It doesn't get much more short-sighted than this. What happens in 20 years if engineers are everywhere and can't get work?
Instead, let's make liberal arts degrees cheaper. There's no reason why a Philosophy or English degree needs to cost 15k+ a year. It's been said before, and it needs said again: a liberal arts education is just as valuable today as it was 300 years ago. The current problem is one of cost, not of value.
I think that's backwards. Make Science/Engineering cheaper and liberal arts more expensive... arts degrees should be considered luxury items: nice to have but not strictly necessary. I think many people would be better off not going to University than get an arts degree, whereas there is huge societal benefit to pushing out more scientists and engineers.
Liberal arts should exist, just at a much smaller (frankly, more reasonable wrt actual demand) scale.
If the objective is to maximize short-term economic gains, then yes, that would work.
If the objective is to create well-rounded, cross-disciplinary citizens, then no, that is a horrible idea.
Regardless, I think it's a false dichotomy. Why does one have to be expensive while the other is cheap? And why can't someone get both a liberal arts education and a "practical" education? I see no reason why a student can't pay 5k for a 2-3 year liberal arts degree, and then go on to (competitively-priced) a 2-3 year engineering degree.
> If the objective is to create well-rounded, cross-disciplinary citizens, then no, that is a horrible idea.
Why is it that everyone thinks a STEM education means you are automatically not well-rounded or cross-disciplinary? There are universities with STEM programs that mitigate this problem successfully by creating the right requirements for the degree.
As an example, the requirements for breadth were FAR more stringent at my university for technical fields than for the humanities/social sciences. The 'science' breadth requirement for a humanities major could be satisfied by first-semester courses like the introductory Nutritional Science course, but the breadth requirements for technical majors required that students end up taking at least a couple 3rd/4th year courses in liberal arts fields (which in turn had lower-level prerequisites, naturally). This resulted in the inverse problem from my POV, whereby the majors generally assumed to create well-rounded students actually failed to do so.
Furthermore, being well-rounded is a lot more than what you study in college IMO. A well-rounded citizen has to continually invest in 'upkeep' that earns them that label. The most well-rounded folks I know read throughout their life (often across a broad set of topics), continually invest in their education on their own time through this reading, keep up on current-events, and so forth. I don't see a lack of liberal arts education precluding these activities or any other activities that might contribute to being well-rounded.
> And why can't someone get both a liberal arts education and a "practical" education?
I generally agree that this would be ideal, but it is also constrained by how much money we have as a society. Remember - you and I are contributing our own funds indirectly to subsidize this same education, and it is certainly not cheap these days (see other comments on cost of education). The trick of course is to strike the right balance and realize a good return on that educational investment. Personally, I can see value in something like a Minor in a field that is completely different than one's Major, but I don't see the benefit being much greater if one were to get two full degrees.
> > If the objective is to create well-rounded, cross-disciplinary citizens, then no, that is a horrible idea.
Why is it that everyone thinks a STEM education means you are automatically not well-rounded or cross-disciplinary? There are universities with STEM programs that mitigate this problem successfully by creating the right requirements for the degree.
...
> And why can't someone get both a liberal arts education and a "practical" education?
I generally agree that this would be ideal, but it is also constrained by how much money we have as a society.
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So, a) we'll require everyone take liberal arts, to solve the problem of b) it's too expensive for everyone to take liberal arts?
The main issue I've heard people cite with majoring in the liberal arts is that liberal arts majors don't make enough money to cover costs. Raising the costs of being a liberal arts major seems like a pretty roundabout way of solving that problem.
I think the key there is the plural. If you're given two subsets of the population, where:
Subset A roughly corresponds to the current population's mix of educational backgrounds, and
Subset B is the transformation of A where all liberal arts majors have been replaced with STEM graduates,
I think it's obvious that subset A would be more "cross-disciplinary" and "well-rounded" taken as a group. It's not that individual liberal arts majors are more well rounded, it's that having a well-rounded collective of citizens is important.
> But, how much do liberal arts majors contribute to said "well-rounded collective" and at what cost?
Are you asking how they contribute to well-roundedness, or are you asking to value their individual contributions to society while ignoring contributions to well-roundedness as a valuable asset? How they contribute to well-roundedness is handled with the whole Subset A vs Subset B thing, I think. In regards to value -- I'm pretty sure that Hunter Thompson guy was good to have around. I dunno.
As to the cost: I guess that depends on whether you view liberal arts majors as a detriment to society, or at least intrinsically inferior to STEM majors. If they're equal then they're no additional cost, because their education costs exactly the same dollar amount.
> And, that's ignoring the benefit of having this "rounded" within individuals instead of across groups.
Certainly well-rounded individuals are important. But unless everyone is forced to be dual-degree, there will inevitably end up being biases towards the main major -- and I say this as a well-rounded STEM grad.
And doesn't requiring the well-roundedness to be at the individual level ignore the benefit of having some number of single-focus specialists within a society? It's not like Salman Rushdie spends his spare time proving P=NP, or Dijkstra's out writing papers on critical race theory.
>> But, how much do liberal arts majors contribute to said "well-rounded collective" and at what cost?
> Are you asking how they contribute to well-roundedness
Yes.
> How they contribute to well-roundedness is handled with the whole Subset A vs Subset B thing
Not clear. You're claiming that an LA degree has some "roundedness" value. That's not obvious. And, even if it's true, that doesn't imply that we need a lot of LA degrees to get whatever benefit there is. For example, how much worse off would we be with half as many English majors?
> I'm pretty sure that Hunter Thompson guy was good to have around.
I'd agree, but would ask whether his existence depended on the existence of a large number of LA majors. I'd point out that similar folks existed before we had a lot of LA majors and we don't have more Hunter Thompsons now.
> If they're equal then they're no additional cost, because their education costs exactly the same dollar amount.
Huh? It doesn't matter whether LA majors cost more or less than STEM majors. The question is the relationship between the cost of LA majors and the benefits of LA majors. (There's a similar question about STEM majors.)
It's interesting that we had a thread a while back about how China was better because its political leadership had engineering degrees....
> You're claiming that an LA degree has some "roundedness" value.
I think I understand our point of disagreement.
I don't mean to claim LA majors have a "roundedness" value. I'm claiming that the collective average of STEM and LA leads to a rounded group, assuming "roundedness" in this case is considered to mean equally proficient in the diverse areas of knowledge.
As a metaphor, assume we have a bag full of red, purple, and blue marbles, where the purple is equivalent to roundedness (having equal amounts of red and blue). Replacing all of the red marbles with perfectly-purple ones actually decreases the purpleness of the bag -- it shifts the average color towards blue. Even if we give the blue ones with "a bit more 'rounded'" purple, to echo your call, the average remains shifted more towards blue than it was when there was red to balance it out.
LA majors don't have a roundedness value -- pure-LA is as unrounded as pure-STEM. I'm generally working under the assumption that "roundedness" means that you're knowledgeable in many areas, instead of only knowledgeable in a single one. Replacing a specific set of specialists with jacks-of-all-trades leaves the group with less average knowledge in the direction of the replaced specialists' knowledge base.
You could be arguing to make everyone completely and equally rounded/purple -- replacing both the blues and the reds, so that everyone would graduate with both a full LA degree and a full STEM degree. But your call for adding "a bit more 'rounded' to STEM majors" instead of having LA majors didn't sound like that, and making everyone be dual-degree seems a bit infeasible.
I keep hearing this flood meme. I'm not sure I buy into it.
It may conceivably devalue the degree itself by making it less uncommon, but skills likely lose value at a much lower rate. There are also network effects - the pace of modern science and engineering goes almost entirely on the fact that we have a great many people working at once and sharing results.
There's also nothing to stop you from studying engineering then getting a job which uses a completely different skill set. A liberal arts degree is not a career training program in most cases. Opportunity cost is one big reason why this is less acceptable than it could be. However, it may be that different program models make different revenue models more viable, driving down the opportunity cost.
Of course, none of this addresses the quality problem. It's one thing to say "throw more engineers" but it's another entirely to create more good engineers.
I've wondered how necessary it is for colleges to force a $50k tuition on students. Where does the money actually go? I'm skeptical. The administration at university just seems like one big, disgusting fraud.
That is just the summary, there is a more complete report available too. The high points for me was that employee
compensation accounts for 60-70% of costs, with increases there being driven by benefits (I assume this means health insurance costs rising), and that only 30-40% of that 60-70 is spent on instructional staff.
I attend CUNY Baruch in NYC. It is known for providing an excellent liberal art and business education in it's Zicklin school of business. The cost to students is about 5500 a year, and the city supplies another 11,000 or so a year per student. That's $16,500 total cost per student per year (not semester) for an excellent education, and this also funds research, buildings (in NYC, no less), and more. And many students receive large amounts of financial aid.
It is entirely possible for a school to give an excellent education for an order of magnitude less than the large schools do, and this is evidence to me that most schools are horrendously inefficient.
A better question is why law degrees cost as much as they do. Law is one of the cheapest subjects for a university to teach yet law is usually one of the most expensive.
I am aware universities can charge what they please for a law degree and that they benefit from exclusivity (less people studying means more money for the ones who do). But what if the price was reflective of the cost plus a profit instead of cost plus a very generous profit? Law is a cash cow for most universities. Do you think society would benefit from a greater supply of people knowledgeable and qualified in the field of law? Is a society better off with law in the hands of the many or of the few?
First year associates at NY law firms pay $165k + bonus. Current fourth years make close to $300k. 50k+ for three years is a good investment if you do above average at a top 10 school.
Are you saying that liberal arts majors can't be entrepreneurial? It takes more than engineering prowess to make a successful product. Also, although science and engineering degrees do hold the promise of a higher-paying job after graduation, that is small comfort to the engineering student who finds himself struggling with a problem set late into the night while his friends are out partying.
As for going into debt. If you choose to take out student loans in order to study anthropology and find yourself in debt as a result, that was your own mistake, and you are ultimately responsible for it. Let's stop saying that it's "unfair" to not protect people from their own mistakes. Lowering the cost of liberal arts degrees will only lead to a greater surplus than what we have today.
Yeah, what a tragedy it would be to have too many engineers, doctors, or other useful people. If we want to plan for the future, we need more poets.
Liberal arts educations are expensive for the same reason lobster is expensive. They're a luxury item, nobody needs one. If you can afford to be a philosopher, you can afford a philosophy degree.
Instead, let's make liberal arts degrees cheaper. There's no reason why a Philosophy or English degree needs to cost 15k+ a year. It's been said before, and it needs said again: a liberal arts education is just as valuable today as it was 300 years ago. The current problem is one of cost, not of value.