
How Liberal Arts Colleges Are Failing America - stollercyrus
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/how-liberal-arts-colleges-are-failing-america/262711/
======
WalterBright
>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.

~~~
intended
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.

~~~
_dps
> "... 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.

------
nhashem
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.

~~~
001sky
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_chester
Capital gets cheaper, labour gets more expensive. This has been the general
trend in education since the invention of the printing press.

~~~
001sky
Relevant data:

_________

 _Princeton: Endowment US$ 17.1 billion (2011)

Harvard: Endowment US$ 32.0 billion (2011)

Yale: Endowment US$ 19.4 billion (2011)

Stanford: Endowment US$ 16.5 billion (2011)

___________

Facebook: IPO US$ 10.0 billion (2012)_

_________

Its not the payout to the staff. That its typically 1/3 of the budget spent at
a University. Princeton just raised $1.8B for its latest fundraising project.
etc.

~~~
jacques_chester
I'm not sure if generalising from a handful of massively-endowed private
universities to all universities everywhere is a meaningful thing.

It used to be that books were so rare and expensive that they were chained to
desks. A single copy would be read aloud to students -- the very word
"lecturer" means "reader".

These days, for a _liberal arts_ education heavy in classics and great books,
the cost of the materials is close to nought. That's what I meant by the
capital.

~~~
001sky
The attack need not be general. Quick specific examples are even stonger. The
degree from Uni X N years ago is not worth less than Uni X today. Their values
are ordinal not cardinal, although arguably decreasing in relative value in
any event on a more absolute scale.

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JoeAltmaier
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).

~~~
locopati
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'.

------
k_kelly
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
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
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.

~~~
intended
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.

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readymade
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
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.

~~~
gruseom
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.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_...a civilized human being. There are many ways for that to benefit society._

Could you define "civilized human being", and perhaps explain what some of
those ways are?

I.e., explain it to me like I'm 5.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
How about: Sharing core values, understading shared history, arguing from
shared premises makes public discourse meaningful instead of anarchic.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_Sharing core values...arguing from shared premises..._

So the purpose of college is indoctrination? Good to know.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Right, but you use that word like its a bad thing? Don't you spend most of
your time indoctrinating your kids? Don't hit your brother! Be polite to your
mother! Don't shove! Shut up and sit down!

Doctrine, other than political, is critical to civilization.

------
BadassFractal
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
50k might be (in-state tuition)

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

