How Liberal Arts Colleges Are Failing America

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/how-liberal-arts-colleges-are-failing-america/262711/

by stollercyrus • 14 years ago

32 57 14 years ago

readymade2• 14 years ago

If he feels that the primary source of value in an education is its contribution to the GDP, then I feel sorry for him.

paulsutter• 14 years ago

Then perhaps the real contribution to society is having our Starbucks coffee made by a barista with a masters in English literature? Maybe you could explain what you mean because I'm not getting it.

rayiner2• 14 years ago

Are you mad that the English literature majors basically run the country, on Wall Street and in Washington?

ktizo2• 14 years ago

Sounds like a good contribution. They might start a little library in there.

intended3• 14 years ago

I always dislike these off the cuff discussions on education.

Firstly - The topic of education is itself complex and vast.

Secondly - the intersect of education with economic opportunity leaves you with a pretty crummy field filled with myriads of discussion failure points.

House rules of some sort are almost always needed.

Limit your discussion field when you start out, or the constraints/assumptions you are working on.

It serves to have a more productive discussion.

gruseom• 14 years ago

The value of education, traditionally, is that it makes you a civilized human being. There are many ways for that to benefit society.

It's only our narrow age, that conflates education with training and value with economic utility, that would think of GDP as the only contribution.

WhaleBiologist• 14 years ago

I have a CS degree. The degree has been watered down year after year so my university can get more students. They don't care about the quality of their graduates, only the quantity. Because the CS degree was shit, it required almost no effort at all and didn't really teach me much. This seems to be a growing trend among institutions that are starting to care more about money than their students.

The liberal arts electives I picked up taught me critical thinking, which I think were worth more to me than all the CS components combined. Some people still seek out education as a way to be taught how to learn and think, rather than just a 3+ year job investment.

thrdOriginal• 14 years ago

Do you really not understand the point or is that just another vacuous remark to accompany your first cliche? If the former, then perhaps you are making a case as to why liberal arts is still important in society: teaching students the ability to critically think and reach logical conclusions from texts with gaps in information, etc.

readymade2• 14 years ago

What I mean is that if education is the imparting (or rather "drawing forth", from the Latin) of knowledge, a definition of useful knowledge that only hinges on its immediate economic value to the graduate is depressingly narrow.

Firstly, there are all sorts of arguments to be made for how a liberal education can actually end up being unexepectedly advantageous in a professional context. A fair number of the startup engineers I work with majored in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and they all bring interesting perspectives to the table. Steve Jobs has a fascinating anecdote about how a Typography class he dropped in on at Reed was the eventual inspiration for the proportionally spaced fonts of the first Macintosh.

As others have pointed out, studying a broad array of intellectual disciplines with any intensity ultimately will ultimately change the way you think, because even if you don't end up going into a profession directly related to them, creative thinking benefits greatly from the ability to synthesize new connections between seemingly disparate topics.

But there's still more to it than that. HN commenters love to philosophize, but many dismiss philosophy as such. We all have strong political opinions, but it's hard for me to imagine a functional political citizen that doesn't have a grasp of history, civics and the strains of thought that gave rise to our current civilization. We all consume art and music in some way, but presumably it's not worth studying. Or rather, I suspect many would prefer to continue deride those who waste their money and time on such an pursuit, while happily consuming the fruits of their labor. Even knowledge "for its own sake" is worthwhile if the end goal is personal enrichment. Personally, I'd prefer to live in a world with people whose educational prerogatives are not universally economically driven.

Whether higher education should cost so much, whether liberal arts grads are expecting too much upon graduation, and so on are for another conversation.

WalterBright• 14 years ago

>A degree does not guarantee you or your children a good job anymore.

I don't know where this idea came from. It was never true. It certainly wasn't true when I graduated 33 years ago.

My fellow students at Caltech were well aware of the job market, and the prospects of jobs and salary ranges for various degrees. It was well understood, for example, that having a degree in Astronomy meant no job. Astronomy majors did the sensible thing - double majored, AY for fun, another major for a job.

These days, it is so trivial to google for salary ranges and job prospects, I cannot understand anyone selecting a major and being surprised 4 years later.

intended3• 14 years ago

Something thats getting mixed up here is employability vs employment opportunities.

America is facing a problem with the latter - you need to be able to absorb even your lit majors.

_dps2• 14 years ago

> "... you need to be able to absorb even your lit majors"

I think this cuts both ways, and in fact "cuts more" in the opposite direction; even the non-marketable majors (in fact, especially the non-marketable majors) need a plan for how they will participate in the economy to support themselves. Expecting external entities, particularly abstract aggregates like "society", to figure that out for you is not a reasonable bet, and is certainly not compatible with being a responsible, independent adult.

On the other hand, young people are often terrible at reasoning about long-term consequences. To mitigate this, I occasionally ponder whether high schools should offer some kind of 3 month "this is what life is like outside of school" program in which people play a simulated game of seeking employment, paying bills, etc wherein their stated degree/career choices affect the various probabilities.

Unfortunately, it would be very hard to run such a game in a truly representative way (how do you reasonably estimate the chance of a lit major getting a good job straight out of college? How do you incorporate their other talents?). If done poorly, there's a chance such a game would devolve into being dominated by pre-law/pre-med/engineering/CS/business strategies, which would probably alienate more people than it educated.

aik• 14 years ago

I believe this statement about college guaranteeing a job has become the poster-motivational-tool used on kids and parents in an effort to motivate them.

Concerning failing graduates: I think the problem is that many graduates today are at the uncomfortable crossroads of existing in a knowledge economy after passing through an education system pushing an industrial age mindset. They need to take a step back and realize that passively sitting in 1000 seats in 1000 classrooms for 1000 weeks following 1000 instructions does not equate to what's considered real competency in a targeted job area and in general a happy and successful life.

Maybe there should be a warning attached to every college application:

Warning: The shiny glorification of what a college education actually provides you may cause blindness to reality.

nhashem• 14 years ago

The liberal arts themselves aren't the problem. For those of us on HN that went to college and got a computer science degree, I'm sure a lot of took a handful of liberal arts courses as electives. It's even possible that we remember the reading, discussions, and papers in those classes even more than Introduction to the Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science II. As the OP indicated, there is no reason why learning subjects related to logic, writing, psychology, and history can't be complementary to the practical knowledge required for math and science.

In my opinion however, the real issue isn't just the students that get solely a liberal arts degree, but the amount of debt racked up to get one. Getting a philosophy degree at a state university and being $25,000 in debt is one thing, but getting that degree at a private university is being $100,000 in debt is another.

I'd imagine the younger generations will gradually stop pursuing these degrees because of the terrible ROI in terms of debt to future income. If this happens, our economy will be healthier in the short term without so much accumulated debt, but it may come at a cost of eliminating the programs that nurture our future philosophers and artists.

ricksta• 14 years ago

>I'd imagine the younger generations will gradually stop pursuing these degrees because of the terrible ROI in terms of debt to future income.

The problem with this is that most 17-18 year old don't have a sense of what ROI of their education will get them. Many of high-school graduates will be thinking "oh I like to read shakespeare so I'm going to major in English", and they probably have no idea how long the $100k will take to get paid off after their job.

I think if anything that will solve this problem once and for all is to make liberal arts minor degrees and only offer STEM as majors.

ktizo2• 14 years ago

That is a ludicrous suggestion. Even hard line soviets weren't that materialistic about education.

reader5000• 14 years ago

$100k STEM degrees aren't pumping out ROI either.

001sky4• 14 years ago

Isn't the issue that liberal arts educations have not changed in the past 40 years, but the cost has gone from $10K to $100-200K?. So, there is an order of magnituded cost and some minor Nx delta on the Return (~inflation).

English/logic/philosophy/history etc should be plumeting in cost. With the internet, the cost of books/articles should have gone to zero by now. Non-profit universities could force sharing of peer-reviewed work online for the priviledge of the peer review publication (for example).

A degree of this type is not worth more or less (especially as a social rank signifier) today than yesterday. And they are valuable. But they sure as hell cost way more than they should. Its time to question why they are priced as if they were luxury, brand name handbags. Rather than public goods being distributed by non-profit, tax exempt organizations.

jacques_chester2• 14 years ago

Capital gets cheaper, labour gets more expensive. This has been the general trend in education since the invention of the printing press.

patio11• 14 years ago

English/logic/philosophy/history etc should be plumeting in cost.

If one assume that an English degree's purpose is to teach the comprehension and production of English vis-a-vis a body of literature, and assuming that degree is priced cost-plus, one would assume the price of degrees to come down modestly over time due to efficiency gains.

Consider the alternative hypotheses where a) an English degree is primarily a signaling mechanism to demonstrate that you are in the upper N% of some distribution measured by the university admissions office, b) the LTV of being in the upper N% is widely perceived to be high, c) credit is available in quantity, and d) universities price degrees at 100% of their customers ability to pay. If these hypotheses all hold, you would expect the price of degrees to inflate to capture all familial ability to pay plus all aid plus all available loans plus a bit of a fudge factor for blood plasma, summer jobs, and gifts from grandma.

Which world more closely resembles the world we are living in?

P.S. I believe your use of the term "public good" is non-standard in this paragraph. Do you mean that, as an aspirational statement, we should subsidize the consumption of English degrees, or that perhaps "English degrees have positive externalities"? The more common use of "public good" in economics is "a good which, when produced, is enjoyed non-rivalrously by the public, such that one's enjoyment of the good does not content with another's enjoyment of the good." For example, national defense (well, precisely, the state of nation-not-under-attack) is a public good. University educations are not a public good under the standard usage of that term: buying you a degree does not buy me a degree.

tzs2• 14 years ago

> For those of us on HN that went to college and got a computer science degree, I'm sure a lot of took a handful of liberal arts courses as electives.

Now I'm curious.

At Caltech, you must have a minimum of 486 units to graduate (Caltech units are based on the amount of time a course is expected to take (lectures + labs + reading/homework) a week: 1 hour == 1 unit).

Of that, 108 units must be in humanities and social sciences. At least 36 must be humanities (art, English, film, history, history and philosophy of science, humanities, music, and philosophy), and at least 36 must be social sciences (anthropology, business economics and management, economics, law, political science, psychology, social science). Half of those must be introductory courses and half must be advanced courses.

Generally, this means a Caltech CS major (or any other major except a humanities or social science major) takes one humanities or social science course every term, which is about 20% of their total course load.

Anyone happen to know the humanities and social science requirements for other top schools, like MIT, Berkeley, and so on for people in technical majors like CS, math, physics and so on?

storborg• 14 years ago

MIT is basically the same (average of one course per term), with an additional "distribution requirement" which means that a selection of your humanities courses must be spread across a certain number of categories.

http://web.mit.edu/hassreq/

marshray• 14 years ago

I've never heard anyone say "a bachelor's degree in history is as valuable as, say, a chemical engineering degree".

BadassFractal• 14 years ago

You often hear the argument that a University is not a 4-year boot camp for the job world. What are people's thoughts on that? Is paying 200k to become a more well-rounded better-thinking human being worth it?

sukuriant• 14 years ago

50k might be (in-state tuition)

k_kelly• 14 years ago

I did a liberal arts degree and some time afterwards a CS masters.

To me I got educated by doing arts and got qualified by doing CS. Being exposed to challenging opinions on what it means to live is not going to come up in an engineering interview but I don't feel poorer for thinking about it.

I almost feel like arts would do much better as a sabbatical from a real degree, where you took a year to think about yourself and your interests.

Certainly price is the biggest problem here, no college degrees are worth their current prices, what you bank on is that they allow you to skip ahead of others less qualified to get better paid jobs, with no defined career from liberal arts this is a massive problem. Your education had value, but to yourself and writing a check for a hundred thousand dollars to yourself at 18 is not a wise investment period.

On the other hand, CS majors are failed by their course too, everyone knows that a CS grad who only learns the prescribed texts is not the best grad. All college degrees do these days is determine intent.

Education right now is at a massive junction, I feel like an arts student who used their extra free hours to hit Udacity, Coursera and mitX as well as building a github and doing internships in software companies would be downright dangerous when they graduated.

cafard• 14 years ago

I did the same route--BA and then about 15 years later CS masters. I would say that the liberal arts education gave me some of the background I needed to continue my education; I didn't even at the time consider myself educated. And I should say that I spent a good deal of those 15 years fairly broke, not from loans hanging over me but from low earning power while I figured out what to do next.

Price is the killer. In the mid-1970s, a kid stocking shelves or pumping gas could make a year's tuition at a state school with a fair bit left over during the course of summer's work. For a private school it might be more like a third of tuition, leaving a couple thousand to be come by some other way.

bdunn• 14 years ago

I went from being an EE major at a state school to studying liberal arts at St. John's College in Annapolis, MD (http://sjca.edu). My final destination had no textbooks, no grades, and every seminar or tutorial (aka class) wasn't taught by an instructor, but instead focused around conversation and discussion.

I'm a programmer, small business owner, and recently an author. I credit St. John's with helping build the foundation that I've used in my professional life - namely, the ability to listen well and think through problems, and most importantly, "fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion." This is something that most definitely wasn't a priority while chasing an EE degree.

intended3• 14 years ago

You should see how STEM fetishization plays out on a nation scale.

The assumption that STEM = logic is erroneous. I've seen enough mental athletes and Frankenstein monsters to know.

JoeAltmaier5• 14 years ago

Its true that a '4-year degree' is a ritual, similar to Catholic Confirmation or other coming-of-age hurdles. Its purpose is to confirm adulthood and ensure shared values. Job training is secondary.

Look at all the arbitrary rules: it has to be 4-year (apparently art takes exactly as long to learn as bio-engineering!) It has to include a football team, dormitories, in-person lectures, mid-terms and tests.

Look at all the squishy rules: you can graduate with a C- or D-average. You can learn pretty much anything you want. You can take up to 10 years to do the "4-year" degree.

Clearly its not What you learn that is the critical aspect; its the fact that you went through the same gauntlet as everybody else.

Given the irrationality of the whole process, its no wonder folks have fastened on the optional job-training feature as its true purpose - that's at least something you can measure (in terms of return-on-investment).

locopati3• 14 years ago

Your point about 'it has to be 4-year' conflicts with your point about 'you can take up to 10 years to do a 4-year degree'.

How Liberal Arts Colleges Are Failing America

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