It's funny that you use the term 'smugness', as that's exactly the feeling I got while reading your post. There's just something telling about a person who calls others Philistines.
(For what it's worth, I do think there's an echo chamber of STEM 'superiority', absolutely present on HN but more so on Reddit and Slashdot.)
I didn't realize that anyone still used the word, let alone that there was a category, "the kind of person who says 'philistine'". It reminds me of Louis CK's thing about people who say "People from Phoenix are called 'Phoenicians'". Not a category one would knowingly step into!
But wow, your comments are really insinuating. "There's just something telling". "People who purposefully". "The lack of nuance in your understanding". I was interested in your point of view, but I'm finding this unpleasant and am going to stop now.
That's not an insult so shake it off and don't take it as one. You've got the term wrong. I agree that maybe we could have a great conversation about it, if only you'd address it instead of whining about the phrase "lack of nuance in your understanding." It's not exactly Don Rickles material.
Others? I'm talking about an attitude. (I even checked http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/philistine to make sure I had the word right.) If you don't think that attitude dominates our age, we must move in different circles. In the world I live in, "education" and "job training" are synonyms.
It's funny that you use the term 'smugness', as that's exactly the feeling I got while reading your post.
Oh dear. That's not good. Well, it's hard to see oneself accurately. I will say that my comment comes from long and hard experience ending in failure.
Furthermore, the idea that an engineering major is in any way less intellectual than an English major is ridiculous. And if that's not what you meant by the term "Philistine", then I suggest you pay more attention to the spirit of its definition less to the letter. A Philistine was once upon a time a person who had never studied philosophy, but this as only the case because every student once studied philosophy.
A technology-oriented education certainly doesn't imply any kind of Philistinism, despite the lack of nuance in your understanding of the term.
FWIW, I had a highly varied college experience, working and associating with students of engineering, music, CS, psychology, and English. The STEM tracks demanded a uniformly pretty high level of effort, whereas you get out of the humanities about what you choose to put in.
Interestingly, a lot of the people you'd revere and read and study in an English class are people who had no formal English training whatsoever, or maybe high school level at best. It's only in recent years that colleges have managed to spread the myth that you can't have really learned something if you didn't pay $100,000 to do it. To me, it's just silly.
This is true everywhere; there is nothing insightful about this. I found C.S. courses to be rather mundane, boring (and even sometimes uglier) than pure Math courses. There were people in C.S. who were there because they couldn't cut it in Math. There were also people who did C.S. because they were fascinated by it. People have different motivations why they do something.
Regarding the attitudes of STEM students, you seem to take for granted that they're wrong about the relative importance of those fields. That isn't at all obvious to me.
As I've said in another comment, you've completely blinded yourself to the spirit of the term and taken the most literal definition. If Computer Scientists existed in Jonathan Swift's day, he most certainly would not have lumped them in with the Philistines.