6 ms·

> At least, these tend to be real subjects that students are actually interested in. I don't think that whether real students are interested in a topic is rela

• non-entity 6y ago
  > We should be pushing people towards STEM and trade schools. Hopefully this situation helps do that. Might as well cut the S and M off that because most people who get a science degree probably aren't working in the filednwithout higher education and even the there's so few jobs available. Most people with math education probably aren't working directly in mathematics, but at least you can make the argument that there are other fields where math is related enough to be somewhat useful.
• netcan 6y ago
  International relations is an actual subject area. It's true that we don't need that many diplomats, and that people might be just studying it out of interest... or because it sounded better than something else. Most business courses are literally fake. The stuff being taught was invented in order to be taught. Quite a lot of it is learning the meaning of terms that were invented in order to be taught. It's not that there aren't real business subjects. Finance and accounting are real subjects. Economics is a real subject, in the sense that philosophy is a real subject. Statistics, etc. The trend is (and has been for decades) to teach mostly (or only) fluff courses. The bottom third of these things are functional equivalents of diploma mills. Ask business graduates over a pint. Most will admit it.
  • beaner 6y ago
    I agree in the distinction you're making, I just think that many of the degree programs for these older subjects are effectively acting as "diploma mills" today because their result for the student is about the same.
    • netcan 6y ago
      I guess you're right. In practice, a lot of people are just putting one foot in front of another, much of the time. Myself included, probably. At least humanities courses teach students to write. They're basically essay writing classes.
      • sebmellen 6y ago
        I'm not sure about that. Have you read the writing of a recent college grad? I worked with two on a project some time ago, one with a BA in English and another who dropped out of a Mathematics degree. The one who'd dropped out was clearer and more consistent in their writing than the BA in English. Perhaps math enforces a level of pragmatism that the humanities don't? Anecdotal, of course, but I've seen this pattern often.
    • TeMPOraL 6y ago
      That's true, but GP is making a distinction between diploma mills that have some underlying substance, vs. ones that are completely fake and invented for purpose. From the POV of a student entering a job market, anthropology or international studies may be completely useless. But the student gained real knowledge that is useful for some jobs (even if they're not pursuing them). And it can be useful in their life. To use a CS analogy, I never needed calculus or control theory during my $dayjobs, but I use them for myself, to better understand the world and occasionally on hardware hobby projects. Meanwhile, those fake degrees are literally scams. I.e. students (and their families) are being scammed for their money. The topics are self-referential (invented to be taught), and exist in order to justify spending few years on them, so that the degree rewards putting in work - which makes that degree valuable for employers in the first place. And during the course of that degree, various entities - universities, textbook publishers, etc. - are bleeding students dry. It's not just a degree mill, it's a money printer. The degree becomes purely proof of work, and on top of wasted years of your life, you also have to pay for it.
• JamisonM 6y ago
  > "online marketing" degrees are just part of this category, not anything special in themselves. I disagree in that many of the other topics have a real academic history and tradition, involve the expression of genuinely important ideas. Being immersed in that for years has value: in the facts learned, the overall experience, and an appreciation for aspects of the world that you might not have understood or appreciated before. The fact that that arts degrees often have a very good return on investment /might/ be because they are a waste of time and irrelevant but it seems like the preponderance of evidence indicates that they are not a complete waste of time. https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/collegeroi/ https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/collegeroi/ Pushing students towards STEM and trade schools is probably not a good idea, creating markets that actually work properly and then letting the students sort all that out for themselves seems like a better way.
  • beaner 6y ago
    I agree. And the market is telling us that more jobs in these fields are not needed, while STEM has endless technological problems to address and high salaries for the taking.
    • JamisonM 6y ago
      The solid ROI on arts degrees is the market saying that they are needed, no?
      • beaner 6y ago
        I think it's a tricky question, because the provided link seems to distinguish liberal arts schools from other non-technology, non-business schools, and I don't know how that distinction is being made. It could be that their subjects are largely similar, but the schools being explicitly marked as "liberal arts" schools are of an elitist class separated by grades and/or family privilege. And that these aspects of the student rather than the content of the degree are what account for the return. Certainly some liberal arts degrees are warranted by the market, but if what's happening is that all the ones from a second rank of colleges are simply not being considered as liberal arts, then that kind of misrepresents what's going on.
• BeetleB 6y ago
  > Some small fraction of the people who study them actually go on to do something near-related to those topics. Many (most?) others go on to work recruters, office managers, in call centers (etc), immediately throwing away their studies and never revisiting them. You are drawing a line that is convenient to your argument. I have an engineering degree, and worked for a bunch of years in my discipline. As part of the degree, I had to take 3 calculus courses and one differential equations course. Never needed them on the job. I took 2 circuits courses, 3 electronics courses, 2 communications courses, 2 E&M courses, 1 control theory course, and 1 microcontrollers course - all part of my major. About half were mandatory (not electives). Of these, only 2 courses were relevant for my job. I could have done it as effectively as I did without taking all those other courses. Amongst engineers, my engineering experience is not an outlier. My experience is the norm. Even while I was in college that was the feedback I would get from people in industry: Most of the engineering courses are useless for your job, and getting the degree is merely a formality and not much of an indicator of knowledge/expertise. The whole "a degree shows you can commit to something for a dedicated amount of time" is mostly a post hoc justification. Your argument that a "small fraction" of people who study them actually go on to use them applies very well to engineering degrees. I suspect they would apply equally well to CS degrees as well. I mean, I'm the perfect example. I took very little CS in school, but make a living as a SW professional. Most people I know who got math degrees (but not a PhD) use almost none of it in their jobs - even the technical jobs. Ditto for physics. Should we do away with these as well? In general, look at all the people who have a BS degree in something other than CS and are working in the SW industry. Look at their degrees. While engineers like me often actually do go on to become engineers, for probably all other majors (math, physics, literature, philosophy, etc) you'll find they rarely get a job in their discipline. I've lived in countries where those subjects are usually not offered in universities. It really sucks. You usually end up with 2 scenarios: A class full of people who don't care about the subject but are taking it because society has deemed that what they are interested in is not to be taught in universities. This often results in a lowering of the standards to appease them (who are often in the majority). Indeed, many math majors in the US complain about this - calculus, diff eq and linear algebra are usually taught to cater to engineers, and not math majors. Or you'll get the other extreme, where the standards are made unnecessarily tight to keep those people out, but in effect also then prevent decent students who are interested in the topic from studying it.
• blahbhthrow3748 6y ago
  STEM includes hard science and mathematics - is there that much more demand for math or biology majors than for any of the social sciences? A math undergrad seems just as likely to end up in a call centre or as an office manager
  • cdipaolo 6y ago
    (context: was a math undergrad) Almost all math graduates at my undergrad ended up going into (a) finance as quants, (b) PhD program, (c) data or SWE-related job in tech [me], or (d) some kind of K-12 math educator job. Probably 30% PhD, 30% SWE/data in tech, 20% quant, 20% K-12 education. The people who did K-12 wanted to do that for much of their life typically, and the people who did PhD either (50%) knew that's exactly what they wanted to or, or really didn't know what they wanted to do. Perhaps our program doesn't reflect the story on a national level though. Unsure there.
  • mountainboot 6y ago
    My good friend got a math degree and works retail.
• eulenteufel 6y ago
  I am currently a physics student (in Germany) and have to tell you that people "throwing away their studies" is not something STEM-students are exempt from. In fact most physics students (at least in Germany) will go on and do something totally unrelated very soon after graduating. We graduate a lot more people than what are actually used in science and physics related industries. Of course some fraction of the aquired skills may also be useful in other jobs, but that applies to a lot of studies in the humanities as well.
• pgcj_poster 6y ago
  I think it's useful for society to have a significant chunk of the population that knows a lot about social sciences or humanities, even if it doesn't translate directly to job skills. On a simple level, as a trans person, I would be really glad to know that my office manager majored in gender studies. On a more grand level, I think it would be good for US foreign policy if every voter had at least one friend who had studied international relations. Therefore, I don't see it as a social problem that we have a lot of people spending a few years of their lives studying those things, although I do think it's a problem that we charge them absurd amount to do it. By contrast, I don't think that whatever they teach in "online marketing" has any positive effect on society. It might even be negative. Those degrees I do see as a social problem. I also agree that it's a problem that a lot of people are going into college just because they don't have any other ideas and it's seen as a respectable thing to do. I think the main cause is that our society doesn't give nearly enough support to people entering the workforce, and is oddly determined for people to move from being a full-time student to a full-time worker, with nothing in between.
  • mensetmanusman 6y ago
    Online marketing teaches how to communicate value of something. Of course, some companies abuse the approach and lie, but the more people who can communicate ideas well, the better.
• ptero 6y ago
  > I don't think that whether real students are interested in a topic is related to how well that choice of study does for them in the real world I think while the correlation may be weaker than what some claim, it is still there. To put it another way, I have seen very few cases of students who hated the field, were force-fed it and then would turn it a successful career. And a few that would do that tend to look for opportunities to change course. Being really interested in a subject is a great encouragement to acquire deep knowledge, not just a good grade. And such deep knowledge can bring benefits for the rest of the life. As an example: I have a PhD in math but "tossed it" and went to work writing software and algorithms. My employers never cared about my PhD. I never used much of the "PhD" math I learned in grad school and I probably forgot most of it. Computing a homology group? Topological entropy? Forget it. But was the PhD a waste? I do not think so! As a side effect of being in grad school, teaching undergrad classes and arguing with friends doing math and physics I became friends with many fields and learned techniques that still serve me well. So definitely no regrets for me for spending 5 years learning things I did not directly use afterwards. I do agree with your last point -- we should not be telling students that anything they study will lead them to success after graduation. They should choose a field with some applications. But among the multitude of such fields they should choose one they genuinely like. My 2c.