Some majors are actually unproductive and a waste of both the student's and taxpayer's money, and should not be subsidized.
But many humanities that often get binned this way are actually civically productive, and they're only economically unproductive because of significant market failure. The benefits to society aren't priced properly. Such majors, and that is the social sciences, should arguably be subsidized by the government, because they are technically public goods.
What the last few years has taught us is how much damage an electorate can do who isn't educated. If they don't understand anything about economic systems, political systems, sociology, history, psychology, then their mind can be taken over too easily by propaganda, which can have catastrophic consequences, all the way up to the death of democracy.
Many people would argue that linguistics is one of those useless studies compared to comp sci, but it shares deep connections to research in logic and by extension type theory (see handbook for logic and languages)
unless youn disagree with the laws of supply and demand, it seems the market consensus at this moment is that compsci majors are far more useful than any fundamental research (which still remains undefined).
Even if the market was wrong and fundamental research could somehow be valuable, why would you not trust the primary beneficiaries oj making that decision, vs some bureaucrat that has no stake in the outcome?
A great video about open-endedness (warning - very long) with Kenneth Stanley, author of the book "Why Greatness Cannot be Planned"
Would it perhaps be prudent to cap the number of participants in those departments to match the number of real-world vacancies available?
According to 'The Master Plan', UCs are designed for research and post-grad work and some professional careers. Only the UCs give out PhDs (with a few exceptions). CSUs are designed for professional and teacher education and cannot give out PhDs (with a few exceptions). So, as an undergrad thinking of grad school, a UC is a better place to go to as they have the grad labs and classes on campus, while the CSUs mostly do not. Your chances of getting into grad school are a bit higher.
Berkeley, being a UC, is more geared toward research than Chico, a CSU. I mean, Cal even has a nobel prize parking lot.
https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-plannin...
What a sad way to categorize people.
It seems so, since it's hard for people to admit that an average STEM graduate is much more useful than an average humanities graduate. It's not that the humanities aren't useful, they are, but to succeed and actually have an impact on society, you need to be one of the best humanities graduates.
We don't need more psych bachelors grads who took on 10-20x their future annual income in student loans, only to file paperwork in an office for the rest of their lives. There are much better ways for them and for society to spend that money than subsidizing/bailing them out.
Your average STEM grad is not having the impact on society like what you describe here.
We also don’t need more CS bachelor grads churning out CRUD apps for adtech companies.
https://twitter.com/benmschmidt/status/1562212497272279041
(Weird that psychology is growing, all the psych degree people I know work in HR and I don't think that's what they dreamed of.)
https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/interactive_embed/car...
My personal take is that humanities departments should be aggressively courting 2nd majors (somewhat egotistical, I was a double major). As much as we might want to believe that the purpose of education is to give person a fuller life, increased earnings potential is an undeniable part of there reason people go to university. Selling a line like “the CS department will teach you how to make money. We’ll help you live the rest of your life” or “engineering got me in on the ground floor. Clarity of thought and speech got me to the top floor” seems like it could open up more demand than trying to go it alone.
My N of one experience suggests it might be effective. I thought I was just getting a vanity politics degree on top of my CS degree because I liked it. After 10 years in career I think I refer to lessons and skills learned in those humanities classes as much as the ones in my CS classes.
I would figure that the whole point of getting a psychology degree (as opposed to taking some psychology courses as part of your main degree) is to work as a psychologist? Why are all these people failing to get their psychologist qualifications?
Where I live, I've never met or heard of anyone who went for a psychology degree without the intention of becoming a psychologist. Sure, not everybody makes it to the end, and few end up doing research instead, but the whole goal of the degree is to produce qualified psychologists.
(I'm oversimplifying a little. There are 6 accredited programs, but there are 10 undergrad universities that produce psych majors, so the numbers probably look worse overall.)
You're right that the goal is to become a qualified psychologist, but the training pipeline doesn't match that goal. Crudely, there are training spots for less than 1% of psych undergrads (maybe 2% if you include research psychologists). There are alternative programs for counseling, but it's not the same license. The cost of these counseling programs is also astronomical for Canada. I know people who went that route and have $150k loans to pay back. If you're competitive enough to get into one of the clinical programs, they are funded (with students given stipends ranging from $30-$40k/year), but even if they aren't tuition is under $7k/year.
What reason do you have to believe that you aren't doing the same thing with the majors you're judging societally unproductive?
But for subjects like Civil, Electrical, sciences like Physics, Biology, I suspect the story is quite different.
I can speak to Biology; most undergrads are left with little opportunity as most roles require a graduate degree to do anything meaningful when the economy is actually favorable, and often seek roles outside of their field when it's not. As a undergrad that was lucky enough to enter the field in the wake of the GFC long enough to just pay off my student debt I've met so many biologists/biochemists who either couldn't find anything in their field, or simply gave up trying and sought the highest paid and somewhat stable role they could get 'that required a degree.' It's quite clear that the system has failed, and the system is designed to onboard more STEM grads as it sounds as their are ever-growing holders of degrees chasing so n amount of open roles.
Tech in unique in that it is one of those few Industries where the barrier of entry is rather low, but the attrition and competence level vets for viable candidates almost entirely on it's own--the gatekeeping interview process is still an unnecessary hurdle.
Personally, for all the controversy Eric Weinstein has made directly and indirectly of his own actions, the concept of Embedded Growth Obligations was incredibly well researched and consistent with what we have seen as outlined since 2005 and then solidified itself in the financial collapse of 2008 [0]:
> Embedded Growth Obligations are the way in which institutions plan their future predicated on legacies of growth. And since the period between the end of World War II in 1945 and the early 70s had such an unusually beautiful growth regime, many of our institutions became predicated upon low-variance technology-led, stable, broadly distributed growth. Now, this is a world we have not seen in an organic way since the early 1970s, and yet, because it was embedded in our institutions, what we have is a world in which the expectation is still present in the form of an embedded growth obligation. That is, the pension plans, the corporate ladders, are all still built very much around a world that has long since vanished.
We have effectively become a Growth Cargo Cult. That is, once upon a time, planes used to land in the Pacific, let's say, during World War II, and Indigenous people looked at the air strips and the behavior of the air traffic controllers, and they've been mimicking those behaviors in the years since as ritual, but the planes no longer land. Well, in large measure, our institutions are built for a world in which growth doesn't happen in the same way anymore.
(Incidentally, I think CS is a very good place to invest, precisely because there’s a lot of demand, start up cost for self employment is low, and applicability is super broad)
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/05/09/310114739/what...
Maybe that’s part of the problem.
https://www.ucop.edu/operating-budget/_files/rbudget/2022-23...
The overall budget gets weird with medical centers and something called “Sales and Support”, but in any case California tax payers put in more money then students. I don’t think that’s a problem, but it’s definitely subsidized.
Who probably proceeds to go into zero or negative-sum trading, or negative sum ad targeting intelligence.