It got briefly mentioned upthread but promptly got buried, so I’ll mention it here: We already use the non-STEM liberal arts to subsidize STEM. It’s well-documented that it’s a lot cheaper to administer non-STEM liberal arts programs than STEM programs (differences in lab space and faculty salaries, just for starters), even when you factor in the generally greater profits overhead revenues from STEM grants.
Many schools add on an extra fee for engineering and some other majors . Both my kids’s schools did for their engineering degrees. We paid more for their educations than if they had been in a major like history, English, etc.
Maybe not worked well if the purpose is to turn out well-educated well-rounded citizens. However, that wasn’t necessarily their priority and if anything…something their leaders feared.
One reason for the deliberate narrowing and more severe control over social science/humanities/arts departments/programs in those societies was the fear allowing “too much freedom” would encourage students to question the status quo and the leaders’/party’s right to be the sole leadership.
Didn’t help that one lesson the Chinese Communist Party leadership took from the Cultural Revolution and Tienanmen in '89* was to place much more emphasize STEM and pre-professional programs and tighten controls on humanities/social science programs/departments to minimize political dissent/protests…especially if they gain enough traction to make the very worker and farmer classes realize the large gap between the party’s rhetoric of prioritizing their concerns and the reality that they’ve been sold down the river in favor of the newly emerging upper/upper-middle class of which mid and senior party officials are a part.
- Vast majority of the student leaders were humanities/social science majors.
The greater clampdown on social science/humanities departments afterwards was underscored by a sardonic joke some Mainland Chinese elite college graduates made about the difference between the pre-professional/STEM oriented Tsinghua vs the more “liberal arts” oriented Beijing U: “Tsinghua grads graduate to work for the government and corporate/technology companies…Beijing grads graduate to jail”.
What we really need is more funding for schools that teach trades to students who really don’t belong in college. There will always be a need for plumbers, auto mechanics, cooks, and hair stylists. A lot of vo-tech high schools, which teach these trades, are struggling. In our area, several school districts that support a local technical high school, decided to pull out.
Incidentally, this discussion about subsidizing STEM and defunding “liberal arts”(mainly humanities/social sciences) reminded me of a US sponsored WWII propaganda reel I saw in which it cited the extremely limited military vocational and technically oriented education of Imperial Japan’s top leaders before and during WWII.
Many of them were graduates of the Imperial Japanese military academies which before 1945 had the prestige and drawing power among K-12 students which rivaled and arguably even exceeded those of Japan’s topflight elite colleges like Tokyo*.
Among the cited deficiencies was a lack of coverage in depth in the fields of international affairs, economics, sociology in terms of personnel management and civil-military relations, exposure to and understanding of cultures and societies different from their own, etc.
And it’s likely those factors combined with Japan’s defeat completely discrediting any institutions associated with the Imperial Japanese military meant that several military academy graduates I read about in a book about Japanese military’s place in Imperial Japan’s society found after 1945 their Military Academy credentials were completely disregarded by employers which meant they had to spend 4 more years at a civilian Japanese college to be employable.
Incidentally, Douglas MacArthur of later WWII and Korea fame and some officers who fought and administered Germany after the WWI armistice found so many West Point graduates placed into administrative positions to be so lacking in some of those same areas that when he was appointed West Point’s superintendent, he implemented a curriculum change which increased humanities/social science requirements over what was a much more narrow military and engineering oriented curriculum. While West Point and the other FSAs didn’t necessarily embraced all of those changes, many of those changes are one reason why the education offered at those institutions today is comparable in breadth and depth to the topflight US civilian colleges today.
- In contrast, the current Japanese equivalent...the Japanese National Defense University doesn't tend to draw the best and brightest Japanese students as it's widely regarded within Japanese society as being on par with lower-tiered universities. A perception which even one faculty member of the NDA admitted to on a Frontline episode.
It would be interesting to see the impact of charging market prices by major. Regardless of cost, the facts are that you will be able to charge more for pre-professional majors like business and engineering, so why not do it?
That especially makes sense at schools where an engineering degree requires a lot more course work than a non-stem liberal arts degree. At DD’s school, a non-stem BA usually requires about 32 courses, but a BS in engineering is usually about 40 courses. The fees are by semester not by course or credit so engineers pay the same, but get more education for their money. I don’t really want to pay more, but it does seem it be fair.
Some schools add on a set extra fee for engineering, some charge extra per credit hour. For instance, UVa currently charges $2,000 more per year for engineering, Virginia Tech charges $39.50 extra per credit hour.
This quote from the article sums up my thoughts pretty well:
On the one hand, I do agree with the idea that the US as a nation needs to be a bit more pragmatic about its educational program and produce graduate numbers that at least somewhat resemble what sorts of skills are going to get them employment. On the other hand I reject the very simplistic “STEM good LA bad” idea that this article seems to advocate.
It is of course true that a lot of STEM majors are tough and have salaries that reflect this. But there’s more than enough work to be done in the world that involves non-STEM knowledge, and it’s too easy to ignore that. Schools should do more to match enrollment with openings.
How would colleges…or anyone feasibly do this considering how unpredictable and volatile the job market could be?
For instance, few people anticipated the dotcom crash which left scores of recent engineering/CS graduates underemployed or even unemployed for long periods after 2001.
In the previous several years before the crash, all the information indicators they heard from older adults/industry folks and employment statistics was that engineering/CS was a booming field with boundless growth while there weren’t enough engineering/CS grads or those with equivalent skills for the computer/tech jobs out there. .
Before the '70s downturn in the chemical engineering field, many of the under/unemployed ChemE majors also thought they were pursuing a major which they thought would have had plenty of openings upon graduation… Thoughts which didn’t pan out by the time they were graduates or upperclass majors who were too far along to change majors easily. .
I don’t think you can really group the two together. China and the USSR are pretty different in how they went about things and I think there are lessons to be learned there.
China (and India for that matter) seem to emphasize a form of “growth at any cost” mentality, where the idea of growth supersedes any other concern. Cobrat covered a lot of interesting points on this matter and I agree for the most part with that interpretation. I think it will backfire at some point in the future because unrestricted growth doesn’t go to good places.
USSR education was based off of initiatives started by the communist party to transform a mostly agrarian nation into an industrialized, educated population at an accelerated pace. That initiative was overall pretty successful - over 100 years, quite a lot of progress has been made and the population is mostly well-educated. Soviet education has always been considered to be pretty high-quality and it did emphasize non-STEM topics (music, art, economics, physical education) in depth. In a lot of topics, both STEM and non-STEM, it’s immigrants from the former USSR that are among the most prominent as teachers and practitioners.
The issue was a lot simpler in that case: robber barons in the government who are well-educated are still robber barons. Systemic corruption kills whether or not the populace is well-educated.
The idea that these trends are unknowable is just straight up wrong. For one, it’s very easy to show that certain ideas are easily provable to be awful, e.g. pumping out more students in Major X when people with a degree in X tend to have very small job placements. Second of all, the BLS tracks this for employment in general, with reasonable success within a margin of error.
20 years in advance you wouldn’t have been able to anticipate the dotcom crash. You wouldn’t have been able to anticipate the dotcom boom either. But It would be ridiculous to claim that it would be difficult to anticipate that computers would see some rather impressive growth in the foreseeable future, which would support the need for more initiatives to push youth into technical/computer programs in the not-so-immediate future. And CS did continue to grow - the dotcom boom may have caused a recession, but history has shown that writing off the tech industry because of that was a pretty big mistake.
Fields change but trends are visible decades in advance. Universities should educate toward those trends and offer the kind of versatility that will allow students to adapt to the inevitable unanticipated changes in how the world looks. Pursuing bubbles like “STEM is hot right now so let’s pour all our resources into it” or graduating students with no regards to their employability are both losing strategies.
Yeah, because engineers don’t use critical thinking skills… facepalm
Personally, I’m a huge fan of a true Core Curriculum, such as required by Columbia, Chicago and Boston College. And no, I don’t mean taking ~6 courses outside of their filed or major. Instead, everyone takes college-level math, science, foreign langaute, fine arts.
Thus, French Lit majors must take a college-level math class (applied math or Stats?), a college-level science class, etc. Along the same lines, Engineering majors should take a foreign language, literature courses (philosophy?), a fine arts course…
In the US, the requirement of diversity tends to exclude mathematics, and by extension more mathematical sciences like physics and chemistry. That really makes “breadth” look one-sided and in the long run, makes people underestimate the value of math in life and in education. Probably has a lot to do with how remarkably bad the US is at math, on average.
Many sales jobs don’t requre a college degree but that doesn’t mean the skills acquired in college do not aid success from perseverance, to meeting deadlines, to critical thinking. Most states only require an associates level degree or less to become a licensed real estate agent but many agents may make 6 figures. Are these agents underemployed? Even for someone working retail out of college, I would argue they are less likely to stay at a low level with a college degree. If they do, then we need to look elsewhere for the issue rather than the job market, evil employers, or the horror of a degree in humanities.
It’s a separate subject, but where colleges fail college students in some degrees is not emphasizing that certain humanities or social science degrees may require graduate studies to be marketable.
“many agents may make 6 figures” My understanding is that for every real estate agent making six figures, there are many more that are struggling ? The ones making the big money probably have intelligence , good social skills, and are go getters. That seems typical of success in many sales jobs.
Exactly my point. The article is judging the criteria to enter a field. Many real estate agents are scraping by while others are highly successful. I agree the skills you list are vital. I used real estate agent as an example where a college degree could be helpful for success, but not required. By the article, if a degree is not required, then a college graduate is under-employed regardless of income or other measure of success in the field.
I think it would also be important to consider majors like psychobiology or neuroscience, where there is both a combination of science and social sciences (psychology).
One of my favorite examples is that of John Reed. Former CEO of Citicorp (before it collapsed under Sandy Weil /Robert Reich). He got degrees in Literature and Metallurgy through a 3-2 program with MIT. He also got an MS in Management, after serving 2 years in the military in Korea. He did it with a disability as he also has dyslexia.
^ How does that relate? Example of what?