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If my tax dollars go anywhere, I would rather encourage students study multiple high-demand majors than provide loan forgiveness to societally unproductive majo

If my tax dollars go anywhere, I would rather encourage students study multiple high-demand majors than provide loan forgiveness to societally unproductive majors (gender studies, literature, etc.). I don’t see why we should use tax money to prop up anything other than proven productive fields of study. Society should get something back, and I’d rather get back a smart physics/econ double major.

trs8080 4y ago
People are really out here thinking that arts and critical theory haven't advanced human civilization... and that science and technology exist in a cultural vacuum.
- nightski 4y ago
  Most people aren't going to college for academic research, which is a big part of the problem. They are going for careers unfortunately.
  - Balgair 4y ago
    In California it's a bit different. According to 'The Master Plan', UCs are designed for research and post-grad work and some professional careers. Only the UCs give out PhDs (with a few exceptions). CSUs are designed for professional and teacher education and cannot give out PhDs (with a few exceptions). So, as an undergrad thinking of grad school, a UC is a better place to go to as they have the grad labs and classes on campus, while the CSUs mostly do not. Your chances of getting into grad school are a bit higher. Berkeley, being a UC, is more geared toward research than Chico, a CSU. I mean, Cal even has a nobel prize parking lot. https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/content-analysis/academic-planning/california-master-plan.html https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-plannin...
- greatpostman 4y ago
  Middle iq people have no business taking on huge debt to study critical theory
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - rafram 4y ago
    > Middle iq people What a sad way to categorize people.
- NtochkaNzvanova 4y ago
  - wwweston 4y ago
    I'd like to make sure I understand your position here. You seem to be saying there is a body of ideas that has gained such a widespread foothold that they hold a significant place in the culture such that they can unfavorably affect social dynamics at civilization-wide levels. If this is true, it would imply that we should be carefully -- some might even say critically -- be examining civilization at all levels from ideas (and their implications and consequences) through practices so we can understand those dynamics and perhaps help civilizations be more healthy. Does that sound about right? Because it also sounds like some kind of critical theory...
    - tsol 4y ago
      Your argument appears to be circular. He said he believes critical theory to have done social harm. You observe that he says there are ideas present in society that cause social harm. Then you say this means we need critical theory to examine such damage(as OP said is the result of critical theory).
      - wwweston 4y ago
        That's actually not what I said, unless any socially critical examination does in fact meet the definition of "critical theory"... And in fact, no one here knows what the commentor means by that phrase, much less how it's ostensibly done damage, which would be necessary in order to change their mind as invited.
    - badpun 4y ago
      > Because it also sounds like some kind of critical theory... What's the "theory" exactly? It just sounds like common sense.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
pevey 4y ago
Agreed. This is the worst possible way to address whatever problem the university thinks they have.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
standyro 4y ago
Regardless of your feelings about tax dollars, I hate to break it to you, but the UC system hasn’t being subsidized by California in decades. Something like 15-20% comes from the state. Maybe that’s part of the problem.
- marcushill 4y ago
  15-20% of what comes from the state? If you are talking about funding, wouldn't that count as the state subsidizing it?
- topkai22 4y ago
  From the UC system budget doc: student tuition and fees are 39% of “core budget”, state general funds are 46%. https://www.ucop.edu/operating-budget/_files/rbudget/2022-23-budget-summary.pdf https://www.ucop.edu/operating-budget/_files/rbudget/2022-23... The overall budget gets weird with medical centers and something called “Sales and Support”, but in any case California tax payers put in more money then students. I don’t think that’s a problem, but it’s definitely subsidized.
trentgreene 4y ago
The strange thing is I as a SWE interviewer generally find an engineering degree to not be indicative of engineering talent, over say, a masters in underwater basket weaving. I’m not sure dumping money into stem education does anything, or if any field of study is “proven productive.”
- jetru 4y ago
  Dumping money in STEM probably does do something, we're all just biased over the CS portion of things - which yea, is a mess. But for subjects like Civil, Electrical, sciences like Physics, Biology, I suspect the story is quite different.
  - Melting_Harps 4y ago
    > But for subjects like Civil, Electrical, sciences like Physics, Biology, I suspect the story is quite different. I can speak to Biology; most undergrads are left with little opportunity as most roles require a graduate degree to do anything meaningful when the economy is actually favorable, and often seek roles outside of their field when it's not. As a undergrad that was lucky enough to enter the field in the wake of the GFC long enough to just pay off my student debt I've met so many biologists/biochemists who either couldn't find anything in their field, or simply gave up trying and sought the highest paid and somewhat stable role they could get 'that required a degree.' It's quite clear that the system has failed, and the system is designed to onboard more STEM grads as it sounds as their are ever-growing holders of degrees chasing so n amount of open roles. Tech in unique in that it is one of those few Industries where the barrier of entry is rather low, but the attrition and competence level vets for viable candidates almost entirely on it's own--the gatekeeping interview process is still an unnecessary hurdle. Personally, for all the controversy Eric Weinstein has made directly and indirectly of his own actions, the concept of Embedded Growth Obligations was incredibly well researched and consistent with what we have seen as outlined since 2005 and then solidified itself in the financial collapse of 2008 [0]: > Embedded Growth Obligations are the way in which institutions plan their future predicated on legacies of growth. And since the period between the end of World War II in 1945 and the early 70s had such an unusually beautiful growth regime, many of our institutions became predicated upon low-variance technology-led, stable, broadly distributed growth. Now, this is a world we have not seen in an organic way since the early 1970s, and yet, because it was embedded in our institutions, what we have is a world in which the expectation is still present in the form of an embedded growth obligation. That is, the pension plans, the corporate ladders, are all still built very much around a world that has long since vanished. We have effectively become a Growth Cargo Cult. That is, once upon a time, planes used to land in the Pacific, let's say, during World War II, and Indigenous people looked at the air strips and the behavior of the air traffic controllers, and they've been mimicking those behaviors in the years since as ritual, but the planes no longer land. Well, in large measure, our institutions are built for a world in which growth doesn't happen in the same way anymore. 0: https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Embedded_Growth_Obligations https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Embedded_Growth_Obligations
sabas123 4y ago
Especially when it comes to fundamental research a lot of work is "useless" until it isn't. This idea of picking winners before people even start at a college is not the way to go. Many people would argue that linguistics is one of those useless studies compared to comp sci, but it shares deep connections to research in logic and by extension type theory (see handbook for logic and languages)
- IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
  what I understood parent to be saying is that the picked winners were picked by students, not some central arbiter of what should be studied. unless youn disagree with the laws of supply and demand, it seems the market consensus at this moment is that compsci majors are far more useful than any fundamental research (which still remains undefined). Even if the market was wrong and fundamental research could somehow be valuable, why would you not trust the primary beneficiaries oj making that decision, vs some bureaucrat that has no stake in the outcome?
  - mint2 4y ago
    Law of supply and demand has no direct relevance on what benefits society as a whole
- visarga 4y ago
  You're right, the search space is deceptive and going directly towards the goal might lead to a dead end. Only in hindsight we can tell which stepping stones were essential. Immediate results are the best, but in the meantime we need to focus on novelty and interestingness. A great video about open-endedness (warning - very long) with Kenneth Stanley, author of the book "Why Greatness Cannot be Planned" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhYGXYeMq_E&t=350s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhYGXYeMq_E&t=350s
- jimbob45 4y ago
  Gender Studies and Literature will never not be useless professionally. That said, there is immense value in having some number of scholars study those fields in great detail and we would suffer as a species if we let our knowledge in those fields rot. Would it perhaps be prudent to cap the number of participants in those departments to match the number of real-world vacancies available?
astrange 4y ago
This is already happening; all humanities majors except for philosophy are collapsing in the US. https://twitter.com/benmschmidt/status/1562212497272279041 https://twitter.com/benmschmidt/status/1562212497272279041 (Weird that psychology is growing, all the psych degree people I know work in HR and I don't think that's what they dreamed of.)
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  Psych is an "easy A" batchelors program for people who don't know what they want to study. It's a useless degree without moving on to the severely placement limited graduate programs.
- topkai22 4y ago
  Bachelor level psych degrees also pay worse than most humanities. https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/interactive_embed/career_earnings_by_college_major https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/interactive_embed/car... My personal take is that humanities departments should be aggressively courting 2nd majors (somewhat egotistical, I was a double major). As much as we might want to believe that the purpose of education is to give person a fuller life, increased earnings potential is an undeniable part of there reason people go to university. Selling a line like “the CS department will teach you how to make money. We’ll help you live the rest of your life” or “engineering got me in on the ground floor. Clarity of thought and speech got me to the top floor” seems like it could open up more demand than trying to go it alone. My N of one experience suggests it might be effective. I thought I was just getting a vanity politics degree on top of my CS degree because I liked it. After 10 years in career I think I refer to lessons and skills learned in those humanities classes as much as the ones in my CS classes.
- dagw 4y ago
  all the psych degree people I know work in HR I would figure that the whole point of getting a psychology degree (as opposed to taking some psychology courses as part of your main degree) is to work as a psychologist? Why are all these people failing to get their psychologist qualifications? Where I live, I've never met or heard of anyone who went for a psychology degree without the intention of becoming a psychologist. Sure, not everybody makes it to the end, and few end up doing research instead, but the whole goal of the degree is to produce qualified psychologists.
enumjorge 4y ago
We do get something back. Having economically unstable individuals and families affects us all even if indirectly.
systemvoltage 4y ago
I want none of this. I want a whole bunch of apprenticeships and tradesmen from our colleges. Technicians and specialists. Subject matter experts. Manufacturing engineers.
wwweston 4y ago
I have a math undergrad. I imagine someone who values physics & econ wouldn't think a math degree is "societally unproductive", but the decided majority of people I meet including other college graduates have absolutely no idea what I studied/learned in the course of doing that. What reason do you have to believe that you aren't doing the same thing with the majors you're judging societally unproductive?
saagarjha 4y ago
Are we really going to rehash the same, tired argument that only STEM majors are useful to society? Having the narrow view of social benefits being solely centered around money is incredibly short-sighted, and I’m not even sure I want to respond to physics/Econ majors being “smart”.
- cultofmetatron 4y ago
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    Dumb, or courageous? Do you not benefit from the people around you who studied liberal arts? Who is going to make the Netflix shows you watch after you get home from work after spending 8 hours slinging JSON around and making bank? No, seriously, these people are going into fields that we benefit from and yet refuse to pay for, and if they didn’t our society would be worse off. Why do you consider this a dumb decision rather than a sacrifice they shouldn’t have to make?
    - nequo 4y ago
      I was going to post something similar but parent got flagged and I couldn't. Gender studies is important. I have to think about non-gender issues for a living and this means that I don't have the time to think about the thousand ways in which women are disadvantaged in society.[1] But gender studies majors do, and I am better off for reading the arguments written or summarized by them than not learning about many of these issues at all. [1] And possibly men too. Not gender studies but an example: https://home.uchicago.edu/~bursztyn/Misperceived_Norms_2020_3_6.pdf https://home.uchicago.edu/~bursztyn/Misperceived_Norms_2020_...
    - cultofmetatron 4y ago
      I doubt the people making shows for netflix are not being paid well. Even the ones pouring out absolute junk lately are being paid bank. a Better example would be english teachers who absolutely are being underpaid while providing value to society. gender studies is still bullshit. I took a few mandated classes back in university. 90% of getting an A is just knowing what the teacher wants to hear. I have a hard time believing any of them can understand critical thinking giving how much of their doing well in that major is just going with groupthink.
hackerlight 4y ago
> societally unproductive majors (gender studies, literature, etc.). I don’t see why we should use tax money to prop up anything other than proven productive fields of study. Some majors are actually unproductive and a waste of both the student's and taxpayer's money, and should not be subsidized. But many humanities that often get binned this way are actually civically productive, and they're only economically unproductive because of significant market failure. The benefits to society aren't priced properly. Such majors, and that is the social sciences, should arguably be subsidized by the government, because they are technically public goods. What the last few years has taught us is how much damage an electorate can do who isn't educated. If they don't understand anything about economic systems, political systems, sociology, history, psychology, then their mind can be taken over too easily by propaganda, which can have catastrophic consequences, all the way up to the death of democracy.
cma 4y ago
> physics/econ double major Who probably proceeds to go into zero or negative-sum trading, or negative sum ad targeting intelligence.
resist_futility 4y ago
The only problem that's cropped up is the decline of the education system due to continued undervaluing of our countries bedrock of teachers. With an increase of business majors during a continuing recession. 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...
fmajid 4y ago
Psychology is massively popular but with too many graduates for available jobs. Same with Law.
dc-programmer 4y ago
I think it’s more of a matching problem. There are lots of students who get nothing out of CS classes. Ideally we would match the available slots with the students with the highest analytical aptitude.

trs8080 4y ago

People are really out here thinking that arts and critical theory haven't advanced human civilization... and that science and technology exist in a cultural vacuum.

nightski 4y ago
Most people aren't going to college for academic research, which is a big part of the problem. They are going for careers unfortunately.
- Balgair 4y ago
  In California it's a bit different. According to 'The Master Plan', UCs are designed for research and post-grad work and some professional careers. Only the UCs give out PhDs (with a few exceptions). CSUs are designed for professional and teacher education and cannot give out PhDs (with a few exceptions). So, as an undergrad thinking of grad school, a UC is a better place to go to as they have the grad labs and classes on campus, while the CSUs mostly do not. Your chances of getting into grad school are a bit higher. Berkeley, being a UC, is more geared toward research than Chico, a CSU. I mean, Cal even has a nobel prize parking lot. https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/content-analysis/academic-planning/california-master-plan.html https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-plannin...
greatpostman 4y ago
Middle iq people have no business taking on huge debt to study critical theory
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rafram 4y ago
  > Middle iq people What a sad way to categorize people.
NtochkaNzvanova 4y ago
- wwweston 4y ago
  I'd like to make sure I understand your position here. You seem to be saying there is a body of ideas that has gained such a widespread foothold that they hold a significant place in the culture such that they can unfavorably affect social dynamics at civilization-wide levels. If this is true, it would imply that we should be carefully -- some might even say critically -- be examining civilization at all levels from ideas (and their implications and consequences) through practices so we can understand those dynamics and perhaps help civilizations be more healthy. Does that sound about right? Because it also sounds like some kind of critical theory...
  - tsol 4y ago
    Your argument appears to be circular. He said he believes critical theory to have done social harm. You observe that he says there are ideas present in society that cause social harm. Then you say this means we need critical theory to examine such damage(as OP said is the result of critical theory).
    - wwweston 4y ago
      That's actually not what I said, unless any socially critical examination does in fact meet the definition of "critical theory"... And in fact, no one here knows what the commentor means by that phrase, much less how it's ostensibly done damage, which would be necessary in order to change their mind as invited.
  - badpun 4y ago
    > Because it also sounds like some kind of critical theory... What's the "theory" exactly? It just sounds like common sense.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

pevey 4y ago

Agreed. This is the worst possible way to address whatever problem the university thinks they have.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

standyro 4y ago

Regardless of your feelings about tax dollars, I hate to break it to you, but the UC system hasn’t being subsidized by California in decades. Something like 15-20% comes from the state. Maybe that’s part of the problem.

marcushill 4y ago
15-20% of what comes from the state? If you are talking about funding, wouldn't that count as the state subsidizing it?
topkai22 4y ago
From the UC system budget doc: student tuition and fees are 39% of “core budget”, state general funds are 46%. https://www.ucop.edu/operating-budget/_files/rbudget/2022-23-budget-summary.pdf https://www.ucop.edu/operating-budget/_files/rbudget/2022-23... The overall budget gets weird with medical centers and something called “Sales and Support”, but in any case California tax payers put in more money then students. I don’t think that’s a problem, but it’s definitely subsidized.

trentgreene 4y ago

The strange thing is I as a SWE interviewer generally find an engineering degree to not be indicative of engineering talent, over say, a masters in underwater basket weaving. I’m not sure dumping money into stem education does anything, or if any field of study is “proven productive.”

jetru 4y ago
Dumping money in STEM probably does do something, we're all just biased over the CS portion of things - which yea, is a mess. But for subjects like Civil, Electrical, sciences like Physics, Biology, I suspect the story is quite different.
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > But for subjects like Civil, Electrical, sciences like Physics, Biology, I suspect the story is quite different. I can speak to Biology; most undergrads are left with little opportunity as most roles require a graduate degree to do anything meaningful when the economy is actually favorable, and often seek roles outside of their field when it's not. As a undergrad that was lucky enough to enter the field in the wake of the GFC long enough to just pay off my student debt I've met so many biologists/biochemists who either couldn't find anything in their field, or simply gave up trying and sought the highest paid and somewhat stable role they could get 'that required a degree.' It's quite clear that the system has failed, and the system is designed to onboard more STEM grads as it sounds as their are ever-growing holders of degrees chasing so n amount of open roles. Tech in unique in that it is one of those few Industries where the barrier of entry is rather low, but the attrition and competence level vets for viable candidates almost entirely on it's own--the gatekeeping interview process is still an unnecessary hurdle. Personally, for all the controversy Eric Weinstein has made directly and indirectly of his own actions, the concept of Embedded Growth Obligations was incredibly well researched and consistent with what we have seen as outlined since 2005 and then solidified itself in the financial collapse of 2008 [0]: > Embedded Growth Obligations are the way in which institutions plan their future predicated on legacies of growth. And since the period between the end of World War II in 1945 and the early 70s had such an unusually beautiful growth regime, many of our institutions became predicated upon low-variance technology-led, stable, broadly distributed growth. Now, this is a world we have not seen in an organic way since the early 1970s, and yet, because it was embedded in our institutions, what we have is a world in which the expectation is still present in the form of an embedded growth obligation. That is, the pension plans, the corporate ladders, are all still built very much around a world that has long since vanished. We have effectively become a Growth Cargo Cult. That is, once upon a time, planes used to land in the Pacific, let's say, during World War II, and Indigenous people looked at the air strips and the behavior of the air traffic controllers, and they've been mimicking those behaviors in the years since as ritual, but the planes no longer land. Well, in large measure, our institutions are built for a world in which growth doesn't happen in the same way anymore. 0: https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Embedded_Growth_Obligations https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Embedded_Growth_Obligations

sabas123 4y ago

Especially when it comes to fundamental research a lot of work is "useless" until it isn't. This idea of picking winners before people even start at a college is not the way to go. Many people would argue that linguistics is one of those useless studies compared to comp sci, but it shares deep connections to research in logic and by extension type theory (see handbook for logic and languages)

IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
what I understood parent to be saying is that the picked winners were picked by students, not some central arbiter of what should be studied. unless youn disagree with the laws of supply and demand, it seems the market consensus at this moment is that compsci majors are far more useful than any fundamental research (which still remains undefined). Even if the market was wrong and fundamental research could somehow be valuable, why would you not trust the primary beneficiaries oj making that decision, vs some bureaucrat that has no stake in the outcome?
- mint2 4y ago
  Law of supply and demand has no direct relevance on what benefits society as a whole
visarga 4y ago
You're right, the search space is deceptive and going directly towards the goal might lead to a dead end. Only in hindsight we can tell which stepping stones were essential. Immediate results are the best, but in the meantime we need to focus on novelty and interestingness. A great video about open-endedness (warning - very long) with Kenneth Stanley, author of the book "Why Greatness Cannot be Planned" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhYGXYeMq_E&t=350s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhYGXYeMq_E&t=350s
jimbob45 4y ago
Gender Studies and Literature will never not be useless professionally. That said, there is immense value in having some number of scholars study those fields in great detail and we would suffer as a species if we let our knowledge in those fields rot. Would it perhaps be prudent to cap the number of participants in those departments to match the number of real-world vacancies available?

astrange 4y ago

This is already happening; all humanities majors except for philosophy are collapsing in the US. https://twitter.com/benmschmidt/status/1562212497272279041 https://twitter.com/benmschmidt/status/1562212497272279041 (Weird that psychology is growing, all the psych degree people I know work in HR and I don't think that's what they dreamed of.)

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
Psych is an "easy A" batchelors program for people who don't know what they want to study. It's a useless degree without moving on to the severely placement limited graduate programs.
topkai22 4y ago
Bachelor level psych degrees also pay worse than most humanities. https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/interactive_embed/career_earnings_by_college_major https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/interactive_embed/car... My personal take is that humanities departments should be aggressively courting 2nd majors (somewhat egotistical, I was a double major). As much as we might want to believe that the purpose of education is to give person a fuller life, increased earnings potential is an undeniable part of there reason people go to university. Selling a line like “the CS department will teach you how to make money. We’ll help you live the rest of your life” or “engineering got me in on the ground floor. Clarity of thought and speech got me to the top floor” seems like it could open up more demand than trying to go it alone. My N of one experience suggests it might be effective. I thought I was just getting a vanity politics degree on top of my CS degree because I liked it. After 10 years in career I think I refer to lessons and skills learned in those humanities classes as much as the ones in my CS classes.
dagw 4y ago
all the psych degree people I know work in HR I would figure that the whole point of getting a psychology degree (as opposed to taking some psychology courses as part of your main degree) is to work as a psychologist? Why are all these people failing to get their psychologist qualifications? Where I live, I've never met or heard of anyone who went for a psychology degree without the intention of becoming a psychologist. Sure, not everybody makes it to the end, and few end up doing research instead, but the whole goal of the degree is to produce qualified psychologists.

enumjorge 4y ago

We do get something back. Having economically unstable individuals and families affects us all even if indirectly.

systemvoltage 4y ago

I want none of this. I want a whole bunch of apprenticeships and tradesmen from our colleges. Technicians and specialists. Subject matter experts. Manufacturing engineers.

wwweston 4y ago

I have a math undergrad. I imagine someone who values physics & econ wouldn't think a math degree is "societally unproductive", but the decided majority of people I meet including other college graduates have absolutely no idea what I studied/learned in the course of doing that. What reason do you have to believe that you aren't doing the same thing with the majors you're judging societally unproductive?

saagarjha 4y ago

Are we really going to rehash the same, tired argument that only STEM majors are useful to society? Having the narrow view of social benefits being solely centered around money is incredibly short-sighted, and I’m not even sure I want to respond to physics/Econ majors being “smart”.

cultofmetatron 4y ago
- saagarjha 4y ago
  Dumb, or courageous? Do you not benefit from the people around you who studied liberal arts? Who is going to make the Netflix shows you watch after you get home from work after spending 8 hours slinging JSON around and making bank? No, seriously, these people are going into fields that we benefit from and yet refuse to pay for, and if they didn’t our society would be worse off. Why do you consider this a dumb decision rather than a sacrifice they shouldn’t have to make?
  - nequo 4y ago
    I was going to post something similar but parent got flagged and I couldn't. Gender studies is important. I have to think about non-gender issues for a living and this means that I don't have the time to think about the thousand ways in which women are disadvantaged in society.[1] But gender studies majors do, and I am better off for reading the arguments written or summarized by them than not learning about many of these issues at all. [1] And possibly men too. Not gender studies but an example: https://home.uchicago.edu/~bursztyn/Misperceived_Norms_2020_3_6.pdf https://home.uchicago.edu/~bursztyn/Misperceived_Norms_2020_...
  - cultofmetatron 4y ago
    I doubt the people making shows for netflix are not being paid well. Even the ones pouring out absolute junk lately are being paid bank. a Better example would be english teachers who absolutely are being underpaid while providing value to society. gender studies is still bullshit. I took a few mandated classes back in university. 90% of getting an A is just knowing what the teacher wants to hear. I have a hard time believing any of them can understand critical thinking giving how much of their doing well in that major is just going with groupthink.

hackerlight 4y ago

> societally unproductive majors (gender studies, literature, etc.). I don’t see why we should use tax money to prop up anything other than proven productive fields of study. Some majors are actually unproductive and a waste of both the student's and taxpayer's money, and should not be subsidized. But many humanities that often get binned this way are actually civically productive, and they're only economically unproductive because of significant market failure. The benefits to society aren't priced properly. Such majors, and that is the social sciences, should arguably be subsidized by the government, because they are technically public goods. What the last few years has taught us is how much damage an electorate can do who isn't educated. If they don't understand anything about economic systems, political systems, sociology, history, psychology, then their mind can be taken over too easily by propaganda, which can have catastrophic consequences, all the way up to the death of democracy.

cma 4y ago

> physics/econ double major Who probably proceeds to go into zero or negative-sum trading, or negative sum ad targeting intelligence.

resist_futility 4y ago

The only problem that's cropped up is the decline of the education system due to continued undervaluing of our countries bedrock of teachers. With an increase of business majors during a continuing recession. 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...

fmajid 4y ago

Psychology is massively popular but with too many graduates for available jobs. Same with Law.

dc-programmer 4y ago

I think it’s more of a matching problem. There are lots of students who get nothing out of CS classes. Ideally we would match the available slots with the students with the highest analytical aptitude.