this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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I think a big part of it is the mindset that college education should train you to do a job, rather than provide a knowledge based on which job-specific training can be built upon. I think this is dually precipitated by employers not investing in training/educating their employees anymore, and outsourcing that cost to the employee, but also the issue of students who throw a fit about taking class X because they're going for a degree in Y (I see this a lot with science/engineering majors when having to take classes in the humanities).
Yeah. That's really an ongoing issue that I've seen too. "Why do I have to take English Comp and some other art crap, when I'm studying CS?" Is something that I have heard a lot. And the reason is that context matters and humans are not rational actors so, it's important to learn about other ideas in order to both be able to effectively apply hard sciences in a world that doesn't always match up to what's on paper, understand why ethical standards exist, and know about the things that we humans do without clear material reason.
I blame the neoliberal idea that everything must relate to profit and anything that isn't directly related to profit is luxury as a cause of this problem. Hard sciences are about understanding the world around and, to some degree inside, us. Arts and humanities are about what gives us joy, purpose, and interesting ways to make the world a weirder place.
I'll be honest, I understand the college student's point of view because for the most part, the teachers in the geneds did not give two fucks about what they were teaching, and I had already learned enough that wasn't directly relevant to my interests when it was free. Like, seriously, I put up with over a decade of this palpable disinterest in K-12, now I'm paying for the privilege of taking more of it from adjuncts, because the college says I need to buy $20K worth of credits before I can talk to someone who's actually motivated?
Chicken, meet egg.
I identify with your sentiment so much. Forced to spend the first quarter of my life absorbing questionable curriculum that ultimately didn't prepare me for adulthood, then agree to unforgivable debt, for what?
The current status of college in America is a scam. It's designed to uplift the upper class and ruin lives of the lower classes to discourage future generations from trying.
It's gatekeeping.
A very good point. The obscene cost and lack of that money going to hiring motivated faculty is more than a but of a buzzkill for humanities. And the use of adjuncts to replace faculty is nothing but exploitation of both the adjunct and the students.
True, but there's a certain set of STEM students who resent that their BS degrees are not simply technical certifications. The idea of college is supposed to be that you come out a well rounded person who had exposure to a lot of fields of human endeavor at a sophisticated level compared to high school.
Now, can we argue that not everyone qualified to pursue a technical subject needs a well-rounded education? Sure, but I don't want to work with or for those people. Even for someone who rolled their eyes through English Comp 101, you can expect that they've been taught how to write a damn paragraph and how to engage with a narrative beyond the surface level.
This is such a weird idea to me. For my money, the people I've met who have a more well rounded understanding of the world aren't the people who've attended expensive colleges and been tucked away in the lap of privilege their entire lives, it's the people who've been through some shit and come out the other end.
Life will round you out if you go out and live it. And if you do the kind of research and study on your own that anybody poking around on some obscure Lemmy instance is more than capable of, you can do plenty to expand your horizons far beyond anything you'd learn in college.
I'm not against college, I think education is great, but people seem to think the only way to learn anything is to listen to lectures and take tests. Like, yeah, that's a way to do it, but it certainly isn't the only way to do it or even the best way to do it.
What it is, almost certainly, is the most expensive way to do it.
So like, to me, when you imply that people who didn't spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to have someone else read to them can't be every bit as educated as those who did, it's a little classist and a little insulting.
I think should be normal to expect that basic level of all-around competence from high school graduates.
Obviously high school systems have their own significant failures, though.
It's so blatant how gen ed classes are used to get every last cent out of students. Like, I understand the reasoning that some students lack general skills they'll need for their jobs (e.g. engineering students having terrible English skills, which will be needed for presentations/reports), but that's not an excuse to require every student to take those classes no matter what. If they really only cared that students were proficient in those subjects, there would be the option to test out, but that's never a possibility. Most big universities near me also refuse to give credit for AP/IB classes, and don't even allow credits to transfer from other colleges for everything but the most base-level courses.
I can think of about one class per semester (so almost a quarter of my classes) that was pure filler, where I only showed up for tests/presentations, and that I could have tested out of with maybe a week of effort, but that wasn't allowed. In one case, I managed to skip the first semester of a subject and take the second course because they forgot to list the first one as a prerequisite. The scheduling counselor found out after I had already passed the more advanced course and was pissed. They made me take a replacement course even though I was 30 credits over the graduation requirement and had clearly already filled the knowledge requirement for that subject. You get one guess as to why that was 🤔
Engineering school for me was mostly about learning how to learn, getting some baseline knowledge to know what questions to ask or where to start looking for answers, and broadening my horizons. Those have a ton of value for me.
Having gone through heavily interdisciplinary education, with focus on hard sciences, I absolutely agree. My educational experience in sound production, scientific instrumentation, and cultural studies have really improved my ability to think of things abstractly, effectively communicate, and come up with novel solutions to technical problems.
As a current college student, I think a lot of this has to also do with teachers and our schools also having this mindset and even actually giving us basically job training. On the one hand it makes sense; If you're getting a degree in graphic design, you might as well learn Illustrator. But on the other hand, it communicates to, say, graphic design students that their degrees are "Illustrator Degrees" instead of "Graphic Design degrees." I don't want to generalize too broadly, but I've definitely seen it where if you give a student these types of classes, they start to disregard the theoretical or even the "knowledge base" classes in favor of "here's what you'll be doing in 2 years" classes.
It is the age old argument. The question is why are you going. Unless your wealthy, it is nuts to spend money and take debt without a plan of how you will pay for it. Too many people do not consider the price value side of things.
As far as the the tech versus liberal education. It makes no sense for someone like me to pay for or waste time on useless crap. What is useless crap is very person dependent. The other interesting thing is one never hears about the liberal education folks pushing that they need more science and tech skills. How many liberal arts people actually understand science and tech?
I’m in medicine, and one of the biggest issues I see in my field, as well as science in general, is a lack of ethics and cultural understanding. The humanities give context for scientific findings, and guide us in the research process. Without it, we wind up with the Tuskegee trials or Nazi medicine. The same sort of things can happen in tech (privacy, security, wellbeing) and engineering (safety, integrity).
Humanities aren’t a waste of money. They broaden your knowledge of our world and the people in it. Maybe you don’t have interest in art or history, but law, ethics (or other areas of philosophy), and sociology all can help a person be more well-rounded.
The answer to that is specific specialty training. Something actually useful. I rather doubt that there is much you can do to teach people to be good. Lot of people argue religion is for that but I see no evidence that helps either.
The only humanities class I took in college that had value was economics and that I would have taken any way. This does not mean that I have not taken tons broadening stuff that would not do the same thing but would also not satisfy the crazy humanities requirements.
The one area where you may have a point is my experience is that specialists have to meet people where they are, not the other way around. I have seen some specialists not seem to do that very well on one hand and on the other hand lack skills they should have learned in high school like good writing. Not that I think that humanities requirements helps that much, but maybe. These people took those and it did not solve the problem.
Humanities isn’t to teach people to be good. It’s to teach people to critically think, communicate well, and understand each other through various lenses. People may be inclined to act more ethically when they do these things however. And can more clearly understand other perspectives.
These are all things people should have done in high school. A far as critical thinking, STEM requires much more precise thinking then most other fields.
There’s a reason a freshman writing course is required at a lot of colleges. High school education is inconsistent, especially when you consider how poorly resources are equitably split amongst schools. Critical thinking doesn’t involve just the type of thinking in STEM.
As someone who studied in both STEM and humanities, I’d say this conversation is an example. The fact you genuinely believe precise thinking = critical thinking is why these courses are needed. Too many stem students think they have it figured out, when they don’t, and then go on to embarrass themselves in their careers cause they’re poor communicators or ignorant of others perspectives. Or unwilling to listen because they think they already understand something someone else is expressing to them when they don’t. And they don’t even know how much they’re not understanding cause they’re convinced they are critical thinkers in all the ways that matter, when it’s beyond just the type of problem solving involved in STEM.
The whole process of science is an exercise in critical thinking. What your talking about is more about human psychology, listening, leadership, and polotics. People are mostly emotional creatures that sometimes think. It is why stories and emotive arguments often win the day. This is not about critical thinking. It is about meeting people where they are.
I agree that these things should be taught in high school but they aren’t really one-and-done lessons - they are honed skills that take need to be practiced and refined. Gen ed courses really help with that more than stem, because as you said, stem classes require precise technical skills and profs likely aren’t going to spend precious teaching time in critical thinking, reading comprehension, or communication skills if they need to teach you Newtonian physics or biochemistry or something.
I went to a college with a strong engineering program. Presumably students would have to have done well in high school and on SATs to get in. Engineers treated college as a job prep program and were pretty blatantly put off by doing any gen ed coursework. So many companies and firms complained to the college about the graduates’ poor writing and communication skills that they had to institute a writing exit exam to graduate with a bachelors. All you had to do was write a 4/5 paragraph essay to some generic prompt - the exact sort of thing you do for SAT or AP exams. The pass rate was ~25% for graduating engineers! This was a few decades ago now, I imagine as ai gets more commonly used for writing assignments this issue will worsen… Or fundamentally change how critical thinking works in a way that I can’t foresee.
Frankly the amount of writing encouraged where I worked for over 20 years was minimal. It was mostly PowerPoints and emails that you had to get all the substance into the first paragraph. The major writing I ever did was for stuff the was going into patents and that is a very different kind of writing. Not sure liberal arts or college writing would help with either if those.
I do admit though some people's writing is terrible. I remember reading nominations for an employee reward. People's writing skills varied widely. Some were really terrible.
As for me, we had a writing requirement in college that was integrated with lab reports. The English prof too one look at my reports and said taking their class was a waste of time. So basically I tested out.
I think it depends where you end up for your career and how good at writing you are. Sounds like you were already proficient. A lot of people aren’t! I am in a research role now where manuscripts, PowerPoint, and posters are my main deliverables, so writing and figure design is quite important. I work with a lot of younger folks and they really struggle with organizing their arguments through writing and visual design. Practice helps, but at base I think it’s a critical thinking issue. They aren’t dumb, they just know the conclusion but don’t know how to step their audience through from a beginning to an end in a logical and engaging way.
I had to take a technical writing class at one point (memos, patents, manuals, etc) and yea that’s a totally different type of writing that probably won’t help with emails and PowerPoints! I don’t think I’ve ever “used it” but it was eye opening and I have a lot of respect for people who can do that well. I guess (to pull in what you said earlier) this type of writing is just critical thinking for technical exactness where I think the type of communication I do in my job, and what I assume a lot of day to day communication other stem people do either internally or for the public, is more rhetoric through storytelling, which is where I think the gen ed classes really help.
Yes, I think role depends. I did a lot more real writing in graduate school. Papers, thesis, etc. As far as writing ... this relates a lot to critical thinking. If you cannot write a good technical paper or article it may be a critical thinking problem. There is also a difference between being given the answer or solution method from books or papers and working it out yourself.
My wife taught science at the community college level. Thing she said was a lot of students did not understand critical thinking and how to think through things. She felt real accomplishment when half way through the semester she could start to see some students understanding. Same thing with a lot of the general public. Lot of people think science is an opinion not a fact. For that matter many think that there is no difference in objective fact and opinion.
A lot of people were also lied to about the cost analysis; there was a pervasive idea that everyone who went to college would get a 'good job' that would pay for all of the loans.
Yes. The the whole college thing seems scary these days. I know I went to an informational session for parents with kids where I worked. The company had a whole program to help parents. Just all seemed so complicated. I never had kids but was interested in the situation.
I also think the title on the article is stange too. The idea one should take collage on faith just seems nuts. One always needs to figure a combination of their skills and interests and do their own analysis. But how is the average 18 year old going to do that and how many have patents that can help.
On the other hand my nieces and nephews seemed to more or less figure it out without crazy debt. Not all have figured out a career or one that pays that well at least yet.
It is also interesting the different attitudes about college in my family and my wife's family.