Often, they’re not spending their own money, but other people’s money.
Congratulations on your mind-reading skills.
No, this isn’t true. We all can, and should, express ourselves on the subject, especially given the amount of public money being spent on it.
Regards,
Shodan
Since micro was one of the ones I clepped, I’m not sure the argument holds - if anything, it shows that you can boil an entire semester class into one or two basic concepts that take a few sentences to communicate rather than literal months wasted in class and tests that you could have spent exploring ideas and frontiers you were actually interested in.
On a broad education making you smarter, where is the evidence? Do you have any citations? Because I fundamentally disagree that a FORCED “broadening” of education is either a worthwhile or efficacious goal, and that’s where we are today.
By all means, we should OFFER a broad diversity of classes in college - the more the merrier, and let everyone follow their innate interests. But literally forcing a broad diversity, particularly when the fact of forcing it itself terminally degrades the quality of instruction and the amount you can actually learn about the topic on hand, I feel is a mistake.
If you have some peer-reviewed citations or evidence otherwise though, I’d be interested in reading it.
No the point of this discussion is;
- do you all see other schools paring down certain departments, mostly in the liberal arts and humanities fields, and focusing on others which have clear career pathways?
- having programs be required to show employment, income, and job placement data for its graduates?
I think schools already can with all the online coursework available.
This also I agree with.
Dont colleges always talk about how much or how little money they get from the state? They are not private schools. Why shouldnt the general taxpayers have some say in what is taught there?
If an institution has illogical “requirements” for graduation, students are free to avoid that institution. I chose mine, in part, because it allowed great flexibility in designing my own course of study. I think there were general areas we had to hit (science, history, literature) for a BA degree, but many choices within each area that could satisfy the requirements. My daughter, similarly, picked a school that didn’t require her to take any math courses. Some schools require foreign language study, some don’t. Each college will decide what they believe are essential courses for all to take. (plus, the accrediting agencies will influence the curriculum too). The tension between minimum requirements and student choice is always present, and every school will navigate it differently.
You know, the right wing has turned really against learning, knowledge, and science over the last decade or two. It’s rather refreshing to see their even greater disdain of the social sciences and humanities be so formidable that they can hold heir nose long enough to embrace education in sciences, if only for a fleeting second.
Of course, should universities adopt the proposal to eliminate social sciences and humanities, I’m sure the goalposts will move again. Maybe we will start hearing that the only use of universities is to produce military officers and football players.
I just want to add in here that I enjoyed and got a heck of alot more out of english comp 1 and comp 2 in college at the jr. college than I did later taking comp 3 at the university level and definitely more than english and language courses back in high school.
Why? Only in comps 1 and 2 did I learn to write! In high school it was all about crap like diagramming sentences and figuring out verb tenses and such. In comp 3 we read different books (which we had to buy) and discussed them. In comparison English comps 1 and 2 at the university level have maybe 300 students in the class (ours had about 20) and you had to buy maybe 15 books.
But only in comp 1 and comp 2 (which BTW, I took both in the summer) did I learn to actually write. Plus we only used ONE small, cheap textbook (the Little, Brown Book) and even that just barely. so comps 1 and 2 were quick, to the point, and cheap. HERE is where it was.
Similarly, if you take the home mortgage interest deduction, taxpayers should have the right to tell you to take that awful “Elvis on velvet” abomination out of your living room.
The general taxpayers have the same say in education as they do over all the other functions of their states. State universities are run by state employees who are accountable to elected officials. In my state, the regents of the state higher education system are themselves elected officials.
You pick the people that run things. If you want more say than that, run for Regent.
This is a common strawman objection for persons who have a major stake in those areas such as persons who are employed in those departments. They will come up with a way to either coerce or force students to take their courses.
I remember they would tell students to “dont think about the money, follow your dreams” and other crap to get students to waste time going after a worthless degree.
But listen up. times change. College is way too expensive to waste ones time and colleges are paring down their institutions. Not every school NEEDS a department for blah blah studies.
So basically, your just trying to justify a college wasting resources.
Irrelevant question simply because the world has changed so much. For example:
- Cost. Students didnt take out $100,000 loans back then that they would end up taking 20 years to pay off.
- Job market. Few people had college degrees back then so even crappy degrees could often get one a job. Back then a law degree was a ticket to the upper class. Now lawyers often barely make it.
- Gender balance. How many women were getting degrees back then outside of education and nursing?
- International competition. Back then jobs were not being outsourced nor were companies replacing american workers with foreigners.
So basically students could afford to take 10 years to complete college with the knowledge they could then get a decent job when graduating.
Right, this is why I wonder, why not just go for a program like this one where you learn to install wind turbines? Its only 2 years long, cost just $14,000, and leads straight to a decent paying job?
You know what? I think the left wing has done a poor job on their end. They have wasted both time and money and given to society what? Graduates with degrees in worthless areas they cannot get jobs in so 10 years after they graduate they are still living with their parents, working at Starbucks, and trying to pay back those huge loans they took out because professor GrabYourBucks convinced them that a degree in blah-blah would lead to lifetime fullfillment!
THEN they wonder, why the heck didnt I just go and learn to be a plumber?
No offense, but if that’s the case, then why is your spelling and grammar so incredibly shitty?
You can thank the Bush recession for that. My son-in-law got his law degree at just the wrong time. But things seem to have recovered, and he is indeed headed for the upper class.
As for getting jobs, I graduated in 1973 and it was a matter of the state of the economy. CS degrees certainly meet all your usefulness standards, but tell a 2001 graduate how great he had it.
Sorry, I didn’t know anyone who took ten years. Often people taking a long time are doing so because they are working part time to pay for college. Lots of colleges try to get people out - Maryland for one, at least when my daughter went there.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there were approximately 5800 wind turbine technicians in the US in 2016, and the Bureau expected the field to roughly double between 2016 and 2026. Say 12,000 total technicians. Once those 12,000 jobs are filled, what else is a graduate in Wind Turbine Technology qualified to do? What kind of options does a wind turbine technician have if it turns out (s)he hates the job? Between now and 2026, there will be roughly 40 million students graduating from post-secondary degree programs. If everyone working in that field quits today and those 12,000 jobs are each filled by one of those graduates, you’ve still got 40 million grads, give or take, who need jobs.
The BLS also reports that the bottom 10% of wind turbine techs earn around $37,000 a year - I assume that’s entry level pay. But in 2015, the mean starting salary for humanities graduates was just over $46,000. And over a lifetime, that difference adds up.
Here’s an article discussing that. Check out table 4 - that shows the statistically-derived lifetime earnings for men and women with various degrees, as well as for high school graduates. It also regresses those earnings to a present value at age 20. An average male high school graduate earns just under $1.5 million over 40 years of work. An average man with a BA in liberal arts/humanities, art, or architecture earns just over $1.9 million. Regressing those lifetime earnings to a present value at age 20, the median liberal arts degree for a man is worth $115,000. Women’s expected lifetime earnings are less, but the difference between high school and college grad is greater - the median liberal arts degree for women is worth $139,000. That’s a straight economic calculation that doesn’t take into account flexibility in employment, enjoyment of work, experiences, or any other intangible reward that higher education offers. Differences are much great for STEM degrees and grad degrees, but even the BAs that are so frequently derided as worthless show a significant return on average.
Clearly, that’s why no less a bastion of the left than the Wall Street Journal has repeatedly touted liberal arts degrees over the last few years.
:rolleyes: Excuse me for finally interrupting your enjoyment of content-free speculation and threadbare folklore with inconvenient allusions to fact, but… cite? Exactly what evidence are you basing your stereotyped claims about so-called “worthless areas” on?
For example, this assessment of the 10 currently “worst” college majors for lucrative career prospects lists the following:
There are only three stereotypically “useless” traditional liberal-arts degree fields (art, anthropology, and religion) among that top ten. The rest of them are non-liberal-arts job-focused majors: exactly the sort of thing you claim colleges ought to be focusing on more. But apparently they lead the pack as some of the most useless majors for graduates today.
(I note with amusement that one of these “ten most useless” fields, namely graphic design, is one of the subjects that the university campus in your OP is promoting as a curricular replacement for some traditional humanities majors! It just goes to show that trying to tailor educational programs narrowly to current trends in an eternally variable job market is ultimately a fool’s errand, even if the fools who tend to indulge in it like to think of themselves as hard-headed and practical.)
Again, I recognize that all these discussions are skewed by the heavy burden of higher education debt in the modern American educational system, and I don’t blame students for being fearful of that prospect. We should definitely make higher education less of a financial ball and chain for the students who undertake it. But we won’t improve the situation by rehashing stale myths and uninformed prejudices about the alleged “worthlessness” of specific subjects in defiance of evidence.