^ Examples from long ago (CEO of X company who got their degree 30-40 years ago) are mostly irrelevant to today’s job market.
It takes four years worth of courses to earn and ABET-accredited engineering degree. Adding in anything close to a true common core requirement results in something akin to a 3+2 program or Dartmouth’s five-year degree. The cost of that fifth year cannot be underestimated.
Those two years in the 3+2 engineering program typically are not eligible for FA, and very few students have shot at a program as exclusive as Dartmouth’s.
ABET does require the following for an accredited engineering bachelor’s degree program:
25% math and science
37.5% engineering science and engineering design
humanities and social studies (amount not specified, but cannot be none, so Brown has to require some, for example)
Schools where humanities and social studies make up about 25% or more of a four year engineering degree program:
MIT
Harvey Mudd
California State Universities
United States Naval Academy (probably the others also)
So if a core curriculum requirement includes 25% of the degree in humanities and social studies (and presumably some more in math and science as well), why would it necessarily require more than four years for students to major in engineering?
Aside from the fact that three of the four examples you cite are uber elite (and I’m guessing most of their graduates can hold their own in pretty much any humanities and social science field), I’m not sure we’re defining “core curriculum” the same way. Yes, ABET requires a number of humanities and social science courses, but I’m not sure every student comes out of the average engineering program with the writing and communication skills of someone who attended an elite 3+2 program or a school like Dartmouth.
We’re splitting hairs here, however, because I think most students who graduate with any kind of engineering degree, while perhaps not the person you’d be looking to hire to run your company’s PR department, are not likely to be completely unable to produce satisfactory written communications or be a poor salesman either. We’re talking degrees of proficiency and suitability for specific jobs.
The Stanford English major mentioned earlier is a very special animal. I can see why he or she might be preferable to an engineer for certain things in large corporation and a relatively risk- free hire. But the average English major? That’s a different calculation, I’m guessing, and requires a lot more screening, which most companies, of every size, seem loath to do these days.
Yes, but the fourth example outnumbers them, since there are many CSUs, and they are not elite.
In any case, a large percentage of 3+2 programs restrict the major at the “3” school to a science major, so the extra H/SS courses may be fewer than you assume.
What were you thinking of for score curriculum, and how much of the total would its H/SS portion take?
I guess I’m thinking in terms of the rigor of the individual classes, more so than the total number. I suspect the writing requirements in the humanities and social science classes at a school like Haverford, for example, are a lot more demanding than, say, those same core classes at the University of Alabama, where my son is an engineering student now. Personally, I was OK with that potential lack of rigor for my kid, because I knew he’d already received that level of writing instruction in HS, but we paid a lot for that too.
Unfortunately, these things often come down to dollars and cents propositions.
I think it makes sense to provide incentives to students to enter high-demand fields. Provide special service-cancelable loans to people in STEM majors,* or reduce tuition in those majors by subsidizing costs, or provide scholarships funded by the state.
But it doesn’t necessarily make sense to provide zero funding for social sciences and humanities majors (which is what people mean when they say “liberal arts.”) Number one, not all college students have the aptitude or desire to be an engineer or a software developer. We want good programmers, not just warm bodies in seats - nobody wants bridges to fail and and computer programs to collapse all over the place because we’re pushing C students into engineering and computer science majors. Number two, we currently don’t have enough faculty to support large increases in CS and engineering programs - if you look at most popular state universities, those majors are impacted with low acceptance rates. Not everyone can get in. The problem with both of these issues is that a college degree is still the ticket to a middle-class lifestyle, even if that degree is in French literature. A French literature major will still make more money than your average high school graduate. We want to encourage students to consider STEM majors and careers, not discourage them from going to college altogether unless they are good at science and math.
Number three, if we encourage too many people to enter the science and engineering workforce, then we’ll have an oversupply. Salaries will fall and that area won’t be so lucrative anymore. It’ll be like the law market. And number four, we simply have a need for a variety of careers and talents - we just need to balance the numbers a little more. We’ll always need journalists; maybe we need fewer of them than we currently have, but somebody has to report the news. Even within tech, we need all kinds of social science and humanities and business majors to keep the enterprise running. I’m a social scientist who works in tech testing products to ensure that they’re usable; my job needs to be done by a social scientist. Computer science and engineering majors aren’t taught the skills I have to do the testing.
Debra Humphreys makes the best point: We as a society are not good at predicting what jobs are going to be required 5-10 years down the road. In 2006 who would’ve thought we would’ve had the explosion of social media and data that we have now? As I tell my high schoolers, when I started college most of the social media they use on a regular basis - and that has all the hot, high-paying software jobs - simply didn’t exist. I’m only 29! Who knows what the world is going to look like in 2026? Maybe we’re in a seriously tenuous political situation with China and Russia and seriously need political analysts, psychological operatives and Chinese and Russian speakers to make it all work. Maybe we realize that with all the cuts in education and falling real wages, people can’t afford and can’t learn to use the tech that we’re producing, so we need sociologists and anthropologists to figure out how to remake and sell the stuff to people. (In fact, sociologists and anthropologs do already do that.)
However, I do agree that more focus needs to be shifted to post-graduation outcomes. Many professors are incensed when legislators and others have disdain for the humanities, but the truth is those humanists often show disdain for the professional development and post-graduation outcomes of their students. They see it as “not their job” to teach professional skills to their students and believe that the students should appreciate French literature or economic theory or Atlantic philosophy for what it is rather than what it can do. They’re nailing the nails into their own coffins, though, because in a world where a BA costs upwards of $100K at public schools everyone needs to pull their weight and justify their worth. Nobody wants to make $25,000 a year after four years in college and $30,000 worth of debt. I wish more social scientists and humanists would put more effort into professionalizing and modernizing their curricula rather than squawking about how nobody understands us. I spend a lot of time teaching my students about the worth of the liberal arts and sciences. And I think that basic computer programming needs to become a general education requirement like English composition and math.
*Of course, let’s remember not all STEM majors are created equal. When this conversation comes up people are almost always talking about computer science, engineering, statistics, and sometimes math and physics. The salary and employment outcomes for biology, chemistry, and often physics majors aren’t really all that different from social science majors.
This sort of thing can, in fact, be predicted, albeit with a margin of error.
MySpace was around before 2006, and it wasn’t even the first of its kind. Computing power has been growing steadily and the importance of big data could be predicted. Not to mention you could very easily predict the further development of the computer software industry even back then. Could you predict things would turn out exactly as they did? No. Could you have a marginally accurate perception of the future that is 10-20 years ahead? Certainly.
Political tensions are decades in the making, so that’s another example you can predict ahead of time. Nothing in international politics comes out of left field. A good focus on understanding other cultures goes a long way in understanding that.
Can we predict if we will need 100k or 150k more engineers (or teachers or nurses etc) in a decade? Not really. Can we say that we won’t need 400k more journalists in the next decade? I think that’s a fair assertion. We can limit enrollment accordingly and train people to be versatile (e.g. teach French majors to teach students, deal with immigrants, work in international relations, and other lines of work).
@bluebayou I’m not convinced that adding more general education/breadth is really a good idea. The more classes we need to take, the more money it costs, and student loan debt is already a huge problem. I’d sooner we didn’t either keep students in school longer by adding to the list of what students have to take, or take away some time away from their major by making them take fewer major classes and more GE classes.
As to foreign language requirements, I feel like America’s system of teaching languages is just plain horrible. Language is something you learn better younger, ideally having a strong base before your teenage years. If we want to require every kid to have a foreign language, we need to start in elementary school, not wait for junior or high school. By then, the majority students just won’t retain information well. Some people will take to a language that late, but not a whole lot. Requiring college students who never had a foreign language to take one? That’s just pointless and unfair. Unless the student is REALLY invested in studying that language (and most won’t be, because for most it’s just another mandatory GE), it’s just going to be an incredibly frustrating experience that they won’t retain much from after graduating.
I’m not suggesting adding anything, or lengthening the 4 years, but requiring that existing electives be used to fulfill Core requirements. In other words, a STEM major can’t take Rocks and count it as fulfilling the Core, whereas it might be eligible to complete a Distrbiution requirement at some schools.
I wholeheartedly agree. But, let’s not acquiesce to the problem. If I am running a college, I am not going to let the high schools off the hook.
Are there any US high schools who do not offer a foreign language (I really have no idea), or is this a straw man question? Never mind, I goggled it: the answer is that 91% of US high schools do offer a foreign language. I would assume that the 9% are reform, and other special schools, such those that focus on say, the performing arts and/or trades.
And, btw, 60-75 of middle schools offer a foreign language.
So, in essence, your question is a straw man.
@bluebayou I went to a public high school in California, and I was never required to take a foreign language (I wanted to take one, and my high school offered French and Spanish, but my mother wouldn’t allow it). I graduated HS without having one. A lot of my fellow students did, too. Granted, I also graduated HS without taking enough math or science courses to be allowed to apply to a California State University. I wouldn’t exactly claim HS served me well.
But, yes, there are public US high schools that will allow you to graduate without a foreign language, though those schools do typically offer languages. Whether the schools offer a language is irrelevant to this discussion if the students do not have to take a language, because many will choose not to or have that choice made for them. If, by 18, you’ve never chosen to take a language when the opportunity presented itself, it sounds rather probable that you don’t really want to take a foreign language. Studying a language you don’t want to study at that age is unlikely to impart much but frustration, so I don’t see why all college students should have to take one.
Don’t see how that’s a strawman.
What would you include in your ideal “Core” requirements?
Probably very few, although, as reported on these forums, some which do may offer very little (e.g. only one language up to level 2, which may not be enough to place higher than the beginner course in the same language in college).
“In other words, a STEM major can’t take Rocks and count it as fulfilling the Core”
What is wrong with counting a Geology, or Plate Tectonics course?
^^Thank you Much2learn!
DS IS at Caltech getting his PhD in Seismology, which would not be possible if he had not taken numerous Geology classes at USC to fulfill the requirements of his major.
One of my engineering kids took an entomology class to fulfill a distribution type requirement. In addition to learning about bugs in general, he had to maintain, feed , a “bug in a cup” for a semester -brought it home at Thanksgiving to take care of it and released it over the Christmas holiday at home after the semester was over. Sounds crazy but we went outside , let it out and wished it well!
Nothing wrong with it; fine courses all. But the object of my college is breadth, and that requires a science major to take non-science courses to fulfill the Core. And similarly, “classes …to fulfill the requirements of his major” won’t count either (bcos those courses are generally in the same/similar field).
Sounds like a personal choice, huh? And, I’d bet the cyber house that your “mother” would have been all over a HS foreign language course if it was required for college admissions*. 
*in California, our state publics require 2 years of FL for admission, so nearly every HS student aiming for college will take at least the minimum.
A lot more than “six courses outsides your field or major.” See Columbia, Chicago or Boston College for examples.
IMO, its all about my definition of a college education. Obviously, most will disagree, since there are few Core colleges left.
@bluebayou Personal choice? These are teenagers. Teenagers often make short sighted and foolish choices. And what about personal choice to decide that a foreign language isn’t a necessary subject for my adult education? I’m glad I could make that choice.
Foreign language is required to get into a CSU from high school, but not to get in from a CC. I got in from a CC. My mother actually didn’t think I was capable of going to college, and wanted me to just do what it took to get a diploma and not risk anything harder. My mother never had a high opinion of my intelligence or capabilities, and used my failures as an excuse to forbid me from more and more things for my own good.
My personal problems with my mother aside, the point is that I never had any linguistic knowledge when I entered college, and German proved to be that one class that piled on all the stress without teaching me anything I’d remember or use. All it did was drag me down, and I was a much happier and more productive student after I dropped the subject and studied geography instead. I don’t know what I would have done if I had to go through two or three years of that to move on to university. And for what? So I could barely conversate in a language I didn’t really want to learn and get by well enough without?
Columbia has been mentioned-Columbia SEAS requirements (more technical electives) may be different than Columbia College CORE requirements?
For Columbia, there are 6 specified courses:
1 writing (various topic options)
3 humanities
1 social studies
1 science
Plus the following that are more like breadth requirements with varied student options (and presumably could overlap with one’s major):
2 science
2 global (social studies)
foreign language to 4th semester (16th credit) or equivalent by testing
2 physical education
So about 10-14 courses (depending on foreign language placement), plus 2 physical education, though some may overlap with one’s major.
Perhaps MIT may be a contrast. It has minimum requirements of 8 math and science courses and 8 humanities, arts, and social studies courses (total of 16 courses), but all of these can overlap with one’s major. It does indicate a heavier emphasis on math and science. Harvey Mudd is similar in emphasis, though humanities, social studies, and arts requirements are still quite substantial.
Other schools with different core curricula include the following:
the military service academies
Saint John’s College (“great books” core curriculum that is the entire curriculum)
I couldn’t find that detail for Columbia SEAS. Do you have a link in terms of what SEAS students need to take as opposed to the College students? Is it the same ?