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Makes sense- it used to be that college was a place where the ruling class sent their children to be educated in how to be gentlemen/managers. The humanities w

Makes sense- it used to be that college was a place where the ruling class sent their children to be educated in how to be gentlemen/managers. The humanities were considered what such a person needed to know; an understanding of people and society, but not specific work skills since it would be the underclass doing the work. Now, college is increasingly a form of trade school where members of every class go to learn a marketable skill, in order to sell their labor. Not everybody can be a member of the ruling class, and people are realizing that. Getting a degree in the humanities is only advantageous if you have a reasonable expectation that you'll never have to know a specific trade but will simply be in the management.

frockington 8y ago
I'd rather have management that knows its business/technology over a humanities major any day
- derefr 8y ago
  Maybe you're picturing "management" on the wrong level. Think "Limited Partners in VC firms", not CEOs. Being in management—even being a CEO!—is still a trade-skill (it is, in fact, the quintessential haute-bourgeoisie trade-skill) and not the sort of thing you'd historically learn in college. Most historical "captains of industry"—think e.g. Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller—never went to college. College, really, was for the people who boss CEOs around: the patrons (modernly, "angel investors") of the founders who started the company; the capitalists who sit on the boards of the the mutual funds who invest in IPOed companies; etc. People who got taught how to "manage wealth" and the essentials of an MBA on their daddy's knee (with said father possibly being one of the wealthy middle-class "captains of industry"), and are now, in their teenage years, being sent off for "polishing" at college, such that they can be a good person, not just a brutally efficient one. (And, also, to enculturate them into the upper-class by immersion among upper-class children, so that a merely-wealthy family can be thus transmuted into an upper-class dynasty, with descendants worthy of noble status in countries that grant such.) Or, to put that another way: the humanities were created to turn people like Jeff Bezos into people like Elon Musk. (Or to turn people like during-Microsoft Bill Gates into people like post-Microsoft Bill Gates.) To take people who already have a knack for "making money", but are still fundamentally human with human drives like greed and pride; and inculcate into them a perspective on wealth as being a means to a greater, humanitarian end.
forapurpose 8y ago
> Getting a degree in the humanities is only advantageous if you have a reasonable expectation that you'll never have to know a specific trade but will simply be in the management. Is there data showing that humanities degree-holders have lower career earnings (controlling for other factors, of course)? IIRC, engineers start faster, but generally hit a ceiling (on income and age) while humanities degree holders keep going. Humanities deals with much more difficult and realistic problems than STEM - the problems that cannot be quantified and have no easy answers, which includes most of what we experience in reality and are the real challenges in life and in business. Algorithms are great, but most of life cannot be addressed that way. And to say only the 'ruling class' are worthy of learning such things is, I think, the true elitism. Also, life is much more than career. We have to be family members, spouses, citizens, community members, individuals, etc. etc. STEM doesn't help much with those things. The problems of Facebook aren't interface and back end, but what to write. The current problems of society (and Facebook) are not technical - we have wave after wave of technical innovation and look where we are - but political and social. We haven't come close to solving them all, but we've come a long way in the last few hundred years, and I hope we do more for the next generation than give them more algorithms.

frockington 8y ago

I'd rather have management that knows its business/technology over a humanities major any day

derefr 8y ago
Maybe you're picturing "management" on the wrong level. Think "Limited Partners in VC firms", not CEOs. Being in management—even being a CEO!—is still a trade-skill (it is, in fact, the quintessential haute-bourgeoisie trade-skill) and not the sort of thing you'd historically learn in college. Most historical "captains of industry"—think e.g. Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller—never went to college. College, really, was for the people who boss CEOs around: the patrons (modernly, "angel investors") of the founders who started the company; the capitalists who sit on the boards of the the mutual funds who invest in IPOed companies; etc. People who got taught how to "manage wealth" and the essentials of an MBA on their daddy's knee (with said father possibly being one of the wealthy middle-class "captains of industry"), and are now, in their teenage years, being sent off for "polishing" at college, such that they can be a good person, not just a brutally efficient one. (And, also, to enculturate them into the upper-class by immersion among upper-class children, so that a merely-wealthy family can be thus transmuted into an upper-class dynasty, with descendants worthy of noble status in countries that grant such.) Or, to put that another way: the humanities were created to turn people like Jeff Bezos into people like Elon Musk. (Or to turn people like during-Microsoft Bill Gates into people like post-Microsoft Bill Gates.) To take people who already have a knack for "making money", but are still fundamentally human with human drives like greed and pride; and inculcate into them a perspective on wealth as being a means to a greater, humanitarian end.

forapurpose 8y ago

> Getting a degree in the humanities is only advantageous if you have a reasonable expectation that you'll never have to know a specific trade but will simply be in the management. Is there data showing that humanities degree-holders have lower career earnings (controlling for other factors, of course)? IIRC, engineers start faster, but generally hit a ceiling (on income and age) while humanities degree holders keep going. Humanities deals with much more difficult and realistic problems than STEM - the problems that cannot be quantified and have no easy answers, which includes most of what we experience in reality and are the real challenges in life and in business. Algorithms are great, but most of life cannot be addressed that way. And to say only the 'ruling class' are worthy of learning such things is, I think, the true elitism. Also, life is much more than career. We have to be family members, spouses, citizens, community members, individuals, etc. etc. STEM doesn't help much with those things. The problems of Facebook aren't interface and back end, but what to write. The current problems of society (and Facebook) are not technical - we have wave after wave of technical innovation and look where we are - but political and social. We haven't come close to solving them all, but we've come a long way in the last few hundred years, and I hope we do more for the next generation than give them more algorithms.