5 ms·

If he feels that the primary source of value in an education is its contribution to the GDP, then I feel sorry for him.

paulsutter 14y ago
Then perhaps the real contribution to society is having our Starbucks coffee made by a barista with a masters in English literature? Maybe you could explain what you mean because I'm not getting it.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Are you mad that the English literature majors basically run the country, on Wall Street and in Washington?
  - pinaceae 14y ago
    citation? law degress seem more prevalent, looking at obama and romney alone.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      I was being facetious in response to his barista comment, so no, no citation. My point is simply that while engineering is a valuable degree and leads to great jobs, a liberal arts education is the traditional foundation for careers in banking and politics. Henry Paulson ha a BA in English from Dartmouth. Romney has a BA in English from BYU. Obama has a BA in political science and international relations from Columbia. Empirically, the majority of JD's have an undergraduate degree in liberal arts or social sciences. Anecdotally, the majority of bankers have a liberal arts or social science degree.[1] I'm an engineering major myself so I'm acquainted with the disdain with which engineers view liberal arts types, but it's greatly misplaced. The simple fact is that outside STEM fields, college is more about signaling than education. It is the nature of non-STEM fields that you don't really need to know anything before you start the job. The purpose of college is to learn how to think abstractly and how to write, and to allow employers to separate out the smart, hard-working people. [1] Amusingly, Harvard, a major feeder into the big New York banks, doesn't even have a finance major.
      - jacobolus 14y ago
        > Amusingly, Harvard, a major feeder into the big New York banks, doesn't even have a finance major. Schools like Harvard don’t do “professional” majors like that (there’s no “business”, “medicine”, “communications”, etc.). Even science and engineering students are mainly learning abstract tools rather than just being trained in some vocation.
        deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - wisty 14y ago
        Also, Steven Hawking has a B.A. in arts (thought the Oxford system may be a bit different - Arts can mean just about anything).
        elemeno 14y ago
        Oxford and Cambridge can be a little strange about the degrees they award, almost entirely due to tradition. Undergraduate degrees almost all confer a BA at Oxford and they don't award BSci or (I think) BEng so reading a STEM subject would still get you a BA. Stephen Hawking read Natural Sciences for what it's worth.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Those people are contributing to GDP.
- ktizo 14y ago
  Sounds like a good contribution. They might start a little library in there.
- intended 14y ago
  I always dislike these off the cuff discussions on education. Firstly - The topic of education is itself complex and vast. Secondly - the intersect of education with economic opportunity leaves you with a pretty crummy field filled with myriads of discussion failure points. House rules of some sort are almost always needed. Limit your discussion field when you start out, or the constraints/assumptions you are working on. It serves to have a more productive discussion.
- gruseom 14y ago
  The value of education, traditionally, is that it makes you a civilized human being. There are many ways for that to benefit society. It's only our narrow age, that conflates education with training and value with economic utility, that would think of GDP as the only contribution.
  - _dps 14y ago
    I agree with one minor quibble: I don't think it's a conflation of education with economic utility, but rather a convergence. To put it another way, it's not so much a new perception of education but rather a new reality colliding with a 50-year old perception. Modern employment markets are simply more efficient in pricing the various components of human capital than they used to be; it used to be enough to be smart and good at anything challenging at all (the classical liberal arts value proposition is, I submit, fundamentally based on this idea). The "learning to learn" and "critical thinking" components of this education were valuable enough to demand a price premium relative to 1950s vocational education, but it's much harder to compete with a modern degree in (say) mathematics which, I claim, is at least as powerful in developing said meta-skills as a degree in literature (and has the added bonus of having direct economic value in many industries). Over time, market forces will adjust the prices for these two different investments accordingly. Thinking purely economically (obviously, there's more to life than economics), education in a subject for which no one will pay and which has no measurable positive externalities is indistinguishable (to the market) from consumption. So I think the future for these kinds of degrees will hinge heavily on finding evidence of positive externalities, or accepting that a degree in medieval history is better compared to a seminary (i.e. no expectation of economic reward) than a medical school. Edit/Note: I realize that mathematics degrees, done in certain ways, can fit inside the framework of a liberal arts education. However, all the mathematicians of my generation I know took as many math courses as possible within the requirements of their degree programs. I speculate that, even at liberal arts schools, mathematicians pursue much more concentrated curricula than the typical student.
    - mjt0229 14y ago
      I quibble with your quibble. This article does conflate economic return with actual value. Many people contribute positively to society (including economically), without necessarily being directly compensated proportionally to their contribution. For example, I am an engineer at a research institute that does a substantial amount of cancer and other medical research. As a CS guy, I get a pretty nice salary. However, there are plenty of folks who I work with whose degrees came from liberal arts education who contribute more directly to the cancer research, but whose salaries are lower than mine. Much of this research might actually go on to make pharmaceutical companies substantial profits, but these people will not be directly or proportionally compensated for that. If some of the research does not translate to therapeutics, then they will not have increased economic value at all, but will have definitely added intellectual and scientific value - a value that is not really easy to measure on a simple economic scale --- and certainly not on one so simple-minded as the one used in the article.
- WhaleBiologist 14y ago
  I have a CS degree. The degree has been watered down year after year so my university can get more students. They don't care about the quality of their graduates, only the quantity. Because the CS degree was shit, it required almost no effort at all and didn't really teach me much. This seems to be a growing trend among institutions that are starting to care more about money than their students. The liberal arts electives I picked up taught me critical thinking, which I think were worth more to me than all the CS components combined. Some people still seek out education as a way to be taught how to learn and think, rather than just a 3+ year job investment.
  - jbaiter 14y ago
    I wholeheartedly agree. I recently finished a 4-year B.A. in History (in Germany, mind you, so my decision wasn't hard on me in a financial way). I didn't double-major in CS or anything, but kept programming and IT stuff as a hobby, contributed to Open Source projects, helped with IT-related problems at university and generally tried to learn something new all the time (The recent surge in online classes like Coursera and Udacity has helped a lot). Now I'm fully employed, directly from University, as a software developer. Is/was my degree useless? No way. Those 4 years of studying history and doing lots of research (I think I wrote around 15 papers in those years, around 70% of which were on subjects with little previous research done before) have taught me to choose my sources wisely, to reflect on my own thinking critically (this is a prime asset as a historian, you cannot uncritically let your own preconceptions of the world direct your decisions) and to generally try to see things (and especially abstractions and thought-systems) from as many different sides as possible. All great skills to have if you code for a living. I might not be as well versed in theoretical computer science as a CS graduate from a good(!) program, but I am familiar enough with the territory that I can pick up new areas/technologies/algorithms rather quickly and it prevents me from getting the "I graduated in CS, I know everything and do not have to make any effort any more"-attitude that I've e.g. seen in my predecessor at the current job I have (he used unsalted md5-hashes for passwords, wrote Java classes that are >10k lines long and used a mix of zip-archives of his Eclipse-workbench and hundreds of commented-out LOCs as a form of version control)
- thrdOriginal 14y ago
  Do you really not understand the point or is that just another vacuous remark to accompany your first cliche? If the former, then perhaps you are making a case as to why liberal arts is still important in society: teaching students the ability to critically think and reach logical conclusions from texts with gaps in information, etc.
- readymade 14y ago
  What I mean is that if education is the imparting (or rather "drawing forth", from the Latin) of knowledge, a definition of useful knowledge that only hinges on its immediate economic value to the graduate is depressingly narrow. Firstly, there are all sorts of arguments to be made for how a liberal education can actually end up being unexepectedly advantageous in a professional context. A fair number of the startup engineers I work with majored in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and they all bring interesting perspectives to the table. Steve Jobs has a fascinating anecdote about how a Typography class he dropped in on at Reed was the eventual inspiration for the proportionally spaced fonts of the first Macintosh. As others have pointed out, studying a broad array of intellectual disciplines with any intensity ultimately will ultimately change the way you think, because even if you don't end up going into a profession directly related to them, creative thinking benefits greatly from the ability to synthesize new connections between seemingly disparate topics. But there's still more to it than that. HN commenters love to philosophize, but many dismiss philosophy as such. We all have strong political opinions, but it's hard for me to imagine a functional political citizen that doesn't have a grasp of history, civics and the strains of thought that gave rise to our current civilization. We all consume art and music in some way, but presumably it's not worth studying. Or rather, I suspect many would prefer to continue deride those who waste their money and time on such an pursuit, while happily consuming the fruits of their labor. Even knowledge "for its own sake" is worthwhile if the end goal is personal enrichment. Personally, I'd prefer to live in a world with people whose educational prerogatives are not universally economically driven. Whether higher education should cost so much, whether liberal arts grads are expecting too much upon graduation, and so on are for another conversation.

Then perhaps the real contribution to society is having our Starbucks coffee made by a barista with a masters in English literature? Maybe you could explain what you mean because I'm not getting it.

rayiner 14y ago
Are you mad that the English literature majors basically run the country, on Wall Street and in Washington?
- pinaceae 14y ago
  citation? law degress seem more prevalent, looking at obama and romney alone.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    I was being facetious in response to his barista comment, so no, no citation. My point is simply that while engineering is a valuable degree and leads to great jobs, a liberal arts education is the traditional foundation for careers in banking and politics. Henry Paulson ha a BA in English from Dartmouth. Romney has a BA in English from BYU. Obama has a BA in political science and international relations from Columbia. Empirically, the majority of JD's have an undergraduate degree in liberal arts or social sciences. Anecdotally, the majority of bankers have a liberal arts or social science degree.[1] I'm an engineering major myself so I'm acquainted with the disdain with which engineers view liberal arts types, but it's greatly misplaced. The simple fact is that outside STEM fields, college is more about signaling than education. It is the nature of non-STEM fields that you don't really need to know anything before you start the job. The purpose of college is to learn how to think abstractly and how to write, and to allow employers to separate out the smart, hard-working people. [1] Amusingly, Harvard, a major feeder into the big New York banks, doesn't even have a finance major.
    - jacobolus 14y ago
      > Amusingly, Harvard, a major feeder into the big New York banks, doesn't even have a finance major. Schools like Harvard don’t do “professional” majors like that (there’s no “business”, “medicine”, “communications”, etc.). Even science and engineering students are mainly learning abstract tools rather than just being trained in some vocation.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
    - wisty 14y ago
      Also, Steven Hawking has a B.A. in arts (thought the Oxford system may be a bit different - Arts can mean just about anything).
      - elemeno 14y ago
        Oxford and Cambridge can be a little strange about the degrees they award, almost entirely due to tradition. Undergraduate degrees almost all confer a BA at Oxford and they don't award BSci or (I think) BEng so reading a STEM subject would still get you a BA. Stephen Hawking read Natural Sciences for what it's worth.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Those people are contributing to GDP.
ktizo 14y ago
Sounds like a good contribution. They might start a little library in there.
intended 14y ago
I always dislike these off the cuff discussions on education. Firstly - The topic of education is itself complex and vast. Secondly - the intersect of education with economic opportunity leaves you with a pretty crummy field filled with myriads of discussion failure points. House rules of some sort are almost always needed. Limit your discussion field when you start out, or the constraints/assumptions you are working on. It serves to have a more productive discussion.
gruseom 14y ago
The value of education, traditionally, is that it makes you a civilized human being. There are many ways for that to benefit society. It's only our narrow age, that conflates education with training and value with economic utility, that would think of GDP as the only contribution.
- _dps 14y ago
  I agree with one minor quibble: I don't think it's a conflation of education with economic utility, but rather a convergence. To put it another way, it's not so much a new perception of education but rather a new reality colliding with a 50-year old perception. Modern employment markets are simply more efficient in pricing the various components of human capital than they used to be; it used to be enough to be smart and good at anything challenging at all (the classical liberal arts value proposition is, I submit, fundamentally based on this idea). The "learning to learn" and "critical thinking" components of this education were valuable enough to demand a price premium relative to 1950s vocational education, but it's much harder to compete with a modern degree in (say) mathematics which, I claim, is at least as powerful in developing said meta-skills as a degree in literature (and has the added bonus of having direct economic value in many industries). Over time, market forces will adjust the prices for these two different investments accordingly. Thinking purely economically (obviously, there's more to life than economics), education in a subject for which no one will pay and which has no measurable positive externalities is indistinguishable (to the market) from consumption. So I think the future for these kinds of degrees will hinge heavily on finding evidence of positive externalities, or accepting that a degree in medieval history is better compared to a seminary (i.e. no expectation of economic reward) than a medical school. Edit/Note: I realize that mathematics degrees, done in certain ways, can fit inside the framework of a liberal arts education. However, all the mathematicians of my generation I know took as many math courses as possible within the requirements of their degree programs. I speculate that, even at liberal arts schools, mathematicians pursue much more concentrated curricula than the typical student.
  - mjt0229 14y ago
    I quibble with your quibble. This article does conflate economic return with actual value. Many people contribute positively to society (including economically), without necessarily being directly compensated proportionally to their contribution. For example, I am an engineer at a research institute that does a substantial amount of cancer and other medical research. As a CS guy, I get a pretty nice salary. However, there are plenty of folks who I work with whose degrees came from liberal arts education who contribute more directly to the cancer research, but whose salaries are lower than mine. Much of this research might actually go on to make pharmaceutical companies substantial profits, but these people will not be directly or proportionally compensated for that. If some of the research does not translate to therapeutics, then they will not have increased economic value at all, but will have definitely added intellectual and scientific value - a value that is not really easy to measure on a simple economic scale --- and certainly not on one so simple-minded as the one used in the article.
WhaleBiologist 14y ago
I have a CS degree. The degree has been watered down year after year so my university can get more students. They don't care about the quality of their graduates, only the quantity. Because the CS degree was shit, it required almost no effort at all and didn't really teach me much. This seems to be a growing trend among institutions that are starting to care more about money than their students. The liberal arts electives I picked up taught me critical thinking, which I think were worth more to me than all the CS components combined. Some people still seek out education as a way to be taught how to learn and think, rather than just a 3+ year job investment.
- jbaiter 14y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree. I recently finished a 4-year B.A. in History (in Germany, mind you, so my decision wasn't hard on me in a financial way). I didn't double-major in CS or anything, but kept programming and IT stuff as a hobby, contributed to Open Source projects, helped with IT-related problems at university and generally tried to learn something new all the time (The recent surge in online classes like Coursera and Udacity has helped a lot). Now I'm fully employed, directly from University, as a software developer. Is/was my degree useless? No way. Those 4 years of studying history and doing lots of research (I think I wrote around 15 papers in those years, around 70% of which were on subjects with little previous research done before) have taught me to choose my sources wisely, to reflect on my own thinking critically (this is a prime asset as a historian, you cannot uncritically let your own preconceptions of the world direct your decisions) and to generally try to see things (and especially abstractions and thought-systems) from as many different sides as possible. All great skills to have if you code for a living. I might not be as well versed in theoretical computer science as a CS graduate from a good(!) program, but I am familiar enough with the territory that I can pick up new areas/technologies/algorithms rather quickly and it prevents me from getting the "I graduated in CS, I know everything and do not have to make any effort any more"-attitude that I've e.g. seen in my predecessor at the current job I have (he used unsalted md5-hashes for passwords, wrote Java classes that are >10k lines long and used a mix of zip-archives of his Eclipse-workbench and hundreds of commented-out LOCs as a form of version control)
thrdOriginal 14y ago
Do you really not understand the point or is that just another vacuous remark to accompany your first cliche? If the former, then perhaps you are making a case as to why liberal arts is still important in society: teaching students the ability to critically think and reach logical conclusions from texts with gaps in information, etc.
readymade 14y ago
What I mean is that if education is the imparting (or rather "drawing forth", from the Latin) of knowledge, a definition of useful knowledge that only hinges on its immediate economic value to the graduate is depressingly narrow. Firstly, there are all sorts of arguments to be made for how a liberal education can actually end up being unexepectedly advantageous in a professional context. A fair number of the startup engineers I work with majored in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and they all bring interesting perspectives to the table. Steve Jobs has a fascinating anecdote about how a Typography class he dropped in on at Reed was the eventual inspiration for the proportionally spaced fonts of the first Macintosh. As others have pointed out, studying a broad array of intellectual disciplines with any intensity ultimately will ultimately change the way you think, because even if you don't end up going into a profession directly related to them, creative thinking benefits greatly from the ability to synthesize new connections between seemingly disparate topics. But there's still more to it than that. HN commenters love to philosophize, but many dismiss philosophy as such. We all have strong political opinions, but it's hard for me to imagine a functional political citizen that doesn't have a grasp of history, civics and the strains of thought that gave rise to our current civilization. We all consume art and music in some way, but presumably it's not worth studying. Or rather, I suspect many would prefer to continue deride those who waste their money and time on such an pursuit, while happily consuming the fruits of their labor. Even knowledge "for its own sake" is worthwhile if the end goal is personal enrichment. Personally, I'd prefer to live in a world with people whose educational prerogatives are not universally economically driven. Whether higher education should cost so much, whether liberal arts grads are expecting too much upon graduation, and so on are for another conversation.