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> In it, Caplan argues that the true purpose of education is not to improve students but for students to signal their worth as employees to their future employe

> In it, Caplan argues that the true purpose of education is not to improve students but for students to signal their worth as employees to their future employers. While those two goals are not antithetical to each other, it is not at all a secret. I would say engineering/STEM schools are openly designed to get students good jobs. But good engineering schools don not have "bird courses", the number of mandatory classes to electives is really high. If you are at a school where students are doing the behavior you say, perhaps you are at the wrong institution or degree program. For example, I have heard rumors that business-area degrees tend to attract people who just want to buy their way to a credential.

chongli 6y ago
No, I’m at a school that is highly ranked for engineering. The engineering students have barely any electives at all. They’re always working their butts off and super stressed out all the time. For the few electives they do have they tend to choose bird courses. I’m a pure math student though. Math students tend to have way more flexibility in what they study. You can take extremely rigorous courses like functional analysis and algebraic topology. Or you can do a math-based accounting program and pretty much stop taking hard math courses after first year.
- iguy 6y ago
  I thought this was true of math almost anywhere. Those who are serious will take hard courses and learn a lot, there is no ceiling. The reward isn't a high GPA, but if something formal is needed, a transcript naming what you took ought to be fairly readable. Perfect scores on soft math-accounting courses won't open any doors. Engineering programs are a bit different, and more interested in making sure the floor is high. More like medicine in that they are concerned that a certified professional should be competent.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Math is also a bit of an outlier in that, to a greater degree than most STEM majors, what's relatively easy for some is "I could just as soon flap my arms and fly as graduate with a math degree" for others. My math was OK enough to graduate with an engineering degree. I could never have contemplated getting a math degree. (Probably uniquely among degrees where I went. Well, maybe physics, but same thing.)
- a1369209993 6y ago
  > No, I'm at a school that is highly ranked for engineering. In other words, you're at a school that cheats on the rankings. (As the saying goes, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a measure.)
- com2kid 6y ago
  Two of the best courses I took in college outside my major: 1. The art of listening to music 2. Geographic Information Systems Both courses were pretty much impossible to fail. The first course expanded my musical horizons and led to me enjoying almost any genre of music, whereas before I had listened to only a few select genres. Huge QoL improvement. The 2nd course had proven useful whenever the topic of mapping has come up, which includes understanding property lines and real estate. A bunch of smart people work at universities who are there to teach students stuff. It is up to the students to learn.
  - chongli 6y ago
    That’s fine. I’m taking philosophy courses toward my minor and they tend to be impossible to fail. Having said that, I spend huge amounts of time doing the readings and writing the papers. I don’t need to, but I do anyway. When I talk about students taking bird courses, I mean the kind where they never show up to class and just memorize a bunch of stuff before the midterm. They walk away with an 80, completely satisfied, having learned nothing.
    - com2kid 6y ago
      I've honestly never seen that. Seems to me, that is like paying for a nice steak dinner, coming in, sitting down, eating the potatoes, then leaving. Like, why? The point of college is to learn things. Balancing course load is important, but not learning at all is just a waste of time.
ghaff 6y ago
At least at the grad level, the difficulty of MBA programs tended to vary enormously depending upon how good your math, computer, etc. skills were. And, to be clear, I'm not talking about hard math. I tutored some first year students at one point and, with no exaggeration, they mostly couldn't do high school algebra or really grok a supply demand curve in microeconomics. There were a few business school memoirs written around that time and it was invariably about the struggles of someone who couldn't handle math. Other than that, it was a fair bit of work but it wasn't really hard.

chongli 6y ago

No, I’m at a school that is highly ranked for engineering. The engineering students have barely any electives at all. They’re always working their butts off and super stressed out all the time. For the few electives they do have they tend to choose bird courses. I’m a pure math student though. Math students tend to have way more flexibility in what they study. You can take extremely rigorous courses like functional analysis and algebraic topology. Or you can do a math-based accounting program and pretty much stop taking hard math courses after first year.

iguy 6y ago
I thought this was true of math almost anywhere. Those who are serious will take hard courses and learn a lot, there is no ceiling. The reward isn't a high GPA, but if something formal is needed, a transcript naming what you took ought to be fairly readable. Perfect scores on soft math-accounting courses won't open any doors. Engineering programs are a bit different, and more interested in making sure the floor is high. More like medicine in that they are concerned that a certified professional should be competent.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Math is also a bit of an outlier in that, to a greater degree than most STEM majors, what's relatively easy for some is "I could just as soon flap my arms and fly as graduate with a math degree" for others. My math was OK enough to graduate with an engineering degree. I could never have contemplated getting a math degree. (Probably uniquely among degrees where I went. Well, maybe physics, but same thing.)
a1369209993 6y ago
> No, I'm at a school that is highly ranked for engineering. In other words, you're at a school that cheats on the rankings. (As the saying goes, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a measure.)
com2kid 6y ago
Two of the best courses I took in college outside my major: 1. The art of listening to music 2. Geographic Information Systems Both courses were pretty much impossible to fail. The first course expanded my musical horizons and led to me enjoying almost any genre of music, whereas before I had listened to only a few select genres. Huge QoL improvement. The 2nd course had proven useful whenever the topic of mapping has come up, which includes understanding property lines and real estate. A bunch of smart people work at universities who are there to teach students stuff. It is up to the students to learn.
- chongli 6y ago
  That’s fine. I’m taking philosophy courses toward my minor and they tend to be impossible to fail. Having said that, I spend huge amounts of time doing the readings and writing the papers. I don’t need to, but I do anyway. When I talk about students taking bird courses, I mean the kind where they never show up to class and just memorize a bunch of stuff before the midterm. They walk away with an 80, completely satisfied, having learned nothing.
  - com2kid 6y ago
    I've honestly never seen that. Seems to me, that is like paying for a nice steak dinner, coming in, sitting down, eating the potatoes, then leaving. Like, why? The point of college is to learn things. Balancing course load is important, but not learning at all is just a waste of time.

ghaff 6y ago

At least at the grad level, the difficulty of MBA programs tended to vary enormously depending upon how good your math, computer, etc. skills were. And, to be clear, I'm not talking about hard math. I tutored some first year students at one point and, with no exaggeration, they mostly couldn't do high school algebra or really grok a supply demand curve in microeconomics. There were a few business school memoirs written around that time and it was invariably about the struggles of someone who couldn't handle math. Other than that, it was a fair bit of work but it wasn't really hard.