
We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training - wyclif
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/02/18/we-dont-need-more-stem-majors-we-need-more-stem-majors-with-liberal-arts-training/
======
bediger4000
From the editorial: _In business and at every level of government, we hear how
important it is to graduate more students majoring in science, technology,
engineering and math, as our nation’s competitiveness depends on it._

Very good! You've given a reason, but it's based on an argument from
authority: BUSINESS and GOVERNMENT say the nation needs more STEM people. I
find that entire type of argument unconvincing. Businesses usually say they
need more people with some quality when they find the existing people with
that quality are too expensive. As an employee, if I had a quality in demand,
I'd seek to keep the supply of people with that quality as low as possible.
Lawyers and doctors do that (in the USA) why can't STEM people?

That's to say: I'm unconvinced.

~~~
enraged_camel
It's funny that you mention doctors and lawyers, because the way doctors and
lawyers artificially keep their numbers small has earned them a very bad
reputation among the general populace. They aren't doing it for quality
either. They have their own interests in mind (just like businesses do in the
STEM case) and they are willing to deny other people the same opportunities in
order to get paid more.

My parents are actually doctors and we used to get in debates about this all
the time. They of course follow the party line about how an influx into the
medical field would lower quality of service. But of course they say that
because they want their own earning potential to remain very high.

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eximius
Ironically, the main example is of a chemistry student who knows how to
program.

I actually do agree with the article, I just think it is hopelessly vague. As
a math major who frequently programs and has a great interest in chemistry in
physics, it is not "liberal arts" that I find helpful, but philosophy, ethics,
and things that were, until recently, considered sciences as well. (I _love_
the metaphysical ramifications of Godel because my favorite part of philosophy
is epistemology)

Analyzing a poem or learning about diversity or whathaveyou won't help me -
not necesarily because it can't but because liberal arts education at the
undergraduate level is hopelessly useless. There are two extremes I see in it:
hopeless rigidity (you can't end a sentence with a preposition or your
interpretation of this piece is wrong because I disagree with it) and
incompetent formlessness where every opinion is valid and has merit - even
when it doesn't.

It is too rare that I see education that accepts diversity of opinion while
maintaining rigour in anything.

~~~
analog31
Indeed, math was also once considered to be a liberal art.

------
Glyptodon
I have two minors in liberal arts fields in addition to a CS degree (a BS) and
the main reaction they've ever engendered is curiosity at how the minors are
totally unrelated to a CS major. (IE there's a subtext of "why aren't your
minor minors in math or science?" Because I guess they should be, or
something?)

Even more annoying is the frequent assumption that if a person works with
computers it's inconceivable that they might have a clue about design,
writing, or art.

~~~
dcre
I've gotten those same questions, but never felt a negative subtext. I've
always considered the question an easy way to start a conversation about
versatility.

~~~
mattmurdog
It's negative when people start to pigeonhole you and tell you you can't do
certain things because you're not suppose to know how.

------
bennyg
Combinatorial creativity is a very real thing. So why limit yourself to one
intellectual pursuit (whether that's liberal arts, STEM, teaching, etc)? This
article could be reversed and still make sense - We need more liberal arts
majors with STEM training.

~~~
sitkack
We need more people with a broad, diverse education. Because those people make
better people.

------
dj-wonk
I'd like to mention that my alma mater (The University of Texas at Austin) has
an honors program (called Plan II) that allows (and encourages) students to
major in both liberal arts and other, often technical fields:
[http://www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/plan2/admission/application...](http://www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/plan2/admission/application/other-
honors.php)

My particular program combined liberal arts and engineering _and_ had
institutional support and a student group to help.

Of course, many other students still thought we were crazy to do both. I'm
glad I did. Many of my Plan II instructors did a better job of teaching
critical thinking and scholarship than most of my engineering professors.

------
stolio
None of these arguments are very moving. The best argument of the article is
that it's good to learn programming even if your interests are in the hard
sciences. But computer science is a STEM field. STEM majors already cross-
train in other STEM disciplines because it's useful and helps give them a
well-rounded education.

Why not make liberal arts students, who are the ones who can't get jobs and
whose educations aren't doing much for society, take science classes? They're
the ones who end up working at Starbucks. That's the part of the education
system that's _broken_, but we're supposed to ask the most productive part of
education to follow suit?

~~~
voyou
"Why not make liberal arts students, who are the ones who can't get jobs..."

It's not really that simple. Recent liberal arts graduates have about the same
unemployment rate as recent computer science and maths graduates. Physical
science graduates have a much better chance of finding a job, but so do
education majors.[1] And there isn't a big glut of unfilled STEM jobs which
would be available to these liberal arts students if they just took STEM
courses.[2] The idea that the liberal arts are "broken" and STEM is
"productive" isn't supported by the evidence.

[1]: [https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-
content/uploads/HardTimes2015-...](https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-
content/uploads/HardTimes2015-Report.pdf) [2]: [http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-
work/education/the-stem-crisis-i...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-
work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth)

~~~
stolio
Your "evidence" is underwhelming, I don't really understand the point you're
trying to make. My argument wasn't based on the "STEM crisis" so debunking it
is irrelevant. If you look at figure 1 of your Georgetown link it seems clear
that STEM degrees correlate with lower unemployment, liberal arts with higher
unemployment.

You don't get to just cherry-pick the easy comparisons. Your link suggests
technical educations have, as a whole, lower unemployment. In addition to
that, average salaries for recent STEM grads are 25-50% higher than their
liberal arts counterparts.

Maybe it's not fair of me to say that one is awesome and the other is
horrible, but if we're going to make one of them more like the other it seems
clear which one is falling behind.

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madengr
"Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, credits her degree in
philosophy and medieval history in helping her be the first woman to lead a
high-tech Fortune 20 corporation."

Yeah, allot of good she did to HP. Hewlett & Packard were engineers.

~~~
enraged_camel
I'm not too familiar with her case. Was her subpar performance caused by her
lack of technical education?

~~~
madengr
Not nessicerily, but she turned a respected test and measurement company into
a purveyor of garbage PCs and printers.

------
kabdib
Though I never got a degree, I did take a LOT of history on the opposite side
of the campus from the CS building. (There were a lot more women on that side
of the campus as well, which was nice).

History was tons of fun, and remains one of my favorite types of reading to
this day.

More practically, I highly recommend taking a number of courses on writing,
because one of the things you'll need to do in your great CS career is
communicate effectively to people, up and down your management chain, and to
customers. Hell, good writing skills come into play when you're filling-in bug
reports.

~~~
caseydurfee
Coding is just a really specialized type of writing. A lot of the principles
of writing and editing prose well equally apply to code.

~~~
dingaling
> Coding is just a really specialized type of writing

.. for the attention of a single audience, the compiler. The compiler demands
accuracy and completeness yet also provides patient, useful and virtually
infinite feedback to guide the writer. That's not typical of human audiences!

Creating prose for human audiences is challenging and yet is an essential
skill in the corporate world.

A two-minute elevator pitch to a C-level officer is going to be a lot
different than notes on a bug report. But I've worked with many people who
can't make that context-switch and just overwhelm their audience with
irrelevant details.

That's one of the interesting aspects of an education in history: analyse
inputs, synthesise, evaluate and only output what is relevant to the argument.

~~~
kabdib
Good code has to be good on a number of different axis:

\- Understandability and maintainability. People are going to toss your code
if it's bad. If the stuff you write is consistently bad, they're going to toss
_you_.

\- Syntax, as enforced by the compiler.

\- Functional. Many sub-axis here, including efficiency, usability, resilience
to failure, number of bugs, and so on.

... and so on.

------
ryoshu
It's called STEAM. There's a movement in education -
[http://www.risd.edu/About/STEM_to_STEAM/](http://www.risd.edu/About/STEM_to_STEAM/)

~~~
j2kun
Is anything left out of this movement? What separates STEAM from just...
education?

~~~
ryoshu
It's project based, something you don't normally see in public education. It
focuses on integrating the disciplines. Students don't have a science course,
then a math course, then a writing course. Students are given a problem to
solve that cuts across disciplines and have to use different disciplines to
solve the problem.

The concept has been around forever, but modern education has put disciplines
into silos. STEAM is trying to reintegrate things.

------
geebee
While I certainly agree that STEM students with a background in humanities
would be valuable, we still need to ask if this is a rational career path for
someone with this kind of ability.

Medicine is also a good career choice for academically talented students with
strength in both humanities and science. To get these students over to STEM
you'll need to offer career prospects, pay, stability, and prestige comparable
to dermatology or radiology.

In short, I can see why STEM employers would want these students, but the
students have better options than STEM.

------
jackvalentine
For what it's worth, I did a Liberal Arts degree, a Business degree and ended
up working in IT. Liberal arts came first and Business came second.

Liberal arts thoroughly enriched my understanding of the world when coupled
with business (particularly the economics aspects of it). I use both when
managing clients and projects in my IT job. I encourage all students to become
multi-disciplinary even if you think your future focus will be only in one
area.

------
mlitchard
What we need to do is to discern between education and training. Once we do
that, we can begin to elevate the vocational back to a place where it's
valued, and institutions dedicated to education can get back to it and not
have it's resources diverted to a task outside the charter of education. I
look forward to engaging in the debate of the line between the two.

~~~
seanflyon
Could you elaborate on the distinction between education and training and why
you think a single institution should not do both? I think colleges should
teach things that are things that are directly applicable to a job as well as
things that are not.

~~~
mlitchard
First, when I say education, I mean Liberal Arts education. In this, I would
include the humanities, and pure maths. The difference could be found in the
approach to technical skills. For example, when I was a student of Attic
Greek, our teacher liked to point out that our technical mastery of English
grammar would serve us well if we chose a career in publishing. The acquiring
of this technical skill was a side-effect of our pursuit, the study of Attic
Greek, not the point of it. In vocational training, the entire point is in the
acquiring of technical skill. I believe this is as important, and must be a
separate pursuit so that it gets the resources it needs. A STEM example would
be the difference between how engineering is treated in Canada, versus the
U.S. After an education of engineering theory, a student in Canada is then
qualified to enter into an apprenticeship where they then have the opportunity
to become a qualified engineer, after their vocational training is completed.
In the U.S., there's not as much discernment between theory and praxis, and
one may not be entirely sure of receiving the right amount of each. The
official certification one receives in Canada seems to signal the valuing of
vocational training. Receiving an education in theory as a pre-requisite
signals the value of theory.

------
dba7dba
Lenders need to start charging hire interest rate for loans made to non-STEM
majors. Those loans are more risky. I know I will get flack for this but I
believe it will be good policy.

------
Yhippa
What exactly is she suggesting we do about it?

------
MichaelCrawford
I myself have a Bachelor of Arts in Physics, from UC Santa Cruz. I regard the
courses I took in history, anthropology and social psychology to be invaluable
to my work as a coder.

~~~
Eridrus
I would love to hear any concrete examples you might have.

~~~
MichaelCrawford
I can produce some but not just now as I have not been feeling well.

But consider that software may be executed by machines, but it is written by
humans. I once read a fascinating UCSC doctoral dissertation by an
anthropologist who studied High Energy Physicists at SLAC.

Working at Apple was just like that for me. I didn't just write code, I
studied my fellow employees.

------
frozenport
>>thinkers who know to consider chemistry’s impact on society and the
environment.

I would rather we had chemistry that could impact the environment instead of
thinkers who philosophized over its impact.

There might be an interesting argument about how liberal arts eduction
contributes to STEM, or perhaps that STEM has low standards and anybody can
decide to be a biologists on a whim, but the more interesting arguments are
not made by the article. Perhaps the author could use an extra English class.

~~~
sliverstorm
How about:

 _A scientist trained in the liberal arts has another huge advantage: writing
ability._

It might not be an "interesting" argument, but I remember my best college
professor expressly lamenting that engineering students no longer knew how to
write.

I also remember discovering the steady decline in the quality of datasheet &
manual technical writing, starting somewhere in the late 80's.

~~~
walterbell
Writing is quite important in software development, especially on open-source
projects where much communication occurs via email and bug tracker. With the
glut of projects competing for attention, copywriting ability can be important
in attracting other developers to a project.

