And that's before we consider the intangible nature of "real world value." Very few of us want to live in a world where value is a pure function of expected production.
closing implies the government does it by force, my point is that things that provide value- whether economic or more abstract, will be fine without government subsidizing it. Research labs have proven ROI and benefits for society, humanity majors no so much. If humanities majors had so much value companies would be paying for them or other nations governments would be recruiting these debt ridden students and poaching them to benefit their own country
Like I said, people can learn anything humanities related by reading free resources online. No need to rack up massive amounts of debt to do that
The fact you have to make a value judgement of it being "reprehensible" and act like without humanities majors we'll be "a world where value is a pure function of expected production" is a sign of a weak argument. It's a very common argument style I see of people stuck in the past with rose-tinted views of what college is about
They do, all the time: as journalists, economists, political dissidents and, most saliently in this context, programmers. It turns out that obtaining a well-rounded education means that those who can program (or perform other technical roles) do so better than their purely technical counterparts!
You can learn anything online, with enough effort, discipline, and engagement from others. Lots of people try to learn programming (not Computer Science, just the technical aspect of programming) online each year, and I'd wager that the overwhelming majority fair. It turns out that the classroom environment is conducive to learning in ways that self-directed online learning is not!
Yes, it is a value judgment. It is one I stand by: it is reprehensible to eliminate sources of value in our society just because we don't have an instrument capable of measuring them. One wonders how many fewer adolescents and young adults would be inspired to study aerospace should Tom Wolfe have been told to study it instead of writing The Right Stuff; one also wonders whether we'd even be having this conversation over the Internet were it not for a bunch of "worthless" philosophizing in Viennese cafes over the nature of mathematical structure.
Going into debt for a humanities degree is akin to consumer credit. The individual is free to take on that debt, but it is by no means an investment.
I do not think people should weight the intangible value of the degree that they are going 50k in debt for. Doing so will lead to the current student debt crisis.
Humanities teach you that life isn't a ROI thing.
One could possibly acquire that particular knowledge for free.
Also, life may not be a ROI thing, but being heavily indebted is still misery. Do the teachers whose salaries depend on their students being heavily indebted teach that, or do they prefer not to talk about this issue? Or the administrators?
I would call it a material (and painful) lesson on conflicts of interest.
The world is perfect. Those students and society are getting their monies worth in intangible benefits.
Whether or not the thing we call "universities" continues to exist into the indefinite future is not of particular concern to me.
The primary thing I'm concerning myself with in this conversation is the recurrent and myopic belief among the HN commentariat that everything, especially anything that isn't STEM, needs to fit into the bottom line of some profit structure to be worth any of society's time and effort.
How about a severe and widening disconnect between the people paying for the loans, the people guaranteeing the loans, and the measurable value received by the recipient?
we are talking way more fundamental things here. If all of society suddenly had a ton of humanity major knowledge but no farming knowledge, society dies.
The government is only able to subsidize a luxury like humanities majors because all the other basic needs are taken care of by the miracles of technology created by engineers and physicists. Otherwise, everybody would still be doing subsistence farming to survive and wouldn't have time for the humanities anyway. You can't fake productivity and economic output, it all comes down to technology