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Isn't the issue that liberal arts educations have not changed in the past 40 years, but the cost has gone from $10K to $100-200K?. So, there is an order of magnituded cost and some minor Nx delta on the Return (~inflation).

English/logic/philosophy/history etc should be plumeting in cost. With the internet, the cost of books/articles should have gone to zero by now. Non-profit universities could force sharing of peer-reviewed work online for the priviledge of the peer review publication (for example).

A degree of this type is not worth more or less (especially as a social rank signifier) today than yesterday. And they are valuable. But they sure as hell cost way more than they should. Its time to question why they are priced as if they were luxury, brand name handbags. Rather than public goods being distributed by non-profit, tax exempt organizations.

Capital gets cheaper, labour gets more expensive. This has been the general trend in education since the invention of the printing press.

Relevant data:

_________

Princeton: Endowment US$ 17.1 billion (2011)

Harvard: Endowment US$ 32.0 billion (2011)

Yale: Endowment US$ 19.4 billion (2011)

Stanford: Endowment US$ 16.5 billion (2011)

___________

Facebook: IPO US$ 10.0 billion (2012)

_________

Its not the payout to the staff. That its typically 1/3 of the budget spent at a University. Princeton just raised $1.8B for its latest fundraising project. etc.

I'm not sure if generalising from a handful of massively-endowed private universities to all universities everywhere is a meaningful thing.

It used to be that books were so rare and expensive that they were chained to desks. A single copy would be read aloud to students -- the very word "lecturer" means "reader".

These days, for a liberal arts education heavy in classics and great books, the cost of the materials is close to nought. That's what I meant by the capital.

The attack need not be general. Quick specific examples are even stonger. The degree from Uni X N years ago is not worth less than Uni X today. Their values are ordinal not cardinal, although arguably decreasing in relative value in any event on a more absolute scale.

English/logic/philosophy/history etc should be plumeting in cost.

If one assume that an English degree's purpose is to teach the comprehension and production of English vis-a-vis a body of literature, and assuming that degree is priced cost-plus, one would assume the price of degrees to come down modestly over time due to efficiency gains.

Consider the alternative hypotheses where a) an English degree is primarily a signaling mechanism to demonstrate that you are in the upper N% of some distribution measured by the university admissions office, b) the LTV of being in the upper N% is widely perceived to be high, c) credit is available in quantity, and d) universities price degrees at 100% of their customers ability to pay. If these hypotheses all hold, you would expect the price of degrees to inflate to capture all familial ability to pay plus all aid plus all available loans plus a bit of a fudge factor for blood plasma, summer jobs, and gifts from grandma.

Which world more closely resembles the world we are living in?

P.S. I believe your use of the term "public good" is non-standard in this paragraph. Do you mean that, as an aspirational statement, we should subsidize the consumption of English degrees, or that perhaps "English degrees have positive externalities"? The more common use of "public good" in economics is "a good which, when produced, is enjoyed non-rivalrously by the public, such that one's enjoyment of the good does not content with another's enjoyment of the good." For example, national defense (well, precisely, the state of nation-not-under-attack) is a public good. University educations are not a public good under the standard usage of that term: buying you a degree does not buy me a degree.

This is a fair point. I'm using the term probably in all of the ways you mention, plus another. Partly thats rhetorical, and partly analytical. Huge portions of reserach are paid for by the US government. The logic is to finance knowledge as an economic public good (ie, can't patent science, ideas, flow freely etc). That is the positive externality. And we fund it like we fund NASA and Defense, a communal public works. Or like roads, etc. The idea is that all should be able to drive on the information superhighway...etc (i know, this is stretching slightly optimistic, traffic etc;). But this is not what we are getting out of the system as a society.

& You raise some interesting points on what that front...But it just points to the answer: Universities are acting as hierarchies (ie, like firms) with monopolistic pricing power under assumptions of profit maximization (viz, rent seeking). You have to ask your self: self: why are these 20-30Bn investment hedge funds being not only tx exempted by the government, but having their operations/cost based subsidezed (viz, grants) and having their revenues subsidized (viz subsidized loans, grants) etc?

These institutions are highjacking huge flows of money that are supposed to be charitable contributions. The are leveraging the prestige of the projects financed to create a massive rent-seeking opportunities for themselves, not to further the free flow of information. This rent seeking is counterthetical to their stated mission and the public policy principles that underly their tax-exmpt and socially privledged status. The degree as entrenched credential is now a giant "hold-up-problem", with universities as the opportunists. And With kids as the hostages.

They should just hand out Birkin Bags at graduation. In the latest colors. To he!! with the sheepskin. =D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkin_bag

[edits]

>I'd imagine the younger generations will gradually stop pursuing these degrees because of the terrible ROI in terms of debt to future income.

The problem with this is that most 17-18 year old don't have a sense of what ROI of their education will get them. Many of high-school graduates will be thinking "oh I like to read shakespeare so I'm going to major in English", and they probably have no idea how long the $100k will take to get paid off after their job.

I think if anything that will solve this problem once and for all is to make liberal arts minor degrees and only offer STEM as majors.

That is a ludicrous suggestion. Even hard line soviets weren't that materialistic about education.

$100k STEM degrees aren't pumping out ROI either.

Huh? My son did graduate work in CS at CMU. He's paying back his reasonable loans at a staggering rate; won't be in debt in a year or two after graduation.

STEM is absolutely worth the money.

Just curious, your son is paying back $100k in loans within 2 years of graduation?

Didn't have that big a loan; and yes, earns big money at a Silicon Valley startup doing JBoss programming.

> For those of us on HN that went to college and got a computer science degree, I'm sure a lot of took a handful of liberal arts courses as electives.

Now I'm curious.

At Caltech, you must have a minimum of 486 units to graduate (Caltech units are based on the amount of time a course is expected to take (lectures + labs + reading/homework) a week: 1 hour == 1 unit).

Of that, 108 units must be in humanities and social sciences. At least 36 must be humanities (art, English, film, history, history and philosophy of science, humanities, music, and philosophy), and at least 36 must be social sciences (anthropology, business economics and management, economics, law, political science, psychology, social science). Half of those must be introductory courses and half must be advanced courses.

Generally, this means a Caltech CS major (or any other major except a humanities or social science major) takes one humanities or social science course every term, which is about 20% of their total course load.

Anyone happen to know the humanities and social science requirements for other top schools, like MIT, Berkeley, and so on for people in technical majors like CS, math, physics and so on?

MIT is basically the same (average of one course per term), with an additional "distribution requirement" which means that a selection of your humanities courses must be spread across a certain number of categories.

http://web.mit.edu/hassreq/

Cool. Caltech seems to have an implicit distribution requirement, through the requirement that that part of the units be split evenly between introductory and advanced courses--I think one would run out of introductory courses if one tried to do them all in one area.

I suspect that MIT and Caltech students end up taking as much humanities and social sciences as do STEM majors at liberal arts colleges, and could plausibly claim to have obtained a liberal arts education.