> “When we work with undergraduates on digital humanities projects,” Quinn said, “it's often easier to take a humanities undergrad and teach them just enough co

> “When we work with undergraduates on digital humanities projects,” Quinn said, “it's often easier to take a humanities undergrad and teach them just enough coding to do what they need to do rather than taking some of the CS majors who can do the coding in their sleep but don't really think about the questions in the nuanced ways that we need them to.” This is a false dichotomy. I had the good fortune to study Math and Computer Science at a liberal arts school. During the course of my undergraduate degree, I had to spend a fair amount of time writing about STEM, in addition to actually doing STEM things. I've found, for example, reading and critiquing a paper on some ML research and asking "Is this true?" uses many of the same skills as asking "Is this true?" in other areas. And I was able to take plenty of Humanities classes as an undergrad as well. It is possible to get both a liberal arts education and a STEM education at the same time. > Humanities specialists argue that these majors open up higher-earning opportunities later in life because they don’t lock students into a narrow programming language, certification or career path. While I actually am a fan of liberal arts generally, this is an uninformed argument. Most CS programs I know of do not teach anything all that specific to the moment. At least when I was in school, and soon after, many programs included at least some course work in Lisp, ML (the programming language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language)), or Haskell, with the idea that they would teach a lot of programming language precisely so that you can learn how to pick up things later. No programs I'm aware of prepare students for a particular certificate. And, if they did, outside of consulting these certificates seem to not be particularly popular in computer science or software engineering fields. I suppose if an education in Humanities had prepared these particular people to make such a crummy argument, that would be a reason not to pursue a degree in the Humanities.