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Non-major courses are an amazing opportunity for students to learn about a wide variety of scholarship from some of the top experts in those fields. The cogniti

Non-major courses are an amazing opportunity for students to learn about a wide variety of scholarship from some of the top experts in those fields. The cognitive strategies / methods of inquiry of various fields vary significantly, and learning to “think like a historian” or “think like an ethnographer” or “think like an economist” or “think like a philosopher” or “think like a mathematician” etc. is incredibly valuable for future work and also for becoming an informed citizen and an inheritor of the richness of human culture. Liberal arts degrees are not supposed to be narrow job training. The problem here is the debt students need to take on to go through college, not the college content per se (at least at the level of which courses students need; some of those courses themselves could use better content and pedagogy).

seabird 9y ago
There's a difference between what liberal arts degrees are "supposed" to be and what they are. College has been effectively (but incorrectly) marketed as a requirement for the everyman to stand any chance of success in the future economy. For better or for worse, Joe Average couldn't give a shit less what an ethnographer thinks of the plight of rice farmers in Cambodia or what a philosopher thinks of the absurdity of the human condition. What he does care about is having a viable income in an economy where unskilled gravy jobs have dried up. Informed citizens and "inheritors of the richness of human culture" generally care about such things before they even reach a university. For everyone else, it's a place that takes their money so they can get a degree and stand a fighting chance in the job market. The overall problem isn't that it's too expensive (it is), it's that people are effectively being forced to go to college in the first place, spending four years earning a degree when they would have been better served by four years of work experience.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  Joe Average can do a wide variety of vocational training programs, go to a technical/engineering college, join the military, or skip college and go straight into working if he so desires. It’s hardly the colleges’ fault that people show up who don’t really want to be there and “don’t give a shit” about the concept of liberal arts. What kind of future career does your imagined Joe Average aspire to? Semi-skilled manufacturing jobs have mostly dried up because of automation, healthcare costs continue to skyrocket due to the financialization of the medical industry, and wages have been depressed by a range of policy changes that give more and more power and wealth to rentiers and capitalists at the expense of everyone else. I suppose as an alternative all the Joe Averages could get together and vote European-style socialists into office.
gowld 9y ago
Paying a top expert in Foo to teach Foo 101 is either a massive waste or a huge lecture hall that may as well be a video.

seabird 9y ago

There's a difference between what liberal arts degrees are "supposed" to be and what they are. College has been effectively (but incorrectly) marketed as a requirement for the everyman to stand any chance of success in the future economy. For better or for worse, Joe Average couldn't give a shit less what an ethnographer thinks of the plight of rice farmers in Cambodia or what a philosopher thinks of the absurdity of the human condition. What he does care about is having a viable income in an economy where unskilled gravy jobs have dried up. Informed citizens and "inheritors of the richness of human culture" generally care about such things before they even reach a university. For everyone else, it's a place that takes their money so they can get a degree and stand a fighting chance in the job market. The overall problem isn't that it's too expensive (it is), it's that people are effectively being forced to go to college in the first place, spending four years earning a degree when they would have been better served by four years of work experience.

jacobolus 9y ago
Joe Average can do a wide variety of vocational training programs, go to a technical/engineering college, join the military, or skip college and go straight into working if he so desires. It’s hardly the colleges’ fault that people show up who don’t really want to be there and “don’t give a shit” about the concept of liberal arts. What kind of future career does your imagined Joe Average aspire to? Semi-skilled manufacturing jobs have mostly dried up because of automation, healthcare costs continue to skyrocket due to the financialization of the medical industry, and wages have been depressed by a range of policy changes that give more and more power and wealth to rentiers and capitalists at the expense of everyone else. I suppose as an alternative all the Joe Averages could get together and vote European-style socialists into office.

gowld 9y ago

Paying a top expert in Foo to teach Foo 101 is either a massive waste or a huge lecture hall that may as well be a video.