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You miss my point.

STEM research has plenty of room for mundane, boring, routine work.
A great deal of real science is patiently sifting through shitloads of data, looking for the correlation that ties it all together, or the one "Aha!" spike in the data buried inside a billion other useless points.

I'm also not saying 'close all the arts & humanities programs!'
There is a real need for those professions in the world.
Just not in the numbers that current universities try to produce.
Perhaps 1 A&H:100 STEM ratio seems more sane.

B.Sci degrees (usually) have a good number of arts & humanities courses in the syllabus.
For the vast majority of people, of vastly average intellect, they are more useful to society as work-a-day drones in STEM careers.
A little exposure to arts & humanities to round out their intellectual development, but a larger portion of the syllabus devoted to useful careers.

We really don't need anymore Starbucks waiters with a masters degree in Sociology or Philosophy.
The universities here are producing far too many graduates with arts & humanities degrees.
They are loading delusional kids up with student loans, preying on their dreams in career fields that are grossly oversaturated.


Would you rather read another hand-wringing derivative paper on just how badly the Algerians had it?
Or would you rather fund engineering projects to make things better there (water, food, infrastructure), or medics and doctors to go over there?
Might need one or ten good journalists to bring the matter to public attention, but then you need another 100 or 1000 STEM drones to go actually fix things.

Most of the humanities graduates here are doomed to serve lattes, scribbling novels on napkins, hoping to be the next JK Rowling.
Their education is, for the most part, wholly impractical and inapplicable to the workplace.
They delve far too deeply into obscure niche studies at the undergrad level here, and neglect fundamentals of a general education.
What the arts & humanities need is a good general education, applicable to the current needs of the job market.
They are not getting it.

It is like the sports programs in colleges, or even inner city highschools - selling the 1:1,000,000 dream of playing for the NBA or NFL, while undereducating the student athletes for their more probable real-world career after their college sports days are over.

Yes it is a structural issue, a financial issue, and a logistics issue.
The education system, from Kindergarten through PhD, is very much broken here.

We do have a slant towards the practical, historically speaking.
Not sure if it applies to the US currently.
I think we're currently stuck in Entitlement to Entertainment thinking.

My point is that there is a place for Art & Humanities.
That place is not, however, as a mythical pot of gold waiting at the end of a $50,000 student loan rainbow.

Last edited by rdx-fx (2012-10-06 12:24:20)

Jay wrote:

Who are you to tell others how to live their lives?

You think you're the next JK Rowling, or Michael Jordan?
Go for it. Good luck.
No, really.
And breve means make my latte 'with cream or half/half' rather than 2% milk, please.

I'd prefer to see the kids graduating with more options, more employable skills.
Not stuck as waiters or baristas or bloggers or interns.

rdx-fx wrote:

Most of the humanities graduates here are doomed to serve lattes, scribbling novels on napkins, hoping to be the next JK Rowling.
Their education is, for the most part, wholly impractical and inapplicable to the workplace.
They delve far too deeply into obscure niche studies at the undergrad level here, and neglect fundamentals of a general education.
What the arts & humanities need is a good general education, applicable to the current needs of the job market.
They are not getting it.

It is like the sports programs in colleges, or even inner city highschools - selling the 1:1,000,000 dream of playing for the NBA or NFL, while undereducating the student athletes for their more probable real-world career after their college sports days are over.

Yes it is a structural issue, a financial issue, and a logistics issue.
The education system, from Kindergarten through PhD, is very much broken here.

We do have a slant towards the practical, historically speaking.
Not sure if it applies to the US currently.
I think we're currently stuck in Entitlement to Entertainment thinking.

My point is that there is a place for Art & Humanities.
That place is not, however, as a mythical pot of gold waiting at the end of a $50,000 student loan rainbow.

yes but dilderp's problem is with people who make it to that 'pot of gold'; his problem is the pot of gold itself. he thinks high-level and successful professors are "deadbeats" studying "useless" things. i completely disagree with that. i think a professor at a top university has achieved a remarkable amount, considering all the odds and obstacles. do i think my professors are the most practical or world-wizened types? no, probably not. but that's not what they are there for. to my mind they are people that have given themselves to a pursuit and have achieved in that chosen pursuit to the highest possible level. dilderp thinks the only effort that counts is the effort that has gone into his own engineering career (he said to me in PM's that pretty much every other high-level profession is nonsense, for some dilderp justification or other-- very convenient).

i'm not here to talk about job prospects for american humanities graduates. that's their problem. i'm not really concerned with the job market at all, really. i think of education idealistically, in its original liberal-humanistic purpose. job markets and economies rise and fall, come and go; this decade's engineer was last decade's computer scientist. universities and students going to improve their minds shouldn't concern themselves too much with whatever the 'real world' supply&demand curve asks for at whatever current juncture. otherwise the university system would be shambles: up 600% on lawyers one year, then the employment gap is plugged, then up 125% on journalists the next, etc. universities shouldn't work to a quota. if someone wants to go to college to think about shakespeare for 4 years, it's their life and it's their brain. it WILL be good for them. the structural-employment problems (specific to the US) are a separate problem, to be solved with politics and higher-education policy, not philosophical-evaluative debates on 'subject x versus subject y'. a bright and intelligent humanities graduate being destined to work in a coffee shop shows a problem with the US job-market (or perhaps the college syllabus before that): it does not mean that the humanities themselves as a discipline are rubbish. it means you have particular problems at the institutional level that need to be solved.

Last edited by aynrandroolz (2012-10-06 12:46:09)

aynrandroolz wrote:

yes but dilderp's problem is with people who make it to that 'pot of gold'; his problem is the pot of gold itself. he thinks high-level and successful professors are "deadbeats" studying "useless" things. i completely disagree with that. i think a professor at a top university has achieved a remarkable amount, considering all the odds and obstacles.

[...]
universities shouldn't work to a quota.

I can't speak for Dilbert's perspective.
It would be like a horror movie for me to tread through the darkened hallways of his mind.

In my opinion, there is a very solid place for Arts & Humanities in a well rounded general education.
Art & humanities are the why?, to STEM's how? and what?.
Perspective, empathy, context, and understanding.

Jay,
What career field someone takes is none of my concern, on an individual level.
On a systemic, societal level, however, the general employability of the next generation IS my concern.
I want to see kids graduate college with employable skills, with the ability to put food on the table and a roof over their heads.
Past that, what they do to 'follow their personal bliss' is of no concern to me.

If the colleges gave the kids an honest assessment of their career prospects, and the mundane basic skills to start a career, that would be fair.
Instead they bullshit, feed the dreams & delusions, and rake in the student loan money.

A fair 'eyes open' assessment before they're loaded up with student loans, not after.
If they want to smoke pot, and finish their associates degree on the 6 year program - that's on them.

Yes, but that is the job of their parents, and barring that, their own research. You're asking colleges to step in and play daddy. That's not their job.

Jay wrote:

Yes, but that is the job of their parents, and barring that, their own research. You're asking colleges to step in and play daddy. That's not their job.

No, I'm asking for some truth in advertising, and some responsibility from the education system.

That is the systemic problem with the US right now;
A legal obligation to the shareholder, with a disregard for the quality of the product or an ongoing relationship with the customer. 

Profit margin doesn't define a quality product, and 'the market' is not the customer.

It gets worse when you apply a broken market logic to the education system.

Uzique wrote:

a certain way of thinking, a certain skill for considered contemplation and analysis, for critical thought, for rhetorical articulation and presentation. humanities and liberal arts students are meant to be well-rounded and open-minded.

All of that is a beautiful goal, but functionally useless without also teaching them the skills to apply those abilities in the real world.

If they want to go to college purely for knowledge or enlightenment, great for them.
I've taken classes purely for the joy of learning the topic.

You need the majority of college/university graduates to have both the enlightened classical liberal education, and a grounding in the skills to pay the bills.

My interest isn't in controlling others lives (Jay), or denigrating the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge (Uzi).
My interest is in the general health of a society that is failing to properly train the next generation of workers, and (on a personal level) the unfairness of preying on the hopes & dreams of naive college kids for predatory financial gain.

Give them a fair chance at a decent career, without stacking the odds against them from the start.

Uzique wrote:

listen to this snippet, it's from my favourite author giving a commencement speech at a prestigious liberal arts college.

Will listen later tonight.

I do get the whole classical liberal education concept.
I understand 'learning for the sake of knowledge & enlightenment'.
I would guess that about 1/3rd of my college credits are under 'personal edification'

But most people go to college as a step towards a profession, and the US education system, as it currently stands, is failing to provide that advertised service in too many ways.

Jay wrote:

It's not the job of colleges to play daddy, and it's certainly not their job to train people for a job. Sure, college can provide basic skills that are useful in a career, but they can't train people for a specific field. You're an engineer, yes? How often do you sit there with a pencil, paper and calculator and calculate the point load on a beam? How often do you calculate stress concentration factors? Or how about the step down voltage for a transformer and the losses due to hysteresis? Personally, all of my work is done in SolidWorks and I let the damn computer do the calculations for me. My school training simply gave me the ability to understand the fundamentals. Most of it was completely and utterly inapplicable to the work I do today. The real benefit of the engineering degree was it's emphasis on empirical problem solving. How to break down a problem into manageable pieces.

You're falling into the same trap as the politicians who are always talking about providing job training and retraining programs in order to get people back into the workforce. Those programs are better at getting people hooked up with welfare benefits than they are at getting people actual jobs. Their success rate is <20%. Colleges, like the government programs, can never possibly keep up with the changing demands of employers, and they shouldn't be asked to anyway. Why should the taxpayer fund training for private companies? That's what their own HR departments are for.

Exactly.

Theory classes are meant to give you the general concept.
Day to day engineering is mostly computer, spread sheet, and copypasta standards.
But, when your spreadsheet starts telling you the resistance is 24 amps, you have to know enough to figure out that's not right, and walk it back to where it's screwed up.

An undergrad degree doesn't teach you everything you need to know for that field.
No, an undergrad degree teaches you the basic principles and vocabulary of a field, and certifies that you should be trainable in a career within that general degree field.
Your employer will teach you the specifics of that job.

When the college has failed to train you in the basics, they have failed to provide their end of the deal.
The real basics - For an engineering example, MS Office, general CAD, ohms versus amps, speaking in front of an audience, organized writing, and 'how to self-educate'

The bullshit 'welfare to work' programs are a completely different scenario.
There are people who just need a hand up.
Then there are people who's most valuable educational lesson would be 'how to show up to work every day, on time, and do your job - even when you don't feel like it'.

rdx-fx wrote:

But, when your spreadsheet starts telling you the resistance is 24 amps, you have to know enough to figure out that's not right, and walk it back to where it's screwed up.

karma wrote:

resistance is in ohms, not amps

That was the point.
If "your spreadsheet starts telling you the resistance is 24 amps", then something is fucked up.

Since that was mostly aimed at Jay, I figured he'd get it.
And since the majority of people here are STEM degree types, I figured an explanation was unnecessary.

rdx-fx wrote:

rdx-fx wrote:

But, when your spreadsheet starts telling you the resistance is 24 amps, you have to know enough to figure out that's not right, and walk it back to where it's screwed up.

karma wrote:

resistance is in ohms, not amps

That was the point.
If "your spreadsheet starts telling you the resistance is 24 amps", then something is fucked up.

Since that was mostly aimed at Jay, I figured he'd get it.
And since the majority of people here are STEM degree types, I figured an explanation was unnecessary.

Most of us seriously don't have a clue as to what the hell you are talking about. This happens with like 75% of your post.

Last edited by Macbeth (2012-10-06 16:16:07)

Dilbert_X wrote:

Convince us otherwise, convince us that academic humanities departments are doing anything of remote use or interest to anyone but themselves, because I just don't see it.

aynrandroolz wrote:

ya sure let me spend my saturday afternoon typing another 5 posts to you when you have boneheadedly roped out this argument about 20 times in the past. okay dilbert, you've said it all before. barristers and lawyers are duplicitous and mendacious. academics are useless self-perpetuating deadbeats. financiers and traders are immoral and corrupt. publishing and journalism are full of nepotistic 'shirt tugging' toffs with useless degrees and great-uncles in high places. you have dismissed every single traditional 'high profession' with these bogus generalisations. except engineering of course. the new kid on the block, the status anxious profession, wanting to join the gentleman's club and the yacht club whilst simultaneously proclaiming to hate all that. the one truth path, divinely ordained. the highest expression of kismet. right. funny how that works.

also pretty funny how not many 40 year old academics, lawyers, traders, publishers, or journalists would still live at home. engineering and being a science geek that ardently hates the humanities seems to lead to a really sweet and enriched lifestyle. i'll take my tenure and wine clubs, thanks. you can keep your mom's wood-panelled basement and your collection of xena: warrior princess vhs tapes.

OK, so when push comes to shove you have nothing, factoids which prove to be wrong, or personal attacks - usually all three wrapped in a load of verbiage.
All those incisive criticism, analysis and argument skills the Fortune Times Industrial Stock Average 500 companies are ready to pay top dollar for don't add up to more than a hill of beans do they?

I'm going to stop now, I suggest you stop trying to ram your brilliance down other peoples throats and pissing all over their efforts and achievements a la

please be quiet, business major kid. people with real degrees are talking about adult topics. go back to revising elastic and inelastic theories of demand. the stuff that gets discussed in d&st doesn't have an 'answers' section at the back of the textbook.

great life ambition bro. "make someone else money". what a use of your brain. one life on this earth and your biggest want is to bendover and please a dude with an MBA. can tell you're first-generation college educated. you reek of poor.

Or you can continue making yourself look small and ridiculous, I don't care.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2012-10-06 21:33:06)

THE former boss of Radio 1 KNEW of accusations about Jimmy Savile and child sex abuse as long ago as 1973.
Worried station controller Douglas Muggeridge asked his press officer Rodney Collins if newspapers were planning to expose their star DJ.

Collins said last night: "He had not received a letter or anything official, but he had picked up a rumour from somewhere that Jimmy Savile was involved with underage girls."

Collins said he reported back that papers were not planning to publish any stories - and the matter was not mentioned again.

But he added: "The BBC should now, having first of all said they knew nothing about this, co-operate with the police.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/ne … z28aEq6e9r

Welcome to the world of unlimited financial liability.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2012-10-06 21:26:23)

the unemployed kid with aspergers who cant afford to buy his own set of spanners, but seems like a decent fellow, fits the description of a lot of people on this forum