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I think that both sides are doing the current situation a disservice. The STEM-Lords[1] are acting like everything without a clearly defined profitable career t

I think that both sides are doing the current situation a disservice. The STEM-Lords[1] are acting like everything without a clearly defined profitable career track is a complete waste of time. The guidance counselors are still living in the 90s, where any college degree could get you a job without question. The reality is in the middle - majoring in a humanities subject can still work out just fine, but you have be a lot more careful about what you do in college and what skills you develop. This scares the shit out of the STEM folks, as their idea of "be careful about what they do in college" mostly appears to be "Oh, so I need to do an okay internship or two over the summer." The humanities kids have to do a lot more research and a lot more gumshoeing to figure out where they're going to go after they graduate. Unfortunately, most kids aren't like that. They're going to college because Mommy and Daddy told them to do so, and they're majoring in History because it "sounded cool," not because it was their passion or because they decided that a History degree was the correct decision for achieving their goals in life. If you expect this apathetic kid to go out and look for himself to figure out exactly how his History degree can get him a job, you've got another thing coming. That's where we get the "barista with a master's degree" stereotype. Basically, if your chosen major doesn't have a well-defined career path, (This includes biology, incidentally) you need to work harder and be even more proactive in figuring out where your next move is going to be. This bodes poorly for the average immature 19-year-old who has absolutely no idea what he's going to be doing. [1]https://i.imgur.com/aHNyJ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/aHNyJ.jpg

tomlock 11y ago
>>Basically, if your chosen major doesn't have a well-defined career path, (This includes biology, incidentally) you need to work harder and be even more proactive in figuring out where your next move is going to be. This bodes poorly for the average immature 19-year-old who has absolutely no idea what he's going to be doing. I think this slippery-slope outcome of this is that children are funneled into early tutoring, academic kindergartens, etc. It seems absurd to do everything in life just to optimize for profit. Bye bye holidays???
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  I'm not sure if we should call it a slippery slope so much as a water-slide: when you present the extreme version of this scenario people tend to eat the bullet and endorse it as virtuous/prudent/praiseworthy rather than rethink the assumptions.
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
>(This includes biology, incidentally) It actually includes most of the pure natural sciences, and mathematics. Engineering is the track with the careers.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  The "pure natural sciences" and mathematics are as much engineering as Computer Science is (or, perhaps more accurately, computer science is as little engineering as those other things), however much working programmers like to call themselves "Software Engineers".
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    Computer Science is a weird academic department. There is very much such a thing as the pure, non-engineering formal science of computing. However, most Comp Sci departments justify their budgets and existence by recourse to teaching undergraduates a minimal foundation in actual computer-science, and a substantial amount of software engineering, which is actually a separate field. Personally, I like pure computer science and CS academia, but most of the undergrads taking CS degrees are trying to learn software engineering, and will object loudly if asked to take, for instance, type theory, topology, computability and automata theory, statistical learning theory (ML courses have massive drop rates), computational complexity, Kolmogorov complexity theory, how to build an operating system, compilers and optimization, abstract interpretation for static analysis, mathematical logic, etc.
justin66 11y ago
> The guidance counselors are still living in the 90s, where any college degree could get you a job without question. That wasn't true in the 90s. The guidance counselors still pretended it was, in the 90s.

tomlock 11y ago

>>Basically, if your chosen major doesn't have a well-defined career path, (This includes biology, incidentally) you need to work harder and be even more proactive in figuring out where your next move is going to be. This bodes poorly for the average immature 19-year-old who has absolutely no idea what he's going to be doing. I think this slippery-slope outcome of this is that children are funneled into early tutoring, academic kindergartens, etc. It seems absurd to do everything in life just to optimize for profit. Bye bye holidays???

eli_gottlieb 11y ago
I'm not sure if we should call it a slippery slope so much as a water-slide: when you present the extreme version of this scenario people tend to eat the bullet and endorse it as virtuous/prudent/praiseworthy rather than rethink the assumptions.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago

>(This includes biology, incidentally) It actually includes most of the pure natural sciences, and mathematics. Engineering is the track with the careers.

dragonwriter 11y ago
The "pure natural sciences" and mathematics are as much engineering as Computer Science is (or, perhaps more accurately, computer science is as little engineering as those other things), however much working programmers like to call themselves "Software Engineers".
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  Computer Science is a weird academic department. There is very much such a thing as the pure, non-engineering formal science of computing. However, most Comp Sci departments justify their budgets and existence by recourse to teaching undergraduates a minimal foundation in actual computer-science, and a substantial amount of software engineering, which is actually a separate field. Personally, I like pure computer science and CS academia, but most of the undergrads taking CS degrees are trying to learn software engineering, and will object loudly if asked to take, for instance, type theory, topology, computability and automata theory, statistical learning theory (ML courses have massive drop rates), computational complexity, Kolmogorov complexity theory, how to build an operating system, compilers and optimization, abstract interpretation for static analysis, mathematical logic, etc.

justin66 11y ago

> The guidance counselors are still living in the 90s, where any college degree could get you a job without question. That wasn't true in the 90s. The guidance counselors still pretended it was, in the 90s.