The humanities and social sciences have fallen off a cliff, heath care and STEM has soared. I'm skeptical that this is a good thing.
> if the tech bubble bursts, computer science may even be riskier than a humanities degree, which gives graduates a broader set of knowledge.
How do humanities degrees provide "broader knowledge" than CS degrees? Different, sure, but broader?
Good CS degrees are not coding bootcamps. CS students take a lot of mathematics and logic-heavy courses and can easily pivot from programming to jobs in insurance, finance, accounting, education, project management, and even law.
Good CS degrees also require a lot of technical writing, which opens up all of the stuff that's usually associated with humanities degrees.
Bad CS degrees exist. But then, so do bad English departments.
This also ignores the fact that a lot of CS students are taking courses in English/poli sci/History/etc, but very few humanities students are taking CS courses. E.g., I didn't have a major or minor in any of the above fields, but I took upper-division courses in the English, Relgiion, poli sci, and history departments. However, I only ever encountered one non-STEM major in CS courses beyond CS 101.
I don't really understand why people act like humanities majors are "well rounded" compared to science or engineering majors - it seems like the absolute opposite. To confirm this, just pick a respectable college and read the degree requirements for students in different majors (I don't mean elite colleges, there are hundreds of colleges that meet this standard).
I do agree that non-STEM degrees should have stronger math requirements. But K-12 math education in the US is such a disaster that the universities wouldn't stand a chance if they wanted to do it.
This depends on the type of institution. Liberal arts and most honors colleges at large universities have small class sizes with high-quality instruction for their gen-ed humanities.
> You are extremely likely to be put on the spot and made to defend a subjective position you've taken.
This is also true in (good) mathematics and computer science programs, where you'll need to learn how to communicate well to technical audiences and defend all manner of subjective positions.
Also, something similar is true for the transferability of humanities skills! The writing skills you develop in humanities courses do not directly transfer to technical writing. Learning to write well for any audience will teach you a lot about good writing, but your random English major will probably be completely useless when it comes to writing proofs, design/requirements documents, technical documentation, or especially useful comments in their code. And if I had a dollar for ever business person with a humanities background who made an ass out of themselves in a technical meeting because they have no idea how to communicate with a technical audience about a technical subject... ;-)
> In math, and to some extent engineering or science, you can often reason your way through if you get stuck, or else there are simple procedures you can rote memorize.
I disagree. Your observation about lower vs. upper division courses is as true for STEM as it is for humanities courses. There's a lot of subjectivity/taste involved in upper-division courses, especially any proof-based or project-based course!
> But K-12 math education in the US is such a disaster that the universities wouldn't stand a chance if they wanted to do it.
That's a big problem. It's also a chicken-and-egg problem. Our elementary and middle school teachers are often innumerate, which makes it hard to prepare students for HS (where the quality is often still bad despite subject-area qualifications), which in turn creates problems for gen ed STEM at universities.
I'm a CS/Engineering grad that had some of those, and my colleagues in other STEM degrees had requirements that weren't dissimilar from what you describe. We were required to take classes in philosophy (with emphasis on ethics), history, as well as required to take some electives that could be in all sorts of areas, some in other scientific areas, others in arts, theatre, music. Effectively, it was required of us to at least be cognizant of the goings-on in other fields, even if just the conversational basics.
As for colleagues of mine in humanities degrees, most of them didn't see a single STEM class, and if they did, they were very superficial one-semester courses on Excel spreadsheeting, LaTeX, or very basic physics/probability mathematics, which were effectively a rehashing of high school, but with easier exams.
I echo your sentiment, maybe at some point in the distant past, STEM degrees were isolated in their own bubble and only had very theoretical classes, but I don't know anyone who experienced that, and that's most certainly not been a reality for the past couple of decades.
These things aren't binary (more humanities bad! more humanities good!), and it's a disservice to the topic to treat them as such.
E.g., CS PhD have plentiful $200K+ job opportunities after graduation and a relatively labor-friendly faculty market. Meanwhile, many mathematics PhDs postdoc into their 40s.
The third category isn't as fortunate in the job market, like say a biology major. How about Dev OE, OS. Doeos? Wow, that almost works. But it kind of reminds me of nxivm though :-)
And recently, I feel a lot of them tried to force change, leaving their role of scientist and becoming backseat politicians. They don't run for office but still try to make the rules.
If you want to look at it in another lense, it hurts our whole economy because many younger people in this group aren't able to help our economy grow through buying stuff like previous generations did. When I went to college long long ago it was really cheap, like $1000 a semester. The states stopped subsidizing it so much. I was a beneficiary of this.
It will also be cancelled after 20 years of payments.
I would vastly prefer more direct subsidies though.
I get that "bills aren't important" is a thing if you don't have trouble paying them, but that's not the situation for everybody. "Hey, lighten up, have some fun, you don't need to work that hard" is cool if you're wealthy. It's an insult to somebody living paycheck to paycheck. They do have to work that hard.
I sometimes complain about being burnt out and needing a vacation after working for about 3 years, 9-5 max, 5 days a week that includes one day a week working from home.
I seriously doubt that a reduction in number of degrees granted in arts-focused majors actually equates to a populace that is less appreciative or knowledgeable regarding the arts.
It’s not about actual arts & culture (which any given person learns through many walks of life)... it’s about these expensive arts-only degrees simply not conferring economically meaningful labor market skills.
Don't conflate culture with those who study it. The vast majority of non-STEM graduates generate no activity of either cultural or economic significance. All such degree programmes could be dropped tomorrow with no detriment to society.
That is such an outrageous and untestable claim that it is basically meaningless.
It's not "bullshit" if you're independently wealthy and can pay to "study" for "fun", or as a second major to something that's in demand. But for everybody else I'd consider more in-demand professions, even though they're usually much harder.
For an example, take a gander at this list: https://www.washington.edu/students/gencat/degree_programsTO.... All the bullshit majors are very easily identifiable. Most, but not all of them have "studies" in their name.
By that metric, one of my undergrad majors (physics) is a bullshit major as very few of us went into that field. But it prepared us very well for many other fields, so I'd say that metric is not meaningful.
That being said, there are some crappy degrees out there. Some disciplines are mostly just watered down philosophy and I'd go for philosophy instead anytime.
>> it merely means that
>> studying the respective field is less likely
>> to be very economically rewarding
Your examples are bad too, because back in the day all those painters, writers, etc, were either independently wealthy already, or did other jobs before they became famous. H.P. Lovecraft, for instance, worked as a traveling salesman. Van Gogh both comes from a wealthy family _and_ had a job at an art dealer. And there are very few of such people anyway, it's not a viable route for most people, it's more like a lottery.
If you don't mind being broke and living on welfare, by all means, get that liberal arts degree.
IMO most talented/flexible degree per year studied is electrical engineering.
Best degree is no degree though. One Vitalek or Bram Cohen is worth 10000 Harvard computer science graduates.
For the unicorns that can pull that off, sure. For the other 99.9999999999999% of the population of the planet it's really bad advice.
"Higher education" is mostly make-work for pedants and busy work for students; the result is pretty similar to what high school was 100 years ago. It's also a form of dysgenic population control, and a way of growing debt peonage among the more intelligent half the of the population, which is probably useful for social control.
I've considered trying to raise a bunch of little Vitaleks myself, just to see if it can be done. Cathedral scholar style. While his and, say, Bram's output is exceptional: I think one of the big reasons it was is they never went to college. Greatest individual systematic trader I know: same story -he never want to college either.
Also your sigdifs are way off. I bet you learned that in collitch. ;-)
We don't really need (economically speaking) lots of philosophy majors. And maybe that's okay if people are doing philosophy majors for the knowledge, but I don't think that's the case. And if they want a good job, I think we should discourage these majors.
That doesn't mean we don't need philosophy. It's really important. But it doesn't make much difference if the people who have a degree on that work on unrelated things.
We can even look at my Fine Arts degree the same way. My whole career people have said it is odd for a Fine Arts major to be a coder, until I explain what that degree really taught me - to look at the existing body of work in a field, learn the techniques, and look for new and innovative ways to change those techniques. Then to create a vision of something you want to deliver, start from scratch, and build up to a final product that takes the field a step or two forward, while also effectively communicating with, and engaging, your audience.
You could draw similar parallels with any humanities degree. That process of deconstructing an entire body of work, learning the ins and out of its components, and reconstructing it into something completely new is common to all liberal arts educations. And that is why people with liberal arts degrees are often not the slightest bit concerned whether their degree and their career are a 'match'.
I am willing to bet that given a population of philosophy majors and a population of engineering majors, if you gave them an equivalent year of quality mentorship in programming, the philosophy majors would perform better. Because philosophy heavily emphasizes critical and abstract thinking. Better yet they might be able to really think about the consequences of the systems they build, whereas the tech industry mostly seems to have no problem and no concerns about building a global surveillance apparatus. Engineers learn how to do now the stuff that is relevant now. As a software engineer I am constantly battling with abstraction, and I constantly feel held back by my limited understanding of math, science, and philosophy.
The cost of college is an issue of its own and it's irrelevant to choice of major. School is the one place where we have an institutionalized system to study and progress the liberal arts as a whole, which teach us how we got here, what we value, and how we ought to live. One episode of The Wire should be sufficient demonstration of the need for our understanding of sociology to improve, among other things. Discouraging any of the liberal arts due to the overwhelming cost of college exacerbates our problems and risks turning universities into trade schools, directionless and with all the volatility of economic cycle.
I've taken a few classes in philosophy (it was my major for a while), and I can't tell if this is super different in the US vs Europe or you're just making stuff up, but this is just not what I saw. Yes, logic is part of philosophy, and everybody needs to take that class, but it's not heavily emphasized for the majority of students. Being able to write summaries and essays is, and learning the lingo, and reading (and hopefully understanding, or being able to pretend so well enough) the classics.
> Better yet they might be able to really think about the consequences of the systems they build, whereas the tech industry mostly seems to have no problem and no concerns about building a global surveillance apparatus.
Please don't. Studying in the humanities doesn't make you a better person, and it doesn't make you consider ethics in everything you do either.
> School is the one place where we have an institutionalized system to study and progress the liberal arts as a whole
Except not everybody agrees that is what life is all about, what's best for society, the country, humanity or whatever you choose. Somebody has to do the actual work, you know? Sure, we can all become philosophers and then starve to death, or we can make sure that we have enough people that know how to grow food. When it comes down to it, yeah, with all of my ethics training, I very much prefer people that know how to grow food over people that will explain that the ethical thing to do is to feed them first, because only they can lead progress and advance the liberal arts. But then again, I always had a thing for utilitarianism and was highly suspicious of the bourgeois elitism in intellectual circles.
I don't understand your last paragraph at all. Not everybody agrees, so therefore liberal arts education is invalid? Or not everybody agrees, so let's give up? These are defeatist attitudes to take in either case. Implicit in your argument, as a response to this whole thread, is that not "somebody has to do the work", which I have never argued against; you're saying "nobody should do anything but the work". Meaning STEM, or whatever BigCo is hiring for right now. We continue to have huge problems globally that either have nothing to do with technology or are directly caused by technology, that need to be solved with entirely different skillsets. People perform better when they are motivated, and money is a poor motivator after a certain point. You make a very poor assumption that someone studies one of these subjects and their skills and experiences just go into this void, and/or that I'm advocating that people major in something and strictly do that for the rest of their lives. If you want to do the hands-on work and major in Hands-On Working, then do it. But don't discourage others from doing what they want and are good at during the narrow window of their lives when society supports them to do it.
You're making claims about philosophy, I'm not making claims about STEM - I don't know what you're trying to accomplish.
> Not everybody agrees, so therefore liberal arts education is invalid?
No. Not everybody agrees, thereforce "liberal arts advances humanity" isn't agreed upon and shouldn't guide us. Let's agree upon it first.
> you're saying "nobody should do anything but the work"
No. I'm saying "please contribute". And by "contribute" I mean "do something that all/most/many consider to be of value". If we start defining "contributing" to mean something that the individual believes to be valuable, then it's just random. Build houses, grow roses, torture people, whatever, as long as you feel like it's a good idea, you're contributing.
> But don't discourage others from doing what they want
I'd never dream of doing that. I'm just saying: if you want to do what you want, please pay for it yourself. Don't make me give you part of my money to indulge in your personal pleasures.
No, I wasn't. You made claims about philosophy and I uttered my doubts because they didn't match my personal experience at all. You then decided to tell me how bad STEM was, which I hadn't even mention.
> you have a severe misconception that none of these “bullshit majors” are useful
That's not what I said. They might very well be useful, my point is that we should let the market decide whether they are. Vague statements about some loss of culture or a descent into dystopian nightmares if we don't finance them just isn't that - it's fear mongering to push something through without giving those a vote that are supposed to pay for it.
> “torture people” is bringing your argument to absurity
You should've taken a few philosophy classes, especially logic. Using extremes and hypothetical situations is what you do to test an argument/claim. If you present a claim and I present to you an example that makes your claim fall short, there's no "well, exceptions prove the rule", that's not how logic works.
> You’re basically arguing that individuality is a bad thing now.
Somewhat, sure. I don't like the kind of individuality that wants all the freedom but puts the responsibility (that is: footing the bill) on other people. Either say "I want to be free, and I will suffer the consequences of my decisions" or enjoy the protection of the collective at the cost of having to also submit to the collective's rules & needs, and limit your freedom. If you want the collective to pay for what you study & work in, choose something that the collective needs and it will gladly pay for it.
Same applies to coordinated protest activities.
One of the big differences at the time was the use of "repeaters" by the North. Having a gun that can shoot again quickly when the other side cannot is a huge advantage.
With the North winning the Civil War, they put both Reconstruction and the 15th Amendment in place, causing Blacks to have the right to vote (of course many people tried to thwart that law for almost a century).
[0] - https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/civil-war-...
It's very different in Europe, there may be some mocking, and we also don't create unlimited jobs for every graduate, but they'll most likely not end up doing minimum wage jobs, and most of them easily transition into working in the media, for the government, large corporations or foundations.