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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

Why shouldn't it cost less for an English or a philosophy degree than an engineering degree? The job prospects are not only worse but so are your lifetime earnings.

Or looking at it another way the English and philosophy majors are subsidizing the cost of an engineering degree.

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From a cost perspective it doesn't cost that much more to educate an English major than an engineering major.

I am not sure if that is true. English professors are paid less than Eng ones and does not require expensive lab and equipment.

In all honesty, as a Materials Engineering student at a "learn by doing school", I could easily have done without the expensive lab equipment, but not without the library. I've always thought industry should be supporting the labs and having students perform some relatively basic work for them, for a random example Scanning Electron Microscope sample prep and basic analysis

Edit: not a current student and graduated 10 years ago.

As I understand it, at a lot of schools facilities are supported by industry. To offer a non-engineering example, I was once in a Dunkin Donut-sponsored pastry instruction room at a culinary school.

Yes, see here [1], for example.

[1] http://crookedtimber.org/2013/08/14/humanities-science-is-no...

Not the case in US research universities where science professors bring in large grants from usually the federal government to fund machines and grad students. The university takes an "overhead" cut of these grants of around 50%. So if a grant is $150k then the professor gets 100k to spend and the University gets $50 (and pays for buildings, electricity, admin, etc). Most studies show that the overhead the universities take is a net plus for them over the cost of the services they provide.

English professors make maybe 70% of the salary of an engineering professor. With benefits that's probably closer to 85%. And the cost of faculty is less than half the cost of education. You also have administration, buildings, sports, etc. So that ends up being maybe a 7-8% difference. Plus lab equipment, but the expensive lab equipment is probably mostly paid by research, and the other stuff probably isn't very expensive on a per student basis.

Not true. Engineering students actually use expensive equipment like nuclear reactors and radioisotopes.

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