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In my opinion the main problem is that there are too many graduates from certain social sciences and humanities compared to the actual need of employers / acade

In my opinion the main problem is that there are too many graduates from certain social sciences and humanities compared to the actual need of employers / academia. It would be better to have fewer scientists with adequate and consistent funding, than lots of underemployed scientists fighting for funding and living under constant uncertainty. Scrapping all support for any particular branch of science is an overreaction, but cutting number of graduates in these fields and focusing funding only on the studies with most practical benefits could make sense. As an example, social scientist studying poverty, unemployment or crime could produce useful information for policymakers to reduce these phenomena, and cutting all funding from such research is probably a bad idea.

Ekaros 2y ago
Right level of funding in many cases is non-zero. Still balancing for employability and general funding say every 5 years would be reasonable approach for most social sciences. As many of the fields under that moniker produce very useful specialist when run at right scale. And these people might not even need PhDs always.
- nxobject 2y ago
  Re: PhDs... the "the system's purpose is what it does" explanation of a PhD program is to get cheap labor, without the employment conditions of standard employees, in exchange for the long-term promise of the letters after your name, sadly. There's a reason that, in the US, graduate student researchers often have union/bargaining units separate from postdoctoral academics, and it's not to benefit the graduate students.
lolinder 2y ago
> too many graduates from certain social sciences and humanities compared to the actual need of employers / academia. The real problem is that college was never designed to be job preparation and (with limited exceptions) it does rather poorly at that. The idea was never that you'd go to college to research a subject at the bachelor level and then go into a career that directly uses what you learned—it wasn't always a white collar trade school. Back when college was the privilege of the elite, it was about learning for learning's sake and about making connections and meeting people. It didn't especially matter what subject you chose to learn about—you're a member of the elite after all, and you either have money already or have the family connections to get it whatever you studied. It seems to have only been once college started to democratize that we started expecting every subject to be job prep for something specific. On one level this makes sense—you can't actually democratize the experience of learning for learning's sake alone until you democratize being guaranteed sufficient money to live on. But only a few departments in most universities are even capable of reshaping themselves into job training programs, leaving the rest to now frantically justify their existence. This is a huge problem because the knowledge produced by those departments—even while they were only the privilege of the elite—has been invaluable. But they don't meet the modern economics of the university.
- maxerickson 2y ago
  The US state college system was pretty much never for elites, it was always about increasing the capacity of the country.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    But how was "increasing the capacity of the country" conceptualized? I can believe that it was put together with the intention of strengthening the new country and building up institutions that it felt it needed, but that's not at all the same thing as being not for the elite (at the time of the founding of the first state schools we still had property requirements to vote!), much less that they conceived of it as job training. For a primary source on how they conceptualized the role of the university, see the charter for the University of Georgia (1785) [0]. It essentially says that universities are really important and it would be unacceptable to have to send youths to foreign countries, so we're starting one here. They weren't reconceptualizing the university, they were funding the rapid development of institutions that would otherwise take centuries to develop if at all. [0] https://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/sclfind/view?docId=ead%2FUA22-010.xml&query&brand=default https://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/sclfind/view?docId=ead%2FUA22-0...
  - bluGill 2y ago
    The US is a young country for this discussion. Other than maybe the likes of Harvard college was already democratizing around the world when US colleges started.
    - terrabiped 2y ago
      [dead]
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  I’m really not sure how many more Literature papers we need on Proust, Shakespeare, Beowulf, and on and on. They have to continue to pump out papers and books, exclusively read by other people in the same subjects. “Invaluable” this is not
cess11 2y ago
Who cares about "the actual need of employers"? If they have needs, they can see to it that they are met. Create their own schools or educate people on the job or whatever, it's not a purpose of educational institutions like universities and so on.
- zdragnar 2y ago
  And yet, every college and University in the US advertises the job placement rate of graduates. I myself considered a track that would lead to law school, and one of the things that stopped me was there were a growing number of lawsuits against schools for falsely inflating their numbers.
  - cess11 2y ago
    Perhaps, but I'll advise my kids to avoid failed and harshly authoritarian states.
- fallingknife 2y ago
  > Who cares about "the actual need of employers"? 99% of college students and 100% of college administrators whose schools will all cease to exist if they can't convince those students to enroll and pay tuition.
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    They had issues before this NZ thing. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admissions/traditional-age/2024/10/23/after-fafsa-issues-steep-drop-first-year-enrollment https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admissions/traditional-a...
  - cess11 2y ago
    Educational institutions aren't commercial. If it's run in a commercial manner, it's not an educational institution, it's a business.
    - fallingknife 2y ago
panzagl 2y ago
> too many graduates from certain social sciences and humanities compared to the actual need of employers / academia. The natural employer of the social sciences grad is the government- social workers, city planners, etc. This type of government funding has been under attack at all levels of government since the 80's. We don't see any benefit to, say, sociology, because we've bought the idea that those benefits only go to those that don't 'deserve' them, and are paid for by taking what I've 'earned'.

Ekaros 2y ago

Right level of funding in many cases is non-zero. Still balancing for employability and general funding say every 5 years would be reasonable approach for most social sciences. As many of the fields under that moniker produce very useful specialist when run at right scale. And these people might not even need PhDs always.

nxobject 2y ago
Re: PhDs... the "the system's purpose is what it does" explanation of a PhD program is to get cheap labor, without the employment conditions of standard employees, in exchange for the long-term promise of the letters after your name, sadly. There's a reason that, in the US, graduate student researchers often have union/bargaining units separate from postdoctoral academics, and it's not to benefit the graduate students.

lolinder 2y ago

> too many graduates from certain social sciences and humanities compared to the actual need of employers / academia. The real problem is that college was never designed to be job preparation and (with limited exceptions) it does rather poorly at that. The idea was never that you'd go to college to research a subject at the bachelor level and then go into a career that directly uses what you learned—it wasn't always a white collar trade school. Back when college was the privilege of the elite, it was about learning for learning's sake and about making connections and meeting people. It didn't especially matter what subject you chose to learn about—you're a member of the elite after all, and you either have money already or have the family connections to get it whatever you studied. It seems to have only been once college started to democratize that we started expecting every subject to be job prep for something specific. On one level this makes sense—you can't actually democratize the experience of learning for learning's sake alone until you democratize being guaranteed sufficient money to live on. But only a few departments in most universities are even capable of reshaping themselves into job training programs, leaving the rest to now frantically justify their existence. This is a huge problem because the knowledge produced by those departments—even while they were only the privilege of the elite—has been invaluable. But they don't meet the modern economics of the university.

maxerickson 2y ago
The US state college system was pretty much never for elites, it was always about increasing the capacity of the country.
- lolinder 2y ago
  But how was "increasing the capacity of the country" conceptualized? I can believe that it was put together with the intention of strengthening the new country and building up institutions that it felt it needed, but that's not at all the same thing as being not for the elite (at the time of the founding of the first state schools we still had property requirements to vote!), much less that they conceived of it as job training. For a primary source on how they conceptualized the role of the university, see the charter for the University of Georgia (1785) [0]. It essentially says that universities are really important and it would be unacceptable to have to send youths to foreign countries, so we're starting one here. They weren't reconceptualizing the university, they were funding the rapid development of institutions that would otherwise take centuries to develop if at all. [0] https://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/sclfind/view?docId=ead%2FUA22-010.xml&query&brand=default https://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/sclfind/view?docId=ead%2FUA22-0...
- bluGill 2y ago
  The US is a young country for this discussion. Other than maybe the likes of Harvard college was already democratizing around the world when US colleges started.
  - terrabiped 2y ago
    [dead]
monero-xmr 2y ago
I’m really not sure how many more Literature papers we need on Proust, Shakespeare, Beowulf, and on and on. They have to continue to pump out papers and books, exclusively read by other people in the same subjects. “Invaluable” this is not

cess11 2y ago

Who cares about "the actual need of employers"? If they have needs, they can see to it that they are met. Create their own schools or educate people on the job or whatever, it's not a purpose of educational institutions like universities and so on.

zdragnar 2y ago
And yet, every college and University in the US advertises the job placement rate of graduates. I myself considered a track that would lead to law school, and one of the things that stopped me was there were a growing number of lawsuits against schools for falsely inflating their numbers.
- cess11 2y ago
  Perhaps, but I'll advise my kids to avoid failed and harshly authoritarian states.
fallingknife 2y ago
> Who cares about "the actual need of employers"? 99% of college students and 100% of college administrators whose schools will all cease to exist if they can't convince those students to enroll and pay tuition.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  They had issues before this NZ thing. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admissions/traditional-age/2024/10/23/after-fafsa-issues-steep-drop-first-year-enrollment https://www.insidehighered.com/news/admissions/traditional-a...
- cess11 2y ago
  Educational institutions aren't commercial. If it's run in a commercial manner, it's not an educational institution, it's a business.
  - fallingknife 2y ago

panzagl 2y ago

> too many graduates from certain social sciences and humanities compared to the actual need of employers / academia. The natural employer of the social sciences grad is the government- social workers, city planners, etc. This type of government funding has been under attack at all levels of government since the 80's. We don't see any benefit to, say, sociology, because we've bought the idea that those benefits only go to those that don't 'deserve' them, and are paid for by taking what I've 'earned'.