<p>Students wouldn’t necessarily only learn about artistic culture of course; and understanding of the history of the region, and the language, would provide a huge benefit.</p>
<p>I’ve edited the link I used into the above post. The reason I used it is because I had it bookmarked from when I was trying to convince my mother to accept my Classics major; the author is biased but the numbers, as far as I can tell, are accurate.</p>
<p>The self selection idea is surely true; humanities majors pursuing medical school still have to take basic hard science courses, of course. I would argue that as a whole we shouldn’t use these test scores to determine the intelligence or ability of anyone in any major, but I provided the numbers to counter b@r!um.</p>
<p>The silliest questions I have heard about my home country came from students who had studied its art and history. If I tried to study US culture by studying US movies, I would come to the conclusion that most criminals are black and that everyone looks like a super model. Obviously that’s not what reality looks like.</p>
<p>
Interestingly enough, the mode of inquiry in philosophy is very close to that of mathematics. The gap between sciences and humanities becomes much wider when you look at less rigorous humanities. Math and physics are about 4 points ahead of history and English, and 7 points ahead of general liberal arts. 7 points is an entire standard deviation!</p>
<p>It’s similar for the GRE. Students aspiring to go into science fields outperform students aspiring to go into humanities fields. I admit that one has to be very careful with these numbers. It seems to be much easier to get a high score on the quantitative section than on the verbal section, which gives an advantage to quantitative majors. On the other hand, the verbal scores of science majors are skewed by a huge percentage of foreign test takers. (I don’t know how many international students there are in the humanities, but many science+engineering graduate programs enroll more than 50% foreign students.)</p>
<p>Sure you don’t. But any language degree comes with certain classes that provide a social background, from literature to history courses, that will provide a background which makes the student more “employable”, to use the common way of thinking. </p>
<p>Besides, making a sharp division between humanities and social sciences is misleading; all humanities degrees are tied strongly to the social sciences, and vice versa for many social sciences.</p>
<p>Humanities and Social Sciencees have severely outdated curriculums, at least when looking at skills needed for employment in the traditional avenues (private sector business, non-profit, government). The only real application for them is in academia.</p>
Look, I buy this argument to the extent that an applicant with knowledge of language/culture would be chosen over another with roughly equal qualifications otherwise. In other words, an engineer who speaks Russian and took a course in Slavic history might be chosen over another engineer who has done neither. However, a Russian Studies major still can’t do the engineer’s job. What exactly is the Russian Studies major hired to do?</p>
<p>@noimagination - obviously someone without engineering training is not going to be working for an engineering company, no matter the circumstances, but the majority of jobs at international firms or corporations that do business in other nations are not going to be engineers. There are other sides to a Russian or Russian studies degree, in which one learns about the politics and economics of the region.</p>
<p>To give you an example (if a personal one, so I’m sure it won’t be accepted), my cousin graduated recently from University of Richmond with a Spanish degree. She now works (if I remember her position correctly) in the marketing department of a corporation that does business in Spain. She now lives for most of the year in northern Spain. Granted, her job could have been held by a native speaker, though there is no guarantee that person would understand America like she does.</p>
<p>Anyway there are at least half a dozen threads right now about the eternal and pointless argument over whether a humanities or technical degree is best, perhaps we should just agree that the question posed in this thread is pointless as well.</p>
<ol>
<li>computers are already everywhere</li>
<li>real robots could be the automobile/television of the 21st century. (not the primitive robots we have today. think: advanced artificial intelligence)</li>
<li>computer science itself is basically the study of algorithms. in a way, it’s the study of efficiency, or at least efficient math and problem solving. that’s incredibly applicable to our future.</li>
<li>money-wise, CS grads are way up there. (at my school, CS is the highest paid major, with an average of about $75K/year, for your first year out of college)</li>
</ol>
<p>like many other majors, CS grads don’t necessarily stick to CS jobs.</p>
<p>I also read somewhere that M.S Computer Science grads from a certain school were receiving ~25 job offers, even during 2008 recession.</p>