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Comment by pvankessel | Hacker News Reader

Except many STEM graduates are having a harder time finding jobs right now than liberal arts and humanities majors: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:....

For what it's worth, I have enjoyed a very successful career in data science and software engineering after taking some AP STEM courses in high school, followed by three liberal arts degrees. Many of the best engineers I've known have had similar backgrounds. A good liberal arts education teaches one how to think and learn independently. It's not a substitute for a highly-specialized education in, say, molecular biology, but it provides a really solid foundation to easily pick up more logic-derived technical skills like software development. It's also essential for an informed citizenry and functional democracy.

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It’s sad that many people need to spend years on liberal arts education to learn to learn independently. Where has our society failed that 11 years of schooling and upbringing can’t provide that?

Oh I agree with you on that wholeheartedly. I think our society would be substantially healthier if we required civics, philosophy, economics, etc in high school. But if we're already struggling to have evolution taught in schools and we have state boards of education removing references to the slave trade and founding fathers from history curriculum (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/16/texas-schools-...), expanding liberal arts in public education is a non-starter. Hell, half the country would love to see it wiped from post-secondary education. Best I figure we can do at this point is defend the idea itself to the extent we can - for instance, in Hacker News threads where the liberal arts are being dismissed as an unnecessary lesser-than academic pursuit.

You do realize that an engineering degree is better to learn how to learn than a typical liberal arts degree? Read academically adrift, this is well studies.

In general the more difficult your degree the better it teaches you how to learn, because you are forced to learn more difficult stuff.

Hard disagree. I gave up a top-10 engineering scholarship and switched to liberal arts largely because my entire curriculum was predetermined in the former. Five courses in calculus and two slots for electives in your entire undergraduate schedule - that doesn't teach you how to think. Political philosophy, symbolic logic, comparative history, econometrics - having the freedom to explore and dabble and push yourself into new ideas instead of being fast-tracked into a pipeline, that's how you learn how to learn. And the "difficulty" is entirely what you make of it. Sure, if you show up to college and want to major in anthropology and put no effort in, you get nothing out. But I saw very quickly that with absolute unfailing effort applied to my engineering degree, I was still going to get exactly one and only one thing out of it. The liberal arts gave me a cornucopia of possibility. I've gone on a human trafficking sting op with the FBI, I've presented my research at the White House, I've been cited by the Pope - that's all wild shit that an engineering degree never would have enabled. Breadth of learning and soft skills matter. I'd be a shell of a person today if not for my liberal arts education. I owe everything to it, and the constant condescension towards non-STEM education in tech would frustrate me more if I didn't run laps around my peers.

>In general the more difficult your degree the better it teaches you how to learn, because you are forced to learn more difficult stuff.

How right you are! From now on I'm only hiring folks who created abiogenesis in a cereal bowl while fellating a hungry lion. Anyone else had it much too easy, amirite?

It's either that or just folks who discovered a new elementary particle while defending Afghani women from the Taliban.

Anything else would be way too easy.

I entirely agree - I have a 30 year career in STEM and am now a senior software architect at a $5b company. I also read, write and speak classical Latin at an advanced (almost fluent) level.

My favourite pastime is quoting Cicero in planning meetings.

I also hire SEs - if I see a resume come in with a CS and liberal arts background, they are definitely going to the top of the pile and getting an interview. If they can explain to me how Plato relates to their work as a SE then the job is theirs...

Lol. Way to filter our people without a western education.

It's ok - most companies that matter are led by people who have spent more time reading the Mahabharata rather than Plato. Enjoy your scraps.

> Except many STEM graduates are having a harder time finding jobs right now than liberal arts and humanities majors: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:....

Is that in both respective fields of study, though?

It aplears liberal arts/humanities majors are much more willing to work non-related jobs where their STEM collegues more strictly pursue relevant titles.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherrim/2023/01/11/the-p...

Well that's kind of my point - liberal arts and humanities set you up with a very versatile baseline. With a proper education in those disciplines you learn how to think, and that's applicable to a wide range of fields. The woman I dated in grad school at UChicago studied war history and wound up being an analyst for a prominent wine auctioneering firm as a key researcher. My master's thesis was on the meaning of life, and now I'm running data science at a non-profit. So many of my fellow liberal arts grads have gone on to do incredible things entirely unrelated to their chosen subject of study.

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