This discussion would be well served if we separated concerns about the economics of higher education in general (obviously student debt burdens are too high. There has been much written about how this came to be for all major) from the value of humanities program. Where I am coming from (so source of bias) I got a BA and PhD in philosophy, make plenty in software now, and credit to some extent my time in the humanities with the ability of I do that.
I often see comments here about how the humanities and many social sciences are pointless, should be cut, and so forth, as evidenced by this thread. Though as you say, problems with the insane cost of higher education (especially in the United States), are separate, if partially related since so many people believe that getting educated = getting a job that makes more money than if you weren't and that's education's only purpose.
But I also see how so many of the upvoted and discussed articles and papers on this site are about history, archaeology, literature, philosophy, language, etc. It has always struck me as contradictory, though of course a lot of the people who are into the latter are not those writing the former.
How do we continue to push the bounds of human knowledge and thought in those disciplines, if not through higher education? In my opinion the world would be a whole lot better if, for instance, people learned more history and learned how to more critically approach sources. But I'm biased of course, I have PhD in history.
When I was in school we were educated in STEM alongside the humanities, they called this being "interdisciplinary".
One of my undergraduate chemistry professors went to Cal Tech and he told us that his professors encouraged him to ask people outside of his discipline about problems if he got stuck.
I do not understand why people are unwilling to do more interdisciplinary studies. When I took courses on crop botany and plant genetics we also read books and had seminar to discuss the topics of the books - that is a humanities skill, to discuss in a group what meaning you can derive from texts.
As for the people saying you should get a degree that pays well...look at all the folks who got Comp. Sci. degrees who are now being thrown in the wood chipper. Was that worth it? Time will tell.
Sure, but to be fair to STEM fields, group discussions aren't uniquely a humanities skill. Collectively ripping apart a scientific journal article to find all of its flaws is a common activity.
Interdisciplinary study is great but there can be some friction in the labor market, at least for new graduates seeking entry level positions. When corporate recruiters see a college transcript that doesn't fit neatly into one of the usual slots they don't know what to do with it.
Computer Science also has its own friction with the labor market. It's really a branch of abstract mathematics and only tangentially related to commercial software product development. I think colleges ought to offer something like a "Bachelor of Fine Arts in Software Development" for students more interested in practical craftsmanship. There will always be demand for people who can build working software, even if most of them move up to higher levels of abstraction leveraging AI tools instead of directly writing code themselves.
My CS college told us bluntly: 'We're training you for the last job you'll ever have. Pick up the stuff you need to know for your first one on your own or while doing class projects.'
Worked out pretty well in my case. There's plenty I don't know about the Java Enterprise Edition standard libraries, but I can still walk through computing in decent depth from transistors to algorithms.
(And to the article's point, have probably gotten more CS jobs from my interdisciplinary skills than my CS-only skills)
I clearly applied my CS knowledge in breadth and depth in my last job. And to a lesser degree, I did the same in my first job. It's the jobs in the middle that veered me off the original path. It's like navigating a maze...
Interdisciplinary is a broad umbrella term that most people fall under to some degree. The benefit of focusing on a primary discipline is that there are well worn career paths to follow. I think the best approach is to brand yourself to one or two disciplines, and look for collaboration opportunities with other disciplines. Study them for enrichment and inspiration. Have friends and colleagues outside of your discipline.
If someone says they are "interdisciplinary" it provides little information about what they actually study and are good at. If someone says they have a Masters in Philosophy with a focus on Metaphysics I have enough information about their background to ask questions they might provide insightful comments on.
The humanities are why the internet exists. Coding is linguistics, writing is the key aspect of most software creation. Why then do we devalue this critical skill and those who wish to pursue its excellence? It seems most of ya’ll are content to make a fat check working a bs job in a marketing/business capacity where no real things of substance are being learned or progressed other than “how do i squeeze the utmost money out of the system”. Is this the world you continue to want to promote?
No. Coding is mathematics. The internet exists because of engineering. The web was invented because of physics.
Humanities came late to the game and try to claim the honor without actually having done anything. Except whine and complain about the demise of X because of this new fangled internet thingy. For X you may insert "reading", "writing", "critical thinking", "books", "education", "manners", "discussions" and another 50 things at least. I'd say the humanities hindered the progress of humanity more than they promoted it over the last 50 years.
Coding is not mathematics. If you'll recall from your philosophy courses (irony of ironies), Russell's project in the Principia Mathematica failed. Mathematics is not just logic, and vice-versa.
Also, the "p exists because of q" form of argument puts philosophy causally "before" these other disciplines.
No, you should re-read and understand what exactly failed in the Principia Mathematica. Goedel-Incompleteness only means that either the Principia is short an axiom, or it will produce a contradiction because it already has an axiom too many. Nothing there separates mathematics from logic in any way. Nothing separates coding from mathematics in any way. The only failure the incompleteness proof gives us is that we now know that the Principia will either be found contradictory or incomplete. But that doesn't make it useless at all, our mathematics, coding and logic is still based on the axioms from the Principia and derived proofs. Science works very well with this, our physical description of nature by principia-derived mathematics also didn't turn up any kinds of problems there. The only real failure is the philosophical expectation of being able to generate all mathematical truth from that one set of axioms.
Yes, if you go back to antiquity, there were only philosophy and religion. Science and mathematics were once sub-branches of philosophy. But that's a few thousand years before the internet, and the renaissance at the latest was where philosophy was fully separate from sciences and mathematics.
In addition to these points we also have a handful of weaker-than-arithmetic but provably-decidable theories, which jointly encompass almost everything done on a finite computer.
> No. Coding is mathematics. The internet exists because of engineering. The web was invented because of physics.
Maybe, only maybe, getting to know the history of the internet (oh, and of mathematics, too), of the people that designed and built it, would inform a little more your stance.
Separating so bluntly maths, physics, biology, from humanities (and reciprocally) is precisely a trait that is telling of an unbalanced understanding of the world humanity built around itself with all these languages and abstractions to describe it.
I am not accusing, I am perceiving that from your stance.
No. You should derive from that that human life, and humanities being part of that, are a matter of experience, more than of argument/convincing. I could spend some time to argue with you about that, but you're showing you are not open to such a discussion, and my time is more valuable (and yours) than that.
It's like sex, intimacy, sight, smell, touch: you can't argue about it or explain it to someone who never experienced it.
It's definitely hard to argue or demonstrate how sometimes a book, a painting, a music can turn around your whole perspective on things.
So you argue that humanities are like art, cooking, literature, sexual preferences: a matter of personal taste, which I supposedly lack. The general consensus about matters of taste is that it is pointless to argue about those. And that matters of taste are an indulgence, important only to fans of that particular variety.
Which means that humanities cannot be important to mankind as a whole, because most won't appreciate them, as they are a matter of taste. And they are as arbitrary as other matters of taste, lacking the universality that is necessary for usefulness. Good riddance!
Ah. So you determine I'm not in the in-group for the magic circle that is humanities, so I can never appreciate or evaluate them. And you place any evaluation entirely in the subjective realm, such that no objectivity is possible anyways.
So it's not just a matter of taste, humanities are a cult.
You are stating that a specific segment of human experience and knowledge is a cult, without a sensible argument, and as displaying a very astute contempt and seeming lack of experience towards this segment. With an absolutist stance. And then, ask people to prove you wrong. What do you expect?
Philosophy split off mathematical logic 200 years ago. Boole and Bolzano lived around 1800 to 1850 or something. There were no contributions from philosophy after that.
Chomsky is one I grant you, he was influential in both computer science as well as linguistics. But his success in linguistics was even more revolutionary than his influence on CS, exactly because he introduced abstraction, rigor and various ideas from computer science and mathematics into linguistics.
What it actually seems like is that Humanities are trying to retain/gain power in this new world where it's increasingly apparent that rigor is far more valuable.
If humanities taught logic, and actually rigorous analytic capabilities that were on par with STEM, I don't think we'd be in the situation we're in now.
Instead it's the opposite. The departments have made humanities increasingly easier, thereby devaluing them even more.
Hi, Phil major here. I did math. I did logic, which was required. My peers in other humanities generally did not. But Phil might be the only exception.
Further I ended up taking a class that actually read original Greek texts, which isn't all that common even within the department I was at.
One can graduate in philosophy without having heard a formal logic lecture. Philosophy only has rigor in some branches, most modern ones are less rigorous and more social, political or economical.
So far the entire field of "AI safety" is one big grift that has never produced anything of value. The people who work in that field have vivid imaginations but lack the practical writing skills to become published sci-fi authors.
As someone with a degree in fine arts, good. A lot more of these programs need to be downsized or removed. Not because they aren't popular, they are (or were when I went) extremely popular. Rather they have poor outcomes for the students. After 4 years, I was left with the realization that I had wasted my time, and I was further away from a career than my peers.
I know people will push back and say that is not the point of the university. But it doesn't change the fact that our economy is not built on poetry and painting, but we educate large number of people to specialize as one. Those people are instead left in debt with no path forward in their chosen field.
From a fellow classically trained artist, I too feel disenchanted with my BFA.
I'm surprised so many folks defend the university system for fine arts. It's a relatively modern notion, as in only a few decades! Historically, arts education is provided in museum, academy, apprentice, and/or community settings. Academic (as in the modern university system) art is still in its early stages and deserves criticism. I assume much of our cohort are in a worse position for their commitment to an art degree.
I think some of the disconnect is that when people think of humanities they think of the masters, and not attending figure drawing classes while accruing 5-10 years worth of salary as debt.
I'd say that this is a take only for your time, not for all time. For all time, learning about the humanities has shown to further one's ability to reason, create and imagine. IMHO Curiosity paired with an understanding of humanity (social skills) will become the most valuable job skills. The ability to talk and connect with people will outweigh any technical skill. You can only do this by understanding humanity and living in a society that promotes and fosters humanity.
In the near term, AI will override any and all non-physical skills. However AI is not able to create or imagine, it can only mimic and regurgitate. Additionally, it cannot fix a leaking shower, and it cannot make your bed. Add in physical real-world limitations and complexities,(randomness and disorder), and you have a world where physical skills and artistic abilities will dominate.
People will value authenticity, human touch and the magic that is human creativity (love) more and more as the non-physical world becomes less and less real.
Makers, Do-ers, Designers and Caretakers will dominate the workforce in 25 years.
People do value human creativity, but why do you think that comes from the degree mills and monocultures of the humanities departments? I don't agree that these departments foster creativity, rather the opposite, they foster conformity. There are lots of concrete real life examples of this.
I think that creativity doesn't come from humanities departments, but more likely, organically from counter culture. Who doesn't know what a rick roll is? This did not come from a humanities department.
Edit:
Forgot to add my second point: AI is going to let people outside the mainstream produce genuinely credible, professional-level work without a massive budget.
That means further devaluing of establishment institutions like humanities departments. It strips away the gatekeeping power, deciding who gets to count as legit. AI blows that up.
I'm not sure why you're being down voted. Art degrees aren't aimed at artists. There are dedicated schools to go to for things like graphics design and other creative degrees, but those aren't the sort of humanities degrees that we're talking about.
I vaguely recall even creative art degrees as being looked down upon by artists as teaching you to conform to certain styles, essentially mimicry rather than creativity (though it has been some years since anyone in my network attended one).
In any case, despite the waxing philosophical of the personal growth value of a humanities degree, there's still the fact that every college and university also advertises job placement rates of their majors. Individual courses may focus on specific topics, but the people taking your money are promising job opportunities to parents and school councilors to convince them that the over inflated price tags are worth it.
> There are dedicated schools to go to for things like graphics design and other creative degree
Yes, there are dedicated trade schools for graphic design just like there are coding bootcamps.
There are also university degree programs designed for creative artists. (And yes, there are universities that specialize exclusively, or nearly so, in those degrees and are highly regarded within them, just as is the case in STEM.)
There are some art-adjacent degrees that aren't primarily focussed on doing art (Art History being the most common and well-known one) and some of the creative-focussed programs may have options to focus on more critical/analytical vs. practical concentrations available, as well.
But creative degrees focussed on actual creative output whether writing or film or theater or dance or music or photography or other visual art are a very big slice of the humanities.
> But creative degrees focussed on actual creative output whether writing or film or theater or dance or music or photography or other visual art are a very big slice of the humanities.
But the result doesn't seem to be very creative, so what is the point?
A good point in general but not here specifically: among the various liberal arts degrees, philosophy majors have some of the highest average earnings.
Because they have the highest IQs. Philosophy programs are a sink for smart students who don’t want to do math or engineering. Employers don’t actually value the philosophy degree itself.
Employers? Philosophy majors are generally unemployable, unless they're going into law. Though they do tend to make decent entrepreneurs or are self-employed in some other way.
A large fraction of philosophy majors go on to law school. It's great training for analyzing complex texts and writing logically sound arguments. These are timeless skills that apply to many areas even if the philosophical content itself doesn't have as much practical value in the labor market.
I worked at a state university for 8 years writing code, and I was in contact with many of its student facing offices. There is an office that is dedicated to showing that law school students have very positive post-graduation outcomes. Basically, they send them a survey asking them if they had full or part time employment, and if they said "yes" to it, the university counted it as a positive outcome. "96% of our law school graduates find work within 12 months".
I am quite confident that not only is philosophy a waste when it comes to finding gainful employment, going to law school to put that philosophy to good use is just doubling down on the same bad gamble. Large fraction? What about the remainder?
It really depends on the school. Most graduates of first and second tier law schools are able to pass the bar exam and find gainful employment as lawyers, or in a related field. But going to a "third tier toilet" law school seldom pays off, at least not financially.
>Most graduates of first and second tier law schools are able to pass the bar exam and find gainful employment as lawyers,
You believe this to be the case, because you're relying on the statistics provided by the office I described.
>But going to a "third tier toilet" law school seldom pays off, at least not financially.
This is a solid T2 school. But if you were working at Subway whatever hours they'd give you, they marked you down as employed for the purposes of saying their graduates get jobs.
Let me push back and say that is not the point of university.
If you take the stance that education's function is to act like a feeder for business institutions; I guess? But that's only one byproduct of a strong education. Another is research; the other is critical thinking and civil productivity as a whole.
I'm as pro-capital as any private industry-focused tech worker is; but lets not pretend that's all the value we get out of the humanities.
But that isn't the pitch. "You go to college so you can get a good job..."
The fact is, the entire college/university system is outsized and wrong-fit for what most people actually need. And while I don't think humanities programs should be cut from universities, I also don't think that taxpayer backed student loans or payouts should be made for programs that have vastly more people enrolled in than the general economy has a demand/need for.
I'd like to see more accredited options for trade schools beyond what people currently think of as trades. From accounting, to software development. I know there are some schools that focus on these things, I just think they should be more at the forefront and higher profile options.
Isn't it fine if different degrees lead to different job opportunities? A nineteen year old should be able to understand the difference between the job market for a doctor or engineer and the job market for an MFA.
We don't need to have different institutions to grant different degrees with different levels of marketability. A college that only taught lucrative subjects and a college that taught non-lucrative subjects would both offer less educational value than a single college that offered the full range.
Sure... have all the options out there.. but taking on debt, and the risks associated should also account for the ability and risk of paying it back or not... which is pretty heavily dependent on the program in question.
I'm fine with people choosing whatever they want... but then the question comes down to how/who pays for it... and I'm emphatically not in favor of public (taxpayer) funding for programs that don't have a direct need/demand in society or the economy in general.
You want to be a fine arts major.. go for it. It may be harder if you need student loans to pay for it, when there's a few thousand people working on that degree and a few hundred jobs in the world of demand.
Someone graduating with a BFA intending to teach art or music at the K-12 level might be very satisfied with their job prospects and the life it leads to. There are at the very least tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of art and music teachers in the United States.
A bachelor's degree is required to be a K-12 teacher, so if it's impossible for teachers to pay undergraduate student loans, the problem is not with the teacher or the degree they chose to get.
A BFA wont qualify you to work as a teacher at an accredited school in the US. Positions at those schools that allow you to "teach" without a teaching degree are typically part time and volunteer.
What do you mean? Music and art teachers typically have BFAs. There are BFA programs designed for teachers, including the pedagogical training that qualifies them for teaching.
My BFA does not qualify me to be a teacher anywhere I have looked (south east, new england, ca). I do not meet the educational requirements or the practical classroom time to got a teaching certificate required to teach K-12.
I am sure there are programs that are a mix between a typical BFA program and a teaching degree, but that is not the norm.
Oh, yeah, if you don't specifically train to be a teacher, you won't qualify. I'm just saying that (AFAIK, and from a specifically Texas perspective) most people who intend to be art or music teachers get a BFA. Many of my high school teachers earned degrees specific to their subject, like B.S. in Chemistry, B.A. in History, B.A. in Literature, while concurrently completing the coursework that qualified them for teaching. You don't have to be an education major. Most state universities also have programs for people who have a bachelors degree to complete the requirements for teaching, too, and I think those programs qualify for financial aid even if they don't lead to an additional degree.
At the same time, a healthy society needs people who are trained in the arts and humanities. The reason you experienced a bad outcome is because our society doesn't care much about this, despite being richer and more able to afford the arts than at any point in history. I would also argue that, not coincidentally, our society is unhealthy, and getting more so.
Your solution is like pointing out that the patient can't tolerate food anymore, so the solution is just not to feed them. It's all true! And also misses the fact that something is causing the patient to starve.
It's more like the patient needs some fixed amount of food each day and it doesn't make a lot of sense to create lots more food than they need on the hopes that someday they'll want to eat more than they can.
If the argument is that everyone should focus on the arts at the expense of everything else, it's hard to imagine that's an ideal outcome relative to alternatives. If we're not arguing that everyone should focus 100% on the arts (no other degrees should be available), then it's a matter of degree and certainly some outcomes might end up with more people pursuing the arts than what society needs.
In many wealthy societies, there is broad funding for the arts and humanities. Here in the US we're discussing massive cuts for art and humanities funding. These amounts aren't large, and presumably we can afford them -- given the massive tax cuts we just passed for people making over $500,000 and the increased funding we came up with for ICE and the military.
>Your solution is like pointing out that the patient can't tolerate food anymore, so the solution is just not to feed them. It's all true! And also misses the fact that something is causing the patient to starve.
Ironically, with chronic obesity and the related metabolic disorders becoming absolutely epidemic, people might do well to eat less. I can manage 48 hours at a stretch, it's only psychologically discomforting, I wish I could go 72 hours. It's like we have some sort of racial memory of the famines our ancestors suffered tens of thousands of years ago, and now we can't stop gorging ourselves.
>At the same time, a healthy society needs people who are trained in the arts and humanities.
Everyone thinks that the thing that they learned to do is what everyone should learn to do. Car mechanics think that people should be able to do repairs, at least know a little more about what goes wrong. And guess what? Our economy relies on them, and they're right... we do need people who can repair them. Janitors think that people should be able to clean things up. And guess what? We do need people who can clean things up. Shipbuilders, steelworkers, construction workers, farmers... we need people who can do those things.
No one was ever in danger and needed to be able to know Titian's third most famous painting. No one was ever rescued by liberal arts graduate's knowledge of third rate classical composers.
>I would also argue that, not coincidentally, our society is unhealthy, and getting more so.
I would agree. People need gainful employment opportunities, and the training to be able to take advantage of those. They need to enter adulthood debt free, and not just student debt, but to also know that the government isn't mortgaging their future paying for a bloated secondary education system today that is wasting years of their lives and hundreds of billions in fortune setting them up to fail. If academia doesn't want to be the vocational schools that it dreads to be associated with, then it should shut up and quit pretending that it has much to offer the vast majority of people. Maybe it didn't claim that these degrees would set everyone up for life, but it certainly didn't protest when others made that claim for it.
>despite being richer and more able to afford the arts than at any point in history.
We're all actually poor. As a country. (Other countries too, come to that.) We remember having once been rich, and we're in denial about it no longer being true. We can't even afford social security, old people will need to start dying sooner. Even the so-called billionaires for the most part just have a pile of stock certificates in the vault. Even on this very website, we see constant links about making people live in pods because it's no longer possible to build housing anyone can afford. You now rent the things your grandparents used to buy outright, and to buy seconds and thirds when they got bored with the first. You tell yourself it's because it's more convenient, but you couldn't afford to pay for it up front if you wanted.
We're that married couple swimming in credit card debt. They deny that it's a big deal, look here we can juggle this one and use that one to pay the minimum payment on the third card. And don't you think we can't keep doing that, we'll be able to do it next month too! But I'm not even allowed to talk about it, because a full 8 or 9 years ago the people on the left told everyone that credit card analogies don't work for a country as big and rich as the United States.
Fewer than 7% of all high school graduates should even go on to higher education. High school should become more strict, willing to flunk everyone who fails to meet rigorous standards. We need our government to make a true effort to reindustrialize.
I'm not even sure what it is you're complaining about. That people are forcing students to spend money studying subjects that don't have lucrative careers following them? None of this information is secret; if you think that rational people can't figure out that arts careers have poor prospects, then you don't believe in the free market in the first place. (And, to some extent I'm happy to entertain that discussion -- I'm just willing to bet that "the free market makes bad decisions" is not part of your specific basket of off-the-shelf beliefs.)
This is what a liberal arts institution is (the university I went to is one). At my uni if you are taking a science degree you need to take 4 social science classes and 4 fine arts/humanities. and vice versa for students in fine arts/social sciences.
Yeah, I feel like something has got to give, maybe we don’t fund student loans for certain majors. Maybe we bring back certain types of book or social clubs to learn these materials instead. Online learning? I totally see the beauty in the humanities, it’s largely all I read for fun, But you can’t have a system that incentivizes people to take out bigger and bigger loans on investments that don’t pay back.
Student loan approval and interest rates should be based on actuarial calculations that account for risk of default based on school and major. This will allow market signals to work rather than treating everyone the same. Some people have this fantasy that everyone should be able to study their passion even if it's something with no value in the labor market but in the real world society can collectively only afford to have a tiny fraction of scholars living a life of the mind.
Yeah, I’d love to live in the post-agi utopia where we can all do what we want, but liberals are often not good at making trade offs within our own value systems
>> our economy is not built on poetry and painting
Really? Hollywood operates on the efforts of screenwriters and digital rendering masters, both areas very informed by poetry and painting. Graphic design and quick language are the basis of online ads, which in turn are what supports the likes of Facebook and Google. If not for the wordsmiths and visual artists, the modern internet would be a very different place.
You're looking for a trade school. Universities have always been about education often for the sake of learning. Generating money just came to be a nice side effect as knowledge work grew in value.
That's a nice fantasy that hasn't been true for a long time. Even university websites talk just as much about career opportunities as they do personal growth.
As you might imagine this is favorable to STEM and unfavorable to the humanities. But I think that expensive private institutions are a better venue to educate students who are more insulated from economic disadvantage in disciplines with a low return on investment. It's a good thing to bias the opportunities of disadvantaged students in favor of greater earning capacity. In higher education, the lower the expected pay for a skill set, the more it should be treated as a luxury good.
The argument is rather that humanities degrees are a luxury item. Neither kids just starting out their adult lives nor society should be burdened propping up departments whose value doesn't match their price tag.
And making it un-dischargeable in bankruptcy so people are either in perpetual debt bondage or the taxpayer picks up the tab for the inflated costs takes it from gross to downright criminal.
I'd be a lot more OK with student loan jubilees if universities had to pay the remaining principal on any forgiven loans. They'd immediately get their costs under control and be a lot more careful about degree programs which don't have any earning potential.
I don’t disagree with your general point, but for clarity, student loans are non-dischargeable because they have been federally guaranteed since 1965. Meaning that if the borrower defaulted, taxpayers would be on the hook. And the reason for the federal guarantees was that students are bad credit risks. So without the guarantees, banks wouldn’t lend to students, especially disadvantaged ones.
It almost sounds like student loans should be harder to get. Giving a student a loan seems like a bad bet. All the parties that know how to do a proper risk analysis aren't willing to take that on. So this hot potato gets passed around. Eventually it ends up back on the prospective student, who is least equipped to make a rational financial decision.
Kind of makes the whole thing sound like a scam from that perspective.
The reason for the federal guarantees was because voters wanted lower taxes, or otherwise did not want to redistribute wealth to students.
It’s a common way to scam today’s young and future taxpayers. See also underfunded pensions and other post employment benefits for government employees and taxpayer guaranteed 30 year fixed rate mortgages with no prepayment penalty.
Instead of helping someone, society lends them money and lets future taxpayers deal with the mess. That is how you win elections in aging societies.
Yeah, I think the argument for the humanities can only exist if college wasn't outrageously expensive.
The world made college into a checkpoint to get a good salaried position, it's not the same as the old geezers experienced it, where college was thought of as a bonus education, but not solely needed to get a decent paying job.
Those of us who came of age in the dotcom era already had the vocational skills to pull big salaries, so college was a bonus education. I (and others in this thread) have a philosophy degree because of it.
100% on the non-dischargeable debt. I appreciate the humanities and their importance, but encouraging kids to take out loans to study them, with no risk to the lender, is obscene.
The latest chapter of America’s cultural revolution has been driven largely by radical currents in the humanities and by students eager to impose them beyond campus.
It is finally time for universities to reconsider what they truly want to teach. They need to stop producing ideological foot soldiers and focus instead on real learning,including the humanities, when they are done honestly and not just used to push one narrow worldview.
With so much changing in the world right now, we urgently need the humanities to recover their integrity and purpose.
If your goal is to push back against Trumpism, denial that flagrant university indoctrination doesn't happen... is certainly one of the strategy's of all time.
yes, pushing back on fascism is flagrant indoctrination. even reality has Trump derangement syndrome!
how do you even propose such indoctrination would work? would they be revoking visas for supporting Trump? would they be picking people off the streets and sending them to extraterritorial concentration camps?
All right, let's sum up. This year we explored the failure of democracy. How our social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos. We talked about the veterans, how they took control and established the stability that has lasted for generations since. You know these facts, but have I taught you anything of value this year?
People who agree with this happening take for granted the critical ways humanities education contextualizes and guides stem research and progress. By studying the humanities you peer past the present and all of its trappings in the capitalistic race to the bottom. Shame on you humanities graduates that believe there being zero English, History, English, etc majors will lead to a better world.
I think the universities made a mistake in becoming too culturally left wing. The faculty (and students) in the humanities in particular are far to the left of the political mainstream. (I am on the left though more focused on labor rights and good jobs than identity politics.)
The attack on the universities is fueled by this divergence, now that the right is firmly in power. This will just hurt the country in the long run. There was so much group think and silencing happening on the left over the last decade. It seems now to have been self-destructive.
Some university humanities departments undermined themselves by being divisive and exclusionary. Several years ago the University of Chicago made this public statement.
"For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies."
There's nothing wrong with encouraging scholarship in a particular field but when they intentionally exclude other fields it tends to limit public support. Taxpayers will naturally question why they're being asked to subsidize student loans, and wonder whether universities are being used to promote ideologies rather than educate.
This is a popular criticism that is partially true, but it rings a bit hollow because conservatives (rather, Republicans) don't seem to want intellectual career paths. They're nowhere to be found in academia.
And, to pre-empt the usual objection, they aren't being crowded out by ideology. They aren't there in the first place. They're not in the STEM majors outside of engineering, and they're not in the humanities except for law. Otherwise you'll find them in sales, marketing, business, and management.
These people complain about academia but have little invested in it in the first place.
They are chased out of academia. I knew professors who were proudly, vocally socialist but the professors who had any conservative leanings were very subtle about it.
You don't get tenure if your fellow professors don't like you, and they've created their own echo chamber long ago.
In contradiction to your point, the conservative professors and teachers that I knew were not in arts humanities at all (with one exception in law) but in crunchier fields like economics. The STEM and maths professors didn't talk social topics at all, so it is impossible to know what their feelings were.
The mechanism that lead to this is imho that humanities generally do not have any more grounding in facts, logic or reality. Science, technology and (to some extent) medicine and mathematics are bound to describe existing phenomena that occur in nature. They do this by observation and experiments (except mathematics), proposing axioms and theory, and then bringing those into strict logical agreement. Humanities nowadays reject observation and experiments as biologism. Or they never had those, and always just proposed ideas to be discussed, like in philosophy. They also nowadays reject objective logic and proof in favour of subjective evaluations and a wholly individual-centered world view.
This decline of rigor in the humanities means that they no longer really teach logic, critical thinking, or any kind of reality-related ideas. What they do is arbitrary and therefore objectively pointless, except maybe to further some political or social goal. That those goals are mostly left-wing is imho just an accident, they could as well be promoting right-wing politics.
(In a similar manner, arts now reject their original goals of beauty, aesthetics, depictions of reality, mastery and entertainment. But that's less of a problem, because arts have always been even less important than humanities.)
You make a false dichotomy first, with an additional straw man, and continue in a circular argument. This alone renders your conclusion unsupported regardless of your premises.
Then you mistake what could be a rather evasive appeal to authority with an ad hominem.
Perhaps engaging more deeply with the actual methodologies and scholarship within these fields might reveal the rigor you claim is absent.
You're masquerading your assertion as an argument.
This discussion would be well served if we separated concerns about the economics of higher education in general (obviously student debt burdens are too high. There has been much written about how this came to be for all major) from the value of humanities program. Where I am coming from (so source of bias) I got a BA and PhD in philosophy, make plenty in software now, and credit to some extent my time in the humanities with the ability of I do that.
I often see comments here about how the humanities and many social sciences are pointless, should be cut, and so forth, as evidenced by this thread. Though as you say, problems with the insane cost of higher education (especially in the United States), are separate, if partially related since so many people believe that getting educated = getting a job that makes more money than if you weren't and that's education's only purpose.
But I also see how so many of the upvoted and discussed articles and papers on this site are about history, archaeology, literature, philosophy, language, etc. It has always struck me as contradictory, though of course a lot of the people who are into the latter are not those writing the former.
How do we continue to push the bounds of human knowledge and thought in those disciplines, if not through higher education? In my opinion the world would be a whole lot better if, for instance, people learned more history and learned how to more critically approach sources. But I'm biased of course, I have PhD in history.
When I was in school we were educated in STEM alongside the humanities, they called this being "interdisciplinary".
One of my undergraduate chemistry professors went to Cal Tech and he told us that his professors encouraged him to ask people outside of his discipline about problems if he got stuck.
I do not understand why people are unwilling to do more interdisciplinary studies. When I took courses on crop botany and plant genetics we also read books and had seminar to discuss the topics of the books - that is a humanities skill, to discuss in a group what meaning you can derive from texts.
As for the people saying you should get a degree that pays well...look at all the folks who got Comp. Sci. degrees who are now being thrown in the wood chipper. Was that worth it? Time will tell.
Sure, but to be fair to STEM fields, group discussions aren't uniquely a humanities skill. Collectively ripping apart a scientific journal article to find all of its flaws is a common activity.
Interdisciplinary study is great but there can be some friction in the labor market, at least for new graduates seeking entry level positions. When corporate recruiters see a college transcript that doesn't fit neatly into one of the usual slots they don't know what to do with it.
Computer Science also has its own friction with the labor market. It's really a branch of abstract mathematics and only tangentially related to commercial software product development. I think colleges ought to offer something like a "Bachelor of Fine Arts in Software Development" for students more interested in practical craftsmanship. There will always be demand for people who can build working software, even if most of them move up to higher levels of abstraction leveraging AI tools instead of directly writing code themselves.
My CS college told us bluntly: 'We're training you for the last job you'll ever have. Pick up the stuff you need to know for your first one on your own or while doing class projects.'
Worked out pretty well in my case. There's plenty I don't know about the Java Enterprise Edition standard libraries, but I can still walk through computing in decent depth from transistors to algorithms.
(And to the article's point, have probably gotten more CS jobs from my interdisciplinary skills than my CS-only skills)
I'm now retired.
I clearly applied my CS knowledge in breadth and depth in my last job. And to a lesser degree, I did the same in my first job. It's the jobs in the middle that veered me off the original path. It's like navigating a maze...
Interdisciplinary is a broad umbrella term that most people fall under to some degree. The benefit of focusing on a primary discipline is that there are well worn career paths to follow. I think the best approach is to brand yourself to one or two disciplines, and look for collaboration opportunities with other disciplines. Study them for enrichment and inspiration. Have friends and colleagues outside of your discipline.
If someone says they are "interdisciplinary" it provides little information about what they actually study and are good at. If someone says they have a Masters in Philosophy with a focus on Metaphysics I have enough information about their background to ask questions they might provide insightful comments on.
The humanities are why the internet exists. Coding is linguistics, writing is the key aspect of most software creation. Why then do we devalue this critical skill and those who wish to pursue its excellence? It seems most of ya’ll are content to make a fat check working a bs job in a marketing/business capacity where no real things of substance are being learned or progressed other than “how do i squeeze the utmost money out of the system”. Is this the world you continue to want to promote?
No. Coding is mathematics. The internet exists because of engineering. The web was invented because of physics.
Humanities came late to the game and try to claim the honor without actually having done anything. Except whine and complain about the demise of X because of this new fangled internet thingy. For X you may insert "reading", "writing", "critical thinking", "books", "education", "manners", "discussions" and another 50 things at least. I'd say the humanities hindered the progress of humanity more than they promoted it over the last 50 years.
> Humanities came late to the game and try to claim the honor without actually having done anything.
IIRC some early programming languages were even tailored to the humanities, like Snobol.
Coding is not mathematics. If you'll recall from your philosophy courses (irony of ironies), Russell's project in the Principia Mathematica failed. Mathematics is not just logic, and vice-versa.
Also, the "p exists because of q" form of argument puts philosophy causally "before" these other disciplines.
No, you should re-read and understand what exactly failed in the Principia Mathematica. Goedel-Incompleteness only means that either the Principia is short an axiom, or it will produce a contradiction because it already has an axiom too many. Nothing there separates mathematics from logic in any way. Nothing separates coding from mathematics in any way. The only failure the incompleteness proof gives us is that we now know that the Principia will either be found contradictory or incomplete. But that doesn't make it useless at all, our mathematics, coding and logic is still based on the axioms from the Principia and derived proofs. Science works very well with this, our physical description of nature by principia-derived mathematics also didn't turn up any kinds of problems there. The only real failure is the philosophical expectation of being able to generate all mathematical truth from that one set of axioms.
Yes, if you go back to antiquity, there were only philosophy and religion. Science and mathematics were once sub-branches of philosophy. But that's a few thousand years before the internet, and the renaissance at the latest was where philosophy was fully separate from sciences and mathematics.
In addition to these points we also have a handful of weaker-than-arithmetic but provably-decidable theories, which jointly encompass almost everything done on a finite computer.
No, coding is linguistics.
> No. Coding is mathematics. The internet exists because of engineering. The web was invented because of physics.
Maybe, only maybe, getting to know the history of the internet (oh, and of mathematics, too), of the people that designed and built it, would inform a little more your stance.
Separating so bluntly maths, physics, biology, from humanities (and reciprocally) is precisely a trait that is telling of an unbalanced understanding of the world humanity built around itself with all these languages and abstractions to describe it.
So, you accuse me of being uninformed and having an unbalanced understanding.
But where are your arguments, and where is your evidence? Or should I derive from this that all arguments in the humanities boil down to name-calling?
I am not accusing, I am perceiving that from your stance.
No. You should derive from that that human life, and humanities being part of that, are a matter of experience, more than of argument/convincing. I could spend some time to argue with you about that, but you're showing you are not open to such a discussion, and my time is more valuable (and yours) than that.
It's like sex, intimacy, sight, smell, touch: you can't argue about it or explain it to someone who never experienced it.
It's definitely hard to argue or demonstrate how sometimes a book, a painting, a music can turn around your whole perspective on things.
So you argue that humanities are like art, cooking, literature, sexual preferences: a matter of personal taste, which I supposedly lack. The general consensus about matters of taste is that it is pointless to argue about those. And that matters of taste are an indulgence, important only to fans of that particular variety.
Which means that humanities cannot be important to mankind as a whole, because most won't appreciate them, as they are a matter of taste. And they are as arbitrary as other matters of taste, lacking the universality that is necessary for usefulness. Good riddance!
Not a matter of taste: a matter first of own experience.
I don’t know if you lack anything there. What you say is indicative of such a lack of it.
And your conclusion is obviously negated by history and experience itself.
And your final envoy is indicative of a kind of comptent that is itself a tell. Farewell indeed.
Ah. So you determine I'm not in the in-group for the magic circle that is humanities, so I can never appreciate or evaluate them. And you place any evaluation entirely in the subjective realm, such that no objectivity is possible anyways.
So it's not just a matter of taste, humanities are a cult.
You are stating that a specific segment of human experience and knowledge is a cult, without a sensible argument, and as displaying a very astute contempt and seeming lack of experience towards this segment. With an absolutist stance. And then, ask people to prove you wrong. What do you expect?
Not sorry, doesn't work that way.
Its disingenuous to discard the contribution of humanities. To name a few of the top of my mind:
Chomsky hierarchy is an important concept in programming languages and could be considered as originating from linguistics
Philosophy (which is counted in humanities) has had massive contributions to Logic and formal methods in computer science.
There's even more examples of humanities contribution in HCI and AI safety.
Philosophy split off mathematical logic 200 years ago. Boole and Bolzano lived around 1800 to 1850 or something. There were no contributions from philosophy after that.
Chomsky is one I grant you, he was influential in both computer science as well as linguistics. But his success in linguistics was even more revolutionary than his influence on CS, exactly because he introduced abstraction, rigor and various ideas from computer science and mathematics into linguistics.
What it actually seems like is that Humanities are trying to retain/gain power in this new world where it's increasingly apparent that rigor is far more valuable.
If humanities taught logic, and actually rigorous analytic capabilities that were on par with STEM, I don't think we'd be in the situation we're in now.
Instead it's the opposite. The departments have made humanities increasingly easier, thereby devaluing them even more.
Hi, have you heard of philosophy?
Hi, Phil major here. I did math. I did logic, which was required. My peers in other humanities generally did not. But Phil might be the only exception.
Further I ended up taking a class that actually read original Greek texts, which isn't all that common even within the department I was at.
My point still stands.
One can graduate in philosophy without having heard a formal logic lecture. Philosophy only has rigor in some branches, most modern ones are less rigorous and more social, political or economical.
Rigor is not enough to build durability and sustainability. You learn that when you learn to build structures. It's not even metaphorical.
Wordplay isn't an argument. You learn that when you actually do engineering.
Humanities are far, far more than "wordplay".
So far the entire field of "AI safety" is one big grift that has never produced anything of value. The people who work in that field have vivid imaginations but lack the practical writing skills to become published sci-fi authors.
As someone with a degree in fine arts, good. A lot more of these programs need to be downsized or removed. Not because they aren't popular, they are (or were when I went) extremely popular. Rather they have poor outcomes for the students. After 4 years, I was left with the realization that I had wasted my time, and I was further away from a career than my peers.
I know people will push back and say that is not the point of the university. But it doesn't change the fact that our economy is not built on poetry and painting, but we educate large number of people to specialize as one. Those people are instead left in debt with no path forward in their chosen field.
From a fellow classically trained artist, I too feel disenchanted with my BFA.
I'm surprised so many folks defend the university system for fine arts. It's a relatively modern notion, as in only a few decades! Historically, arts education is provided in museum, academy, apprentice, and/or community settings. Academic (as in the modern university system) art is still in its early stages and deserves criticism. I assume much of our cohort are in a worse position for their commitment to an art degree.
I think some of the disconnect is that when people think of humanities they think of the masters, and not attending figure drawing classes while accruing 5-10 years worth of salary as debt.
I'd say that this is a take only for your time, not for all time. For all time, learning about the humanities has shown to further one's ability to reason, create and imagine. IMHO Curiosity paired with an understanding of humanity (social skills) will become the most valuable job skills. The ability to talk and connect with people will outweigh any technical skill. You can only do this by understanding humanity and living in a society that promotes and fosters humanity.
In the near term, AI will override any and all non-physical skills. However AI is not able to create or imagine, it can only mimic and regurgitate. Additionally, it cannot fix a leaking shower, and it cannot make your bed. Add in physical real-world limitations and complexities,(randomness and disorder), and you have a world where physical skills and artistic abilities will dominate.
People will value authenticity, human touch and the magic that is human creativity (love) more and more as the non-physical world becomes less and less real.
Makers, Do-ers, Designers and Caretakers will dominate the workforce in 25 years.
I agree with your axioms but not your conclusion.
People do value human creativity, but why do you think that comes from the degree mills and monocultures of the humanities departments? I don't agree that these departments foster creativity, rather the opposite, they foster conformity. There are lots of concrete real life examples of this.
I think that creativity doesn't come from humanities departments, but more likely, organically from counter culture. Who doesn't know what a rick roll is? This did not come from a humanities department.
Edit:
Forgot to add my second point: AI is going to let people outside the mainstream produce genuinely credible, professional-level work without a massive budget.
That means further devaluing of establishment institutions like humanities departments. It strips away the gatekeeping power, deciding who gets to count as legit. AI blows that up.
I'm not sure why you're being down voted. Art degrees aren't aimed at artists. There are dedicated schools to go to for things like graphics design and other creative degrees, but those aren't the sort of humanities degrees that we're talking about.
I vaguely recall even creative art degrees as being looked down upon by artists as teaching you to conform to certain styles, essentially mimicry rather than creativity (though it has been some years since anyone in my network attended one).
In any case, despite the waxing philosophical of the personal growth value of a humanities degree, there's still the fact that every college and university also advertises job placement rates of their majors. Individual courses may focus on specific topics, but the people taking your money are promising job opportunities to parents and school councilors to convince them that the over inflated price tags are worth it.
> Art degrees aren't aimed at artists.
Yes, they are.
> There are dedicated schools to go to for things like graphics design and other creative degree
Yes, there are dedicated trade schools for graphic design just like there are coding bootcamps.
There are also university degree programs designed for creative artists. (And yes, there are universities that specialize exclusively, or nearly so, in those degrees and are highly regarded within them, just as is the case in STEM.)
There are some art-adjacent degrees that aren't primarily focussed on doing art (Art History being the most common and well-known one) and some of the creative-focussed programs may have options to focus on more critical/analytical vs. practical concentrations available, as well.
But creative degrees focussed on actual creative output whether writing or film or theater or dance or music or photography or other visual art are a very big slice of the humanities.
> But creative degrees focussed on actual creative output whether writing or film or theater or dance or music or photography or other visual art are a very big slice of the humanities.
But the result doesn't seem to be very creative, so what is the point?
Christina P: “I graduated with a degree in philosophy only to discover The Philosophy Corporation wasn’t hiring.”
A good point in general but not here specifically: among the various liberal arts degrees, philosophy majors have some of the highest average earnings.
Because they have the highest IQs. Philosophy programs are a sink for smart students who don’t want to do math or engineering. Employers don’t actually value the philosophy degree itself.
Employers? Philosophy majors are generally unemployable, unless they're going into law. Though they do tend to make decent entrepreneurs or are self-employed in some other way.
At least that's my assumption from experience.
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A large fraction of philosophy majors go on to law school. It's great training for analyzing complex texts and writing logically sound arguments. These are timeless skills that apply to many areas even if the philosophical content itself doesn't have as much practical value in the labor market.
I worked at a state university for 8 years writing code, and I was in contact with many of its student facing offices. There is an office that is dedicated to showing that law school students have very positive post-graduation outcomes. Basically, they send them a survey asking them if they had full or part time employment, and if they said "yes" to it, the university counted it as a positive outcome. "96% of our law school graduates find work within 12 months".
I am quite confident that not only is philosophy a waste when it comes to finding gainful employment, going to law school to put that philosophy to good use is just doubling down on the same bad gamble. Large fraction? What about the remainder?
It really depends on the school. Most graduates of first and second tier law schools are able to pass the bar exam and find gainful employment as lawyers, or in a related field. But going to a "third tier toilet" law school seldom pays off, at least not financially.
>Most graduates of first and second tier law schools are able to pass the bar exam and find gainful employment as lawyers,
You believe this to be the case, because you're relying on the statistics provided by the office I described.
>But going to a "third tier toilet" law school seldom pays off, at least not financially.
This is a solid T2 school. But if you were working at Subway whatever hours they'd give you, they marked you down as employed for the purposes of saying their graduates get jobs.
Let me push back and say that is not the point of university.
If you take the stance that education's function is to act like a feeder for business institutions; I guess? But that's only one byproduct of a strong education. Another is research; the other is critical thinking and civil productivity as a whole.
I'm as pro-capital as any private industry-focused tech worker is; but lets not pretend that's all the value we get out of the humanities.
Ever watch Netflix these days? Woof.
But that isn't the pitch. "You go to college so you can get a good job..."
The fact is, the entire college/university system is outsized and wrong-fit for what most people actually need. And while I don't think humanities programs should be cut from universities, I also don't think that taxpayer backed student loans or payouts should be made for programs that have vastly more people enrolled in than the general economy has a demand/need for.
I'd like to see more accredited options for trade schools beyond what people currently think of as trades. From accounting, to software development. I know there are some schools that focus on these things, I just think they should be more at the forefront and higher profile options.
Isn't it fine if different degrees lead to different job opportunities? A nineteen year old should be able to understand the difference between the job market for a doctor or engineer and the job market for an MFA.
We don't need to have different institutions to grant different degrees with different levels of marketability. A college that only taught lucrative subjects and a college that taught non-lucrative subjects would both offer less educational value than a single college that offered the full range.
Sure... have all the options out there.. but taking on debt, and the risks associated should also account for the ability and risk of paying it back or not... which is pretty heavily dependent on the program in question.
I'm fine with people choosing whatever they want... but then the question comes down to how/who pays for it... and I'm emphatically not in favor of public (taxpayer) funding for programs that don't have a direct need/demand in society or the economy in general.
You want to be a fine arts major.. go for it. It may be harder if you need student loans to pay for it, when there's a few thousand people working on that degree and a few hundred jobs in the world of demand.
Someone graduating with a BFA intending to teach art or music at the K-12 level might be very satisfied with their job prospects and the life it leads to. There are at the very least tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of art and music teachers in the United States.
A bachelor's degree is required to be a K-12 teacher, so if it's impossible for teachers to pay undergraduate student loans, the problem is not with the teacher or the degree they chose to get.
A BFA wont qualify you to work as a teacher at an accredited school in the US. Positions at those schools that allow you to "teach" without a teaching degree are typically part time and volunteer.
What do you mean? Music and art teachers typically have BFAs. There are BFA programs designed for teachers, including the pedagogical training that qualifies them for teaching.
My BFA does not qualify me to be a teacher anywhere I have looked (south east, new england, ca). I do not meet the educational requirements or the practical classroom time to got a teaching certificate required to teach K-12.
I am sure there are programs that are a mix between a typical BFA program and a teaching degree, but that is not the norm.
Oh, yeah, if you don't specifically train to be a teacher, you won't qualify. I'm just saying that (AFAIK, and from a specifically Texas perspective) most people who intend to be art or music teachers get a BFA. Many of my high school teachers earned degrees specific to their subject, like B.S. in Chemistry, B.A. in History, B.A. in Literature, while concurrently completing the coursework that qualified them for teaching. You don't have to be an education major. Most state universities also have programs for people who have a bachelors degree to complete the requirements for teaching, too, and I think those programs qualify for financial aid even if they don't lead to an additional degree.
At the same time, a healthy society needs people who are trained in the arts and humanities. The reason you experienced a bad outcome is because our society doesn't care much about this, despite being richer and more able to afford the arts than at any point in history. I would also argue that, not coincidentally, our society is unhealthy, and getting more so.
Your solution is like pointing out that the patient can't tolerate food anymore, so the solution is just not to feed them. It's all true! And also misses the fact that something is causing the patient to starve.
It's more like the patient needs some fixed amount of food each day and it doesn't make a lot of sense to create lots more food than they need on the hopes that someday they'll want to eat more than they can.
If the argument is that everyone should focus on the arts at the expense of everything else, it's hard to imagine that's an ideal outcome relative to alternatives. If we're not arguing that everyone should focus 100% on the arts (no other degrees should be available), then it's a matter of degree and certainly some outcomes might end up with more people pursuing the arts than what society needs.
What is your solution? Should the rest of us all consume more art? A lot of people are struggling just to pay for housing and food.
In many wealthy societies, there is broad funding for the arts and humanities. Here in the US we're discussing massive cuts for art and humanities funding. These amounts aren't large, and presumably we can afford them -- given the massive tax cuts we just passed for people making over $500,000 and the increased funding we came up with for ICE and the military.
Why should I (as a taxpayer) have to pay for a luxury item like art? If you want to pay for that, you are free to do so.
>Your solution is like pointing out that the patient can't tolerate food anymore, so the solution is just not to feed them. It's all true! And also misses the fact that something is causing the patient to starve.
Ironically, with chronic obesity and the related metabolic disorders becoming absolutely epidemic, people might do well to eat less. I can manage 48 hours at a stretch, it's only psychologically discomforting, I wish I could go 72 hours. It's like we have some sort of racial memory of the famines our ancestors suffered tens of thousands of years ago, and now we can't stop gorging ourselves.
>At the same time, a healthy society needs people who are trained in the arts and humanities.
Everyone thinks that the thing that they learned to do is what everyone should learn to do. Car mechanics think that people should be able to do repairs, at least know a little more about what goes wrong. And guess what? Our economy relies on them, and they're right... we do need people who can repair them. Janitors think that people should be able to clean things up. And guess what? We do need people who can clean things up. Shipbuilders, steelworkers, construction workers, farmers... we need people who can do those things.
No one was ever in danger and needed to be able to know Titian's third most famous painting. No one was ever rescued by liberal arts graduate's knowledge of third rate classical composers.
>I would also argue that, not coincidentally, our society is unhealthy, and getting more so.
I would agree. People need gainful employment opportunities, and the training to be able to take advantage of those. They need to enter adulthood debt free, and not just student debt, but to also know that the government isn't mortgaging their future paying for a bloated secondary education system today that is wasting years of their lives and hundreds of billions in fortune setting them up to fail. If academia doesn't want to be the vocational schools that it dreads to be associated with, then it should shut up and quit pretending that it has much to offer the vast majority of people. Maybe it didn't claim that these degrees would set everyone up for life, but it certainly didn't protest when others made that claim for it.
>despite being richer and more able to afford the arts than at any point in history.
We're all actually poor. As a country. (Other countries too, come to that.) We remember having once been rich, and we're in denial about it no longer being true. We can't even afford social security, old people will need to start dying sooner. Even the so-called billionaires for the most part just have a pile of stock certificates in the vault. Even on this very website, we see constant links about making people live in pods because it's no longer possible to build housing anyone can afford. You now rent the things your grandparents used to buy outright, and to buy seconds and thirds when they got bored with the first. You tell yourself it's because it's more convenient, but you couldn't afford to pay for it up front if you wanted.
We're that married couple swimming in credit card debt. They deny that it's a big deal, look here we can juggle this one and use that one to pay the minimum payment on the third card. And don't you think we can't keep doing that, we'll be able to do it next month too! But I'm not even allowed to talk about it, because a full 8 or 9 years ago the people on the left told everyone that credit card analogies don't work for a country as big and rich as the United States.
Fewer than 7% of all high school graduates should even go on to higher education. High school should become more strict, willing to flunk everyone who fails to meet rigorous standards. We need our government to make a true effort to reindustrialize.
I'm not even sure what it is you're complaining about. That people are forcing students to spend money studying subjects that don't have lucrative careers following them? None of this information is secret; if you think that rational people can't figure out that arts careers have poor prospects, then you don't believe in the free market in the first place. (And, to some extent I'm happy to entertain that discussion -- I'm just willing to bet that "the free market makes bad decisions" is not part of your specific basket of off-the-shelf beliefs.)
Long shot, but maybe require humanities as a minor for tech and business majors so that our technology might start to be built with humanity.
This is what a liberal arts institution is (the university I went to is one). At my uni if you are taking a science degree you need to take 4 social science classes and 4 fine arts/humanities. and vice versa for students in fine arts/social sciences.
Yes, some colleges already require that.
https://www.hmc.edu/hsa/program/
Actually I think it's the other way around. Humanities should require math and science in order for people to graduate.
At the minimum Calculus/Stats + a CS class + some kind of science should be the absolute bare minimum.
Yeah, I feel like something has got to give, maybe we don’t fund student loans for certain majors. Maybe we bring back certain types of book or social clubs to learn these materials instead. Online learning? I totally see the beauty in the humanities, it’s largely all I read for fun, But you can’t have a system that incentivizes people to take out bigger and bigger loans on investments that don’t pay back.
Student loan approval and interest rates should be based on actuarial calculations that account for risk of default based on school and major. This will allow market signals to work rather than treating everyone the same. Some people have this fantasy that everyone should be able to study their passion even if it's something with no value in the labor market but in the real world society can collectively only afford to have a tiny fraction of scholars living a life of the mind.
Yeah, I’d love to live in the post-agi utopia where we can all do what we want, but liberals are often not good at making trade offs within our own value systems
That's kind of my pov, on the funding aspect. Student loans should definitely have an aspect depending on the major/minor chosen.
>> our economy is not built on poetry and painting
Really? Hollywood operates on the efforts of screenwriters and digital rendering masters, both areas very informed by poetry and painting. Graphic design and quick language are the basis of online ads, which in turn are what supports the likes of Facebook and Google. If not for the wordsmiths and visual artists, the modern internet would be a very different place.
Hollywood is part of the economy, but only a small one, around 3% of US GDP. All of arts and entertainment is around 4.5%: https://www.statista.com/statistics/248004/percentage-added-...
And without the DRM, lockdown and prosecution demands of Hollywood, the internet would indeed be a better, freer place.
You're looking for a trade school. Universities have always been about education often for the sake of learning. Generating money just came to be a nice side effect as knowledge work grew in value.
That's a nice fantasy that hasn't been true for a long time. Even university websites talk just as much about career opportunities as they do personal growth.
Them mentioning both kind of destroys the idea that university is just a job pathway.
https://archive.is/YbXI4
IMHO Outcome Based Funding is a better model for public education.
https://freopp.org/whitepapers/aligning-state-higher-educati...
As you might imagine this is favorable to STEM and unfavorable to the humanities. But I think that expensive private institutions are a better venue to educate students who are more insulated from economic disadvantage in disciplines with a low return on investment. It's a good thing to bias the opportunities of disadvantaged students in favor of greater earning capacity. In higher education, the lower the expected pay for a skill set, the more it should be treated as a luxury good.
"Only rich kids should get to choose what they study in school, poor kids are too dumb to make their own choices"
The argument is rather that humanities degrees are a luxury item. Neither kids just starting out their adult lives nor society should be burdened propping up departments whose value doesn't match their price tag.
Good? Encouraging people to go into six-figure debt for a degree with no earning potential is gross and predatory.
And making it un-dischargeable in bankruptcy so people are either in perpetual debt bondage or the taxpayer picks up the tab for the inflated costs takes it from gross to downright criminal.
I'd be a lot more OK with student loan jubilees if universities had to pay the remaining principal on any forgiven loans. They'd immediately get their costs under control and be a lot more careful about degree programs which don't have any earning potential.
I don’t disagree with your general point, but for clarity, student loans are non-dischargeable because they have been federally guaranteed since 1965. Meaning that if the borrower defaulted, taxpayers would be on the hook. And the reason for the federal guarantees was that students are bad credit risks. So without the guarantees, banks wouldn’t lend to students, especially disadvantaged ones.
It almost sounds like student loans should be harder to get. Giving a student a loan seems like a bad bet. All the parties that know how to do a proper risk analysis aren't willing to take that on. So this hot potato gets passed around. Eventually it ends up back on the prospective student, who is least equipped to make a rational financial decision.
Kind of makes the whole thing sound like a scam from that perspective.
The reason for the federal guarantees was because voters wanted lower taxes, or otherwise did not want to redistribute wealth to students.
It’s a common way to scam today’s young and future taxpayers. See also underfunded pensions and other post employment benefits for government employees and taxpayer guaranteed 30 year fixed rate mortgages with no prepayment penalty.
Instead of helping someone, society lends them money and lets future taxpayers deal with the mess. That is how you win elections in aging societies.
Yeah, I think the argument for the humanities can only exist if college wasn't outrageously expensive.
The world made college into a checkpoint to get a good salaried position, it's not the same as the old geezers experienced it, where college was thought of as a bonus education, but not solely needed to get a decent paying job.
Those of us who came of age in the dotcom era already had the vocational skills to pull big salaries, so college was a bonus education. I (and others in this thread) have a philosophy degree because of it.
Which part do you object to more? The policy choice to have the entire cost borne by the student (in the US, specifically)?
Or "society" encouraging people to study the humanities?
100% on the non-dischargeable debt. I appreciate the humanities and their importance, but encouraging kids to take out loans to study them, with no risk to the lender, is obscene.
Good riddance.
The latest chapter of America’s cultural revolution has been driven largely by radical currents in the humanities and by students eager to impose them beyond campus.
It is finally time for universities to reconsider what they truly want to teach. They need to stop producing ideological foot soldiers and focus instead on real learning,including the humanities, when they are done honestly and not just used to push one narrow worldview.
With so much changing in the world right now, we urgently need the humanities to recover their integrity and purpose.
> They need to stop producing ideological foot soldiers
That's right, MAGAs can do that for themselves, and none of them are educated!
> and focus instead on real learning
Yep, whatever the Eternal Leader says is real is real. Climate change is a hoax, thus spake the Eternal Leader.
If your goal is to push back against Trumpism, denial that flagrant university indoctrination doesn't happen... is certainly one of the strategy's of all time.
yes, pushing back on fascism is flagrant indoctrination. even reality has Trump derangement syndrome!
how do you even propose such indoctrination would work? would they be revoking visas for supporting Trump? would they be picking people off the streets and sending them to extraterritorial concentration camps?
Sorry but this is what the GOP actually did by weaponizing the uneducated evangelical zealots
https://thehill.com/opinion/education/5446702-performative-v...
> The result is not conviction but compliance.
aka. being a dick gets you kicked out of social groups.
All right, let's sum up. This year we explored the failure of democracy. How our social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos. We talked about the veterans, how they took control and established the stability that has lasted for generations since. You know these facts, but have I taught you anything of value this year?
People who agree with this happening take for granted the critical ways humanities education contextualizes and guides stem research and progress. By studying the humanities you peer past the present and all of its trappings in the capitalistic race to the bottom. Shame on you humanities graduates that believe there being zero English, History, English, etc majors will lead to a better world.
Zero may not be the optimal number but nobody is arguing for zero anyway. Also, you don't need to be a History major to study history.
"you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!"
I think the universities made a mistake in becoming too culturally left wing. The faculty (and students) in the humanities in particular are far to the left of the political mainstream. (I am on the left though more focused on labor rights and good jobs than identity politics.)
The attack on the universities is fueled by this divergence, now that the right is firmly in power. This will just hurt the country in the long run. There was so much group think and silencing happening on the left over the last decade. It seems now to have been self-destructive.
Some university humanities departments undermined themselves by being divisive and exclusionary. Several years ago the University of Chicago made this public statement.
"For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies."
There's nothing wrong with encouraging scholarship in a particular field but when they intentionally exclude other fields it tends to limit public support. Taxpayers will naturally question why they're being asked to subsidize student loans, and wonder whether universities are being used to promote ideologies rather than educate.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/16/university-ch...
This is a popular criticism that is partially true, but it rings a bit hollow because conservatives (rather, Republicans) don't seem to want intellectual career paths. They're nowhere to be found in academia.
And, to pre-empt the usual objection, they aren't being crowded out by ideology. They aren't there in the first place. They're not in the STEM majors outside of engineering, and they're not in the humanities except for law. Otherwise you'll find them in sales, marketing, business, and management.
These people complain about academia but have little invested in it in the first place.
They are chased out of academia. I knew professors who were proudly, vocally socialist but the professors who had any conservative leanings were very subtle about it.
You don't get tenure if your fellow professors don't like you, and they've created their own echo chamber long ago.
In contradiction to your point, the conservative professors and teachers that I knew were not in arts humanities at all (with one exception in law) but in crunchier fields like economics. The STEM and maths professors didn't talk social topics at all, so it is impossible to know what their feelings were.
If the students aren't there, there won't be professors.
The mechanism that lead to this is imho that humanities generally do not have any more grounding in facts, logic or reality. Science, technology and (to some extent) medicine and mathematics are bound to describe existing phenomena that occur in nature. They do this by observation and experiments (except mathematics), proposing axioms and theory, and then bringing those into strict logical agreement. Humanities nowadays reject observation and experiments as biologism. Or they never had those, and always just proposed ideas to be discussed, like in philosophy. They also nowadays reject objective logic and proof in favour of subjective evaluations and a wholly individual-centered world view.
This decline of rigor in the humanities means that they no longer really teach logic, critical thinking, or any kind of reality-related ideas. What they do is arbitrary and therefore objectively pointless, except maybe to further some political or social goal. That those goals are mostly left-wing is imho just an accident, they could as well be promoting right-wing politics.
(In a similar manner, arts now reject their original goals of beauty, aesthetics, depictions of reality, mastery and entertainment. But that's less of a problem, because arts have always been even less important than humanities.)
> In a similar manner, arts now [...]
Really, it's quite a stance to not have a background in arts and history of the arts, and perhaps epistemology as well, and writing this.
Then prove me wrong with facts, instead of just arguing ad hominem.
You make a false dichotomy first, with an additional straw man, and continue in a circular argument. This alone renders your conclusion unsupported regardless of your premises.
Then you mistake what could be a rather evasive appeal to authority with an ad hominem.
Perhaps engaging more deeply with the actual methodologies and scholarship within these fields might reveal the rigor you claim is absent.
You're masquerading your assertion as an argument.