This decision makes a lot of sense to me and I actually think all universities should do more to encourage students to major in STEM. If taxes are paying for the school we should subsidize things that are good for America not individuals.
Zooming out beyond academia, Bret Devereaux, a historian whose writing appears with some regularity on HN, wrote a superb essay a few years ago on the practical case for the humanities and puts it better than I ever could, so I will link to his post: https://acoup.blog/2020/07/03/collections-the-practical-case...
One effective but evil engineer in power could do a lot of damage. Hitler wanted to be an artist but couldn't get into university. Although if I'm going to use selection bias: some of our tech overlords seem morally repugnant.
I wonder if we could show that:
(1) humanities graduates have better morals, and
(2) that those graduates got those morals by going to university (versus had them as children - selection bias of those choosing to do humanities).
> when it comes to deciding _whether_ something needs to be built, _what_ to build
Can of worms: how to successfully teach people to be ethical. Certainly our churches seem to me to often fail: fail at the level of the individual (I have met enough arsehole Christians), and fail at the level of a society (a group of Christians deciding to do extremely unchristian things).
I’m also unclear what tax money has to do with anything - why does the funding method matter, with regards to educating students? What, specifically, makes a physics major “better” or more worthy of your tax dollars, than an English major?
I do believe in the value of the academic humanities.
I'm not sure I agree that the linked article is well reasoned (although I have liked some of their other articles). It finishes:
We look for scientific solutions to humanistic problems (where our forebears, it must be confessed, often looked for humanistic solutions to scientific problems) and wonder why our wizards fail us. We have all of the knowledge in the world and yet no wisdom.
We would do well to go back to the humanities.
"Wisdom" is probably the hardest part of the framework to define clearly, but across formulations it's about being able to integrate different kinds of knowledge from difference sources, and then using that to be able to know when and why to take a certain action, or to know what the right thing to do might be. Obviously this is something that is frequently informed by knowledge derived from science and scientific reasoning, but usually also relies on some of the ways of thinking and understanding that the humanities can help provide. So that's how I'd understand what Devereaux was saying (allowing for some rhetorical flourish on his part)- it's a "both-and" kind of situation rather than an "either-or"; in other words, science and humanities on their own are both necessary and insufficient.
And of course for a humorous take on the matter, SMBC is always a reliable source: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2009-10-18
I enjoy living in a society with music, literature, dance, plays, sculpture, painting, architecture, and not-strictly-necessary decoration. Those are all good for Americans, individually and collectively.
The problem isn't that humanities jobs are all worthless, it's that there are a very, very limited number that have enough of a value add to society to make a good living. For every successful author/artist there are 100 or 1000 struggling ones. The numbers just don't work.
Universities--especially private big-name art schools--have preyed on this lack of perspective on this asymmetry. The other commenter is right about administrative costs, but this particular scam of selling an unrealistic dream has got to stop somewhere.
As pointed out elsewhere, a significant increase in the cost of education (the actual operating budgets) is the increase in the administrative class. That needs to be addressed as part of fixing the issue with high costs.
Does it? I'm serious. I see people say all the time that incomes of people with stem vs humanities degrees get so cleanly bucketed. But the actual data that I see from the universities I've been involved with are far less clear. The distributions are wide and overlap within individual majors, within BA/BS distinctions, and within STEM/Humanities distinctions. We don't see this sort of discourse about how sad it is that biology majors exist when they could otherwise be studying computer science.
Yes, computer science graduates have higher average starting salaries than music performance graduates. But it does not clearly convert into "humanities graduates get low paying jobs and stem graduates get high paying jobs." It is further complicated by the actual social merit of various jobs coming out of these disciplines. A math major who goes to graduate school to do pure math research gets paid way way less than a math major who goes and does analytics for a trading firm. But... I'm not certain that we actually want the government to push people towards doing analytics on Wall Street.
I work in a front-office engineering role at a successful quant hedge fund, after a decade working in FAANG and equivalents. My wife is a stay-at-home wife/fur-mom.
Incidentally, I also graduated with total debt of about $13k, which I paid off six years after graduating with my first paycheck from Amazon. I know several other people from my English program who are equally successful -- one who graduated from a top-20 law school, one who was the lead narrative designer for Halo: Infinite, several software engineers.
Let's stop this stupid argument about STEM vs. humanities, and talk about integrative learning. (And, let's stop treating university as job training -- but that's a harder battle.)
There may be an argument for university degrees in these domains but that isn't one. All these things existed before students had to be 100 K or 150 K in debt to learn them.
There's a big difference between actual artists and the people studying them.
Addition: Most of great Mathematicians in last two centuries did not graduate with a math degree. That doesn't mean that we should abolish math degrees. People also built cities and beautiful huge buildings before there was a university degrees in architecture and civil engineering. No one will say that we don't want them because of that
Media and advertising comprise a $500 billion annual market in the United States. The Humanities teaches people to write and writing is the start of every media product.
When I got my CS degree my university required four semesters of creative and business writing. Students complained and now they do not. Many universities have followed suit.
Recent graduates now tend to write as though they are suffering from a head injury. Even worse they have started to rely on AI tools so now they tend to communicate like robots with head injuries.
I hated with the fury of a thousand suns all of the writing I had to do in school. Now I hate how bad new hires are at communicating even more-- to the point that I believe that a mediocre engineer who can write effectively and present data effectively is better for the company than a "rockstar" whose emails read like, well, someone with a head injury wrote them.
But adtech (i.e., the infrastructure underpinning digital advertising) is all data and code, nothing artistic at all. Check out any RTB spec: https://github.com/InteractiveAdvertisingBureau/openrtb2.x/b...
There's been the push that everybody should go to college, which is well-intended but misses the mark.
Everybody who can learn and grow from it should go. Those who can't should have access to vocational training. They shouldn't be denied because they can't afford it. The boomers got affordable education that they could pay for with a part time job and graduate debt-free. That seemed to work out well for them and the country as a whole.
As for who should pay for it, as a public good it should primarily be payed for by the public coffers. But treating college as a glorified trade school (clear downstream economic impact) is short-sighted.
What do you think the people who made those things studied in college? Unless you're watching Futurama exclusively, it wasn't STEM.
Non-STEM majors have value too. A society of nothing but engineers and scientists isn't one I'd want to live in.
If all you have access to is a subsidized state school, do you get to learn a different language, examine history, ponder philosophy, experience and make art? Or is that only reserved for folks that can afford to go to fancy schools?
Are citizens who are aware of history, other languages and cultures, know how to create and understand art, not good for America?
[1] Data List - https://www.historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development...
[2] "Where Historians Work (interactive charts)" - https://www.historians.org/wherehistorianswork
[3] AHA Jobs Report 2022 - https://www.historians.org/ahajobsreport2022
Personal take: One issue I think some people have, is that there's not a "lot" of private sector historian work. As a percentage of the profession, its relatively small. Higher-Ed (Tenure, Non-Tenure, Admin) is close to 70%.
You don’t fix engines, or any sophisticated system, by treating its various parts as functionally the same.
Unless that information isn’t available, but universities are openly observable systems.
Weird take. Universities aren't trade schools.