5 ms·

The words you're looking for are "liberal arts education." The liberal arts are (roughly) fields concerned with the search for truth and the study of human lif

The words you're looking for are "liberal arts education." The liberal arts are (roughly) fields concerned with the search for truth and the study of human life: math, philosophy, physics, biology, chemistry, anthropology, psychology, literature, etc. Some computer science programs should arguably be counted among the liberal arts, insofar as they're about something deeper than contemporary software engineering practice. Liberal is meant as in freedom: the objects of study worthy of a free person, particularly if you put a Marxist lens on it and consider wage slavery unfree. The liberal arts do not have salary optimization or the production of skilled workers of any kind as their mission, though it may be a side effect in some cases. Finance, business, management, engineering, communications, etc. do not count, and a proponent of liberal arts education (like myself) would say they do not belong in an undergrad program. Many people believe that the primary value of undergrad is a coming-of-age ritual where students develop as intellectuals and learn to be informed and rational citizens of the world. The best way to do this is with mandatory and rigorous breadth in the entirety of the liberal arts [0], and a particularly rigorous specialization in one. Those professions that require additional formal training ought to be studied in graduate and/or professional school, as is the case with law and medicine. This was a mainstream view until sometime in the late 20th century when the "college as job training and investment in future salary" narrative took off. Many people now (coincidentally almost all are liberals) believe this was a mistake. These are the people you'll find letting their children study non-salary-optimizing fields and lending political support to taxpayer-funded higher education, including in not-necessarily-economically-useful fields. Start here: http://www.ditext.com/pippin/aims2000.html http://www.ditext.com/pippin/aims2000.html [0] This belief is responsible for most gen-ed requirements and core curricula.

hueving 11y ago
Not relevant. I wanted hard numbers for students that don't take salary into account. I don't care about your apologetics for a field that pretends to take credit for granting the ability to think. People from engineering fields and hard sciencies are much more rational citizens of the world than someone who spent all of their time on art history because they were required to rigorously think logically.
- superuser2 11y ago
  To the extent that we can infer desire for salary optimization by choice of major, I'd exclude humanities, social sciences, math and physical sciences (research is not particularly lucrative), and education. Those, taken together, are 46.4% of undergraduate degrees in 2011-12. CS, engineering, and business, on the other side, are 28.6% of undergraduate degrees [1]. Consider how arrogant it is to look at the history and present of human civilization, its institutions and customs and art and languages, what it claimed to know and how, what it fought for and why, who held power and how people thought about its legitimacy, what it valued and worshipped, and think "Nope, nothing there could possibly be interesting or important here beyond what engineers can discover in their spare time. Nobody should bother studying any of this." I'm glad there are people who disagree with you. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.a...
  - hueving 11y ago
    I never said it wasn't worth studying. Consider how arrogant it is to say that liberal arts are for teaching people how to think critically, implying that hard sciences, math, and engineering are just producing thoughtless drones for work.

hueving 11y ago

Not relevant. I wanted hard numbers for students that don't take salary into account. I don't care about your apologetics for a field that pretends to take credit for granting the ability to think. People from engineering fields and hard sciencies are much more rational citizens of the world than someone who spent all of their time on art history because they were required to rigorously think logically.

superuser2 11y ago
To the extent that we can infer desire for salary optimization by choice of major, I'd exclude humanities, social sciences, math and physical sciences (research is not particularly lucrative), and education. Those, taken together, are 46.4% of undergraduate degrees in 2011-12. CS, engineering, and business, on the other side, are 28.6% of undergraduate degrees [1]. Consider how arrogant it is to look at the history and present of human civilization, its institutions and customs and art and languages, what it claimed to know and how, what it fought for and why, who held power and how people thought about its legitimacy, what it valued and worshipped, and think "Nope, nothing there could possibly be interesting or important here beyond what engineers can discover in their spare time. Nobody should bother studying any of this." I'm glad there are people who disagree with you. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.a...
- hueving 11y ago
  I never said it wasn't worth studying. Consider how arrogant it is to say that liberal arts are for teaching people how to think critically, implying that hard sciences, math, and engineering are just producing thoughtless drones for work.