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Comment by chrystalkey | Hacker News Reader

That may just go to show how much you might be caught up in your bubble. All of that is a still very much active part of the human experience. Although technology has brought us great comforts and raised our living standards, art, music, anthropology, social sciences in general do absolutely have value to a great many people and contributed to a raised living standard in other ways.

Even if we decide the only relevant criterium is the free market, people pay for the ability to do these things, and for good reason, just as they pay for the ability to use and develop technologies.

I think it would be a great loss to all of humanity if we suddenly stopped paying for social science education. In a nutshell, and a bit polemic: What do you want humanity to be, a great many cogs in a science machine churning away without looking sideways? I would not want that.

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Construction, mining, and oil extraction are also very much an active part of human experience. Doesn't mean that people need a degree to do it. In fact, people in these industries often work highly skilled jobs where they are required to operate heavy machinery where one mistake can kill people, and all with only a high school education. Degrees are completely unnecessary, and anything that can be learned in a university can be learned outside of a university.

It's nothing but an arbitrary choice that there is an art degree, but not a heavy machinery operation degree, and not the other way around. This is all class based gate keeping, and should never be formalized and funded by tax money.

Construction, mining and oil extraction firms make plenty of use of people with geology and engineering degrees, particularly in jobs that involve doing research and calculations.

Seems fairly obvious why three years of sitting in classrooms and libraries isn't seen as a particularly useful way of demonstrating aptitude for operating heavy machinery.

And yet somehow it is for art and music?

The practice of art and music is much more conducive to a classroom setting and peer group experimentation & discussion than the practice of operating mining equipment, yes. Though a degree has never been a requirement for being a practitioner in those fields, and much of the study focuses on the theory. Universities also welcome many people interested in studying the theory of heavy machinery, and award them engineering degrees.

Do we actually need social “science” and other soft degrees, though? Aren’t these non-rigorous paths the sort of thing people can learn on their own (for free)? How are other nations tackling these sorts of advanced hobbies?

They're sort of self-selecting over an extended period of time. While your degree may sound interesting it won't attract too much talent when there are not relevant job openings and every graduate ends up pivoting. Of course, demand does not zero out which is probably a good thing.

The only degrees where this selection mechanism seems to have inverse effects are business management related ones.

Funny enough, my degree was in business management and it was basically useless except for the accounting and economics classes. I eventually pivoted to software dev (self taught).

In one model, when the universities negotiate for government funding, one key factor is the number of degrees of various kinds they are expected to produce. That has interesting effects on admissions.

Some fields have highly competitive admissions, because the number of people willing to study them far exceeds the demand for graduates. This may be because the field promises a well-paying high-status job (e.g. law, medicine) or because it is inherently interesting (e.g. social sciences, biology). In other fields, particularly in STEM, admissions can be easy, because the demand exceeds the number of capable and interested students.

What can be studied with "hard sciences" is extremely limited. To a first approximation we don't know anything by hard science standards.

Just because some fields don't (pretend to) have formalized theories, it doesn't mean the study isn't rigorous.

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