This is 100% true. I have a chemistry degree that's technically from a liberal arts college and it was super confusing to my immigrant parents how that could happen. Now with the advent of the term "STEM" it's even more confusing because a huge portion of Science degrees are actually in liberal arts programs, not technically "Science" programs.
maxsilver|1 year ago
I kind of get it. The english words "liberal" and "arts" used to mean entirely different things for hundreds of years, and have been redefined into something else only recently (past ~30 years) via common usage.
My degree program was in "Liberal Studies", and my parents consistently assumed it meant "studying how to become a Democrat voter", when in actuality, what it meant was "if you can justify it well, we give you permission to merge two-or-more different degree paths into one"
The university eventually had to rename the program to "Integrative Studies", because too many people simply don't know what "Liberal" means in an traditional academic context, and couldn't shake the modern-political framing of the word.