This is a consequence of the concerted effort by educators to increase post-secondary enrollment in the United States. Presumably, the students likely to enroll in a math or science program were (by and large) already heading to college 25 years ago.
As a metric for high schools, students enrolling in and graduating from a 4-year college is one of the most important numbers in the all-important school ranking. Students weak in the maths and sciences are encouraged to do just this: finish Algebra II, finish Chemistry, enroll in a liberal arts program, and choose a few "gimme" classes to cover whatever core curriculum the school requires. This makes the high schools look a lot better in their rankings, which is what matters to many superintendents and principals.
I'm not sure it's all on the educators' side. It's also been pushed strongly by parents, because for the last few decades having a degree versus not having a degree has been the single best predictor of getting a white-collar job. Doesn't even matter what the degree is in; a 4-year degree qualifies you to get past the "need degree" HR screen in all sorts of generic office jobs, and the pay gap between "generic liberal arts degree" and "high-school diploma" has been large and growing since the 1950s.
Completely agreed. I'm not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg, though: the push for more college-educated students, or the degree screen for jobs.
Let me get this straight - you're arguing that increased college enrollment over the past 25 years is some sort of conspiracy perpetrated by secondary school administrators to better their own rankings?
Ever since society generally decided everyone needs to go to college, all sorts of little incentives have been adding up all over the place to create the effect of getting everyone in the system. That's not the single cause of everything, it's a snapshot of a broader trend that has affected the entire process from top to bottom. You could play the "zoom in on one aspect and mock the idea it could be the cause" all day long with all sorts of little causes... but that would just be a rhetorical game trying desperately to avoid the totality of the situation which is clear as day.
Not at all. The increased college enrollment over the past 25 years is a nationwide push from the highest levels of government, academia, and business to get more students to enroll. Over the years, though, this goal has become somewhat divorced from its intentions.
I teach math (and used to teach CS before budget cuts) at a high school level. I've advised my mathematically weak, sometimes special needs students to do exactly what I mentioned in the first post.
Bereft of outside research, I was responding to the article, which stated, "Over the past 25 years the total number of students in college has increased by about 50 percent. But the number of students graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) has remained more or less constant."
A liberal arts education is just as worth it today as it was 300 years ago. The current problem is that the cost of a liberal arts degree has spiraled out of control. There's no reason why an English or Philosophy degree needs to cost $15k a year.
Making everyone an engineer or scientist isn't the answer.
Making everyone get through 2 semesters of calculus and a real probability class would help both their well roundedness and employee-ability. The lack of numeracy and scientific background among otherwise well educated people is shameful.
Making everyone get through 2 semesters of calculus and a real probability class frankly sounds like a great idea for reforming high school.
Why they can't take kids through "high school" algebra in middle school and have them ready to take more serious math in high school is a mystery to me. From what I gather, a considerably accelerated math curriculum is common in other countries.
Is there any reason other than inertia that we can't do this?
As is the lack of critical thinking, problem solving and communication skills from the other side.
EDIT: In response to some of the questions below, please let me clarify. When I said "other side" I was meaning a lack of well-roundedness. I was NOT trying to pit STEM grads against liberal arts grads.
I do not intend to state that STEM graduates don't know problem solving or critical thinking. Far from it. However in my experience, those skills are discarded too quickly - similar to how Liberal Arts grads tend to discard even the limited quantitative toolsets they've acquired. (I'll concede its probably not as prevalent among the HN crowd.)
Ultimately, its a lack of well-roundedness that limits all camps (I'm sure it would be more accurate to consider more tightly-defined groups than just liberal arts vs engineers.) Ideas are cheap, that's why we laugh at the Wharton posts looking for "code monkeys" every few months. Just as problematic though, is the greatest product but no ability to bring it to market and sustain a viable business.
When a 20-something is strapped with a 50-100K+ debt, the perceived risk involved in doing something they did not exactly go to school for is usually too much to handle.
> There's no reason why an English or Philosophy degree needs to cost $15k a year.
Sure there is. It's called Baumol's Cost Disease.
Now of course some of those engineers & scientists are working on things like khan academy and other methods of attacking that problem. The downside is that the demand for English or Philosophy majors will only further erode (what do you do with a philosophy degree when there are fewer jobs teaching the next generation of philosophy students?).
No one is saying that everyone should be an engineer or scientist, but it's blatantly obvious that moving the ratio a good bit is, in fact, the answer. English and Philosphy majors can't get jobs while some kids with CS degrees are getting close to making 100k/yr straight out of undergrad. The market is speaking. Listen to it.
If student loans were dischargeable in bankruptcy lenders would think much harder about the wisdeom of lending $40k/year for liberal arts degrees. Colleges would have to reconsider what they charge for such degrees and students would have an important market signal when choosing a course of study.
Well, I was one of the 90K people who graduated with performing a performing arts (classical guitar performance) degree in 2008. The culture when you get through with an undergrad performing artist degree is not, "go out into the world and work!" it's more along the lines of, "go back to school and get more degrees in an attempt to stay in school longer by working in academia." I know this because I fell into it. A masters of music degree and a year of doctoral school later, I quit. While I don't regret my time in school, I certainly don't use any of the specific skills learned there.
There's this entire culture among artists where staying in a school environment is the ultimate goal. Artists are entirely capable of driving economic growth and doing really well for themselves, but the skills they get in school are more related to staying in school than making a living outside of it. That's really where the arts are oversold: "Come to my school and you'll be good enough afterward to make a living doing exactly what you love!" The reality is a lot more harsh, a fact never shared with students.
I have a similar conclusion but slightly different reasoning. And I want to defend liberal arts majors a bit, since I'm one of them.
To me, the problem is that most people don't view college as an investment in their future, but rather as a temporary place to delay choices. Certainly, it is positioned as an investment by educators, and it is probably true for science & engineering degrees, but do students approach it that way?
I have a liberal arts degree from an "elite private university", and I can tell you that the school's approach was to give someone like me everything they could possibly need to succeed, but to leave it up to me to do the actual succeeding. My major's requirements had only 8 classes - 1.5 semesters. Our "core curriculum" had a diversity of requirements, but all were easily gotten around; the science core was easily satisfied by courses such as "Solar System Astronomy", "Oceanography", or "Stars, Galaxies, and the Cosmos", as opposed to Calculus 101 or what-have-you.
I took those classes, but I took those classes in all seriousness. They may have been soft on the hardcore science, but they opened up the breadth of my understanding of the world. Some others in my class did not - they were not at school to invest themselves, and that was their right.
I think I'm much better at the work I do today because I took classes with titles all the way from Quantitative Political Methodology, to Metaphysics & Epistomology, to The Political Economy of Development, to Psych 101, to Poetry Writing, to Arabic, to Computer Science 201, to The American Frontier.
But that's because I took all of those courses dead seriously. That's what makes college a good investment. Well, and the life experience itself, but that's not exactly an "investment" in the monetary sense.
If you don't approach school that way, you're not just wasting your money on tuition - there's a massive opportunity cost. 4 years of failing at a startup is certainly a better business education than an undergrad business degree from my school.
Really, it's a cultural problem. It's like a stomach ache after eating too much candy; things were so good for so long, we collectively forgot what it was like to have to sacrifice and work for the things you want. Applying for entrance to school and actually graduating doesn't have much of anything to do with your education. That's something you have to work for.
Now, is it "in the state's interest" to promote, say, English majors? I think that's a whole different topic. I think anyone who is asking the taxpayer to fund their education needs to be ready to pay that back with directly applicable skills, which would seem to suggest you mostly need scientists & engineers.
I found my computer science education to be pretty lightweight and not tremendously useful or beneficial to me.
I found my english, psychology, history and philosophy educations, which I took dead seriously as you did, to be tremendously useful. They didn't force me to learn, and the classes were relatively easy if you just wanted to pass, and I saw plenty of classmates learn nothing but still pass or get high marks.
But for those who take it seriously, it is nothing short of enlightening. You can skim through it and get your A+ and go on to the next stage of your rat-race, but you're shortchanging yourself.
I pity those who don't understand what the great scientists and artists of the past called "enlightenment". It's something you can only get from a serious study of the liberal arts. It has nothing to do with making money, although it can certainly help with making money, even if it doesn't lead to some well-defined corporate career.
Engineers scoff at me when I talk about phenomenology or existentialism or the value in mythology, fiction, critical analysis, personality theory. I pity them. They don't know what they're missing.
I absolutely agree. The courses I've consistently gotten those most out of over the years were not my engineering courses, but my non-engineering. I use history, literature, music, art, speech etc. pretty much every day.
My engineering courses got me my job, my "soft" courses made me good at it.
A degree in Philosophy or English, let's say, is a luxury that would be incomprehensible to many in the developing world. If I were to suggest to the Vietnamese I know here, for example, that they spend their tuition on something that doesn't directly correlate with a roof over their head or food on their table they'd worry about my mental health.
Thanks to globalization that luxury is going to start to seem just as extravagant to Westerners.
A lot of things we do here would make them question our mental health. Say, pretending like you really need more than that $40,000 job the English major can get that lets him live in a small but safe apartment in a fine neighborhood (that has plumbing, electricity, and sanitation) in a non-center-of-the-world American city, and shop for all the groceries he needs in the market 10 minutes away.
Anyway, for a community that loves Steve Jobs so dearly - a man who claims the Mac wouldn't have been so successful if not for that calligraphy class he took at Reed College - there's an awful lot of derision in these comments for non-engineering around here. Of course, this is also a guy that dropped out of school and taught himself technical skills. Just enough to be dangerous... and convince someone like Woz to help him out. Or maybe that was the LSD and Buddhism talking.
> I have a liberal arts degree from an "elite private university".
Ok. Let's make the assumption that you're at least moderately intelligent and would be able to get a job for 40K from the bat.
40K * 4 = 160K
College tuition is 40K itself at an "elite private university". Then you add living expenses, books, food, etc. and you have another 25K. That's 65K.
65K * 4 = 260K
160K + 260K = 420K
Yup. Half a mil to learn about Poetry Writing. Sorry, but that's just silly.
I would much rather my kid spend his time working in a small business and learning about entrepreneurship hands-on, than pissing away untold fortunes to sleep in a class about poetry. You can slip the kid some Robert Frost after work.
Trust me, if he has an inquisitive mind, he'll explore all the weird and strange subjects on his own time. With the internet, he can even be challenged by greater minds.
The best argument for college is the social environment, which can't be replicated outside of it. Not education. The kids get that. That's why they don't go to class.
It sounds like we agree - my post was expressly derisive of the kid who sleeps through his poetry class. Regardless, it sounds like writing poetry suggests a romantic lark to you. To me, it was a lesson in how to convey powerfully complex ideas in concise, but meaningful, language.
I didn't make a lot of money right out of school, but 3 years later I was making a boatload. Why? Because I can write the kind of email that will make someone who has a job I'm able to do agree to coffee with me, and pitch myself successfully in that meeting. I'm a "go getter" who goes and finds my success, because I'm the opposite of the kind of kid who goes to sleep in his poetry class.
And by the way, I taught myself programming. That CS 201 class I took was a java programming class where the instructors wrote a framework that we learned. At the end of the semester, all I knew were a bunch of the functions of their framework. Why would I need school to learn programming? Unlike my major, CS had something like 20 required courses. That's at least half of your whole university education, more once you find a particular area to focus in.
However, I took an economics class from a Nobel laureate and a history class from a professor who lit the room with his enthusiasm for storytelling obscure historical anecdotes. It's the difference between reading a textbook about WWII and watching Band of Brothers. You can't get that stuff on your own.
Also to clarify: I partied my face off in college, too. But it was work hard, play hard. I'm a student of life, not of how to optimize my bank balance before I'm 30.
Regarding below comments: other than an internship I got during college from a graduate of my school, I haven't experienced much nepotism from my university. Most people have never heard of Washington University in St. Louis unless you work in Medicine.
You're working with the edge case in your example where a really smart person can get an amazing job right out of high school. It's more instructive to look at the average case:
- In the current economy, the number of high school grads making $40k/year is vanishingly small. It's more likely he'd be making 25k or less if he has a job at all.
- 25k for living expenses and books for a college student is way too high unless she's going to school across the country and flies home a ton.
- The average student doesn't pay 40k/year in tuition unless he has rich parents and is a below-average student. The average is less than 20k.
Let's redo the math:
Tuition: 20k * 4 = 80k
Living Expenses: 15k * 4 = 60k
Total Expense: 140k
Let's say that our college student gets a below-average job that pays 32k/year.
In a 35 year career with 3% raises, our high school grad makes a total of $1,511,552. In a 31 year career with 3% raises, our college grad makes a total of $1,600,086.
Considering the time value of that $140,000, it's a wash. Go to college and study poetry if you want. The impact to your long-term bottom line is negligible.
>College tuition is 40K itself at an "elite private university". Then you add living expenses, books, food, etc. and you have another 25K. That's 65K.
This is a bit disingenuous. Elite universities are almost universally free for those who need the help.
>Yup. Half a mil to learn about Poetry Writing. Sorry, but that's just silly.
>I would much rather my kid spend his time working in a small business and learning about entrepreneurship hands-on, than pissing away untold fortunes to sleep in a class about poetry. You can slip the kid some Robert Frost after work.
Money has such a weak correlation with happiness that the argument needs to be fleshed out a bit more to be convincing. I've known many engineers in my life and I've seen no evidence that they are happier than those who have pursued the arts. Life isn't a video game in which money is a score. Heck even in a video game, it's rarely about the accumulation of money.
Even in terms of building a lasting legacy, there is much to be said for the arts over business. Byron will be remembered long after the Vanderbilts are forgotten.
> The kids get that. That's why they don't go to class.
Baloney. They don't go to class because they are hung over, or because a new movie came out, or because they want to play video games, or because they just don't feel like going. A very few don't go because they are sick or have actual life issues beyond being unmotivated.
They are - as a rule of thumb, say, about 98% of the time - not sipping wine and discussing complex and nuanced issues.
> I would much rather my kid spend his time working in a small business and learning about entrepreneurship hands-on...
As much as I'd want this for my kids, not all kids have the passion for entrepreneurship, or innovation, necessary to be successful. Liberal Arts degrees can help by allowing young adults find an interesting and for them beneficial and hopefully rewarding career, that they might not otherwise find if their best option is working as a cashier at a dollar store.
The cost though for Arts degrees, and I have sat on the board of governors for a well-known and high reputation university, is ridiculous and largely driven by politics & tradition, more than economic value.
But I don't want to pay for my children to party & socialize for four years at that cost!!
I can't agree with this. Spending a couple hours at a time discussing Heidegger with an engaged teacher is not an experience you can get outside of a college. And it helped me ask questions I am not smart enough to have asked on my own.
The best argument for college is the social environment, which can't be replicated outside of it. Not education.
I don't think that's true in serious liberal arts colleges. They're all about changing the way you think.
Edit: of course the social aspect is important. But it's not the best argument.
You're counting living expenses twice. If he hadn't gone to college he'd have had to eat all the same; so it's more 320K than 420, and we're below a third of a mil instead of near half.
Still a lot for learning to write poetry but that's not all he did...
"Trust me, if he has an inquisitive mind, he'll explore all the weird and strange subjects on his own time. With the internet, he can even be challenged by greater minds.
The best argument for college is the social environment, which can't be replicated outside of it. Not education. The kids get that. That's why they don't go to class."
No. When it comes to non-technical degrees, it's the classroom environment. It's the academic and intellectual environment. Which the internet isn't close to replicating. Someday it might come close, but certainly not in the near future. If you think the internet is approaching a college education in value, you haven't experienced a proper college education.
Ugh. What a depressing way to think about college. But you're right. My English degree isn't doing jack for me. In my free time during college, I actually studied theology, computer science, and martial arts. They are what should be written on my diploma, and what I'd rather show to potential employers (well, not the theology part so much).
I agree with you that the cost of education is very high, but you need to look at the marginal cost. A person has to eat and pay rent regardless of whether they are in school. You can't count that 25K as the marginal cost of school.
>Half a mil to learn about Poetry Writing. Sorry, but that's just silly.
Half a mil so that when you apply for a job at $MEGA-CORP or in government the hirer says "Oh you went to %SCHOOL%, same as me" welcome to our management fast-track program, followed by promotion and VP-dom.
As opposed to "Oh you got a CS degree", well programmers get to sit in this cubicle and get paid $50k until we outsource the whole thing to India.
You bring up some good points. However, to call it a "good investment" requires comparing it to alternatives.
Two decades ago, not many alternatives existed (libraries? buying books? maybe private tutors?). A decade ago, the online world started opening up a ton of information, but it was basically a wild west of unstructured information.
Now fast forward to the present. Information is beginning to have a bit more structure. More importantly online learning is becoming more social. As this trend progresses my best guess is that the comparative value of college will decline. Not because students in college are learning any less. Indeed thinks to technology they're probably learning more efficiently than ever. But, a lot of that learning can take place online and outside of formal academia at much, much lower costs.
So, yes, college has been a nice investment, but I see the returns declining rapidly on that investment. Sort of like how investing in newspaper stock might have been a good play for most of the 20th century. The last decade, not so much so.
And I want to defend liberal arts majors a bit, since I'm one of them.
I agree with you with a slight change. I went to a public liberal arts college and received a BS in Computer Science. I ended up having many hard math and science courses along with courses in philosophy, religion, and chamber music. Overall, I think I received the best of both worlds.
"Most importantly, graduates in the arts, psychology and journalism are less likely to create the kinds of innovations that drive economic growth. Economic growth is not a magic totem to which all else must bow, but it is one of the main reasons we subsidize higher education."
I think this is a completely misguided assumption. Maybe this is true these days. But it wasn't always true, and it shouldn't be true. Higher education, especially in the liberal arts, is for training students to become good community members, citizens and leaders. It's about giving them the cognitive, rhetorical, and even emotional skills required to solve the hard problems that we face as a society. And there is a lot more to solving those problems than promoting "innovation" or "economic growth". We subsidize higher education because producing citizens with those skills is valuable to our society.
Are liberal arts programs perfect? No. Do they cost too much? Maybe. Would it be good for society to have more people going into STEM fields? Probably. Does all this mean that liberal arts education is "oversold"? Certainly not. Indeed, it is rare to see people express just how valuable the liberal arts are, and why.
> It's about giving them the cognitive, rhetorical, and even emotional skills required to solve the hard problems that we face as a society.
I suppose the counter argument is: Do you think individuals graduating in STEM fields don't pick up these skills? And if so, why are these skills limited to liberal arts majors?
> Do you think individuals graduating in STEM fields don't pick up these skills?
That depends, I think, on what their program is. Many STEM programs leading to a Bachelor's degree are still liberal arts programs, in name and in spirit. Let's not forget that math and astronomy, at least, have been part of the conception of the "liberal arts" since antiquity. The idea that there is a sharp division between science and math, on the one hand, and the liberal arts on the other, is a recent one.
Some STEM programs, however, are purely technical programs. Their value is in a particular kind of technical training. I don't know, since I haven't gone through one of those programs myself, but I would bet that students graduating from such programs don't come away with the same kind of skills that a liberal arts education provides.
In sum, I think the STEM/liberal arts distinction is a false dichotomy. The real distinction is something like: as a student in a particular program, are you primarily training to be a citizen, or a technician? You can, of course, do both.
"I think this is a completely misguided assumption. Maybe this is true these days. But it wasn't always true, and it shouldn't be true."
What the past state was does not matter a great deal in these issues--today's problems are what stand between us and the food on our tables. If you read that economic growth as not being responsible for funding of higher education, you are similarly incorrect. At the national level it's about having strong soft power and at the personal level about it's about "keeping up with the Joneses" re: income.
"Higher education, especially in the liberal arts, is for training students to become good community members, citizens and leaders."
It was my impression that high schools and parents were the mechanism for indoctrinating youths into community values. Moreover, without playing too hard to personal experience, if my classmates at uni are tomorrow's leaders I'm a great deal concerned.
"It's about giving them the cognitive, rhetorical, and even emotional skills required to solve the hard problems that we face as a society. And there is a lot more to solving those problems than promoting "innovation" or "economic growth"."
What are these "hard problems"? Hunger? Disease? Working boring jobs to shuffle little bits of paper around? I'd wager that the root of your "hard problems" is ultimately scarcity in one form or another, and the only way to address that is through technology, and the only way to get that is through STEM training.
"We subsidize higher education because producing citizens with those skills is valuable to our society."
You echo your given quote here--you instead handwave the "skills" involved whereas the quote specifically suggests that economic growth is the valuable criterion to pick skills with.
"Are liberal arts programs perfect? No. Do they cost too much? Maybe. Would it be good for society to have more people going into STEM fields? Probably. Does all this mean that liberal arts education is "oversold"? Certainly not."
I agree, disagree, agree, and disagree again.
Liberal arts programs seem to consist primarily of a great deal of reading and research, augmented with the professional musings of an elder in the field. Is my impression incorrect? If it is not, is there a particular reason why it costs so much when that material is so cheaply available? I'd appreciate clarification on this matter.
"Indeed, it is rare to see people express just how valuable the liberal arts are, and why."
You know, there is at least one simple explanation that suggests itself for explaining this phenomena...
> It was my impression that high schools and parents were the mechanism for indoctrinating youths into community values. Moreover, without playing too hard to personal experience, if my classmates at uni are tomorrow's leaders I'm a great deal concerned.
Obviously, parents and pre-college education are important (though if they're doing their jobs well, I wouldn't refer to what they're doing as "indoctrination"). But why should education in cognitive, moral, aesthetic, political, etc. skills end with high school graduation? Your second sentence here underscores this point: today's 18-year olds are not fully-formed citizens, ready to become "tomorrow's leaders" without further development.
> What are these "hard problems"? Hunger? Disease? Working boring jobs to shuffle little bits of paper around? I'd wager that the root of your "hard problems" is ultimately scarcity in one form or another, and the only way to address that is through technology, and the only way to get that is through STEM training.
Hunger and disease are hard problems, yes. And of course, having people with technical training is required for solving them, and for solving any problem that stems from some kind of physical scarcity.
But hunger and disease are two hard problems that are particularly easy to conceive, and whose solutions are likewise readily understood: basically, more food and better medicine. Once a problem and its solution are understood, implementing the solution is very often a matter of working out the technical details.
I think that many of the hard problems facing us are not so easily conceived, and their solutions once conceived are far from obvious. For example: what, if anything, should we do about rising income inequality? What consequences does polarization in political discourse have for our ability to address the divergent needs and interests of different groups of people? Which of our social norms are beneficial, and which are harmful? What reasons do we have to support the production of fine art or architecture, and how (if at all) should we do it? What rights and treatment should our institutions afford to those (prisoners, revolutionaries, the merely uninterested) who directly or indirectly undermine them?
I think these questions---and others like them, which we might not even have the language to express yet---are some of the hardest yet most important questions to answer. But they don't boil down to questions of "scarcity" in any obvious way, and I have a hard time seeing how technical training could ever help produce citizens who are capable of answering them in a reflective and reasonable way.
That doesn't mean that STEM training isn't valuable. And as I said here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3187739) many STEM programs are liberal arts programs that do provide the skills required to answer questions like these.
A lot of people seem very smug about ridiculing liberal arts majors for their life decisions. Please realize that most of us working in software are also lucky enough to be paid well and love what we do, we followed our hearts AND our heads. Imagine a world where there were no software jobs and you needed a PhD in french poetry to get a real job?
Very true. None of my pals who chose software really came in for the money. Though I know a few lawyers and MDs who claim to be in purely for the cash. I don't know should we even wish for that kind of culture (comes with financial prestige...) in STEM-education
But the thing is, there is a lot of people who know they'd rather be playing with children in a kindergarten, doing archeology or reading books all day - but knew that following PURELY your heart is not the smart & rational thing to do when we signed up. Part of the problem is, that libart-schools are filled with kids who thought stuff will just work itself out, like it has always happened for them. Romantically just following ones dreams to the end.
I honestly don't know how else we could be sharing the lesson of pragmatism to the newer generation if we can't point out the consequences of everyone chasing their hopes at the same time. An imaginative person figures out new goals and dreams every day anyhow...
"Part of the problem is, that libart-schools are filled with kids who thought stuff will just work itself out, like it has always happened for them. Romantically just following ones dreams to the end."
Part of it is that, but part of it is our parents giving us incomplete advice. The message is always, "go to college and everything will work itself out" and their kids get the impression that choosing a major is sort of a personal decision that doesn't have any tremendous impact.
The scariest part is that all the people I know who have no confidence in their intelligence ("Oh, I could never major in THAT, I'd have to take Calculus! I hate math!") avoid the science majors and are majoring in education. I think that being a teacher should require a 7-8 year graduate education track similar to a doctor or lawyer, not a quick 4-year liberal arts degree that most people shoot for so that they only work 9 months a year. I'm not hopeful for the future on this one.
The best math teacher I ever had, an inspirational force who was a major reason I got through high school happy and successful, had an undergraduate degree in... something. Not sure it was math, actually.
Definitely no education degree, though. Not even an undergraduate one.
Poor guy couldn't even get an interview today. To see if you're a decent teacher today you must first incur enormous educational debts. Then you try teaching.
Funny you suggest a track similar to law/med school. In those progressions graduates can expect to make well into the six figures.
If we doubled teachers' pay, lightened their workload, and most importantly did not require teachers to answer so stringently to administrators (and voters and homebuyers) who mainly care about test scores, I would agree this is a good idea.
I have a friend who's a teacher, who works hard, and who is picking up boring temp work for $10/hour almost every weekend so she can get out of town in December. That's just sad to me.
I have heard from people who know that turnover in the classroom is already high, even among people who got a 1 year intensive master's degree in teaching. In principle, I'd like to set the bar higher as you suggest, but the first priority is to make teaching an attractive profession.
I'm not sure how increasing pay, further reducing work hours, and completely eliminating accountability will do anything other than buy teacher's loyalties in an election year.
Incidentally, there is also little evidence that postgraduate degrees in education improve student outcomes. They increase teacher pay (according to union-negotiated pay scales), but don't help the students.
Over this same time period, far more women have been going to college than ever before. I wonder what the numbers would look like with women removed (for the sake of a fair comparison)? I wish it was the case that the hard sciences had just as many women as men, but it is not. At my school, engineering was mostly men, while the liberal arts college was mostly women. I'd think most of the growth in enrollment from women (which is most of the growth, I'd think) is going to the "non-science" fields.
Readit News
As a metric for high schools, students enrolling in and graduating from a 4-year college is one of the most important numbers in the all-important school ranking. Students weak in the maths and sciences are encouraged to do just this: finish Algebra II, finish Chemistry, enroll in a liberal arts program, and choose a few "gimme" classes to cover whatever core curriculum the school requires. This makes the high schools look a lot better in their rankings, which is what matters to many superintendents and principals.
And then we get this.
I teach math (and used to teach CS before budget cuts) at a high school level. I've advised my mathematically weak, sometimes special needs students to do exactly what I mentioned in the first post.
This presumption is not supported by the data. Since 1970 the proportion of STEM degrees out of all degrees awarded has averaged 24% with a SD of `2.
Making everyone an engineer or scientist isn't the answer.
Why they can't take kids through "high school" algebra in middle school and have them ready to take more serious math in high school is a mystery to me. From what I gather, a considerably accelerated math curriculum is common in other countries.
Is there any reason other than inertia that we can't do this?
EDIT: In response to some of the questions below, please let me clarify. When I said "other side" I was meaning a lack of well-roundedness. I was NOT trying to pit STEM grads against liberal arts grads.
I do not intend to state that STEM graduates don't know problem solving or critical thinking. Far from it. However in my experience, those skills are discarded too quickly - similar to how Liberal Arts grads tend to discard even the limited quantitative toolsets they've acquired. (I'll concede its probably not as prevalent among the HN crowd.)
Ultimately, its a lack of well-roundedness that limits all camps (I'm sure it would be more accurate to consider more tightly-defined groups than just liberal arts vs engineers.) Ideas are cheap, that's why we laugh at the Wharton posts looking for "code monkeys" every few months. Just as problematic though, is the greatest product but no ability to bring it to market and sustain a viable business.
When a 20-something is strapped with a 50-100K+ debt, the perceived risk involved in doing something they did not exactly go to school for is usually too much to handle.
Sure there is. It's called Baumol's Cost Disease.
Now of course some of those engineers & scientists are working on things like khan academy and other methods of attacking that problem. The downside is that the demand for English or Philosophy majors will only further erode (what do you do with a philosophy degree when there are fewer jobs teaching the next generation of philosophy students?).
No one is saying that everyone should be an engineer or scientist, but it's blatantly obvious that moving the ratio a good bit is, in fact, the answer. English and Philosphy majors can't get jobs while some kids with CS degrees are getting close to making 100k/yr straight out of undergrad. The market is speaking. Listen to it.
There's this entire culture among artists where staying in a school environment is the ultimate goal. Artists are entirely capable of driving economic growth and doing really well for themselves, but the skills they get in school are more related to staying in school than making a living outside of it. That's really where the arts are oversold: "Come to my school and you'll be good enough afterward to make a living doing exactly what you love!" The reality is a lot more harsh, a fact never shared with students.
To me, the problem is that most people don't view college as an investment in their future, but rather as a temporary place to delay choices. Certainly, it is positioned as an investment by educators, and it is probably true for science & engineering degrees, but do students approach it that way?
I have a liberal arts degree from an "elite private university", and I can tell you that the school's approach was to give someone like me everything they could possibly need to succeed, but to leave it up to me to do the actual succeeding. My major's requirements had only 8 classes - 1.5 semesters. Our "core curriculum" had a diversity of requirements, but all were easily gotten around; the science core was easily satisfied by courses such as "Solar System Astronomy", "Oceanography", or "Stars, Galaxies, and the Cosmos", as opposed to Calculus 101 or what-have-you.
I took those classes, but I took those classes in all seriousness. They may have been soft on the hardcore science, but they opened up the breadth of my understanding of the world. Some others in my class did not - they were not at school to invest themselves, and that was their right.
I think I'm much better at the work I do today because I took classes with titles all the way from Quantitative Political Methodology, to Metaphysics & Epistomology, to The Political Economy of Development, to Psych 101, to Poetry Writing, to Arabic, to Computer Science 201, to The American Frontier.
But that's because I took all of those courses dead seriously. That's what makes college a good investment. Well, and the life experience itself, but that's not exactly an "investment" in the monetary sense.
If you don't approach school that way, you're not just wasting your money on tuition - there's a massive opportunity cost. 4 years of failing at a startup is certainly a better business education than an undergrad business degree from my school.
Really, it's a cultural problem. It's like a stomach ache after eating too much candy; things were so good for so long, we collectively forgot what it was like to have to sacrifice and work for the things you want. Applying for entrance to school and actually graduating doesn't have much of anything to do with your education. That's something you have to work for.
Now, is it "in the state's interest" to promote, say, English majors? I think that's a whole different topic. I think anyone who is asking the taxpayer to fund their education needs to be ready to pay that back with directly applicable skills, which would seem to suggest you mostly need scientists & engineers.
I found my english, psychology, history and philosophy educations, which I took dead seriously as you did, to be tremendously useful. They didn't force me to learn, and the classes were relatively easy if you just wanted to pass, and I saw plenty of classmates learn nothing but still pass or get high marks.
But for those who take it seriously, it is nothing short of enlightening. You can skim through it and get your A+ and go on to the next stage of your rat-race, but you're shortchanging yourself.
I pity those who don't understand what the great scientists and artists of the past called "enlightenment". It's something you can only get from a serious study of the liberal arts. It has nothing to do with making money, although it can certainly help with making money, even if it doesn't lead to some well-defined corporate career.
Engineers scoff at me when I talk about phenomenology or existentialism or the value in mythology, fiction, critical analysis, personality theory. I pity them. They don't know what they're missing.
My engineering courses got me my job, my "soft" courses made me good at it.
Thanks to globalization that luxury is going to start to seem just as extravagant to Westerners.
Anyway, for a community that loves Steve Jobs so dearly - a man who claims the Mac wouldn't have been so successful if not for that calligraphy class he took at Reed College - there's an awful lot of derision in these comments for non-engineering around here. Of course, this is also a guy that dropped out of school and taught himself technical skills. Just enough to be dangerous... and convince someone like Woz to help him out. Or maybe that was the LSD and Buddhism talking.
No, it's an economic one.
> I have a liberal arts degree from an "elite private university".
Ok. Let's make the assumption that you're at least moderately intelligent and would be able to get a job for 40K from the bat.
40K * 4 = 160K
College tuition is 40K itself at an "elite private university". Then you add living expenses, books, food, etc. and you have another 25K. That's 65K.
65K * 4 = 260K
160K + 260K = 420K
Yup. Half a mil to learn about Poetry Writing. Sorry, but that's just silly.
I would much rather my kid spend his time working in a small business and learning about entrepreneurship hands-on, than pissing away untold fortunes to sleep in a class about poetry. You can slip the kid some Robert Frost after work.
Trust me, if he has an inquisitive mind, he'll explore all the weird and strange subjects on his own time. With the internet, he can even be challenged by greater minds.
The best argument for college is the social environment, which can't be replicated outside of it. Not education. The kids get that. That's why they don't go to class.
I didn't make a lot of money right out of school, but 3 years later I was making a boatload. Why? Because I can write the kind of email that will make someone who has a job I'm able to do agree to coffee with me, and pitch myself successfully in that meeting. I'm a "go getter" who goes and finds my success, because I'm the opposite of the kind of kid who goes to sleep in his poetry class.
And by the way, I taught myself programming. That CS 201 class I took was a java programming class where the instructors wrote a framework that we learned. At the end of the semester, all I knew were a bunch of the functions of their framework. Why would I need school to learn programming? Unlike my major, CS had something like 20 required courses. That's at least half of your whole university education, more once you find a particular area to focus in.
However, I took an economics class from a Nobel laureate and a history class from a professor who lit the room with his enthusiasm for storytelling obscure historical anecdotes. It's the difference between reading a textbook about WWII and watching Band of Brothers. You can't get that stuff on your own.
Also to clarify: I partied my face off in college, too. But it was work hard, play hard. I'm a student of life, not of how to optimize my bank balance before I'm 30.
Regarding below comments: other than an internship I got during college from a graduate of my school, I haven't experienced much nepotism from my university. Most people have never heard of Washington University in St. Louis unless you work in Medicine.
- In the current economy, the number of high school grads making $40k/year is vanishingly small. It's more likely he'd be making 25k or less if he has a job at all. - 25k for living expenses and books for a college student is way too high unless she's going to school across the country and flies home a ton. - The average student doesn't pay 40k/year in tuition unless he has rich parents and is a below-average student. The average is less than 20k.
Let's redo the math: Tuition: 20k * 4 = 80k Living Expenses: 15k * 4 = 60k Total Expense: 140k
Let's say that our college student gets a below-average job that pays 32k/year.
In a 35 year career with 3% raises, our high school grad makes a total of $1,511,552. In a 31 year career with 3% raises, our college grad makes a total of $1,600,086.
Considering the time value of that $140,000, it's a wash. Go to college and study poetry if you want. The impact to your long-term bottom line is negligible.
This is a bit disingenuous. Elite universities are almost universally free for those who need the help.
>Yup. Half a mil to learn about Poetry Writing. Sorry, but that's just silly.
>I would much rather my kid spend his time working in a small business and learning about entrepreneurship hands-on, than pissing away untold fortunes to sleep in a class about poetry. You can slip the kid some Robert Frost after work.
Money has such a weak correlation with happiness that the argument needs to be fleshed out a bit more to be convincing. I've known many engineers in my life and I've seen no evidence that they are happier than those who have pursued the arts. Life isn't a video game in which money is a score. Heck even in a video game, it's rarely about the accumulation of money.
Even in terms of building a lasting legacy, there is much to be said for the arts over business. Byron will be remembered long after the Vanderbilts are forgotten.
Baloney. They don't go to class because they are hung over, or because a new movie came out, or because they want to play video games, or because they just don't feel like going. A very few don't go because they are sick or have actual life issues beyond being unmotivated.
They are - as a rule of thumb, say, about 98% of the time - not sipping wine and discussing complex and nuanced issues.
As much as I'd want this for my kids, not all kids have the passion for entrepreneurship, or innovation, necessary to be successful. Liberal Arts degrees can help by allowing young adults find an interesting and for them beneficial and hopefully rewarding career, that they might not otherwise find if their best option is working as a cashier at a dollar store.
The cost though for Arts degrees, and I have sat on the board of governors for a well-known and high reputation university, is ridiculous and largely driven by politics & tradition, more than economic value.
But I don't want to pay for my children to party & socialize for four years at that cost!!
The best argument for college is the social environment, which can't be replicated outside of it. Not education.
I don't think that's true in serious liberal arts colleges. They're all about changing the way you think.
Edit: of course the social aspect is important. But it's not the best argument.
Still a lot for learning to write poetry but that's not all he did...
No. When it comes to non-technical degrees, it's the classroom environment. It's the academic and intellectual environment. Which the internet isn't close to replicating. Someday it might come close, but certainly not in the near future. If you think the internet is approaching a college education in value, you haven't experienced a proper college education.
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Except it's payed for by your taxes. Who is silly here?
Half a mil so that when you apply for a job at $MEGA-CORP or in government the hirer says "Oh you went to %SCHOOL%, same as me" welcome to our management fast-track program, followed by promotion and VP-dom.
As opposed to "Oh you got a CS degree", well programmers get to sit in this cubicle and get paid $50k until we outsource the whole thing to India.
Two decades ago, not many alternatives existed (libraries? buying books? maybe private tutors?). A decade ago, the online world started opening up a ton of information, but it was basically a wild west of unstructured information.
Now fast forward to the present. Information is beginning to have a bit more structure. More importantly online learning is becoming more social. As this trend progresses my best guess is that the comparative value of college will decline. Not because students in college are learning any less. Indeed thinks to technology they're probably learning more efficiently than ever. But, a lot of that learning can take place online and outside of formal academia at much, much lower costs.
So, yes, college has been a nice investment, but I see the returns declining rapidly on that investment. Sort of like how investing in newspaper stock might have been a good play for most of the 20th century. The last decade, not so much so.
I agree with you with a slight change. I went to a public liberal arts college and received a BS in Computer Science. I ended up having many hard math and science courses along with courses in philosophy, religion, and chamber music. Overall, I think I received the best of both worlds.
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I strongly agree that college has just become a place to delay becoming an adult, and delay the real-world.
I think this is a completely misguided assumption. Maybe this is true these days. But it wasn't always true, and it shouldn't be true. Higher education, especially in the liberal arts, is for training students to become good community members, citizens and leaders. It's about giving them the cognitive, rhetorical, and even emotional skills required to solve the hard problems that we face as a society. And there is a lot more to solving those problems than promoting "innovation" or "economic growth". We subsidize higher education because producing citizens with those skills is valuable to our society.
Are liberal arts programs perfect? No. Do they cost too much? Maybe. Would it be good for society to have more people going into STEM fields? Probably. Does all this mean that liberal arts education is "oversold"? Certainly not. Indeed, it is rare to see people express just how valuable the liberal arts are, and why.
I suppose the counter argument is: Do you think individuals graduating in STEM fields don't pick up these skills? And if so, why are these skills limited to liberal arts majors?
That depends, I think, on what their program is. Many STEM programs leading to a Bachelor's degree are still liberal arts programs, in name and in spirit. Let's not forget that math and astronomy, at least, have been part of the conception of the "liberal arts" since antiquity. The idea that there is a sharp division between science and math, on the one hand, and the liberal arts on the other, is a recent one.
Some STEM programs, however, are purely technical programs. Their value is in a particular kind of technical training. I don't know, since I haven't gone through one of those programs myself, but I would bet that students graduating from such programs don't come away with the same kind of skills that a liberal arts education provides.
In sum, I think the STEM/liberal arts distinction is a false dichotomy. The real distinction is something like: as a student in a particular program, are you primarily training to be a citizen, or a technician? You can, of course, do both.
"I think this is a completely misguided assumption. Maybe this is true these days. But it wasn't always true, and it shouldn't be true."
What the past state was does not matter a great deal in these issues--today's problems are what stand between us and the food on our tables. If you read that economic growth as not being responsible for funding of higher education, you are similarly incorrect. At the national level it's about having strong soft power and at the personal level about it's about "keeping up with the Joneses" re: income.
"Higher education, especially in the liberal arts, is for training students to become good community members, citizens and leaders."
It was my impression that high schools and parents were the mechanism for indoctrinating youths into community values. Moreover, without playing too hard to personal experience, if my classmates at uni are tomorrow's leaders I'm a great deal concerned.
"It's about giving them the cognitive, rhetorical, and even emotional skills required to solve the hard problems that we face as a society. And there is a lot more to solving those problems than promoting "innovation" or "economic growth"."
What are these "hard problems"? Hunger? Disease? Working boring jobs to shuffle little bits of paper around? I'd wager that the root of your "hard problems" is ultimately scarcity in one form or another, and the only way to address that is through technology, and the only way to get that is through STEM training.
"We subsidize higher education because producing citizens with those skills is valuable to our society."
You echo your given quote here--you instead handwave the "skills" involved whereas the quote specifically suggests that economic growth is the valuable criterion to pick skills with.
"Are liberal arts programs perfect? No. Do they cost too much? Maybe. Would it be good for society to have more people going into STEM fields? Probably. Does all this mean that liberal arts education is "oversold"? Certainly not."
I agree, disagree, agree, and disagree again.
Liberal arts programs seem to consist primarily of a great deal of reading and research, augmented with the professional musings of an elder in the field. Is my impression incorrect? If it is not, is there a particular reason why it costs so much when that material is so cheaply available? I'd appreciate clarification on this matter.
"Indeed, it is rare to see people express just how valuable the liberal arts are, and why."
You know, there is at least one simple explanation that suggests itself for explaining this phenomena...
Obviously, parents and pre-college education are important (though if they're doing their jobs well, I wouldn't refer to what they're doing as "indoctrination"). But why should education in cognitive, moral, aesthetic, political, etc. skills end with high school graduation? Your second sentence here underscores this point: today's 18-year olds are not fully-formed citizens, ready to become "tomorrow's leaders" without further development.
> What are these "hard problems"? Hunger? Disease? Working boring jobs to shuffle little bits of paper around? I'd wager that the root of your "hard problems" is ultimately scarcity in one form or another, and the only way to address that is through technology, and the only way to get that is through STEM training.
Hunger and disease are hard problems, yes. And of course, having people with technical training is required for solving them, and for solving any problem that stems from some kind of physical scarcity.
But hunger and disease are two hard problems that are particularly easy to conceive, and whose solutions are likewise readily understood: basically, more food and better medicine. Once a problem and its solution are understood, implementing the solution is very often a matter of working out the technical details.
I think that many of the hard problems facing us are not so easily conceived, and their solutions once conceived are far from obvious. For example: what, if anything, should we do about rising income inequality? What consequences does polarization in political discourse have for our ability to address the divergent needs and interests of different groups of people? Which of our social norms are beneficial, and which are harmful? What reasons do we have to support the production of fine art or architecture, and how (if at all) should we do it? What rights and treatment should our institutions afford to those (prisoners, revolutionaries, the merely uninterested) who directly or indirectly undermine them?
I think these questions---and others like them, which we might not even have the language to express yet---are some of the hardest yet most important questions to answer. But they don't boil down to questions of "scarcity" in any obvious way, and I have a hard time seeing how technical training could ever help produce citizens who are capable of answering them in a reflective and reasonable way.
That doesn't mean that STEM training isn't valuable. And as I said here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3187739) many STEM programs are liberal arts programs that do provide the skills required to answer questions like these.
But the thing is, there is a lot of people who know they'd rather be playing with children in a kindergarten, doing archeology or reading books all day - but knew that following PURELY your heart is not the smart & rational thing to do when we signed up. Part of the problem is, that libart-schools are filled with kids who thought stuff will just work itself out, like it has always happened for them. Romantically just following ones dreams to the end.
I honestly don't know how else we could be sharing the lesson of pragmatism to the newer generation if we can't point out the consequences of everyone chasing their hopes at the same time. An imaginative person figures out new goals and dreams every day anyhow...
Part of it is that, but part of it is our parents giving us incomplete advice. The message is always, "go to college and everything will work itself out" and their kids get the impression that choosing a major is sort of a personal decision that doesn't have any tremendous impact.
Definitely no education degree, though. Not even an undergraduate one.
Poor guy couldn't even get an interview today. To see if you're a decent teacher today you must first incur enormous educational debts. Then you try teaching.
Mindless credentialism is a terrible force.
If we doubled teachers' pay, lightened their workload, and most importantly did not require teachers to answer so stringently to administrators (and voters and homebuyers) who mainly care about test scores, I would agree this is a good idea.
I have a friend who's a teacher, who works hard, and who is picking up boring temp work for $10/hour almost every weekend so she can get out of town in December. That's just sad to me.
I have heard from people who know that turnover in the classroom is already high, even among people who got a 1 year intensive master's degree in teaching. In principle, I'd like to set the bar higher as you suggest, but the first priority is to make teaching an attractive profession.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf
I'm not sure how increasing pay, further reducing work hours, and completely eliminating accountability will do anything other than buy teacher's loyalties in an election year.
Incidentally, there is also little evidence that postgraduate degrees in education improve student outcomes. They increase teacher pay (according to union-negotiated pay scales), but don't help the students.
[1] Those who work at least 35 hours/week.
Which, of course, they don't.
That's right - many of them have summer jobs.
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