would be another three years of genteel poverty to endure before there was any hope of a steady job. I had the good fortune to take to programming at that time.

The student loan situation is not quite so bad here in the UK (although it is worse now than when I was going through the system). Yet it clearly puts the humanities at a disadvantage. You don't need to have read Toqueville or Heidegger to see that taking on a six figure debt for the slender possibility of a poorly paid and stressful job later is a really bad idea.

Add in the 'other' relevant numbers - "how many papers have you published this year?" and friends - and frankly I'm surprised that anyone is left to teach today's students. It sounds miserable, and also -from the student's point of view - must reduce engagement with the material.

I'm 32, my parents studies humanities and strongly discouraged me "because in the future there are no well-paid jobs in the humanities". I presume I'm not alone?

Lets just say humanities is not the easy path to a well paid job. Certainly there are people who have been successful like Steve Jobs but I feel it was his individual qualities that made the difference.

Steve Jobs dropped out of school.

People win the lottery.

I had a slightly different experience: my parents both majored (and onwards) in liberal arts, and expressed (mild) skepticism when I initially majored in Computer Science.

Anecdotally, though, all of my university friends had the same experience as you.

I'm 34 and my parents suggested I get a degree just to get one. The problem is that the degree doesn't do anything for you if you aren't making the right moves while you're there, or know where you're going before you start. So now I have a diploma saying I spent 4 years studying history before I went back to school to train at a polytechnic to get a job.

> The problem is that the degree doesn't do anything for you if you aren't making the right moves while you're there, or know where you're going before you start.

I've experienced/am experiencing this same thing myself. A degree itself, STEM or not, does no good if you don't utilize your time at university to do something afterwards.

A quarter of a million dollars for a degree in spanish; no job prospects; followed by 20+ years of loan repayment...

Is there any wonder that such degrees are unpopular?

None of the humanities majors improves your employment prospects, while all could be reproduced for free by reading maybe 20 books at your leisure. That makes the humanities more like a form of entertainment than a preparation for life, which is what most of us expect from college.

Even a non-humanities major can be reduced to reading 20 (technical) books at your own leisure.

Much, much, much easier said than done.

IMHO, implementing the projects required in engineering & CS curricula teaches you much more than writing papers does in a humanities program. Thus reading books autodidactically misses the target less in the humanities than in engineering.

My hypothesis would be that in times of economic instability (70's energy crisis, 2008 financial crisis) - people bias towards more obviously reliable fields for income and work (Nursing, engineering, etc.).

It's also probably easier to major in CS (or some other technical subject) and take some humanities classes you find interesting rather than major in humanities.

The graph certainly seemed to support that - humanities degrees fell precipitously in the 70s, started gaining in the mid-80s through 90s, fell again during the dot-com boom, held steady during the 2000s, and then fell precipitously after the financial crisis.

A slightly more accurate model might be that demand for humanities degrees dries up when either students feel that they must get a STEM/professional/trade degree for economic survival, or that they should get a STEM degree to take advantage of a recent technological change. That accounts for the drop during the dot-com boom and during the mobile/crypto/AI boom that followed the financial crisis. At this point in time it's probably a stupid idea to get a humanities degree when all the jobs are in technology, and college students are simply responding to that.

This would also predict that as recent tech markets get saturated and stabilize, then assuming we don't have a major economic crash, you'll see humanities enrollment trend upwards again. Basically stability is good for humanities, but either too little or too much growth pushes people into STEM fields.

There have been a lot of top-down initiatives to get people into STEM fields as well, like presidential speeches by Obama. And ultimately it's something of a zero sum game (total college participation can still grow, but not as easily as shifting existing applicants).

When I look at the problems of today's academy, e.g. extreme ideological bias, replication difficulties, p-hacking, salami-sliced publication --- I can't help but wonder whether the root cause is the pay structure not properly taking into account the value of a high-quality academic ecosystem. It feels like there's a market failure here here.

Due to disgracefully low wages, we're selecting people for academic life who want to be there for all the wrong reasons, be it a sense of being trapped on a bad career path, an opportunity to relish in sanctimony, or some kind of obsolete notion of the dignity of living a life dedicated to knowledge, which academic now seldom produces and which we seldom prize.

College administration costs are going through the roof. Would it hurt to redirect some of this spending toward efficiency wages for faculty? Money brings prestige, and prestige generates all sorts of benefits.

Given the current cost of rent/food/health care/raising children (especially in the US), I can understand making life decisions purely around money, but it also makes me sad. Wouldn't it be better if people could do what they feel is useful instead of fitting themselves into often-pointless jobs just because they're well-paying? Even if you think humanities research is useless, does the world really need more lawyers and accountants?

I agree completely. It would be amazing if everything wasn't so money-focused (though I understand why it has to be) and people could just pursue the job they wanted to do, such as doing study in the humanities if they found it interesting.

It's true though. I just got a job at a FANG company right out of college and if I wanted my own 1 bedroom apartment it would look like a repurposed motel from the 50s.

I make over six figures but can't help but feel guilty when I have to tell my parents, who are below poverty line, that I can't afford my own apartment.

What if the problem is that the humanities are getting worse? The ancient definition of a liberal arts education was language (typically ancient Greek), mathematics, literature (often poetry), physical sciences, and history. During my time at University, I found that students in STEM were required to take classes in literature, language, and history. At my University, it was 8 of 40 classes - 20% of the work over four years, including 2 at a second year level of above. On the other hand, the humanities majors had to take only a tiny bit of math and science (just 3 classes), without any level requirements and humanities students often delighted in taking STEM classes without any real rigor. Advocates of the humanities and a liberal arts education often claim that humanities majors are more likely than STEM majors to be well rounded, but my experience has typically been the opposite - I often have interesting conversations with software engineers about history and politics, but I can't recall an interesting conversation with a humanities major about machine learning / AI or economics.

The Seven Liberal Arts were literally the trivium and quadrivium.

The first were the humanities: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. They were followed by the scientific arts: mathematics, trigonometry, music, and astronomy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education

The evolution of higher education is itself fairly fascinating. The United States produced fewer high school graduates in 1900 than it doees PhDs today, as a fraction of the population.

In the article, there was a graph that indicated that degrees Interdisciplinary studies were actually increasing.

TBH, I think you've identified the real problem here: Having a degree in the Humanities no longer means a well-rounded educated individual. It simply means a person who can't do math.

Seems like rigorous data science on the statistics of people graduating with humanities degrees. Doesn't that seem just a little bit ironic?

Maybe this is more an indictment of universities than of the humanities? Is it possible that university study in general is on borrowed time, and the future is simply here earlier for the humanities? It's not as though the Classics will be forgotten, nor will writers, artists, connoisseurs, or critics disappear. Professors haven't ever been [EDIT:] a vital part of this.

As we transition from a pedigree-based to a skills-based economy, it would make sense that the humanities would be an earlier casualty than many other fields.

I would argue we're just as pedigree based as ever. Just look at any list of the wealthiest (whatever demographic) people in the US. Inheritance and connections dominate it.

It's the wage-earners competing in a pseudo-meritocracy, just like fifty or a hundred years ago. The difference now is that our skilled trades require more formal education.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth

In the top 10, 2 are 1st-generation trust-fund babies (The Koch brothers), 7 are tech company founders, and 1 is self-directed investor. Certainly most of these enjoy great upper-middle-class opportunity and privelege, but these founders did not get their wealth from pedigree-appointed positions at Daddy's company after drinking their way through a Political Science degree.

Then come 3 more trust fund babies (The Walton kids), a self-made casino founder, and another tech company founder.

University studies probably are on borrowed time. It seems to me that they are insanely inefficient for the stated purpose - educating people. They are more than ripe for disruption.

That said, it seems to me that the disruption probably will first be in the engineering areas rather than in the humanities. Do you know chemical engineering? I can test for that, whether or not you went to a university. (The GRE will do that in many fields.) But did you absorb the enrichment that should have come with your university education? The humanities cares about that; STEM doesn't.

> Professors haven't ever been an important part of this.

Professors have definitely been an important part of Classics. First of all, if someone picks up any Latin or Greek text, that text was established (based on painstaking study of the manuscript tradition) by someone who was almost certainly employed at a university.

Then, if the text has notes at the back of it, those notes were written by someone who was almost certainly employed at a university. If it was translated from the original language for a general public readership, then commonly that was done by a scholar in that field.

As time goes by and new manuscripts are discovered, new light is cast on manuscripts already known, our understanding of some aspect of Greek or Latin life is expanded, or the focuses in our contemporary society change, there is a periodic need for new such editions, and we generally look to scholars to do all that instead of just anybody out there.

This makes a lot of sense to me.

In developing countries, humanities can only get you a government job. If your idea is right, as the economy expand and the role of government jobs becomes less important, humanities would naturally decline.

“It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”

- Steve Jobs

I was curious what sort of relationship there might be between recent trends in international students (who I expected would more frequently major in STEM than humanities than the typical American population) and the article's noted decrease in humanities majors.

In [0], the share of college students that is international rose from ~3% in 2010 to ~5.5% in 2017. And from the table in [1], in 2017, about 2% of international students majored in "Humanities" by the strictest definition, though that expands to 10% if you include "Intensive English", "Communications and journalism", "Humanities" and "Legal studies and law enforcement".

The low share, though, definitely suggests that American college students are choosing humanities majors less.

Interestingly, Harvard in particular is focusing a lot on boosting its engineeering programs, including a $1 billion science and engineering campus expansion set for 2020. [2] So looking at recent stated major intents from Harvard applicants is expected to have a trend towards STEM.

[0] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/international-studen...

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/11/13/us-universiti...

[2] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/24/engineering-har...

I think the Harvard trend is probably too little to late on their part. Having worked on both coasts in a variety of companies I didn't even know Harvard had an engineering dept.

Same here but it looks like they're partnering with MIT.

Harvard didn't have an engineering department until a few years ago (might be year 5 or 6 now).

You're off by over 150 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_John_A._Paulson_School...

Harvard invented one of the first computers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I

What you might be misremembering is that

> In February 2007, the Harvard Corporation and Overseers voted for the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences to change its name to the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

realitygrill is probably thinking about the new SEAS campus that mxwsn mentioned. I think they started planning the campus around the time of that renaming.

The website you are posting on was created by a Harvard engineering graduate, Paul Graham.

Harvard has a small, elite engineering and applied sciences school, so you'd generally encounter their grads at elite companies and research institutions, leaning more towards applied science research than what's commonly pictured as "engineering".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_John_A._Paulson_School...

Maybe the humanities need to change and that's the problem, but looking at those graphs in the article it seems that the answer is "it's the economy, stupid." When I was in High School we were all told that it didn't matter what you majored in so long as you got into a good college. Maybe kids now just have a little reality built into them, that jobs don't come free with a college education, that it's possible to take on more student debt than you can afford with your job opportunities. And maybe what's happening is just that fewer kids are getting duped into digging themselves into debt expecting they'll have a career at the end of it because they followed their passion like everyone told them was how you get successful.

It would be interesting to see the graph of degrees in these majors as a percentage of the entire population, rather than as a percentage of total degrees.

I think its essential context to the 'of degrees' graphs. By population there was a large dip from 1975-85, mostly in English degrees. A recovery and relative stability since 1990. I notice this info was included in the authors previous blog post. Its also here:

http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/blog/posts/373/career-value-...

This is going to accelerate.

Indians/Chinese live in a world exactly like this - where all degrees MUST be STEM or you are a useless waste/burden to society.

I dont know what America is doing, but people left my country specifically because there was a better life and more vibrant educational culture in the States.

But ever since no child left behind, and the collapse of jobs which support a wide form of intellectual pursuits, America seems to be recreating the same intellectual ecosystem collapse you see here.

Agreed. It seems pretty unhealthy long term if we have a society with only lawyers, engineers and MBAs.

I think humanities are a great combination degree but worthless on their own.

A finance major who knows history can anticipate how inevitable big market swings are.

Philosophy pairs great with computer science.

A mathematician or physicist that speaks French or Russian has access to much more information.

And for what it’s worth, the breakout high school classmate of mine was an English major. And Economics.

I would never suggest someone get a PhD in it though. There are better ways to enjoy and share the humanities.

I started a humanities degree. Two years in I realised it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on (what we call a toilet paper degree in Australia).

I then proceeded to change degrees and universities, I never looked back. This was back in like 2004-2005, a couple years before the financial crisis started. People then we’re talking about not doing those degrees because they are a waste of time and money.

I studied Spanish and English literature and linguistics undergrad in W.Europe. I made the conscience choice to move into STEM during my postgrads. Now I am pursuing a PhD in natural language processing and machine learning. The tuition fee was about 900USD avg. per year so there was no financial pressure on me to change academic careers: the choice was ideologically driven.

Allow me share you my experience at the humanities faculty:

I had always enjoyed the arts and literature but from year two I noticed ideological and methodologically harmful trends in the humanities: the staunch rejection of empiricism, the politicization of academia and near universal adoption of radical left-wing ideology. Researchers more often see themselves as activists at the cost of scientific methodology. Theories were completely divorced from social or natural reality. Established professors did not know how to do basic statistical tests, and have no problem getting published anyway.

I have a fairly hardcore PhD in social sciences (where I produced some really useful work on how to better understand technology driven social phenomena which are difficult to define, and near-impossible to parameterise). In fact my PhD was awarded in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences. Which is the problem. The business faculties have eaten large amounts of the social science faculties. And in substantial parts of the business faculties the quality of academic work is dreadful (e.g. have a look at how marketing students are taught statistics - or consider in these faculties, Economics is the most rigorous of the disciplines argh!).

So with that PhD, what do I do? I'm a jobbing programmer currently doing ecommerce stuff - i.e. I tell computers what to do. It's good money, interesting work and they mostly leave me alone to get on with it, so on that level, no problem.

It might be informative to see how the average debt burden, in terms of years for humanities graduates to pay off, has changed over the period in question. At several points, the author notes a downwards inflection point around 2011, a time when then-recent economic events might have been expected to bring the issue to the fore.

>Back in 2013, I wrote a few blog post arguing that the media was hyperventilating about a "crisis" in the humanities, when, in fact, the long term trends were not especially alarming. I made two claims them: 1. The biggest drop in humanities degrees relative to other degrees in the last 50 years happened between 1970 and 1985, and were steady from 1985 to 2011; as a proportion of the population, humanities majors exploded. 2) The entirety of the long term decline from 1950 to 2010 had to do with the changing majors of women, while men's humanities interest did not change.

Who cares for the number of degrees? The quality of humanities studies has had a huge decline. Compare the humanities titans of most of the 20th century to the meagre, derivative, and self-absorbed production of the last 30 or so years...

Is this a point you'd like to elaborate on? Without accusing you of anything, when I read a one sentence dismissal of humanities/social sciences, what I tend to think is that this is someone who thinks "post-modernism is bullshit", "third wave feminism is bad", "intersectionality isn't real", "everything is cultural marxism", "safe spaces", etc. and who is appealing to Jordan Peterson as an expert on everything. If we're lucky, they'll throw in Sokal or some other sincere attempt to engage with problems in the discipline.

This might be an unfair judgment of you personally -- certainly it doesn't suggest charity on my part. But I just mention it because, in the event that you have something to add to the discussion that isn't just boilerplate, you might want to know that in the absence of actually adding it, you are being judged in this way.

(Personal disclaimer: I'm not in the humanities, I have my own critiques of where major humanities disciplines are. I am an academic. But I also waste enough of my time on awful websites that I am very acclimatized to driveby dismissals of anything that emerged out of critical theory, and I can't say I agree with that.)

It might have been my school but I found the degree poorly taught. You could get a fairly easy B+/A- by just parroting the teachers opinion on the topic at hand. STEM classes had some teachers like that, but most of the work there had objectively wrong and right answers.

My friends from other schools all had the same experience for the most part with only a handful of exceptions for particularly good teachers, who also all happened to be employed at other jobs and working as an adjunct professor to teach single courses on their topics.

The humanities to me seem like they are of lower quality because professors have no incentive or desire to actually teach, but as much of the humanities has no right or wrong answer then the professor can bullshit as much as they want. I don't think that the teachers are any worse than STEM teachers. If STEM courses were as subjective I'm sure we'd see the same problems

> The humanities to me seem like they are of lower quality because professors have no incentive or desire to actually teach

Why do you think faculty’s lack of desire to teach is something limited to the humanities? In STEM fields too you will commonly see faculty delegating their workload to teaching assistants so that they can focus on things that interest them more.

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I think the lack of desire to teach is a country wide problem for universities in the US. I think it's more apparent in the humanities because a teacher can define their opinion as "right" and put very little effort into educating students on the topic since they can just grade less harshly if they need to keep a certain pass rate on their students. On the other hand there is a much larger proportion of STEM work that is right or wrong and a teacher can't just pass students without it becoming obvious to the department that the students coming out of Professor N's classes have no grasp on the topic, and so they are forced to teach more skills that are useable in any class or jobs that touch on that subject

OK I'll bite. In what sense is post-modernism not bullshit? What has it ever done to actually increase practical human knowledge, improve standards of living, or create a better society?

Humanities and social sciences in general have created a lot of value, but post-modernism appears to be uniquely worthless due to never actually making any progress. Just a lot of empty pontificating and spinning in circles.

I'm not sure you know what you've bitten off. What does your question even mean? What aspect of "post-modernism" are you hoping to tear down? One assumes you're referring to hopelessly abstruse liberal arts senior theses, and is left to wonder whether you're aware of e.g. postmodern architecture. Deliberate, original works of postmodern literary theory might be incomprehensible, but the ideas of postmodernism --- metafiction, irony, intertextuality --- dominate our culture. Have you never seen or heard a remix?

What does your definition even mean? On that basis you could claim almost anything as "postmodern". It's so vague as to be utterly meaningless.

I assert that we would have remixes even if postmodernism had never become a thing. Prove me wrong.

I'm sorry, I don't understand your question. Postmodern architecture is an actual thing; architects do not regard it as "so vague as to be utterly meaningless". There are famous postmodern buildings. Your last sentence amounts to the declaration that we'd have had postmodernism even if postmodernism never began a thing. Sure, I agree, it would have a different name. What's your point?

I feel like maybe your problem is that you're just not very familiar with what postmodernism means in art, architecture, literature, film, and music.

The term "postmodernism" is a broad descriptor intended to inject some understanding into changes that have already occurred. For example:

- Music went from pristine classical chords to overlapping remixes of existing music;

- architecture went from symmetrical glass boxes to crooked chaotic dissonance;

- visual arts went from seeking the perfect form to an acknowledgment that just about any form can be perfect for the right time/viewer/artist/etc.;

- morality went from religious absolutism to moral relativism;

- even physics went from clean equations that worked everywhere to requiring the observer's viewpoint to be considered (relativity) and more extreme, accepting randomness and unknow-ability as inherent principles (quantam mechanics).

Are these cultural changes related at all? You may say no, each is it's own independent thing that happened for its own separate reasons. But even if that's the case, there are definitely some commonalities among them, chiefly that "value" or even "truth" is far more complex and uncertain than we previously thought.

So to answer your question, yes remixes could exist without postmodernism. But I wonder if postmodernism could have existed without remixes.

Iriny and explicit abandonment of modern ideals is also common across postmodern thought.

I wasn’t sure I understood how a building could be ironic until I went and stared at the post modern self parking garage in Chicago for a bit:

https://www.metropolismag.com/architecture/photos-15-buildin...

Great link--thanks for posting it.

I wonder what the correlation is between the price of a university degree and the percentage of humanities majors. I imagine it's much easier to justify an education in English Literature when it doesn't cost $70,000 or more.

At the same time, I know people who majored in English who ended up working as security guards and package sorters. There just aren't many jobs that require that skillset anymore, thanks to the internet. Not many editors, copywriters, or reviewers are necessary when there are millions of people willing to do it almost for free online. Digital publishing has made writing into a free for all. Almost all that is left is teaching which requires separate credentials and very low pay for long hours.

As everyone knows, the costs of a humanities degree (or any degree) has been increasing much faster than inflation - while at the same time, the earnings potential of a humanities degree has dropped. Student loan debt and high housing costs are shackling a generation of college graduates.

Undergraduate tuition and fees at the author's university total nearly $50,000 a year - and that's without counting food, textbooks, rent, etc. Even with help from financial aid, that is a huge amount of money (largely paid for by non-dischargeable debt) to spend on a degree that doesn't provide significant new career prospects.

This is simply short sighted. Yes, we are at a time in which machines have automated enough of the labor to cause panic and drive students to practical fields, but not enough to cause mass revolt.

But it's inevitable. Some form of UBI will have to be instituted, by consensus or force, and at that point, a large part of the population will find itself with lots of time on their hands and no need for knowledge in any productive area. Then, most majors will be in philosophy, literature or art.

This was one of the blogs that factored into deciding not to go grad school even though I ready took the GREs (psychology, would have been for I/O so more quant heavy than most in the field) : https://100rsns.blogspot.com/?m=1

I have a PhD in the humanities and am now working on NLP. I can attest to the difficulty of finding a fulfilling career in humanities academia, but I don’t know if it’s worse than STEM academia since academia is insanely competitive in general. In my school (Ivy League) , PhDs in my department attain professorship as often as STEM ones, if not faster. I think the humanities are more suited for general education than specialization, unless you want to be a professional scholar, which is a fine choice as long as you are aware of the competition. I do think humanities need to re-brand itself as an essential part of general higher education (STEM kids need to know some humanist thinking) rather than just specializations.

http://stemtosteam.org/

With schools increasing costs and no jobs available, going into humanities is a complete financial catastrophe waiting to happen.

If countries care about humanities, they need to fund it via government. I'm not much of a big government person, but things like this is required when you care about things that capitalism won't fund.

This is a matter of "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

In the long run, STEM is going to become increasingly niche, STEM is the industry that eats its young. Not too long ago, it was possible to make a lucrative career out of non-coding front-end, meaning a design focus with no javascript. Those days ended a few years ago.

You can't expect your job to remain stable if you go into anything STEM, unless you move up the value chain to underlying tech, where living-wage jobs are as rarefied as million-dollar, you're literally a rockstar, contracts / jobs. My dream job here is to actually get paid $X00,000 to work on Rails. Not implementing Rails, developing Rails.

This is a pattern that replicates all across STEM. In the humanities, all sustainable jobs are equivalent to my dream Rails gig. Out of hundreds of people who want a salaried anthropology job, only a handful are going to earn them, because the economics just favor STEM at the moment.

But eventually the mid-level market for all STEM jobs is going to dry up. Whatever obsession society has for engineering is going to pass, and then engineering is going to look like the humanities, and the humanities is going to find purchase with all the new technology that we're building and that's where the jobs will go.

Which is a grand shame. Humans shouldn't be so laser-focused on the mother-loving present all the freaking time. It's going to take the web world another 5-10 years to realize that the obsession it's been nurturing over Javascript is ridiculous and that Rails really did do it right. Web assembly is a solution in search of a problem, and native is eventually going to find its sea legs. React is okay but its successor will be better, my guess is that CSS is going to be seen as the bottleneck and the new React will do what React did, only with a management paradigm for styling. The focus on ES6 will die out and decent language design is going to one day win out over that ugly pile of hacks.

Once the development community realizes all of this, and thousands of other lessons that are essentially variations on the same theme of timelessness, then the focus will shift on the people actually creating the meaning and value that people want out of life. Young people who want to rap will, well, rap. The marketplace of ideas will cease to be dependent on the technical ability of creators because STEM will have long eaten its young and has fully professionalized and turned into Hollywood.

Every industry will eventually be Hollywood. It's just a question of how well they manage that mid-level market. Hollywood has a guild system. We feel we're too good for that.

Why would an employer pay you to contribute to Rails when so many others are willing to do it for free? In the end it's just another framework; it works well enough but not really superior to the numerous alternatives.

Rails gets lots of corporate sponsorship, not nearly as much as React, but it's there. So do all the big, useful open-source libraries. Some companies are even willing to pay you a full-time salary to work 20% of your time on their business interests and allowing you to spend your other 80% of your time on framework dev. Open source and the tech world would really, really suck without the generosity of business.

You might want to take a look at the tech stacks, where they've been and where they're going, of the world's most lucrative and innovative companies before you decry that Rails really did do it right instead of js.

I could care less what the big companies are doing, eventually the world will move on from them and they will no longer define the course of society, or even our little sector of it.

80% of humanities papers are never cited once. 80%. That. is. appalling. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/23/aca... Social "science" is even more terrifying in my view. 25% of social sciencist identity as Marxist. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1.ht...

I don't know how anyone can see these statistics and not think that there is a crisis.

I nearly took history at undergraduate. My colleague has an English degree but now works in CS with me. What's shocking is that, at age 16, we're meant to make these huge decisions for our lives and we really have no clue about the ramifications.

Your link on Marxism does not say social scientists are 25% Marxist. Even if they were, what’s the problem?

You're right, it doesn't say that. But it says that sociology has 25.5%.

A lot of them are Marxists because they’ve studied it.

I’m not exactly Marxist but I’m more terrified by those who judge his works without having legitimately studied it critically and in depth under supervision.

He’s a lightning rig for prejudice and too many people equate Marx with Stalin, or believe him to have caused Stalin.

He's not the same as Stalin, but he certainly caused him. Marx was basically the founder of a secular religion and like the theistic kind, religions attract scoundrels because they see it as a way to power. Stalin himself studied to be a priest before he changed religions.

Marx wasn't the first, and he wasn't the last to argue for a community/worker owned and operated economic system. He's just the best known. He might have co-written written a manifesto, but had he not another would very likely have. It was a long time coming. But that's really besides my point.

Importantly, Marx did not advocate for a totalitarian political regime. That's a big deal, because that's a defining element of Stalinism. Marx didn't cause that aspect; the aspect that people actually detest. Stalin did. His military underlings did.

I'll say it again, because it's very misunderstood, generally speaking: Marx did not advocate totalitarianism.

Another underlying point is that violent men come from many places, and given the conditions of early 20th century Russia, I would argue the Russians would have had their violent revolution and totalitarian regime, Marxism or not. Like the French had happen to them. Violence begets violence, and Russia, under their monarchy, was an ugly place and had been for a very long time.

So, Stalin was probably coming no matter what, I hate to say. And he was a totalitarian, unlike Marx.

Interesting side note: Stalin was a darling in the U.S. before we demonized him after we were done with the War. Kind of like Saddam Hussein.

But what would Stalin be without Marx? A minor unpleasant priest in a small Georgian town? Yes, Marx wasn't the first or last promoter of socialism. And yet the followers of, for example, Charles Fourier, didn't create totalitarian systems.

Karl Marx (Capital) “You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property ..."

Did a military underling write that?

Try asking anyone at all what their views are on a suggested policy saying "we will make it impossible for you to own private property!" It's delusional to imagine that such a program could not be accomplished without a totalitarian revolution.

Do you understand the difference between private and personal property?

Marx should be "studied ... under supervision?" Such study should be done "legitimately?"

Perhaps it was an unfortunate choice of words, but that sounds a lot like indoctrination and elitism.

Being a marxist social scientist does not mean that you support a communist political system. It means that you use class as a lens to analyze your data.

Hah, it's interesting to see my comment cause some controversy on HN :-)

I'm not saying social scientists are pro-Stalian or other suggested nonsense in some comments. I'm merely saying that, compared to every other subject, it is shocking to me that such a high proportion identity as Marxist as it is a relatively extreme political belief. It seems analogous to a high proportion of biologists being creationist. In fact, almost every single social scientist is left wing. That and 80% of humanities papers being sent into a vacuum never to be cited again, suggests to me that there is a crisis.

Maybe the idea that a high proportion of social scientists end up describing themselves as Marxist should make you reconsider your view of Marx, rather than dismiss the social scientists as equivalent to creationists?

This is a fallacy of majority.

Most people also believed the Earth to be the center of the universe.

Marx got the labor theory of production wrong. He blames the capitalists for unjustly acquiring the "means of production" and uses that as an excuse for violently stealing and murdering those people.

He would literally insist that you must have stolen for someone because you have a successful 1-man blog earning lots of money.

His argument is that it is nit the capitalist (blog writer) that is responsible for profit.... but the ISP, computer manufacturing factory workers, etc.

And from there would support stealing what you earn because you must have exploited somebody to gain wealth.

Pure evil class hatred

This is nonsense. To start with, a capitalist is someone who employs and exploits a worker. A 1-man blogger (or a 1-man anything) does not employ anyone.

University used to be for the elite, or roughly.

Now, regular folk, who don't come from wealthy families, have to do that as part of their education, and cost is a big deal.

It's natural that people tend towards practical educations and it's not all that bad.

As an Engineer, I was overwhelmed with technical bits and in retrospect I wish we could all have taken a full year of liberal arts type stuff.

In USA, most degree programs require a year's worth of liberal arts "distribution" or "general education" courses.

The crisis is that students are wracking up debt for degrees that will take, on average, 22 years to pay off and have a less than 10% chance of actually being useful for their chosen jobs.

If you want to study humanities, then there are dozens and hundreds of resources available for free or very little financial cost to you.

I took a humanities "education" in my spare time over 5 year span because I love the arts, philosophy.

But I got an actual degree where I can give substantial value to society (as measured in income)

If every imaginable move is made to render the humanities rote and ideologically captive as possible (seemingly for the personal leisure of a handful of faculty), and at the same time prices are increasing, is it any wonder that they are fast going extinct? (or more accurately, that the absolute interest in study under humanities departments is not keeping up with the interest in STEM study)

I agree with almost everything you said, except

> seemingly for the personal leisure of a handful of faculty

So far as I know, the humanities professors do not have any more leisure than other faculty. (Or did you mean that, by making the humanities ideologically captive, the professors don't have to think?)

And in fact, that "ideologically captive" part occurred to me as a possible partial explanation, as well. Large parts of the humanities have come to resemble indoctrination rather than free enquiry. That may place a serious limit on the popularity of those departments.

For reference:

College Majors, 1970-2011 Share Of All Bachelor's Degrees Awarded By Field

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/05/09/310114739/what...

That is ...good. We should be funneling more women and minorities into lucrative majors like CS and engineering.

Problem with that is women and minorities are all individual people who make their own decisions about what they want to do in life. What does a funnel look like? Forced degrees? Forced employment?

Probably just a less obviously-hostile environment would be a good start.

What exactly is obviously hostile about our universities? Is it the safe spaces? Is it the lower standards applied to minorities and women to make it easier to get in? Is it all of the scholarships open only to minorities and women?

Universities are quite obviously the most inclusive and least hostile place in the world for minorities and women.

Yeah, talking about the industry generally. I see you already have your “safe spaces” straw man all set up so I think I’ll just leave you to it.

It’s not a straw man at all, it’s an accurate description of acedemia. Now you’re saying it’s the industry’s fault (never mind that the industry generally practices the same affirmative action as universities do). But that can’t possibly be the case because the industry doesn’t have enough female and minority stem graduates to hire “enough” women and minorities.

The percentage of all PhDs earned by women has just, in the last ten years, hit 50%. Of the STEM fields only biology has over 50%, and engineering, physics, and math are in the 20s. A lot of strides have been made, but "most inclusive and least hostile" is not born out by the data.

https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/fraction-p...

You’re aware this is circular reasoning right?

>Why aren’t there more women studying stem?

Because University is a hostile environment.

>How do you know that?

Because there aren’t more women studying stem.

Assuming you even have a degree: People like you. People who parrot the same sound bites you do. That's what is making our universities hostile.

You know this isn’t a rational argument at all right? You’re literally defending a baseless assertion with “no, you!”.

You do come across as having a negative attitude toward women and minorities because you are saying they only got in because someone let them in, they are expected to be lesser.

I’m not saying that at all. But that is exactly the message affirmative action sends to applicants. In general they are both sexist and racist, even to those they supposedly benefit.

What I said was that even with systemic advantages put in place encouraging women and minorities (excluding Asians of course, because for some reason they don’t count) to join stem courses, they still show a statistically significant preference to do other majors.

If you think I have a negative attitude towards any group, it’s not because of anything I’ve said. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s probably just the reaction you have to people when you can’t engage in rational discussion on this topic.

How are CS and Engineering studies obviously hostile to women and minorities?

It’s not that the courses themselves are hostile, but the industry certainly can be - and that’s going to dissuade people from starting down that path.

Here's an example: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-16/google-re...

Ya know Google isn’t a University right? It also has one of the most “progressive” diversity cultures in the valley.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com