I'm basing it on both my time as a math tutor for Pima Community College and on people I have known.

People like my mother who, if she can quantify the data she can effectively do algebra, but as soon as X and Y appear she shuts down. She cannot make the jump to the abstract thinking of math, and it curtailed her ability to go back to college. It didn't help that her math teacher in 9th grade told her that she would never be good at math, much like many women from poor backgrounds. (I have no study, only the experience in tutoring on how many women said that a teacher told them not to bother, and could never make it over that hump.) Now you say that it's merely psychological for them and that they could. I'm telling you that for as much work as some of these people I tutored put in, they had a mental block that they simply could not overcome, fighting their way to a C in college algebra so they could get to where they're going.

I can give as an example my boyfriend, who can speak and teach two languages better than most people here can in their native language, and is a promising Ph.D candidate in his program. He worked for a month straight (with my help) to raise his GRE math to a minimum score. His limit may be calculus, but certainly not higher math, and not upper level sciences. Yet I have seen this man wake up, read, write, sleep, and repeat for weeks straight.

He's a gifted writer and academic, but even if he could muddle through (say...) managed information systems, he'd never be more than mediocre because his brain simply does not work that way. (He still asks for help with his Mac.) Square peg, round hole.

It doesn't benefit those who have a passion for the sciences to put him and dozens of others in the same class, wearing down the professor because they struggle to grasp concepts that future scientists understood in fifth grade.

Studying engineering isn't the same as innovating, but you accept that people need to know the field first. the same is true for other fields, even if the domain knowledge isn't obvious to you.

My argument is that we have a surplus of humanities majors and the funding for them is disproportional to our basic need to advance scientific knowledge. Additionally, we must remain competitive with other countries that realize that STEM is the way to economic dominance.

The humanities are subjects that can be explored at home by anyone who has the luxury of free time. While I admit that a hand-holding professor can help you traverse the field quicker and lead you to insight that would be difficult to divine on your own, there are books and audio lectures that can do the same job. And what's stopping anyone from joining a mailing list on the topic of interest?

Even "big" art projects pale in comparison to the funding requirements of basic science research. We need to make sure every lab is fully-stocked with not only minds, but the latest equipment necessary to keep pace with the advancements being made at the top institutions.

The fact that it's so much cheaper to teach the liberal arts, yet the same tuition is charged, means that they are already much less subsidized. If you work out tuition paid by students and compare it to department salaries/expenses, humanities departments often turn a net profit for their universities (http://campuscomments.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/ah-bartleby-a...). If you charged students proportionally to the amount it cost to educate them for every credit-hour (i.e. equal subsidies across fields), STEM tuitions would be 20% to 50% higher.

On the other hand, I don't see much reason to subsidize medical education or research across the board, given the huge profits in it; income from patent royalties ought to be sufficient to pay for most of the needed research and education. An exception is harder-to-monetize research, like running clinical trials for old generic medications where it's not profitable for the private sector to do so (since they wouldn't be able to patent the result), or studying diseases that primarily affect poor countries.