The same mentality is why universities graduate more students in the visual and performing arts than computer science, math, and chemical engineering combined(1).
It's not enough to let people follow their dreams, if their dreams lead most of them off a cliff. You have to either catch them when they fall, or help them find better dreams.
Not everyone has the desire or ability to do STEM. I'm not sure why you'd not encourage them. You do appreciate having someone cook your food and create the art and media you consume, right?
The best part is paying minimum wage for it, because there are so many of them. :)
Except not. These aren't people going on to be visual artists. These are people frittering away their college opportunity, and then going on to careers were the degree doesn't help.
>"There is nothing wrong with the arts, psychology, and journalism, but graduates in these fields have lower wages and are less likely to find work in their fields than graduates in science and math. Moreover, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don't require college degrees, and those graduates don't get a big income boost from having gone to college."
These aren't people successfully chasing their dreams - these are people avoiding adulting for four more years. It's not appropriate to encourage kids to go to college "for the love of something," unless they already have the means, or at least a plan, to pay for the rest of their life.
I agree with you that not everyone has the desire or ability to do stem, but the poster you are responding to accounted for that. We have to catch them when they fall if the open market does not value those people, but we as a society do value them. We shouldn't continue on our current path of telling people to follow their dreams or that all careers have some value and then throw them to the wolves when it comes to paying to live in our society. This applies mostly to the US
I'm sure there are plenty of people who have successful careers based on visual arts degrees: my SO is one. Their sibling, however, is the counterexample: her degree was just a vague attempt to put off adult work, and she now lives back at home with her parents, doing nothing.
FTA I posted:
> "There is nothing wrong with the arts, psychology, and journalism, but graduates in these fields have lower wages and are less likely to find work in their fields than graduates in science and math. Moreover, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don't require college degrees, and those graduates don't get a big income boost from having gone to college."
They aren't, as far as I can tell (my wife is a successful visual designer). They tend to be started by individual designers who find a successful niche, or (less often) design collectives that band together to hire business staff.
That's not the point though. The bulk of these people are getting majors they never use. I would argue they should never have been pointed in the direction of an industry they don't have the aptitude for, no matter what their 'dreams' are.
The same mentality is why universities graduate more students in the visual and performing arts than computer science, math, and chemical engineering combined(1).
It's not enough to let people follow their dreams, if their dreams lead most of them off a cliff. You have to either catch them when they fall, or help them find better dreams.
(1) http://www.chronicle.com/article/Tuning-In-to-Dropping-Out/1...