College has been oversold

As a metric for high schools, students enrolling in and graduating from a 4-year college is one of the most important numbers in the all-important school ranking. Students weak in the maths and sciences are encouraged to do just this: finish Algebra II, finish Chemistry, enroll in a liberal arts program, and choose a few "gimme" classes to cover whatever core curriculum the school requires. This makes the high schools look a lot better in their rankings, which is what matters to many superintendents and principals.

And then we get this.

Making everyone an engineer or scientist isn't the answer.

There's this entire culture among artists where staying in a school environment is the ultimate goal. Artists are entirely capable of driving economic growth and doing really well for themselves, but the skills they get in school are more related to staying in school than making a living outside of it. That's really where the arts are oversold: "Come to my school and you'll be good enough afterward to make a living doing exactly what you love!" The reality is a lot more harsh, a fact never shared with students.

To me, the problem is that most people don't view college as an investment in their future, but rather as a temporary place to delay choices. Certainly, it is positioned as an investment by educators, and it is probably true for science & engineering degrees, but do students approach it that way?

I have a liberal arts degree from an "elite private university", and I can tell you that the school's approach was to give someone like me everything they could possibly need to succeed, but to leave it up to me to do the actual succeeding. My major's requirements had only 8 classes - 1.5 semesters. Our "core curriculum" had a diversity of requirements, but all were easily gotten around; the science core was easily satisfied by courses such as "Solar System Astronomy", "Oceanography", or "Stars, Galaxies, and the Cosmos", as opposed to Calculus 101 or what-have-you.

I took those classes, but I took those classes in all seriousness. They may have been soft on the hardcore science, but they opened up the breadth of my understanding of the world. Some others in my class did not - they were not at school to invest themselves, and that was their right.

I think I'm much better at the work I do today because I took classes with titles all the way from Quantitative Political Methodology, to Metaphysics & Epistomology, to The Political Economy of Development, to Psych 101, to Poetry Writing, to Arabic, to Computer Science 201, to The American Frontier.

But that's because I took all of those courses dead seriously. That's what makes college a good investment. Well, and the life experience itself, but that's not exactly an "investment" in the monetary sense.

If you don't approach school that way, you're not just wasting your money on tuition - there's a massive opportunity cost. 4 years of failing at a startup is certainly a better business education than an undergrad business degree from my school.

Really, it's a cultural problem. It's like a stomach ache after eating too much candy; things were so good for so long, we collectively forgot what it was like to have to sacrifice and work for the things you want. Applying for entrance to school and actually graduating doesn't have much of anything to do with your education. That's something you have to work for.

Now, is it "in the state's interest" to promote, say, English majors? I think that's a whole different topic. I think anyone who is asking the taxpayer to fund their education needs to be ready to pay that back with directly applicable skills, which would seem to suggest you mostly need scientists & engineers.

I think this is a completely misguided assumption. Maybe this is true these days. But it wasn't always true, and it shouldn't be true. Higher education, especially in the liberal arts, is for training students to become good community members, citizens and leaders. It's about giving them the cognitive, rhetorical, and even emotional skills required to solve the hard problems that we face as a society. And there is a lot more to solving those problems than promoting "innovation" or "economic growth". We subsidize higher education because producing citizens with those skills is valuable to our society.

Are liberal arts programs perfect? No. Do they cost too much? Maybe. Would it be good for society to have more people going into STEM fields? Probably. Does all this mean that liberal arts education is "oversold"? Certainly not. Indeed, it is rare to see people express just how valuable the liberal arts are, and why.

No one ever oversold college to me. Liberal arts education went precisely as my professors described, with precisely the economic and social benefits they predicted. No professor, no advisor, no student, no parent, no media outlet ever stated that a liberal arts degree was the path to financial success. At worst, the media has depicted having a college degree as more important than what that degree is in, which remains true. The utility of the paper itself remains quite high.

If we have a STEM graduation problem, I place the blame squarely where it belongs: on STEM departments. I watched as engineering majors routinely failed out, destroyed by calculus-based physics in the first year or thermodynamics in the second. Half our ranks in art history were culled from that group; the successful engineers usually had prior background. That learning curve is often too steep given our secondary education system. The courses demand an amount of time inconsistent with the experience of the average student; coming from the right hand of the SAT distribution, they often did not need to put much work into high school. If we want to increase graduation into STEM fields, we need to redesign our education system taking this objective and the preparation of our students into account.

It is a failure if the best we can do for $100,000 is turn mediocre hackers into programmers, obsessive tinkerers into engineers.

But you know all those articles fretting about how recent college grads are struggling these days? They almost all have a quote from some student who says "I went to college, I studied hard, I did everything I was supposed to do..." and then reveals that this jobless graduate with 50k+ in student loans majored in film, or literature, or political science.

I have trouble believing these students weren't at least somewhat aware of what they were getting themselves into with those majors. These quotes never come from a computer science or chemical engineering major. And while I understand these majors don't appeal to everyone, I was a double English/Math major (and I took a lot of CS-courses), and really, the Math and CS was much more difficult - I couldn't get away with a few all nighters writing a paper a few times a semester, it took daily, consistent effort, and a lot of it. Like you, I took my humanities seriously, and I'm really glad I did. In many ways, I think that the English major has been more helpful in my career as a software developer than my math and even my CS classes.

But I don't think you can say "I did everything I was supposed to do, and I still can't get a job" if you majored in "Slavic Literature". People have known for decades that slavic literature majors have trouble getting jobs.

I graduated 20+ years ago, and even then we had that old joke:

the science major asks "why does it work" the engineering major asks "how can I make it work?" the finance major asks "how much will it cost to make it work?" the english major asks "would you like fries with that?"

A lot of the commenters on here keep saying how students would be better off trying their hands at startups or reading/self-educating on the side--basically anything but taking a huge debt load on for a poor investment. You're asking people to think for themselves and find their own road.

When you've been sheltered and protected your whole life, you're not ready to find your own road! You're ready to follow the rules.

Remember, Gen Y was a generation that was allowed A LOT less freedom than previous generations. Kids who got to fool around on bikes, with tools, out in the woods or around the neighborhood on their own, are anomalies.

Personal Anecdote: I grew up mountain biking by myself out the hills around my town a lot from the time I was 12. I had a crew of friends who's parents also let them mountain bike and camp by themselves. But most parents didn't. Most kids never got any sense of independence or the chance to pull off their own little projects.

So how is someone supposed to go from basically being babysat by videogames/TV their whole childhood to winging startups or figuring out their own road through life? Most don't have the basic life skills in place to allow them to do so. So...they go to college. If they were lucky, they got a skill out of it that then allowed them to get a job. But if they didn't, then they go to grad school and bury themselves in even more debt.

Parenting Gurus are waking up to the problem of oversheltering and publishing books like Free Range Kids and 50 dangerous things you should let your kid do.

Meanwhile, in computer science (to take my field), the degree has some economic value, but I don't think nearly as much--- you can get a high-paying tech job just by having a good github "resume". There's no real way to do the equivalent in, say, history. You can write a bunch of freelance historical newsletters, but HR screens want to see a degree in something, anything; doesn't matter what, but must be a degree.

A) and b) aren't totally at odds, but they're not exactly aligned. When the economy was healthy enough and tuition was low enough, that misalignment was basically overshadowed by the signalling value of a degree. Even your liberal arts degree would show you were of value to corporate america. But now, the misalignment is becoming magnified by high tuitions, the poor economy, and increasingly specialized and technical job requirements. You can achieve a) via your philosophy degree, but you'll never find a job. So the signalling value of a non-technical degree has been largely lost (top ivy-league schools excepted).

I don't have a good answer, but I'd argue that we shouldn't abandon the notion that education should be in part about creating a well rounded citizenry capable of critical thinking in pursuit of more economically grounded college education.

I attend a liberal arts school, but we are a career driven school, almost to the point of being conservatory style. I take significantly more credits in my degree program than I even have the option of in general ed requirements. I spend more of my day in meetings for co-curricular and outside paid work than I do in class, by design. Yes, I do take classes called "The Artist and the Making of Meaning" that seem to have no...meaning, but I also already have enough connections in my field to secure me a job that I would be happy in out of college in at least three cities, if not more.

They call it further education and not job training for a reason. College was never meant to train a person for a specific field but to make a person a more well rounded individual which would appeal to an employer.

It's no longer being sold that way yet it's still being ran that way which is why we are seeing a huge issue. For profits are taking advantage of people because they appear to offer the job training you would not get at a regular 4 year. Also thousands of recent graduates who are now working at places like wal-mart and the like are scratching their heads because truthfully they were lied to.

As an example of what this means, the University of Queensland located down the road from me is often ranked in the top 50 worldwide.

Science courses at UQ are about half the cost of liberal arts majors.

I can study there and place tuition on what's essentially an interest-free (plus inflation) government loan that I only have to begin paying back (at 4-8% of my gross salary, depending on earnings) when/if my salary goes above ~$47,000.

I suspect that the professional earning potential within microbiology of a person with a bachelor's degree is probably lower than their earning potential within the food service industry - and the odds of a person with only a bachelor's degree being put in a position which allows substantial research into a major problem are very slim, indeed.

You cannot evaluate the success of an artist in the same way as an engineer. First, Wages are an extremely inadequate measure for the contribution art makes to society.

And looking at "innovations that drive economic growth" as a measure of the collective success of college graduates takes a seriously narrow view of the contributions necessary to foster a healthy economy.

At the current prices that students have to pay, it's simply not worth it. If I had a kid that wanted to go into liberal arts, I would suggest that they take a technical degree, and do night school for their liberal arts education, and I would forbid them from getting student loans.

As the old Wall Street adage goes, the cure for high prices is high prices. At some point, people will stop sending their kids to college if the prices keep increasing like this, and then something will have to be done about it. Unfortunately, it means that the current generation of kids will become the new debt slaves until this education crisis is stopped.

One of the biggest bummers about that chart is the increase in debt it represents.

However, unlike most of the computer science, business, and engineering majors on my campus, my degree has put me in a position to manage an organization of dozens of people where we ship a product four to six days a week, one that is consumed and heavily scrutinized by thousands of people.

I've also written, deployed, and improved software as part of my education that actually gets used at scale in the real world, not as a side project but as a requirement of my degree.

As a result of that, I'm going to leave college with more real-world experience than most of my peers.

Every college degree is what you make of it. Doing problem sets doesn't automatically enable you to really do anything, and studying in the humanities or liberal arts doesn't prevent you from doing something worthwhile, either. The main difference between people who have a valuable college experience and those who don't is whether the individual took advantage of the resources they had to make it valuable.

Also, this doesn't really need to be said, but without the liberal arts, engineering is useless. You can build bridges all day long, but someone still has to sell the thing to politicians and taxpayers and make the thing attractive enough to convince people to pay the toll.

This, of course, is one of many options. The kind of institution you attend is just as important as whether you're a STEM or Humanities major. Size, core curriculum, intellectual environment, difficulty, class style, and all the other factors that separate colleges are huge factors on what you get out of college.

What should you get out of college? Often, a posited counter-experience is four years in the business world. Which would be useful in the short term, but when are you going to radically improve your reading and writing? You're never going to get the chance to devote yourself, 100%, to reading, writing, and learning.

Of course, the reason liberal arts gets a bad rap is majors have lost sight of reading and writing, and have turned into a pseudo-technical fields in larger institutions. A proper liberal arts degree gives you the same skills regardless of what you major, which is why liberal arts students like myself at liberal arts colleges scoff at this categorization by major...I don't care about majors.

Conclusion: Liberal arts degrees are worth the money...if they're done properly.

Seems like we could use more engineers though.

More people need to take the realistic view of spending time in college for what it will get them. The almost obligatory need for people to do any type of higher education devalues the worth of all degree qualifications.

Moreover, education is ripe for startup innovation. Is there really a need to x,000 community colleges when a lecturer from Harvard can be streamed online in HD in real time to thousands or millions of students?

That's not to say that education in the arts isn't valuable, it's jut not as immediately useful and measurable to the bottom line from the perspective of an employer.

First, the critical thinking I learned reading poetry better prepared me for business management, web development, and entrepreneurship than any of my Chemistry courses (I was also a Chemistry minor in Undergrad). I'd be happy to go into the details, but this doesn't seem like the forum for that explanation.

And second, again, as an instructor, one of the bigger problems in the humanities is grade inflation and a sense of entitlement to A's. Whereas in a Calculus class, grading is much easier to quantify (i.e. get X number of questions right on a test, end up with Y grade), grading papers is a less standardized practice. The result is overwhelming grade inflation (I can't tell you the number of students I have who quite literally break down in tears when they receive B's). Perhaps both the utility of humanities degrees and the propensity for being willing to challenge oneself in a STEM course would be increased if getting higher grades wasn't perceived as being easier in the humanities.

http://i.imgur.com/YTFMo.png

Here are the tables from the report, if you'd like to do your own analysis: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/2010menu_tables.asp