There is a NY Times article today on Kentucky discussing cutting funding for liberal arts subjects and redirecting it towards STEM. Here is a quote from Kentucky governor Matt Bevin:
Now, I am a STEM grad, and I am torn by this. On the one hand, we have a real problem with student loan repayments, and much of that is due to colleges and degrees without any career prospects, and it is insane to keep throwing money at the same colleges/degrees without any evidence that there will be improvement. On the other hand, not everyone is cut out for STEM due to either lack of interest or lack of the required talent.
Funny that near the end of the article we learn that Mr. Bevin was himself a Japanese and East Asian Studies major, which seems to have prepared him just fine for his life.
My 11th grader is my first child who will not be pursuing a STEM or health field. Math is by far her easiest subject. She finished cal 1 a few weeks ago with a near perfect score. But, from her perspective it is so long, I do not want to see you again. As easy as math is for her, she does not like it at all. Neither does she enjoy science. What she loves is literature and languages.
She is a gifted young lady. Should the gov’t steer her toward STEM where she would be miserable? Should only the wealthy be able to follow their interests?
What a poor society we will be if we are reduced to focusing strictly on survival via our economic output. (Makes me cringe. Right up there with the devaluing of SAHM (and dads) who are focused on raising their children. Not all things of value are quantifiable by the almighty dollar.
Gotta wonder where education majors are going to land? Can’t see how states can classify that as STEM and yet it would be political suicide to defund. Social workers? Therapists? It is a slippery slope to define “what” is valuable.
If I was in the STEM field right now I would be piss. This is the same thing they did to nursing, pharmacy, and repository therapy. They are going to flood the market with STEM majors which will cause the wages to go down. This isn’t just a issue for liberal art majors.
In practice, it has historically been mostly true that the kids of the wealthy have been the ones with the most freedom to pursue their academic interests (or go to college in the first place), while most other people have to focus more on economic survival. Not that this is necessarily a good thing, but that situation is here and has already been here for a while.
Of course, any article that tries to make a distinction between poorly defined terms like “STEM” and “liberal arts” should be looked at critically, since any conclusions made may be invalid for slightly different definitions of these terms (and these terms do overlap, since math and science properly fall into both categories; social science would also under some definitions of “STEM” that include those fields).
Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) seems to be heading in that direction also. Look for other State Universities to follow FGCU as the Governor seem to be pushing the issue:
The additional irony is that US degrees have core requirements on top of in major requirements. Wonder why there hasn’t been a proposal to decrease degrees to 3 yrs by eliminating t hose pesky humanities subjects?
@ucbalumnus Historically, maybe dominating, but not exclusively. People could work their way through college. I did… My parents did not have college educations. We were on our own at 18. I don’t think for my generation, anyway, that that was that unusual. Or was our area an anomaly?
The greatest, boomer, and early X generation were probably anomalies as far as access to college (including working one’s way through college) was concerned. Until the post-WW2 expansion of colleges and universities (initially filled by GI Bill bearing veterans going to college), few actually went to college, and many of the most prestigious colleges (e.g. HYP) were mainly filled with the scions of the SES elite (often from feeder boarding schools), with a small number of academically elite students from public schools (these colleges gradually shifted their admission policies in favor of more academically elite students, although the SES elite were still important to keep the donations coming; today’s legacy preferences are the remnant of that).
The current generation is largely much more dependent on parental support for going to college than its parents’ generations.
While not all things of value are quantifiable by the almighty dollar, that is how things are paid for. Non-repayment of student loans affects all taxpayers, and student loan repayments vary dramatically according to college and major.
Given that, would you be ok with either of the following alternatives to defunding liberal arts directly?
Tying interest rates to college and major, based upon historical repayment rates?
Having interest rates be the same for everyone, but require students taking out a loan sign a document written in plain English stating:
They may try to increase the number of STEM majors, and as a result, many more may enter the program, but I doubt that many more will graduate. STEM tends to be self-selecting already and people either love the work or hate it. At the margins it may allow some people interested in it but unable to afford it to enter and graduate, but that’s about it.
@hebegebe I have no problem with making people pay back their loans. What concerns me is this part
It is the actual elimination of humanities degrees from public universities, which may be the only affordable option for many students, that would stratify those fields.
The other quote that bothers me is this one
Not all people choose a major in complete ignorance of the financial implications. I have kids that fit this description exactly. Our 22 yod is a COTA (certified occupational therapy assistant). She makes a very good income, more with her 2 yr degree than many 4 yr degree fields. She and her sister often joke about how she will probably make more money with her 2 yr degree than her sister who wants to go to grad school. Right now that dd is in 11th grade and wants to major in Russian, French, and ??? (The ??? being whatever she is going to pursue to make herself employable.) Is the only definition of success how much one makes or can a person deliberately opt for a lower paying job in a field they want?
Non-art humanities are not very expensive for colleges to offer, and there is some demand for them even in a preprofessional context – consider high school English and history teachers for specific needs of those majors, or writing and communication jobs that are not major specific but where humanities majors are likely to be in good practice for (though broad general education is helpful in this context).
So it makes little sense for a non-specialized college to eliminate such majors.
Re: Russian, French, and ???
How about math? Russian and French are two languages that math research papers are often written in (as well as German).
What I’d like to see is the number of US STEM graduates go up, while the number of H-1Bs goes down. That said, I don’t trust politicians to be picking winners and losers among majors. Give the kids the information they need about the job prospects for each major, and then let the kids decide. If the demand for non-STEM programs goes down, then it makes sense to reduce the resources to those programs.