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Hmmm....so you cite politicians. And the NINE justices of the Supreme Court. Warren Buffett is not a humanities student. The people that run banks are finance and accounting people, not liberal arts majors. Do you want to credibly claim that a meaningful percentage of humanties/social science degree holders attain positions of power?
Who in Broadway matters? If Broadway disappeared from the planet, a few would be sad. But no one would starve and life would go on.
Have you forgotten the military?
You can say the same about the iPhone too, but so what.
The point still stands.
STEM specialists do NOT generally attain positions of great power in this country--regardless of what you personally think of politicans. They just don't. And business and finance leaders are hardly EVER STEM students. Accounting and finance are not STEM and never will be. The most powerful business leaders typcially understand markets and people far more than numbers and science, which are only a means to an end.
I think that the contributions of STEM people are incredible and would never downplay them or their talent . But in terms of who actually runs society, STEM people are generally the ones taking orders, not giving them.
If average student debt today at graduation is near $30K (widely reported today), how is the humanities major working at Starbucks going to repay it?
$10/hour = $20,000 per year if working 40 hours/wk. After their iPhone, apartment rent, and food, they can't repay any of it. Unless they live with their parents.
Over 20 years, $30,000 is about $200 a month at the low interest rates federal loans offer. Sure some people are in over their heads, but $30K is very manageable. Think about it, it's the cost of a new car at a much lower interest rate.
And very few humanities majors stay working at Starbucks their whole lives.
I'm from China. When I was in high school, students needed to decide their route in the last year: either "arts" or "science". And then they took different "college entrance exams". Needless to say science and engineering departments only admit "science" students, and arts majors sometimes admit a few science students.
I remember there were about 400 students in my grade, and only 40~50 chose the "arts" route. All the others competed on physics, chemistry and so on. (Math was tested for both.)
Even those who chose the "arts" route may not be able to escape from science in college. A friend of mine studied English but her university requires calculus and general physics for all.
I understand the US is a more developed society and it needs more people to be properly trained in social sciences and arts. However, is it really normal that less than 20% students study STEM majors? In graduate school, over 70% engineering students are from foreign countries.
I do believe some policy needs to be made to encourage, or even force, more students to study math and science. For example, cut the "quota" for arts majors, so many who want to go to college have to choose otherwise. Also, do not hire so many professors in arts...
Young people in America no longer have a work ethic. They have been given everything from their parents and grandparents, have never been expected to work (even in summer when off from school) and see no reason to sacrifice for the future. And so they will take the "easy way out" and study the fun and easy stuff in college. They are assured easy A's and B's to satisfy the parents, and the classes are enjoyable too. Why take demanding major like Engineering when the time required to study and do labs is 4 to 5 times as much, and the grading is MUCH harder?
In my generation (graduating college 1983), those who chose tough majors like Engineering (or doubly tough majors like Chemical Engineering) understood that in return for this very hard work when other students were partying, they were assured jobs that paid a decent amount. Almost all had parents who had a very tough work ethic themselves, and offered very little financial support simply on principle: they paid for their own college degrees and therefore the degree HAD to pay off with decent jobs. Too many people in our generation went to college and got business or liberal arts degrees; they flooded these job markets even before I graduated. A degree in those fields likely wouldn't land a job, even then. The problem is much, much worse today, and we just re-elected a President who thinks even MORE over-educated young adults is the solution to massive structural unemployment.
Even way back then, however, we were seeing the promises dissolve: every single large business in the nation had a hiring freeze on in the spring-summer of 1983; in fact, UNH's graduating class of Chemical Engineers (which previously had 100% job placement every single year) that year had NO graduate that landed a private industry job. Some went into the military which had a super-competitive track for nuclear submarine officers; some went to grad school; some changed track and tried their own businesses. It was our nation's first exposure to the fact that when you graduate in a Recession, you never make up the ground, and the first time a degree in a technical field was as useless as a Liberal Arts degree.
Today the job situation in America has degraded so badly that a decent job is no longer assured, even with technical degrees and good grades. Worse, engineering pay, work conditions, and workhours were drastically harmed over the last 30 years by an influx of foreigners (often Indian) who had (mail-order) engineering degrees from other nations. Business no longer cared that these foreign engineers were not of the caliber of the U.S. engineers; workers in the era of the Robber-Baron CEO were nothing but costs to be minimized anyway. One was as good as another. The most obnoxious and narcissistic (and typically, the least technically knowledgeable) of the foreign engineers were given leadership positions, placing psychologically healthy working engineers in the position of constantly fighting cost-cutting efforts that compromised safety. This is the state of engineering in many large corporations today; work satisfaction is almost nil, and work takes up 90% of their working hours.
Today, engineers for large companies nowadays are not valued, work in cubicles, earn decent money compared to everyone else (but which is greatly eroded by taxes and overseas competition), and typically are required to put in 80 hours a week while being "on call" (within 20 minutes of the plant) 100% of the time. Work hours are 24/7 when a problem arises. Even when rising to higher levels of supervisory engineering, the requirement that you be there all day, every day, does not diminish even as the engineer hits age 50 or more. This is hardly a reward sufficient to lure modern kids into studying STEM subjects for technical jobs.
Incidentally, Big Business has not hired many engineers that today are younger than 50, and there will be a huge gap of knowledge when these people retire (and they will be forced by the demands of the jobs to retire VERY early). This will have ramifications for every American, because the electrical power grid and many other technical systems cannot be maintained without knowledgeable technical staff. When a staff of 120 engineers has only 10 of those under the age of 50, and the vast majority of engineers are only a year away from retiring, how do they think a power plant will continue operating. You can't just hire more engineers; it takes years to learn the systems on many plants. Big Business has had many national symposiums admitting that in "the future," engineers should be paid much better and staffed so that they aren't working 80 hours a week. But they intend to make NO changes until the current crop of engineers retires. After all, it is much cheaper to work the current workaholics to death.
I see a thousand things in America that have the potential to be disastrous, this being probably farther in the future than our current economic disaster. I see nothing that looks hopeful. I certainly hope I'm wrong, but just in case, expect electricity to be increasing unreliable when you make plans for WTSHTF.
The future economy in the US is for creatives. Those art majors are busy designing....the comp sci and engineering jobs are being outsourced because anyone with technical training can do them.
There is one very bood reason fro kids to go to college and get arts/humanities/social science degrees, rather than STEM diplomas.
POWER!
Essentially, the STEM graduates do what they're told, but the rest of us get to do the telling!
In this society, very few positions of real power, outside of noticable exception of the tech industry, are held by anyone in the STEM fields. To take an obvious example, President Obama did not get a degree in chemical engineering, sfotware design, or advanced statistics. Few if anyone in Congress, the Supreme Court, or among our governors or mayors of our largest cities did either. The heads of our biggest media companies? Nope. Our banks? Uh-uh. Industrial conglomerates? A handful since Edward Land, but no more. How about those who run the airlines, rail and car companies? Business specialists, but STEM specialists? Nope. The entertainment biz? Not in Hollywood or Broadway. And where are the university presdients who are scientists? A few, for sure. But most have academic backgrounds in non-STEM fields.
Hence the debt and some of the other problems this country faces. Thanks for another example of the need for MORE math education, even for non-STEM majors.
Obviously i meant "force by policy" not by dictating you.
Just taking a few courses is not a proper training, except you are a genius. The departments also need funding etc.
Few if any people can become a mechanical engineer without majoring it in college. Many courses on mechanics are very boring for any normal person, but you have to endure to succeed.
Learning everything a bit only suits liberal arts.
Forcing by policy is also a very bad idea. If a student LIKES a subject and has aptitude for it, then fine, have the opportunity available. But you don't want people who are bad at math in majors where math ability matters. You are just setting them up to fail. And if there is no real interest in the subject, its not going to produce what you want, just someone who can memorize. If you want to produce engineers, you want those who have the aptitude and the skills and want to be an engineer or all you get is a middling and ineffective one.
I'm lousey at math. I always have been. I would never have been much of an anything in subjects with strong math content. I love science, but my mind doesn't work that way. I'd make a lousey scientist. I love writing and history and arts. The skills learned in these persuits have many applications and do matter. Creative thought is just as important as concrete mechanics. Creative thought teaches you to see *new* pathways instead of just how its done. Writing, and good use of words is something EVERYONE needs to learn since its how we communicate. And History, especially if taught right, gives us a sense of how the world was and how it changed, which does matter since the patterns don't alter all that much.
I agree pure liberal arts are limited, but everyone should also be sufficently well versed in language and history and creative expression because it keeps us from being automitions. Remember, science is only part the hows and whys, and a whole lot more the drive to want to know more just to see where the road leads, and that is as much art as anything else.
Way back when, I decided to quit my history major after the AA since I didn't see jobs. I took programming classes, loved it but it still was not for me. I burned out way early. If I could do it all again, I'd take the two more years of history and have that degree which I still want, and being something I love and am passionate about, who knows? You also have to want to be doing what your doing or you might as well be stocking for Walmart.
Last edited by nightbird47; 11-09-2012 at 06:52 PM..
You can say the same about the iPhone too, but so what.
The point still stands.
STEM specialists do NOT generally attain positions of great power in this country--regardless of what you personally think of politicans. They just don't. And business and finance leaders are hardly EVER STEM students. Accounting and finance are not STEM and never will be. The most powerful business leaders typcially understand markets and people far more than numbers and science, which are only a means to an end.
I think that the contributions of STEM people are incredible and would never downplay them or their talent . But in terms of who actually runs society, STEM people are generally the ones taking orders, not giving them.
This may have been true years ago but Wall Street, Petroleum and Silicon Valley leaders are almost all STEM grads these days. MIT alone has sent 50% of its grads to Wall Street over the past 15 years. Koch Brothers, Bloomberg, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, etc, etc.
If the US put a moratorium on most liberal arts degrees for the next ten years, there would still be an over supply of people vs. jobs that required history, English, religious studies, languages, etc..
There are many people with such degrees who wind up doing well in the business world.
Nothing personal, but with that education (hopefully from good schools), me thinks it is not the education, but other issues. How are the interpersonal skills, management skills, cross-functional skills? Team building? There is much more that goes into a person that is valued by a company than the stack of degrees he/she has. Granted, yes, I have had a few 'super-geniuses', often from Cal-Tech or MIT, and have had to sort of let them 'run their course', as my job was damage control in management, but that is quite rare.
Personally, from much hiring experience, , it seems the chronically underemployed/laid off have had many other factors come into play other than pure technical ability.
To look at it a little bit differently, if someone were the best buggy-whip maker in the entire universe, yet we don't use buggy-whips any more.... what is the value added?
JMHO.
My personal skills, time management, etc. are all fine. I was even promoted several times over the course of my career(s) in the span of only 5 years. The problem is that every company I work for in a tech field either starts shipping work overseas or goes under within 5-10 years. I've been laid off multiple times, not fired. Science gets you nothing more than chronic under employment working for temp firms where companies can let you go on a whim and offer no health care benefits.
The future economy in the US is for creatives. Those art majors are busy designing....the comp sci and engineering jobs are being outsourced because anyone with technical training can do them.
THIS!
People like to knock art degrees, but YOU SIMPLY CAN NOT TEACH creativity. Any schmo can be taught how to do calculus, solve physics problems, or do math, that's why we ship all of those jobs overseas to India and China. BUT you can't not teach innovative ideas and design which is what our art majors do. Creativity sells
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