I have History and CS degrees. The CS experience (at a top engineering school) felt fairly vocational. But being rigorously taught how to research, construct arguments, and communicate ideas in my Liberal Arts degree has been what made me successful past my first hire. I definitely recommend double majoring in a Liberal Arts degree.
Also perhaps there’s a lesson here about the CS curriculum being too vocational at most colleges? Or not needing a 4 year college if it aims to be vocational?
The problem with colleges teaching vocations, such as CS or engineering, is that they are too often remote from the realities of what is actually needed by professionals working in the field. To be honest, most vocations are better taught by apprenticeship, but we turned our back on that path a long time ago. I know a professional journalist who believes the same of his profession. College is not an especially good way of training someone for a profession, it's just that we have nearly eliminated the other ways of doing so, and thus by default it is pressed into service for a task it is not especially suited for.
> Also perhaps there’s a lesson here about the CS curriculum being too vocational at most colleges? Or not needing a 4 year college if it aims to be vocational?
I heard a claim that sounded plausible to me: CS in the US originated from electrical engineering, and so is based on a degree that is based on the ability to directly influence things and make stuff happen - pretty vocational. In Germany CS is derived from maths and places a greater emphasis on the theoretical underpinnings, and yes, the ability to do scientific work and research.
I guess the optimum lies somewhere in the middle: It's mildly shocking to me to hear of US CS bachelors who never heard of complexity (Big-O and all that), while it's also a bit mad that it's possible to obtain a CS bachelor degree in Germany with the only experience in making computers do stuff being 100 lines of Pascal (although that would require a rather arcane set of elective courses, so it probably won't happen all too often)
I also studied both, but only graduated with a History degree. I find some of the things History has taught me that CS and engineering lacked were: critical thinking, understanding power in human relationships, writing to think deeply. But the main topic that it has drilled into me is to consider Second Order Effects.
> Or not needing a 4 year college if it aims to be vocational?
US colleges could absolutely drop the fourth year tomorrow if they wanted to. Many excellent European universities get it done in three and get results just as good.
The real waste of time is the US PhD - doing in seven years what could be done in two or three.
I have friends from university with degrees in history, classics, theology, that make 3x what I do as a software engineer with a PhD. They work in things like corporate intelligence, risk analysis, planning and operations. Really high-powered serious stuff that makes what I do look rather trivial. They get hired as their companies want diversity of thought and the main job requirement is just being smart, switched-on, and understanding the bigger world (hence the history and theology). It's not about knowing technical details. They wouldn't want a grey man who studied 'business operations' - that's not their style.
A couple interesting anecdotes. My first boss had multiple degrees in music, and was a professional touring classical musician. He self taught himself programming because he needed to actually make some money. Now he's a CTO at a large company.
My next boss had a degree in English. His thought was that no matter what he did with his life, communication was always at the center. He had founded 2 different tech companies before I met him, and he's now the CTO of a large company.
One of the smartest people I've ever personally worked with went to seminary (I'm not sure if he was an atheist before or after, but talk about fun conversations over a beer). He was preoccupied with finding meaning in life, and did things like math and CS with what seemed like his spare cycles.
The point is that a persons degree really only matters for their first job, and often even then only if they want to work at a FAANG for that first job. Where people end up 5-10-15-20 years later in their career has little to do with their degree.
I’m guessing they went to top schools. That’s the issue. Humanity degrees at lower tier schools don’t open doors, and a lot of people are borrowing a lot of money to get degrees with a poor ROI.
I have a hard time believing this would be the norm at a sufficient number of companies that it would justify picking up one of these degrees. Knowing technical skills when applying to technical companies seems like a safer bet.
Good point. The one thing in the article I agreed with is that it's better to do a traditional humanities subject rather than a vocational one (like communications, operations management, business operations). The latter seem to narrow and subject to fashion.
I'm not sure there's a really great correlation between earnings and skill when it comes to jobs with titles such as those. You tend to find them a lot in financial firms and some of these industries have a lot of people who float straight from Oxbridge type universities into generic highly paid jobs because the firms don't know how to hire effectively. They just delegate to degrees. I've not been particularly impressed whenever I encountered most corporate planning or corporate intelligence type roles.
The main problem with the humanities is that they have been consumed by the political far left.
That's sad, because English, history, and philosphy could be great programs.
I remember I was struggling to get decent grades on my history papers. I was running out of patience and decided I just wanted to pass. So I just wrote what I thought the professor wanted to hear (far left BS) and started getting B's and even an A-, with little effort.
That's very strange to hear. I'm not sure where you studied but when I studied history at university papers were assessed in terms of argument construction, and how you assessed other historians work, and all you said had to be referenced in some way. Whether the lecturer agreed with your conclusion or not was not the basis of your mark.
I will just say this was not my experience. In my Arab Israeli crisis class, for example, we were encouraged to see and role play Palestinian and Israeli points of view, as well of those of the various nation states involved. You can’t get much more politically charged then that, and we needed to genuinely understand very “conservative” and “liberal” policy points of view.
It’s funny to read that because I had the same experience when I was in school. I’m in the US and took a Canadian and Mexican History class, and had a TA from Canada. When I wrote positive things about America it would be crossed out in red with comments like “wrong!”, “at the expense of others”, things like that. I did a 180 for the later papers and talked about “evil American imperialism” and suddenly started getting A’s.
If you just want to write papers about whatever you want to write papers about, why take a class? The professor is supposed to give you push-back.
Anyway, I studied those subjects in college and had zero issues with professors pushing political agendas. I did, though, have professors push back and give me poor grades on papers where I either didn't understand the material, did a poor job thinking about the material, or had some issues with my writing style that hurt my ability to communicate my ideas. But those are fair reasons for low grades: Students should be compelled to improve those weaknesses. 'Tis the whole point.
I had a history course like that as well. For papers, I would literally grab a beer and ramble on in the most sarcastic fashion I could muster. I received an A, it was a complete sham.
... and that's the real life skills you learned. sometimes you gotta do/say what people want to hear to get ahead. One of the most important life skills ever.
> The main problem with the humanities is that they have been consumed by the political far left.
That's overstated. There's plenty of good scholarship being done, in the humanities and especially in the social sciences, that is by necessity either non-political or extremely careful and overt about any political claims that they do make. But you're absolutely right that there is a growing far-left fringe, driven by Red Guard-inspired ideas from the 1960s and 1970s about "culture" and "academica" being nothing more than bourgeois privilege that one shouldn't have anything to do with. (And yes, that's especially in the Anglosphere - since by and large, other Western countries did their own Maoist thing in academia literally decades ago, and they've gotten it out of their system by now.) At the end of the day it just functions as an enabler of corruption and laziness, since the political stance is pretty clear as you say. They basically spend their time awarding "B's and A-'s" to one another, with basically no-one else caring much at all about the whole thing.
I think it’s worth mentioning all degrees are worthless if you don’t know how to leverage them.
If you get a CS degree from a top school just because you see what salaries are, not because that’s what you’re interested in, your career will be mediocre at best.
School shouldn’t be looked at as mandatory and burdensome, it should be a tool that helps you achieve a level of understanding about something that you’re head over heels excited about.
Passion for something will organically lead to a successful career doing what you love.
How are you supposed to know passion at 18? I do alumni interviewing for my college and most kids have no singular passion they want to pursue (and more often than not, they are hoping college will help them find that passion).
And I don't blame them. Finding a singular passion to center a degree around at a young age is not the norm. And yet we put a lot of pressure on our kids to be specialists before they're even able to vote. It's a very difficult situation to put children through.
I think the real problem is that corporations and HR departments have outsourced filtering candidates to universities. Universities were never designed for job training, and obviously we're seeing the consequences of that. I got a 4 year CS degree from a good university, and it was good, but I have to admit I came out of it with a lot of knowledge that I'm really unlikely to use in the real world (how to write a hash map, for instance), while being completely clueless on things that are extremely useful for actual real world work (how to use distributed version control, or how to write shell scripts).
I also have to say, I've been on the end where we interview people and look through stacks of resumes, and I can't say I've ever actually ever cared about the "education" part unless it's really unusual (IE, very advanced degree, or a degree in a field that isn't CS but might be highly relevant to what my company is doing)
I think it's weird that vocational training is so looked down upon. Not everyone is really built to be a knowledge worker or a professor -- we still need plumbers!
Also whatever happened to apprenticeships? It seems like all we have anymore are internships, but, at least from what I've seen interns are rarely given that much mentoring; it tends to be a lot more about toy-projects or "build a thing that would be nice to have but that we're not going to dedicate a full salaried engineers time to".
IMHO most people should take a STEM degree if they're going to uni. Not because of the labour market, which is a fickle thing.
The main reason is that you will be able to pick up a humanities/social science course with the skills you already have at the end of high school. What do people do in those degrees? Read text, think critically, express ideas. And you've not only practised that a fair bit in school, but also after education, where you're reading the newspaper, looking at art, and so on. Importantly you aren't going to lose the text reading skill because you'll be using it a little each day.
So you have plenty of practice in the humanities, at least to get you started doing it seriously if you need it later in life. And you have enough that you're not gonna be surprised when someone mentions there was a civil war in the US.
Math stuff seems to be use it or lose it. You can easily avoid linear algebra and big-o thinking, and you will if you aren't forced to think about it. If you do a STEM degree at least you will have heard of stuff and practiced a load of otherwise obscure topics, giving you a starting point that isn't years behind on prerequisites, and leaving you where you won't know what's interesting.
I've met plenty of STEM people who knew a thing or two about history, economics, and the arts. It's relatively rare the other way round, though you do get the occasional renaissance man from that side.
I don't think I would argue that reading itself is as hard as learning and using math concepts, but it is a skill that can be lost. after a few years of mainly reading documentation and forum posts, I feel my skill at reading longer-form content has atrophied.
> I've met plenty of STEM people who knew a thing or two about history, economics, and the arts. It's relatively rare the other way round, though you do get the occasional renaissance man from that side.
most interested people can read pop-history, pop-econ, etc. type books and sound pretty knowledgeable in casual discussions, but all they are really learning is how to parrot a couple popular authors' opinions. I think the real observation here is that humanities are much easier to "bullshit" about than something like math, where it actually has to make sense within a rigorous framework.
I would argue that the type of deep dives into original documents that you do in a humanities degree is actually quite difficult. to do this type of learning well is no easier than learning STEM topics, imo.
I also think that STEM degrees teach you to break down problems mechanically and "think like a machine". It also can teach you to be able to project an idea to a logical conclusion even if that end point is uncomfortable or surprising. That might not sound like a skill to a lot of people, but I've noticed people without STEM educations or who aren't self-taught in some sort of similar way aren't always great at doing that. I noticed that the people that dropped out in the first year of CS, for instance, really struggled with seeing the machine as having intentions, or at least anthropomorphizing it more than was useful.
That being said, I also notice that a lot of my STEM colleagues look down on creatives and humanities, which is really unfortunate. It's not about one being better than the other, they both have very useful things to teach.
The proliferation of boot camp grads and autodidacts getting hired in industry would seem to suggest that CS does not apply the same way as other STEM degrees- compared to say mechanical or chemical engineering, one need not be immersed in such math concepts since college to get through industry.
The article contains a number of flaws IMO. Its argument seems to be:
1. Graduates with any degree earn more money and have less unemployment. No doubt true, but how do you discount selection bias here? Given that it's on average the smarter / more diligent part of the population that goes to university a better question would be what's the value add of university (and then break down by faculty / degree)? Maybe their employment rate is higher due to the necessity of having to pay off their tuition fees :)
2. Some humanities people are successful. No doubt. Plenty of smart motivated folks take humanities subjects so it's not surprising that some of them are successful but I'd like to see some data on expected return across the board rather than cherry picked examples. Wildly successful people might be outliers anyway. Also if you're from a wealthy background you could probably do anything and still have a shot at being a CEO.
3. Most examples of jobs for humanities graduates given in the article are not really graduate jobs, e.g. after sales support for Uber (do you really need a degree for that?). Management roles perhaps, but the article doesn't delve into those jobs, presumably there was some sort of vocational experience involved before they were managers?
4. Critical thinking skills. I'm not convinced that humanities degrees do lead to better critical thinking skills. I am biased but it seems to me Maths and hard science subjects would hone your critical thinking much more (isolating variables, logic, understanding complex material) and it's not like Science grads don't read books on other subjects. The author demonstrates a complete lack of critical thinking skills IMO.
5. Understanding of statistics seems like a pretty valuable tool to bring to most occupations and it would be nice if journalists had that and I doubt you get that from Humanities.
6. Empathy? Seriously? You need a degree to develop empathy?
In my experience the liberal arts classes I was required to take were all big 100+ person lecture -> memorize -> test classes. I tend to think a lot of the praise heaped on liberal arts is the fallacy that since these skills are not learned in STEM classes, they must be learned in liberal arts classes. It also seems like those classes are taught at a much lower level. Plenty of people fail out of STEM and go on to be liberal arts majors but not the reverse. I think that bumping up the difficulty to the point that people are actually failing out would go a long way to these majors regaining credibility, and I hope they do because I am not anti-liberal arts in principle, only in practice.
> In my experience the liberal arts classes I was required to take were all big 100+ person lecture -> memorize -> test classes
The classes you were "required to take" likely were intro classes with large enrollments. What you describe is how many intro science classes are taught at many universities as well. And even many second year science classes. It is generally only in the 300-400 level classes that are within your major that you start to have small sections with more intimate interaction with the professor.
Almost none of my liberal arts classes were like that, and a lot of the lowest level science classes were. So there you have the power of anecdotal evidence.
My liberal arts classes required lots of writing and a hell a lot of hard thinking.
So many people decry taking any career path that isn't STEM-based, but surely one of the things the proliferation of technology and automation should one day enable is a world where someone could be a poet, or an artist, or an engineer, and not worry much about providing the material conditions of their life? I want to live in a world where anyone can be anything.
I still think it's pragmatic advice to avoid (or at least consider carefully) spending 150k on an english degree from a private school, but that's not due to any bias against english as an academic discipline - it's more about how much college costs and how debt constrains future choices.
It kind of “smells” like when you see articles saying that there aren’t enough people for the “x” job, even when they are paid 2x the average salary.
Most of the time I realised that in those cases it was just a semi-covert advertisement for the industry in question, and digging in the real numbers you can see huge differences with the numbers reported in the article.
I’m not saying that this is absolutely the case, but certainly the narrative seems quite similar to what I experienced in the past...
At the large public university where I am employed, there has been a recent sharp drop in enrollment in humanities departments, which has sparked a lot of concern about what the future holds for these departments. The business school, on the other hand, is overwhelmed with applicants and growing rapidly.
From personal observations, it seems that students are becoming more and more focused on practical skills development. I would also say this seems to be the prevalent viewpoint on HN. But it is hard to deny the enormous benefits that a liberal arts education can have.
I have a background in the hard sciences, but I would say I owe the heart of my education to the many humanities electives that I took as an undergrad. I can only hope that the pendulum swings back at some point.
With soft degrees, where you go to school matters a lot. At the large state school I went to, many of my friends had soft liberal arts undergrads. The only successful ones wound up as faculty members in mid-tier schools. The liberal arts classes I took were among the worst, with the most closed minded professors.
When people quote Silicon Valley stars like Reid Hoffman (philosophy, Stanford and Oxford) and Benedict Evans (history, Cambridge) look at the school too.
Communicating clearly, and thinking systemically are very important. I’m just not convinced that most colleges and universities teach those anymore. The people who have it get it elsewhere.
I’ve seen philosophy, English and history majors work in tech, I’ve never seen the reversal.
Personally I’m a little worried about ageism, something that doesn’t even enter the mind space of any of my friends with degrees in the humanities.
So maybe there is something to it. I mean, they had much harder times finding jobs than me, and aren’t rigoursly headhunted, but every one of them found jobs.
> I’ve seen philosophy, English and history majors work in tech, I’ve never seen the reversal.
I'm not sure how you define the reverse, but Amazon's head of HR majored in electrical engineering. I would say that's a traditionally liberal arts job with someone who majored in tech.
> I’ve seen philosophy, English and history majors work in tech, I’ve never seen the reversal.
I don't think you can draw a meaningful conclusion from this, other than the idea that it's easier to demonstrate competence in tech versus humanities.
If someone asks you to demonstrate your programming ability, you can point them to something you threw up on GitHub. If someone asks you for a critical analysis of Chaucer, Sein und Zeit or the death of Franz Ferdinand, what are you going to do? A degree is expected in the absence of any clear and demonstrable competency.
This is tangential, but what kind of education is sure to boost critical thinking, creativity and collaboration in their students? Is there a creativity path which pays off more than proficiency path?
There probably isn't one. Universities love to claim they teach critical thinking but this is a claim they can get away with only because most people don't have critical thinking skills: obvious followup questions may include "how" and "what's your definition of critical thinking".
One problem is that your three requests are somewhat at odds. Collaboration works against creativity and critical thinking in my experience because of pressure to conform to the group, or find ideas acceptable to the group. Being truly creative requires exploring ideas that might not pan out, or which are a bit off the beaten path. Group work also increases the cost of the work which can change the cost/benefit analysis.
When I look at my own life, arguing with people on the internet has been far better for my own critical thinking skills than the humanities lectures I attended at university were. The latter were entirely useless.
I think I ended up with the best of both worlds. I received my BSCS from a traditional humanities college. It means I ended up with a lot of CS and math courses, but also things like philosophy and literature. I also sprinkled in courses on accounting, economics, and general business since I found them interesting.
Close to 20 years later, the foundation from those business courses and learning how to write/communicate has done more for my career than any of the CS and math.
This doesn't apply to Romanian education.
Off topic: I also feel doubt to move from my highschool because it is no longer a Technical College but just normal highschool. Anyone has expertise in this?
I have a philosophy degree, and I believe it’s a big part of why I’ve been successful in technology. It taught me to think in patterns and layers upon layers of abstraction; while giving me general-purpose tools that can be applied to problem solving in complex, interrelated systems.
I thought I was making a mistake choosing that degree path over CS; but CS was making me miserable with the crazy workload — which ended up being a bunch of busy work that got abstracted away by new languages / frameworks by the time we all graduated (we started in a world of esoteric mainframe architectures, C++ and perl and ended in a world of java, php and python so to be fair a LOT changed). But I don’t regret the philosophy degree at all.
An honest article would say that a humanity degree signals that you're conformist and happy to tolerate boredem just as well as a STEM degree, and a STEM degree doesn't teach anything relevant either. This article says that with a humanity degree you can be just as smug as people with STEM degrees are.
I honestly feel sorry for people who have this opinion. I'm not implying that your analysis is wrong for the school you went to or even CS programs in general, but I feel that I learned a lot of relevant things in my undergraduate study and I'm sad that other people didn't have the same experience.
just a quick sampling of some stuff I did in my CS major:
* wrote a Pascal compiler from scratch
* implemented a variation of FAT32 in the linux kernel
* implemented a simple pipelined MIPS arch in vhdl
* benchmarked different versions of a parallel algorithm on a HPC cluster to see how it scaled on core count
* implemented lots of data structures in c++
some of that stuff applies directly to the work I do now. I landed a good c++ gig straight out of college, and I really appreciate all the tough c++ projects we had to do in school. amusingly the Pascal compiler also turned out to be relevant, as I now help maintain a compiler for a proprietary dialect of Pascal at work. the cpu arch, HPC, and linux stuff isn't directly applicable to my work, but the linux project was a good exposure to working in a large codebase.
not everything in a CS major is going to be directly applicable to your career, but a good program will give you strong foundations for any specialty you branch into later.
I am not convinced it is wise to abandon an opportunity for a STEM degree in favor of humanities when it seems like it’d be far easier to DIY a humanities education than it would be to DIY a STEM education.
[+] [-] softwaredoug|7 years ago|reply
Also perhaps there’s a lesson here about the CS curriculum being too vocational at most colleges? Or not needing a 4 year college if it aims to be vocational?
[+] [-] rossdavidh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pgeorgi|7 years ago|reply
I heard a claim that sounded plausible to me: CS in the US originated from electrical engineering, and so is based on a degree that is based on the ability to directly influence things and make stuff happen - pretty vocational. In Germany CS is derived from maths and places a greater emphasis on the theoretical underpinnings, and yes, the ability to do scientific work and research.
I guess the optimum lies somewhere in the middle: It's mildly shocking to me to hear of US CS bachelors who never heard of complexity (Big-O and all that), while it's also a bit mad that it's possible to obtain a CS bachelor degree in Germany with the only experience in making computers do stuff being 100 lines of Pascal (although that would require a rather arcane set of elective courses, so it probably won't happen all too often)
[+] [-] abhiyerra|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisseaton|7 years ago|reply
US colleges could absolutely drop the fourth year tomorrow if they wanted to. Many excellent European universities get it done in three and get results just as good.
The real waste of time is the US PhD - doing in seven years what could be done in two or three.
[+] [-] chrisseaton|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matwood|7 years ago|reply
My next boss had a degree in English. His thought was that no matter what he did with his life, communication was always at the center. He had founded 2 different tech companies before I met him, and he's now the CTO of a large company.
One of the smartest people I've ever personally worked with went to seminary (I'm not sure if he was an atheist before or after, but talk about fun conversations over a beer). He was preoccupied with finding meaning in life, and did things like math and CS with what seemed like his spare cycles.
The point is that a persons degree really only matters for their first job, and often even then only if they want to work at a FAANG for that first job. Where people end up 5-10-15-20 years later in their career has little to do with their degree.
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[+] [-] jeffdavis|7 years ago|reply
That's sad, because English, history, and philosphy could be great programs.
I remember I was struggling to get decent grades on my history papers. I was running out of patience and decided I just wanted to pass. So I just wrote what I thought the professor wanted to hear (far left BS) and started getting B's and even an A-, with little effort.
[+] [-] paublyrne|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] chasing|7 years ago|reply
Anyway, I studied those subjects in college and had zero issues with professors pushing political agendas. I did, though, have professors push back and give me poor grades on papers where I either didn't understand the material, did a poor job thinking about the material, or had some issues with my writing style that hurt my ability to communicate my ideas. But those are fair reasons for low grades: Students should be compelled to improve those weaknesses. 'Tis the whole point.
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[+] [-] 0815test|7 years ago|reply
That's overstated. There's plenty of good scholarship being done, in the humanities and especially in the social sciences, that is by necessity either non-political or extremely careful and overt about any political claims that they do make. But you're absolutely right that there is a growing far-left fringe, driven by Red Guard-inspired ideas from the 1960s and 1970s about "culture" and "academica" being nothing more than bourgeois privilege that one shouldn't have anything to do with. (And yes, that's especially in the Anglosphere - since by and large, other Western countries did their own Maoist thing in academia literally decades ago, and they've gotten it out of their system by now.) At the end of the day it just functions as an enabler of corruption and laziness, since the political stance is pretty clear as you say. They basically spend their time awarding "B's and A-'s" to one another, with basically no-one else caring much at all about the whole thing.
[+] [-] traviswingo|7 years ago|reply
If you get a CS degree from a top school just because you see what salaries are, not because that’s what you’re interested in, your career will be mediocre at best.
School shouldn’t be looked at as mandatory and burdensome, it should be a tool that helps you achieve a level of understanding about something that you’re head over heels excited about.
Passion for something will organically lead to a successful career doing what you love.
[+] [-] acconrad|7 years ago|reply
How are you supposed to know passion at 18? I do alumni interviewing for my college and most kids have no singular passion they want to pursue (and more often than not, they are hoping college will help them find that passion).
And I don't blame them. Finding a singular passion to center a degree around at a young age is not the norm. And yet we put a lot of pressure on our kids to be specialists before they're even able to vote. It's a very difficult situation to put children through.
[+] [-] overgard|7 years ago|reply
I also have to say, I've been on the end where we interview people and look through stacks of resumes, and I can't say I've ever actually ever cared about the "education" part unless it's really unusual (IE, very advanced degree, or a degree in a field that isn't CS but might be highly relevant to what my company is doing)
I think it's weird that vocational training is so looked down upon. Not everyone is really built to be a knowledge worker or a professor -- we still need plumbers!
Also whatever happened to apprenticeships? It seems like all we have anymore are internships, but, at least from what I've seen interns are rarely given that much mentoring; it tends to be a lot more about toy-projects or "build a thing that would be nice to have but that we're not going to dedicate a full salaried engineers time to".
[+] [-] lordnacho|7 years ago|reply
The main reason is that you will be able to pick up a humanities/social science course with the skills you already have at the end of high school. What do people do in those degrees? Read text, think critically, express ideas. And you've not only practised that a fair bit in school, but also after education, where you're reading the newspaper, looking at art, and so on. Importantly you aren't going to lose the text reading skill because you'll be using it a little each day.
So you have plenty of practice in the humanities, at least to get you started doing it seriously if you need it later in life. And you have enough that you're not gonna be surprised when someone mentions there was a civil war in the US.
Math stuff seems to be use it or lose it. You can easily avoid linear algebra and big-o thinking, and you will if you aren't forced to think about it. If you do a STEM degree at least you will have heard of stuff and practiced a load of otherwise obscure topics, giving you a starting point that isn't years behind on prerequisites, and leaving you where you won't know what's interesting.
I've met plenty of STEM people who knew a thing or two about history, economics, and the arts. It's relatively rare the other way round, though you do get the occasional renaissance man from that side.
[+] [-] leetcrew|7 years ago|reply
> I've met plenty of STEM people who knew a thing or two about history, economics, and the arts. It's relatively rare the other way round, though you do get the occasional renaissance man from that side.
most interested people can read pop-history, pop-econ, etc. type books and sound pretty knowledgeable in casual discussions, but all they are really learning is how to parrot a couple popular authors' opinions. I think the real observation here is that humanities are much easier to "bullshit" about than something like math, where it actually has to make sense within a rigorous framework.
I would argue that the type of deep dives into original documents that you do in a humanities degree is actually quite difficult. to do this type of learning well is no easier than learning STEM topics, imo.
[+] [-] overgard|7 years ago|reply
That being said, I also notice that a lot of my STEM colleagues look down on creatives and humanities, which is really unfortunate. It's not about one being better than the other, they both have very useful things to teach.
[+] [-] Apocryphon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] presidente20|7 years ago|reply
1. Graduates with any degree earn more money and have less unemployment. No doubt true, but how do you discount selection bias here? Given that it's on average the smarter / more diligent part of the population that goes to university a better question would be what's the value add of university (and then break down by faculty / degree)? Maybe their employment rate is higher due to the necessity of having to pay off their tuition fees :)
2. Some humanities people are successful. No doubt. Plenty of smart motivated folks take humanities subjects so it's not surprising that some of them are successful but I'd like to see some data on expected return across the board rather than cherry picked examples. Wildly successful people might be outliers anyway. Also if you're from a wealthy background you could probably do anything and still have a shot at being a CEO.
3. Most examples of jobs for humanities graduates given in the article are not really graduate jobs, e.g. after sales support for Uber (do you really need a degree for that?). Management roles perhaps, but the article doesn't delve into those jobs, presumably there was some sort of vocational experience involved before they were managers?
4. Critical thinking skills. I'm not convinced that humanities degrees do lead to better critical thinking skills. I am biased but it seems to me Maths and hard science subjects would hone your critical thinking much more (isolating variables, logic, understanding complex material) and it's not like Science grads don't read books on other subjects. The author demonstrates a complete lack of critical thinking skills IMO.
5. Understanding of statistics seems like a pretty valuable tool to bring to most occupations and it would be nice if journalists had that and I doubt you get that from Humanities.
6. Empathy? Seriously? You need a degree to develop empathy?
[+] [-] fallingknife|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cowsandmilk|7 years ago|reply
The classes you were "required to take" likely were intro classes with large enrollments. What you describe is how many intro science classes are taught at many universities as well. And even many second year science classes. It is generally only in the 300-400 level classes that are within your major that you start to have small sections with more intimate interaction with the professor.
[+] [-] lmns|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] your-nanny|7 years ago|reply
My liberal arts classes required lots of writing and a hell a lot of hard thinking.
[+] [-] lordleft|7 years ago|reply
I still think it's pragmatic advice to avoid (or at least consider carefully) spending 150k on an english degree from a private school, but that's not due to any bias against english as an academic discipline - it's more about how much college costs and how debt constrains future choices.
[+] [-] tigershark|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gryson|7 years ago|reply
From personal observations, it seems that students are becoming more and more focused on practical skills development. I would also say this seems to be the prevalent viewpoint on HN. But it is hard to deny the enormous benefits that a liberal arts education can have.
I have a background in the hard sciences, but I would say I owe the heart of my education to the many humanities electives that I took as an undergrad. I can only hope that the pendulum swings back at some point.
[+] [-] mathattack|7 years ago|reply
When people quote Silicon Valley stars like Reid Hoffman (philosophy, Stanford and Oxford) and Benedict Evans (history, Cambridge) look at the school too.
Communicating clearly, and thinking systemically are very important. I’m just not convinced that most colleges and universities teach those anymore. The people who have it get it elsewhere.
[+] [-] jaabe|7 years ago|reply
Personally I’m a little worried about ageism, something that doesn’t even enter the mind space of any of my friends with degrees in the humanities.
So maybe there is something to it. I mean, they had much harder times finding jobs than me, and aren’t rigoursly headhunted, but every one of them found jobs.
[+] [-] cowsandmilk|7 years ago|reply
I'm not sure how you define the reverse, but Amazon's head of HR majored in electrical engineering. I would say that's a traditionally liberal arts job with someone who majored in tech.
[+] [-] throwawaymath|7 years ago|reply
I don't think you can draw a meaningful conclusion from this, other than the idea that it's easier to demonstrate competence in tech versus humanities.
If someone asks you to demonstrate your programming ability, you can point them to something you threw up on GitHub. If someone asks you for a critical analysis of Chaucer, Sein und Zeit or the death of Franz Ferdinand, what are you going to do? A degree is expected in the absence of any clear and demonstrable competency.
[+] [-] scarface74|7 years ago|reply
I see a lot of posts showing anecdotes. There’s enough real data out there that we don’t have to depend on anecdotes.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/news/college-de...
[+] [-] aitchnyu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] repolfx|7 years ago|reply
One problem is that your three requests are somewhat at odds. Collaboration works against creativity and critical thinking in my experience because of pressure to conform to the group, or find ideas acceptable to the group. Being truly creative requires exploring ideas that might not pan out, or which are a bit off the beaten path. Group work also increases the cost of the work which can change the cost/benefit analysis.
When I look at my own life, arguing with people on the internet has been far better for my own critical thinking skills than the humanities lectures I attended at university were. The latter were entirely useless.
[+] [-] matwood|7 years ago|reply
Close to 20 years later, the foundation from those business courses and learning how to write/communicate has done more for my career than any of the CS and math.
[+] [-] HNLurker2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exelius|7 years ago|reply
I thought I was making a mistake choosing that degree path over CS; but CS was making me miserable with the crazy workload — which ended up being a bunch of busy work that got abstracted away by new languages / frameworks by the time we all graduated (we started in a world of esoteric mainframe architectures, C++ and perl and ended in a world of java, php and python so to be fair a LOT changed). But I don’t regret the philosophy degree at all.
[+] [-] throwaway284721|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leetcrew|7 years ago|reply
just a quick sampling of some stuff I did in my CS major:
* wrote a Pascal compiler from scratch
* implemented a variation of FAT32 in the linux kernel
* implemented a simple pipelined MIPS arch in vhdl
* benchmarked different versions of a parallel algorithm on a HPC cluster to see how it scaled on core count
* implemented lots of data structures in c++
some of that stuff applies directly to the work I do now. I landed a good c++ gig straight out of college, and I really appreciate all the tough c++ projects we had to do in school. amusingly the Pascal compiler also turned out to be relevant, as I now help maintain a compiler for a proprietary dialect of Pascal at work. the cpu arch, HPC, and linux stuff isn't directly applicable to my work, but the linux project was a good exposure to working in a large codebase.
not everything in a CS major is going to be directly applicable to your career, but a good program will give you strong foundations for any specialty you branch into later.
[+] [-] veryworried|7 years ago|reply