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Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

• jabberslocku 8y ago
  The crisis is that students are wracking up debt for degrees that will take, on average, 22 years to pay off and have a less than 10% chance of actually being useful for their chosen jobs. If you want to study humanities, then there are dozens and hundreds of resources available for free or very little financial cost to you. I took a humanities "education" in my spare time over 5 year span because I love the arts, philosophy. But I got an actual degree where I can give substantial value to society (as measured in income)
• microcolonel 8y ago
  If every imaginable move is made to render the humanities rote and ideologically captive as possible (seemingly for the personal leisure of a handful of faculty), and at the same time prices are increasing, is it any wonder that they are fast going extinct? (or more accurately, that the absolute interest in study under humanities departments is not keeping up with the interest in STEM study)
  • AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    I agree with almost everything you said, except > seemingly for the personal leisure of a handful of faculty So far as I know, the humanities professors do not have any more leisure than other faculty. (Or did you mean that, by making the humanities ideologically captive, the professors don't have to think?) And in fact, that "ideologically captive" part occurred to me as a possible partial explanation, as well. Large parts of the humanities have come to resemble indoctrination rather than free enquiry. That may place a serious limit on the popularity of those departments.
• eanzenberg 8y ago
  That is ...good. We should be funneling more women and minorities into lucrative majors like CS and engineering.
  • AmericanChopper 8y ago
    Problem with that is women and minorities are all individual people who make their own decisions about what they want to do in life. What does a funnel look like? Forced degrees? Forced employment?
    • matthewmacleod 8y ago
      Probably just a less obviously-hostile environment would be a good start.
      • AmericanChopper 8y ago
        What exactly is obviously hostile about our universities? Is it the safe spaces? Is it the lower standards applied to minorities and women to make it easier to get in? Is it all of the scholarships open only to minorities and women? Universities are quite obviously the most inclusive and least hostile place in the world for minorities and women.
        • matthewmacleod 8y ago
          Yeah, talking about the industry generally. I see you already have your “safe spaces” straw man all set up so I think I’ll just leave you to it.
          • AmericanChopper 8y ago
            It’s not a straw man at all, it’s an accurate description of acedemia. Now you’re saying it’s the industry’s fault (never mind that the industry generally practices the same affirmative action as universities do). But that can’t possibly be the case because the industry doesn’t have enough female and minority stem graduates to hire “enough” women and minorities.
        • wnissen 8y ago
          The percentage of all PhDs earned by women has just, in the last ten years, hit 50%. Of the STEM fields only biology has over 50%, and engineering, physics, and math are in the 20s. A lot of strides have been made, but "most inclusive and least hostile" is not born out by the data. https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/fraction-phd.cfm https://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/fraction-p...
• neom 8y ago
  I'm 32, my parents studies humanities and strongly discouraged me "because in the future there are no well-paid jobs in the humanities". I presume I'm not alone?
  • pkaye 8y ago
    Lets just say humanities is not the easy path to a well paid job. Certainly there are people who have been successful like Steve Jobs but I feel it was his individual qualities that made the difference.
    • ams6110 8y ago
      Steve Jobs dropped out of school.
      • base698 8y ago
        People win the lottery.
  • woodruffw 8y ago
    I had a slightly different experience: my parents both majored (and onwards) in liberal arts, and expressed (mild) skepticism when I initially majored in Computer Science. Anecdotally, though, all of my university friends had the same experience as you.
  • SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    I'm 34 and my parents suggested I get a degree just to get one. The problem is that the degree doesn't do anything for you if you aren't making the right moves while you're there, or know where you're going before you start. So now I have a diploma saying I spent 4 years studying history before I went back to school to train at a polytechnic to get a job.
    • dorchadas 8y ago
      > The problem is that the degree doesn't do anything for you if you aren't making the right moves while you're there, or know where you're going before you start. I've experienced/am experiencing this same thing myself. A degree itself, STEM or not, does no good if you don't utilize your time at university to do something afterwards.
• klodolph 8y ago
  It would be interesting to see the graph of degrees in these majors as a percentage of the entire population, rather than as a percentage of total degrees.
  • strainer 8y ago
    I think its essential context to the 'of degrees' graphs. By population there was a large dip from 1975-85, mostly in English degrees. A recovery and relative stability since 1990. I notice this info was included in the authors previous blog post. Its also here: http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/blog/posts/373/career-value-of-humanities-and-liberal-arts/ http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/blog/posts/373/career-value-...
• zfrenchee 8y ago
  Seems like rigorous data science on the statistics of people graduating with humanities degrees. Doesn't that seem just a little bit ironic?
• seibelj 8y ago
  I was a double major in CS and Latin, and once I asked my Latin advisor about grad school for Latin. I didn’t intend on going, I was just curious about what she would say as a tenured Latin professor at a good university. The look on her face when I asked was complete shock and she went on a rant about how it was the dumbest idea ever. She told me how she was going on sabbatical to write a book that only 30 people would read if she was lucky, but was essentially required to do it. And how ignoring my CS degree for Latin was insanity, and her money problems, and on and on. Additionally, I had a young associate professor who I became close with, had a degree from Harvard, and was essentially the definition of the future of Latin instruction. She told me she was going to leave the university to go to law school because she made basically nothing and had to work crazy hours. When the professors themselves tell you not to bother, you know it’s a terrible idea!
  • anoncoward111 8y ago
    Which is a shame, because I would happily teach Latin for a guaranteed $18,000 a year. Latin is an amazing language that has a lot of tangential applications. At the very least, Latin shouldn't go extinct.
    • seibelj 8y ago
      Hard to live and work around Boston on $18,000 salary
      • darpa_escapee 8y ago
        Hard to be human and get sick on $18k a year.
        • ams6110 8y ago
          One good thing about university employment is that the health benefits are usually very good, even if the salary isn't.
          • 8y ago
• mxwsn 8y ago
  I was curious what sort of relationship there might be between recent trends in international students (who I expected would more frequently major in STEM than humanities than the typical American population) and the article's noted decrease in humanities majors. In [0], the share of college students that is international rose from ~3% in 2010 to ~5.5% in 2017. And from the table in [1], in 2017, about 2% of international students majored in "Humanities" by the strictest definition, though that expands to 10% if you include "Intensive English", "Communications and journalism", "Humanities" and "Legal studies and law enforcement". The low share, though, definitely suggests that American college students are choosing humanities majors less. Interestingly, Harvard in particular is focusing a lot on boosting its engineeering programs, including a $1 billion science and engineering campus expansion set for 2020. [2] So looking at recent stated major intents from Harvard applicants is expected to have a trend towards STEM. [0] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/international-students-united-states#EnrollmentTrends https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/international-studen... [1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/11/13/us-universities-report-declines-enrollments-new-international-students-study-abroad https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/11/13/us-universiti... [2] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/24/engineering-harvard-seas-students/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/24/engineering-har...
  • arthurjj 8y ago
    I think the Harvard trend is probably too little to late on their part. Having worked on both coasts in a variety of companies I didn't even know Harvard had an engineering dept.
    • andromeduck 8y ago
      Same here but it looks like they're partnering with MIT.
    • realitygrill 8y ago
      Harvard didn't have an engineering department until a few years ago (might be year 5 or 6 now).
• coldtea 8y ago
  >Back in 2013, I wrote a few blog post arguing that the media was hyperventilating about a "crisis" in the humanities, when, in fact, the long term trends were not especially alarming. I made two claims them: 1. The biggest drop in humanities degrees relative to other degrees in the last 50 years happened between 1970 and 1985, and were steady from 1985 to 2011; as a proportion of the population, humanities majors exploded. 2) The entirety of the long term decline from 1950 to 2010 had to do with the changing majors of women, while men's humanities interest did not change. Who cares for the number of degrees? The quality of humanities studies has had a huge decline. Compare the humanities titans of most of the 20th century to the meagre, derivative, and self-absorbed production of the last 30 or so years...
  • notafraudster 8y ago
    Is this a point you'd like to elaborate on? Without accusing you of anything, when I read a one sentence dismissal of humanities/social sciences, what I tend to think is that this is someone who thinks "post-modernism is bullshit", "third wave feminism is bad", "intersectionality isn't real", "everything is cultural marxism", "safe spaces", etc. and who is appealing to Jordan Peterson as an expert on everything. If we're lucky, they'll throw in Sokal or some other sincere attempt to engage with problems in the discipline. This might be an unfair judgment of you personally -- certainly it doesn't suggest charity on my part. But I just mention it because, in the event that you have something to add to the discussion that isn't just boilerplate, you might want to know that in the absence of actually adding it, you are being judged in this way. (Personal disclaimer: I'm not in the humanities, I have my own critiques of where major humanities disciplines are. I am an academic. But I also waste enough of my time on awful websites that I am very acclimatized to driveby dismissals of anything that emerged out of critical theory, and I can't say I agree with that.)
    • lovich 8y ago
      It might have been my school but I found the degree poorly taught. You could get a fairly easy B+/A- by just parroting the teachers opinion on the topic at hand. STEM classes had some teachers like that, but most of the work there had objectively wrong and right answers. My friends from other schools all had the same experience for the most part with only a handful of exceptions for particularly good teachers, who also all happened to be employed at other jobs and working as an adjunct professor to teach single courses on their topics. The humanities to me seem like they are of lower quality because professors have no incentive or desire to actually teach, but as much of the humanities has no right or wrong answer then the professor can bullshit as much as they want. I don't think that the teachers are any worse than STEM teachers. If STEM courses were as subjective I'm sure we'd see the same problems
• fossuser 8y ago
  My hypothesis would be that in times of economic instability (70's energy crisis, 2008 financial crisis) - people bias towards more obviously reliable fields for income and work (Nursing, engineering, etc.). It's also probably easier to major in CS (or some other technical subject) and take some humanities classes you find interesting rather than major in humanities.
  • nostrademons 8y ago
    The graph certainly seemed to support that - humanities degrees fell precipitously in the 70s, started gaining in the mid-80s through 90s, fell again during the dot-com boom, held steady during the 2000s, and then fell precipitously after the financial crisis. A slightly more accurate model might be that demand for humanities degrees dries up when either students feel that they must get a STEM/professional/trade degree for economic survival, or that they should get a STEM degree to take advantage of a recent technological change. That accounts for the drop during the dot-com boom and during the mobile/crypto/AI boom that followed the financial crisis. At this point in time it's probably a stupid idea to get a humanities degree when all the jobs are in technology, and college students are simply responding to that. This would also predict that as recent tech markets get saturated and stabilize, then assuming we don't have a major economic crash, you'll see humanities enrollment trend upwards again. Basically stability is good for humanities, but either too little or too much growth pushes people into STEM fields.
    • chillacy 8y ago
      There have been a lot of top-down initiatives to get people into STEM fields as well, like presidential speeches by Obama. And ultimately it's something of a zero sum game (total college participation can still grow, but not as easily as shifting existing applicants).
• yazan94 8y ago
  I think the 'crisis' can be distilled to a simple concept - with rising costs of living not many people want to invest in a degree which has relatively few options for comfortable living compared to other options. If the humanities are really so important for our culture, then the public needs to invest in making them practical options for someone to invest in. Otherwise, why bother lamenting about the lack of people studying humanities when there are limited job options in the humanities? Can you really blame them?
  • andromeduck 8y ago
    I think what's changed is that the humanities have become so easy to access that degreess are no longer required for people with just a passing interest and since the degree itself isn't worth as much as the skills it develops; is more effective to get a higher value degrees and persue those interests in other ways.
  • AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    "Liberal education" originally meant the education appropriate for free people, as opposed to education in a trade, which was for slaves. Translating that into the modern day, if you have to work for a living, a liberal education probably isn't going to pay.
• yedava 8y ago
  In countries like India you would be laughed at if you aren't rich and take an arts degree. It is because in a country with limited earning opportunities, it doesn't make any sense to invest in a degree that has virtually non-existent employment opportunities. Seems like the majority of US population has now become poor enough that taking getting a humanities degree is risky.
  • woodruffw 8y ago
    The cause is probably the other way around: college has become a necessary (but not always sufficient) ticket to the middle class, and so (by this calculation) is no longer valuable for its own sake.
    • ams6110 8y ago
      I agree. In the past, there were fewer people with university degrees so they were worth more. Humanities degrees were seen as a indicator of intelligence and accomplishment. Now they are seen as an indicator of someone who went to university but had no real idea of what he wanted to major in.
  • caro_douglos 8y ago
    To the extent that you have to go into debt...our nation's taxpayers (imo) are subsidizing for profit schools (with manipulative advertising on MTV and the Maury Show). Can we be that surprised when uninspired students getting an underwater basket weaving degree come out with 30k in debt?
  • lloydde 8y ago
    > In countries like India ... I thought India was pretty unique for its culture that values so highly engineering and as a result has the highest rates of engineering graduates. When you say other countries like India, which countries are you thinking of and what about them brings them to mind?
    • mehrdadn 8y ago
      > I thought India [...] has the highest rates of engineering graduates. Where did you see this? Weirdly enough it doesn't even seem to make the top 10 in the stats I can find, though they say "engineering/manufacturing/construction", and I'm not really sure we should be separating them for the purposes of the current discussion. (Though this is a bit weird considering how big India and China are? Not sure what's going on.) [Edit: Seems they're not part of the World Economic Forum, and hence they lack data on India and China.] But to address the question of what other such countries might be: the top 3 seem to be Russia, USA, Iran: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-most-engineering-graduates.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-most-...
• jessaustin 8y ago
  Maybe this is more an indictment of universities than of the humanities? Is it possible that university study in general is on borrowed time, and the future is simply here earlier for the humanities? It's not as though the Classics will be forgotten, nor will writers, artists, connoisseurs, or critics disappear. Professors haven't ever been [EDIT:] a vital part of this.
  • nugget 8y ago
    As we transition from a pedigree-based to a skills-based economy, it would make sense that the humanities would be an earlier casualty than many other fields.
    • wonderbear 8y ago
      I would argue we're just as pedigree based as ever. Just look at any list of the wealthiest (whatever demographic) people in the US. Inheritance and connections dominate it. It's the wage-earners competing in a pseudo-meritocracy, just like fifty or a hundred years ago. The difference now is that our skilled trades require more formal education.
      • gowld 8y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth In the top 10, 2 are 1st-generation trust-fund babies (The Koch brothers), 7 are tech company founders, and 1 is self-directed investor. Certainly most of these enjoy great upper-middle-class opportunity and privelege, but these founders did not get their wealth from pedigree-appointed positions at Daddy's company after drinking their way through a Political Science degree. Then come 3 more trust fund babies (The Walton kids), a self-made casino founder, and another tech company founder.
  • AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    University studies probably are on borrowed time. It seems to me that they are insanely inefficient for the stated purpose - educating people. They are more than ripe for disruption. That said, it seems to me that the disruption probably will first be in the engineering areas rather than in the humanities. Do you know chemical engineering? I can test for that, whether or not you went to a university. (The GRE will do that in many fields.) But did you absorb the enrichment that should have come with your university education? The humanities cares about that; STEM doesn't.
• deleted 8y ago
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• Naga 8y ago
  I majored in History in university. I graduated, was discouraged from grad school by my professors (one of my professors stressed that when he was doing his PhD probably ten years before our conversation, he was so poor he had to literally fish to feed himself), and went back to school for accounting. As someone who went through it and can honestly evaluate the return on investment for my history degree, I don't believe it has paid back yet five years out. I did not learn practical skills, which are important for getting a career after exiting school. That's why my accounting degree was necessary. I will say though that I believe I learned a lot of important soft skills in the humanities, which I believe make me 1) a better person in general and 2) a more attractive candidate for jobs, since the skills I have (critical thinking, writing, etc) are not learned in business. They try to teach it in some courses, but it takes the leisure of taking a full humanities degree to properly learn it. It put this into perspective, writing an essay is taking a firehose of data, analyzing it and presenting a critical opinion on it. Most people who I was in business school with struggled because there is no right answer, and there is no answer key. A well reasoned argument based on the data given makes a good essay and good grades. I will also say that in the professional accounting designation program, they are emphasizing that these are necessary skills for accountants to have now. I watch people studying for exams worrying about the same things. The exams are graded based on giving a 'competent' (their buzzword) answer based on the information given, which many people struggle with. I, on the other hand, find it very easy and do not have to study nearly as hard as my peers to succeed on the exams. I don't mean to toot my own horn, and I do not think I am better than everyone else. I think that my time spent in the humanities has really benefited me in my career, but only after learning practical, 'hard' skills. Would I do it this way again, if I had the chance to start over? Probably not. Would I recommend someone going back to school for a humanities degree, after taking business/STEM? Maybe not, but there is definitely value in them.
• draw_down 8y ago
  Not to put too fine a point on it, there is a certain type of personality that loves to roll their eyes when people are concerned about something and say they are "hyperventilating". Sometimes people can see what's happening before it shows up on a chart. Just because you can't see it doesn't make you wiser than them.
• Moodles 8y ago
  80% of humanities papers are never cited once. 80%. That. is. appalling. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/23/academic-papers-citation-rates-remler/ http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/23/aca... Social "science" is even more terrifying in my view. 25% of social sciencist identity as Marxist. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1.ht... I don't know how anyone can see these statistics and not think that there is a crisis. I nearly took history at undergraduate. My colleague has an English degree but now works in CS with me. What's shocking is that, at age 16, we're meant to make these huge decisions for our lives and we really have no clue about the ramifications.
  • orhmeh09 8y ago
    Your link on Marxism does not say social scientists are 25% Marxist. Even if they were, what’s the problem?
    • AnimalMuppet 8y ago
      You're right, it doesn't say that. But it says that sociology has 25.5%.
  • thesagan 8y ago
    A lot of them are Marxists because they’ve studied it. I’m not exactly Marxist but I’m more terrified by those who judge his works without having legitimately studied it critically and in depth under supervision. He’s a lightning rig for prejudice and too many people equate Marx with Stalin, or believe him to have caused Stalin.
    • jhbadger 8y ago
      He's not the same as Stalin, but he certainly caused him. Marx was basically the founder of a secular religion and like the theistic kind, religions attract scoundrels because they see it as a way to power. Stalin himself studied to be a priest before he changed religions.
• intothemild 8y ago
  I started a humanities degree. Two years in I realised it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on (what we call a toilet paper degree in Australia). I then proceeded to change degrees and universities, I never looked back. This was back in like 2004-2005, a couple years before the financial crisis started. People then we’re talking about not doing those degrees because they are a waste of time and money.
• donbright 8y ago
  You know what's funny is how many topics on 'hacker news' are basically questions of sociology or anthropology or economics or psychology. If you could make some kind of AI that would color the comments here based on what academic discipline they were most closely linked to, I think it would just be a sea of colors that fall under the 'humanities' or 'liberal arts' umbrella. It's not that people aren't deeply interested in these topics. It's just.... maybe academia's current model doesn't work so well anymore. Woudln't be the first time scholarship as a profession adapted to changing society. I hate that it will happen, I hate what we are losing... but I feel like the fundamentals are strong in the long term. You can go to a book store or library ... the books that have staying power represent the ideas that have staying power, and software products that have a life time of 7 years (which is what a lot of classes selling themselves as STEM actually teach) do not make the long term cut in the marketplace of important ideas.
  • dwaltrip 8y ago
    Those topics are intrinsically harder and more intractable. They deal with far more complex and chaotic systems. This is the fundamental issue. Looking at it this way, it isn't surprising that humanity has a much less productive grasp of such subjects. The topics are of great interest, but it is difficult to make substantial, concrete progress. This doesn't mean we should give up. It just means we should expect to struggle greatly as we seek to move forward in these areas. Another important lesson is the value of the indirect approach. Progress and changes from other domains can have a massive impact in the long run, sometimes even dwarfing the majority of efforts from those who are working directly on the thing. I think we need to study these dynamics more.
    • cirgue 8y ago
      It's also important to remember that fundamentally, humanities are a part of cultural production and reproduction. Anything that can be rigorously proven migrates to the realm of science. Humanities are by definition supposed to construct knowledge that guides our decision-making about issues where no certainty is possible.
  • chongli 8y ago
• mannykannot 8y ago
  It might be informative to see how the average debt burden, in terms of years for humanities graduates to pay off, has changed over the period in question. At several points, the author notes a downwards inflection point around 2011, a time when then-recent economic events might have been expected to bring the issue to the fore.
• docker_up 8y ago
  With schools increasing costs and no jobs available, going into humanities is a complete financial catastrophe waiting to happen. If countries care about humanities, they need to fund it via government. I'm not much of a big government person, but things like this is required when you care about things that capitalism won't fund.
• cs702 8y ago
  Indeed. Instead of seeking a broader understanding of the world and a greater ability to question and think critically about it, more students are seeking knowledge of a more practical nature that can lead to better employment opportunities in the near term. It's understandable. On the whole, I don't think this is good... but this has been coming for a long time, due to many reasons, including: * a broken funding system that saddles a majority of students with life-altering debt, effectively keeping many of them from studying what they love and forcing them instead to study what will land them a decent job; * the slow-motion takeover at many universities and colleges by professional managers who use financial and other metrics to measure the "success" of and decide on the funding for different academic departments; and last but not least, * the gradual takeover of liberal arts faculties at many colleges and universities by individuals whom I can only describe as very ignorant -- uneducated, really -- in mathematics, the hard sciences, modern technologies, and the ways of business.[a] Perhaps the smart kids don't want to study with these ignorant individuals? [a] As C. P. Snow wrote about these people in 1959 in his famous Two Cultures lecture: "A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of Have you read a work of Shakespare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question—such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read?—not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures)
  • dorchadas 8y ago
    > It's understandable. And, in my opinion, it's a shame it's happening at universities and not being built up in trade schools for various subjects. Likewise, though, I do agree that it's not a good thing. > [a] It is interesting to see the divide. It really does go both ways between the two, though I think the issue lies more on the focus on focused-specialization over a well-roundedness. Obviously, you're going to have to be specialized for your job, but there's still room for a well-rounded individual. I think part of the problem goes back to secondary schools, and how many just push through them instead of actually learning to become well-rounded and find other things interesting.
• panic 8y ago
  Given the current cost of rent/food/health care/raising children (especially in the US), I can understand making life decisions purely around money, but it also makes me sad. Wouldn't it be better if people could do what they feel is useful instead of fitting themselves into often-pointless jobs just because they're well-paying? Even if you think humanities research is useless, does the world really need more lawyers and accountants?
  • dorchadas 8y ago
    I agree completely. It would be amazing if everything wasn't so money-focused (though I understand why it has to be) and people could just pursue the job they wanted to do, such as doing study in the humanities if they found it interesting.
  • kcmp 8y ago
    It's true though. I just got a job at a FANG company right out of college and if I wanted my own 1 bedroom apartment it would look like a repurposed motel from the 50s. I make over six figures but can't help but feel guilty when I have to tell my parents, who are below poverty line, that I can't afford my own apartment.
• sonnyblarney 8y ago
  University used to be for the elite, or roughly. Now, regular folk, who don't come from wealthy families, have to do that as part of their education, and cost is a big deal. It's natural that people tend towards practical educations and it's not all that bad. As an Engineer, I was overwhelmed with technical bits and in retrospect I wish we could all have taken a full year of liberal arts type stuff.
  • gowld 8y ago
    In USA, most degree programs require a year's worth of liberal arts "distribution" or "general education" courses.
• sonnyblarney 8y ago
  For reference: College Majors, 1970-2011 Share Of All Bachelor's Degrees Awarded By Field https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/05/09/310114739/whats-your-major-four-decades-of-college-degrees-in-1-graph https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/05/09/310114739/what...
• randcraw 8y ago
  A quarter of a million dollars for a degree in spanish; no job prospects; followed by 20+ years of loan repayment... Is there any wonder that such degrees are unpopular? None of the humanities majors improves your employment prospects, while all could be reproduced for free by reading maybe 20 books at your leisure. That makes the humanities more like a form of entertainment than a preparation for life, which is what most of us expect from college.
  • endisukaj 8y ago
    Even a non-humanities major can be reduced to reading 20 (technical) books at your own leisure.
    • bo1024 8y ago
      Much, much, much easier said than done.
    • randcraw 8y ago
      IMHO, implementing the projects required in engineering & CS curricula teaches you much more than writing papers does in a humanities program. Thus reading books autodidactically misses the target less in the humanities than in engineering.
• InTheArena 8y ago
  I think every engineer or applied scientists should be expected to take a reasonable "liberal" education subset - including history, literature and law. I know that this is very much not in vogue with the latest group-think in college, but I also believe that humanities should master at least basic calculus. Not because you may need to do a differential or integral, but rather because it teaches you to think differently. The thing that scares me more then anything else is that my view is that The anti-intellectual authoritarianism has spread even to college campuses, where liberal educations are now viewed as tools of oppression rather then as the minimum expectation for a well-informed citizen.
  • coldacid 8y ago
    There needs to be at least a solid understanding of the trivium along with ethics before anyone should be allowed to graduate with any degree (whether for arts, humanities, or STEM). And yes, I think that basic calculus might be a good thing to add to that as well. The problem with a liberal education doesn't lie so much with the subjects of curriculum as much as how leaders in the humanities abuse their knowledge and positions for their own authoritarian leanings. This is what fuels the anti-intellectualism of today which has lead to the latest wave of populist authoritarianism. An educational system geared towards making money off of sheepskin instead of actually enlightening people doesn't help either.
  • AdamM12 8y ago
    I'd say the anti-intellectual authoritarianism has emanated from campuses. That being said when I first went to college I also held the view that mandating some level of humanities was important to be "well-rounded", and on some level still think this is true, but I've since soured on the people who say we need more B-school & Engineering schools students taking these classes to promote so called "critical thinking" as I've felt that "skill" is more a personal mentality than any thing taught in a class. That and I think it is rent seeking by the schools who have less economic resources. Also part of my souring is, which I think you are alluding to, that it seems to be more about indoctrination than anything else.
    • Spooky23 8y ago
• gdubs 8y ago
  “It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.” - Steve Jobs
• charleslmunger 8y ago
  As everyone knows, the costs of a humanities degree (or any degree) has been increasing much faster than inflation - while at the same time, the earnings potential of a humanities degree has dropped. Student loan debt and high housing costs are shackling a generation of college graduates. Undergraduate tuition and fees at the author's university total nearly $50,000 a year - and that's without counting food, textbooks, rent, etc. Even with help from financial aid, that is a huge amount of money (largely paid for by non-dischargeable debt) to spend on a degree that doesn't provide significant new career prospects.
• withdavidli 8y ago
  This was one of the blogs that factored into deciding not to go grad school even though I ready took the GREs (psychology, would have been for I/O so more quant heavy than most in the field) : https://100rsns.blogspot.com/?m=1 https://100rsns.blogspot.com/?m=1
• mathattack 8y ago
  I think humanities are a great combination degree but worthless on their own. A finance major who knows history can anticipate how inevitable big market swings are. Philosophy pairs great with computer science. A mathematician or physicist that speaks French or Russian has access to much more information. And for what it’s worth, the breakout high school classmate of mine was an English major. And Economics. I would never suggest someone get a PhD in it though. There are better ways to enjoy and share the humanities.
• lizzytheo 8y ago
  I have a PhD in the humanities and am now working on NLP. I can attest to the difficulty of finding a fulfilling career in humanities academia, but I don’t know if it’s worse than STEM academia since academia is insanely competitive in general. In my school (Ivy League) , PhDs in my department attain professorship as often as STEM ones, if not faster. I think the humanities are more suited for general education than specialization, unless you want to be a professional scholar, which is a fine choice as long as you are aware of the competition. I do think humanities need to re-brand itself as an essential part of general higher education (STEM kids need to know some humanist thinking) rather than just specializations.
  • gowld 8y ago
    http://stemtosteam.org/ http://stemtosteam.org/
• cncrnd 8y ago
  Honestly, the majority of humanities students I've interacted with have been uninspired and unmotivated. I took a good deal of humanities classes and more often than not comments were uninformed and presentations poor quality. And what do you expect? These students come in at 18 years old, straight out of high school. You put them in college and they want to do the least work possible. And since it's all papers, there is not an objective minimum for the work. With grade inflation, a poor quality paper can still pass you. By contrast, with engineering there are objective minimums. The program has to compile and tests have to pass. You have the structure that a young person needs out of high school, and the work ethic develops during this time. Maybe about 1% of the humanities students actually cared about what they studied, their output reflected that in the form of papers and internships...when it came time to graduate a couple of the motivated students were Rhodes scholars or otherwise working in their field of study. Everyone else was either not doing much or working in another area. Most of the time a degree is just a necessity to go into the workforce for whatever field, and those in humanities couldn't give less of a shit about what they're studying as long as there's a degree at the end.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • smerdatus 8y ago
    > the majority of humanities students I've interacted with have been uninspired and unmotivated. I took a good deal of humanities classes and more often than not comments were uninformed and presentations poor quality. > These students come in at 18 years old, straight out of high school. You put them in college and they want to do the least work possible. > Most of the time a degree is just a necessity to go into the workforce for whatever field I don't think your critique of undergraduate education is limited to the humanities. In my experience (I graduated two years ago from a top 10 school where I double majored in CS and history), students were there to have a good time and get a degree by the end of their four years. And, to be fair, I had a good time and didn't have to work nearly as hard as I do now. However, I saw little difference between the character of history students and CS students overall. There were exceptional people in both departments (top ~5%), a larger percentage of people who generally worked hard and were competent (~60%), and a population that didn't take it seriously and sometimes wasn't above cheating (there was a non-zero population of CS majors who graduated with next to no programming skills). My school's history department was relatively renowned, though the assignments didn't take nearly as long as CS/math labs. Still, many history profs were doing their best to fight grade inflation and had reasonable minimum standards. At the end of my spring history seminar, I asked my professor (_the_ expert in a relatively large field) what he thought about going to grad school and strongly advised against it, saying it was a bad idea except for maybe one or two students every year: it is just too competitive to get a good job. So, a ton of history majors went into consulting and will probably go back to school for their MBAs; a smaller group is going (or planning on going) to law school if they can get into a top school; others are grinding in the entertainment industry trying to get their foot in the door. I don't think this is evidence of "uninspired" or "unmotivated" humanities students. Nor do I think the fact that many history students go on to work in unrelated fields reflects poorly on the discipline: they learned about things they were interested in, improved their writing skills, critical thinking skills, etc. The fact that their [liberal arts] education was a bad value -- in terms of both time and money -- is less endemic to their chosen major, but to the educational system as a whole.
• jonnat 8y ago
  This is simply short sighted. Yes, we are at a time in which machines have automated enough of the labor to cause panic and drive students to practical fields, but not enough to cause mass revolt. But it's inevitable. Some form of UBI will have to be instituted, by consensus or force, and at that point, a large part of the population will find itself with lots of time on their hands and no need for knowledge in any productive area. Then, most majors will be in philosophy, literature or art.
• vinceguidry 8y ago
  This is a matter of "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." In the long run, STEM is going to become increasingly niche, STEM is the industry that eats its young. Not too long ago, it was possible to make a lucrative career out of non-coding front-end, meaning a design focus with no javascript. Those days ended a few years ago. You can't expect your job to remain stable if you go into anything STEM, unless you move up the value chain to underlying tech, where living-wage jobs are as rarefied as million-dollar, you're literally a rockstar, contracts / jobs. My dream job here is to actually get paid $X00,000 to work on Rails. Not implementing Rails, developing Rails. This is a pattern that replicates all across STEM. In the humanities, all sustainable jobs are equivalent to my dream Rails gig. Out of hundreds of people who want a salaried anthropology job, only a handful are going to earn them, because the economics just favor STEM at the moment. But eventually the mid-level market for all STEM jobs is going to dry up. Whatever obsession society has for engineering is going to pass, and then engineering is going to look like the humanities, and the humanities is going to find purchase with all the new technology that we're building and that's where the jobs will go. Which is a grand shame. Humans shouldn't be so laser-focused on the mother-loving present all the freaking time. It's going to take the web world another 5-10 years to realize that the obsession it's been nurturing over Javascript is ridiculous and that Rails really did do it right. Web assembly is a solution in search of a problem, and native is eventually going to find its sea legs. React is okay but its successor will be better, my guess is that CSS is going to be seen as the bottleneck and the new React will do what React did, only with a management paradigm for styling. The focus on ES6 will die out and decent language design is going to one day win out over that ugly pile of hacks. Once the development community realizes all of this, and thousands of other lessons that are essentially variations on the same theme of timelessness, then the focus will shift on the people actually creating the meaning and value that people want out of life. Young people who want to rap will, well, rap. The marketplace of ideas will cease to be dependent on the technical ability of creators because STEM will have long eaten its young and has fully professionalized and turned into Hollywood. Every industry will eventually be Hollywood. It's just a question of how well they manage that mid-level market. Hollywood has a guild system. We feel we're too good for that.
  • nradov 8y ago
• quotemstr 8y ago
  When I look at the problems of today's academy, e.g. extreme ideological bias, replication difficulties, p-hacking, salami-sliced publication --- I can't help but wonder whether the root cause is the pay structure not properly taking into account the value of a high-quality academic ecosystem. It feels like there's a market failure here here. Due to disgracefully low wages, we're selecting people for academic life who want to be there for all the wrong reasons, be it a sense of being trapped on a bad career path, an opportunity to relish in sanctimony, or some kind of obsolete notion of the dignity of living a life dedicated to knowledge, which academic now seldom produces and which we seldom prize. College administration costs are going through the roof. Would it hurt to redirect some of this spending toward efficiency wages for faculty? Money brings prestige, and prestige generates all sorts of benefits.
• will4274 8y ago
  What if the problem is that the humanities are getting worse? The ancient definition of a liberal arts education was language (typically ancient Greek), mathematics, literature (often poetry), physical sciences, and history. During my time at University, I found that students in STEM were required to take classes in literature, language, and history. At my University, it was 8 of 40 classes - 20% of the work over four years, including 2 at a second year level of above. On the other hand, the humanities majors had to take only a tiny bit of math and science (just 3 classes), without any level requirements and humanities students often delighted in taking STEM classes without any real rigor. Advocates of the humanities and a liberal arts education often claim that humanities majors are more likely than STEM majors to be well rounded, but my experience has typically been the opposite - I often have interesting conversations with software engineers about history and politics, but I can't recall an interesting conversation with a humanities major about machine learning / AI or economics.
  • dredmorbius 8y ago
    The Seven Liberal Arts were literally the trivium and quadrivium. The first were the humanities: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. They were followed by the scientific arts: mathematics, trigonometry, music, and astronomy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education The evolution of higher education is itself fairly fascinating. The United States produced fewer high school graduates in 1900 than it doees PhDs today, as a fraction of the population.
  • yontherubicon 8y ago
    In the article, there was a graph that indicated that degrees Interdisciplinary studies were actually increasing. TBH, I think you've identified the real problem here: Having a degree in the Humanities no longer means a well-rounded educated individual. It simply means a person who can't do math.
• c3534l 8y ago
  Maybe the humanities need to change and that's the problem, but looking at those graphs in the article it seems that the answer is "it's the economy, stupid." When I was in High School we were all told that it didn't matter what you majored in so long as you got into a good college. Maybe kids now just have a little reality built into them, that jobs don't come free with a college education, that it's possible to take on more student debt than you can afford with your job opportunities. And maybe what's happening is just that fewer kids are getting duped into digging themselves into debt expecting they'll have a career at the end of it because they followed their passion like everyone told them was how you get successful.
• singingfish 8y ago
  I have a fairly hardcore PhD in social sciences (where I produced some really useful work on how to better understand technology driven social phenomena which are difficult to define, and near-impossible to parameterise). In fact my PhD was awarded in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences. Which is the problem. The business faculties have eaten large amounts of the social science faculties. And in substantial parts of the business faculties the quality of academic work is dreadful (e.g. have a look at how marketing students are taught statistics - or consider in these faculties, Economics is the most rigorous of the disciplines argh!). So with that PhD, what do I do? I'm a jobbing programmer currently doing ecommerce stuff - i.e. I tell computers what to do. It's good money, interesting work and they mostly leave me alone to get on with it, so on that level, no problem.
• tragic 8y ago
  This topic is fairly personal to me, since - after I got bitten hard by the continental philosophy bug at the age of 18 - I really did aspire to go into academia and teach it. But I got to the point of applying for PhDs and something of the reality started to dawn, not least that there would be another three years of genteel poverty to endure before there was any hope of a steady job. I had the good fortune to take to programming at that time. The student loan situation is not quite so bad here in the UK (although it is worse now than when I was going through the system). Yet it clearly puts the humanities at a disadvantage. You don't need to have read Toqueville or Heidegger to see that taking on a six figure debt for the slender possibility of a poorly paid and stressful job later is a really bad idea. Add in the 'other' relevant numbers - "how many papers have you published this year?" and friends - and frankly I'm surprised that anyone is left to teach today's students. It sounds miserable, and also -from the student's point of view - must reduce engagement with the material.
• intended 8y ago
  This is going to accelerate. Indians/Chinese live in a world exactly like this - where all degrees MUST be STEM or you are a useless waste/burden to society. I dont know what America is doing, but people left my country specifically because there was a better life and more vibrant educational culture in the States. But ever since no child left behind, and the collapse of jobs which support a wide form of intellectual pursuits, America seems to be recreating the same intellectual ecosystem collapse you see here.
  • maxxxxx 8y ago
    Agreed. It seems pretty unhealthy long term if we have a society with only lawyers, engineers and MBAs.
• gillesjacobs 8y ago
  I studied Spanish and English literature and linguistics undergrad in W.Europe. I made the conscience choice to move into STEM during my postgrads. Now I am pursuing a PhD in natural language processing and machine learning. The tuition fee was about 900USD avg. per year so there was no financial pressure on me to change academic careers: the choice was ideologically driven. Allow me share you my experience at the humanities faculty: I had always enjoyed the arts and literature but from year two I noticed ideological and methodologically harmful trends in the humanities: the staunch rejection of empiricism, the politicization of academia and near universal adoption of radical left-wing ideology. Researchers more often see themselves as activists at the cost of scientific methodology. Theories were completely divorced from social or natural reality. Established professors did not know how to do basic statistical tests, and have no problem getting published anyway.
• foxyv 8y ago
  I wonder what the correlation is between the price of a university degree and the percentage of humanities majors. I imagine it's much easier to justify an education in English Literature when it doesn't cost $70,000 or more. At the same time, I know people who majored in English who ended up working as security guards and package sorters. There just aren't many jobs that require that skillset anymore, thanks to the internet. Not many editors, copywriters, or reviewers are necessary when there are millions of people willing to do it almost for free online. Digital publishing has made writing into a free for all. Almost all that is left is teaching which requires separate credentials and very low pay for long hours.