Apparently absent from Gee's approach: reductions to administration and management.
When a university cuts $800k from its library and keeps chartering jets for executives you know this is not going to be about what is best for society or students, no matter how folksy the president wishes to appear.
The title of this article really shows the slant in the reporting.
This decision makes a lot of sense to me and I actually think all universities should do more to encourage students to major in STEM. If taxes are paying for the school we should subsidize things that are good for America not individuals.
I would be very curious to understand a bit more about why you think that formal higher education in the humanities is not "good for America". Speaking as an academic researcher in a STEM field, I strongly believe the opposite to be true- we need _more_, not less, humanities education in this country. Even just restricting myself to a STEM-focused perspective, it is clear to me that the things that I teach students about computer science are of course important when it comes to understanding _how_ to build something, but they are not particularly useful when it comes to deciding _whether_ something needs to be built, _what_ to build, and then how to decide if it's working well- for this you need understanding and knowledge beyond what can be found in an engineering or biology textbook. This is particularly important in my area of specialization (medical informatics)- many of the most important things we think about in terms of system development and evaluation, and many of our most important methodological tools, are heavily informed by the humanities.
Zooming out beyond academia, Bret Devereaux, a historian whose writing appears with some regularity on HN, wrote a superb essay a few years ago on the practical case for the humanities and puts it better than I ever could, so I will link to his post: https://acoup.blog/2020/07/03/collections-the-practical-case...
Aren't you presuming that humanities have humanity and STEM/business graduates are somehow less moral? I suspect there is an insidious presumption behind your comment. Some discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37097655
One effective but evil engineer in power could do a lot of damage. Hitler wanted to be an artist but couldn't get into university. Although if I'm going to use selection bias: some of our tech overlords seem morally repugnant.
I wonder if we could show that:
(1) humanities graduates have better morals, and
(2) that those graduates got those morals by going to university (versus had them as children - selection bias of those choosing to do humanities).
> when it comes to deciding _whether_ something needs to be built, _what_ to build
Can of worms: how to successfully teach people to be ethical. Certainly our churches seem to me to often fail: fail at the level of the individual (I have met enough arsehole Christians), and fail at the level of a society (a group of Christians deciding to do extremely unchristian things).
Did I miss something in OP’s comment? It doesn’t read as if it’s about ethics, so much as qualitative decision making. It seems as though you’re responding to an argument that I don’t think was made.
I’m also unclear what tax money has to do with anything - why does the funding method matter, with regards to educating students? What, specifically, makes a physics major “better” or more worthy of your tax dollars, than an English major?
Fair call. I'm probably creating a strawman by deconstruction. I should have been more careful.
I do believe in the value of the academic humanities.
I'm not sure I agree that the linked article is well reasoned (although I have liked some of their other articles). It finishes:
We look for scientific solutions to humanistic problems (where our forebears, it must be confessed, often looked for humanistic solutions to scientific problems) and wonder why our wizards fail us. We have all of the knowledge in the world and yet no wisdom.
We would do well to go back to the humanities.
That probably shows the bias I stereotypically see: only humanities gives us wisdom?
I think at this point in the discussion we are getting to a very interesting question: about the meaning of the word "wisdom". To my eye, Devereaux is using the word in a way that sounds a lot like how it is conceptualized in Ackoff's Data/Information/Knowledge/Insight/Wisdom model (sometimes instead of "insight" people use "understanding" as the penultimate level). Its Wikipedia page is a little bit rambling (which is actually quite fitting given how many different ways it's been formalized), but is a good place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW_pyramid
"Wisdom" is probably the hardest part of the framework to define clearly, but across formulations it's about being able to integrate different kinds of knowledge from difference sources, and then using that to be able to know when and why to take a certain action, or to know what the right thing to do might be. Obviously this is something that is frequently informed by knowledge derived from science and scientific reasoning, but usually also relies on some of the ways of thinking and understanding that the humanities can help provide. So that's how I'd understand what Devereaux was saying (allowing for some rhetorical flourish on his part)- it's a "both-and" kind of situation rather than an "either-or"; in other words, science and humanities on their own are both necessary and insufficient.
> If taxes are paying for the school we should subsidize things that are good for America not individuals.
I enjoy living in a society with music, literature, dance, plays, sculpture, painting, architecture, and not-strictly-necessary decoration. Those are all good for Americans, individually and collectively.
> I enjoy living in a society with music, literature, dance, plays, sculpture, painting, architecture, and not-strict-necessary decoration.
There may be an argument for university degrees in these domains but that isn't one. All these things existed before students had to be 100 K or 150 K in debt to learn them.
There's a big difference between actual artists and the people studying them.
Not that I want to abolish university degrees for either STEM or humanities but your argument can go about STEM fields too. Engineers, physicists and Mathematicians existed before the students had to be in debt too to learn those things. But to be honest in many STEM fields like particle physics, aerospace engineering (just examples) it is very difficult to practice it without rigorous and formal education.
Addition: Most of great Mathematicians in last two centuries did not graduate with a math degree. That doesn't mean that we should abolish math degrees. People also built cities and beautiful huge buildings before there was a university degrees in architecture and civil engineering. No one will say that we don't want them because of that
Studying the humanities puts people in debt to the tune of $100K, sometimes $250K, to get a job that pays $50K.
The problem isn't that humanities jobs are all worthless, it's that there are a very, very limited number that have enough of a value add to society to make a good living. For every successful author/artist there are 100 or 1000 struggling ones. The numbers just don't work.
Universities--especially private big-name art schools--have preyed on this lack of perspective on this asymmetry. The other commenter is right about administrative costs, but this particular scam of selling an unrealistic dream has got to stop somewhere.
> Studying the humanities puts people in debt to the tune of $100K, sometimes $250K, to get a job that pays $50K.
Does it? I'm serious. I see people say all the time that incomes of people with stem vs humanities degrees get so cleanly bucketed. But the actual data that I see from the universities I've been involved with are far less clear. The distributions are wide and overlap within individual majors, within BA/BS distinctions, and within STEM/Humanities distinctions. We don't see this sort of discourse about how sad it is that biology majors exist when they could otherwise be studying computer science.
Yes, computer science graduates have higher average starting salaries than music performance graduates. But it does not clearly convert into "humanities graduates get low paying jobs and stem graduates get high paying jobs." It is further complicated by the actual social merit of various jobs coming out of these disciplines. A math major who goes to graduate school to do pure math research gets paid way way less than a math major who goes and does analytics for a trading firm. But... I'm not certain that we actually want the government to push people towards doing analytics on Wall Street.
A humanities degree doesn't mean you have to rely on art as your primary source of income. I have a B.A. and work in software; my partner has a B.A. and works in finance.
I have a degree in English lit from a second-tier state school (admittedly, a very good second-tier state school, as these things go -- my favorite professor/mentor was a UC Berkeley grad in medieval studies). My wife has a degree in mathematics from the University of Washington -- generally considered a top-10 math program in the US, and a top-50 university internationally.
I work in a front-office engineering role at a successful quant hedge fund, after a decade working in FAANG and equivalents. My wife is a stay-at-home wife/fur-mom.
Incidentally, I also graduated with total debt of about $13k, which I paid off six years after graduating with my first paycheck from Amazon. I know several other people from my English program who are equally successful -- one who graduated from a top-20 law school, one who was the lead narrative designer for Halo: Infinite, several software engineers.
Let's stop this stupid argument about STEM vs. humanities, and talk about integrative learning. (And, let's stop treating university as job training -- but that's a harder battle.)
As pointed out elsewhere, a significant increase in the cost of education (the actual operating budgets) is the increase in the administrative class. That needs to be addressed as part of fixing the issue with high costs.
>If taxes are paying for the school we should subsidize things that are good for America not individuals.
Media and advertising comprise a $500 billion annual market in the United States. The Humanities teaches people to write and writing is the start of every media product.
When I got my CS degree my university required four semesters of creative and business writing. Students complained and now they do not. Many universities have followed suit.
Recent graduates now tend to write as though they are suffering from a head injury. Even worse they have started to rely on AI tools so now they tend to communicate like robots with head injuries.
I hated with the fury of a thousand suns all of the writing I had to do in school. Now I hate how bad new hires are at communicating even more-- to the point that I believe that a mediocre engineer who can write effectively and present data effectively is better for the company than a "rockstar" whose emails read like, well, someone with a head injury wrote them.
This seems like one of those Chesterton’s fence things where you say “how could it be bad for America to force a bunch of people with no aptitude for STEM to major in STEM or else have a limited education” and then you find out.
If someone doesn’t have aptitude for higher education, they shouldn’t get it. Higher education is not some universal right. But those who do get free public higher education should do it in a field that has clear downstream economic impact.
I'm all in favor of studying fine arts, but this isn't quite accurate: advertisers (i.e., brands who run ads) rely on people with arts and humanities training—it's not a coincidence that the smallest unit of advertising is called a "creative"!
While it's true that the individual employees creating ads probably studied the arts in some way or other (not necessarily fine arts; "graphic design" is a major not generally included in that category that would absolutely fit an advertising creator), the people who actually run them probably studied either STEM, or, even more likely, business/management.
I agree with your first statement but you lose me at the end.
There's been the push that everybody should go to college, which is well-intended but misses the mark.
Everybody who can learn and grow from it should go. Those who can't should have access to vocational training. They shouldn't be denied because they can't afford it. The boomers got affordable education that they could pay for with a part time job and graduate debt-free. That seemed to work out well for them and the country as a whole.
As for who should pay for it, as a public good it should primarily be payed for by the public coffers. But treating college as a glorified trade school (clear downstream economic impact) is short-sighted.
The number of students graduating Per Year in psychology is greater than the total number of psychology jobs in the country. It fits in the category of "things that cannot last forever will not last forever"
> If taxes are paying for the school we should subsidize things that are good for America not individuals.
If all you have access to is a subsidized state school, do you get to learn a different language, examine history, ponder philosophy, experience and make art? Or is that only reserved for folks that can afford to go to fancy schools?
Are citizens who are aware of history, other languages and cultures, know how to create and understand art, not good for America?
Personal take: One issue I think some people have, is that there's not a "lot" of private sector historian work. As a percentage of the profession, its relatively small. Higher-Ed (Tenure, Non-Tenure, Admin) is close to 70%.
The stats for professional historians are indeed horrible, but this is not the only place where people with history degrees can go. If you asked me "should anybody consider going to a phd program in history, except perhaps at the top five institutions and with some financial backup" I'd say "no." But things are a bit different for undergrad.
Best drop that M from STEM; from the article, and similar recent reporting, the graduate Maths program is one of the indulgences Virginians can do without.
The universities have become bloated and mismanaged with great resistance to change. Tenured professors and administrators are very opposed to anything that reduces their jobs or makes them redundant. A lot of universities are carrying dead weight, professors who have no classes to teach because students are not required to take them, or worse, classes whom if not for a student requirement would not exist. Administrators whose jobs are duplicative if not unnecessary. Streamlining higher education is a very noble goal and one that is grossly overdue.
Why not? Both can and in some cases do represent unnecessary bloat, which is an increased cost often passed on to the students, and can be extremely difficult to reduce.
Anything can be bloat. Thats not an argument for treating completely different functional roles, tracks, types of people in a university as interchangeable.
You don’t fix engines, or any sophisticated system, by treating its various parts as functionally the same.
Unless that information isn’t available, but universities are openly observable systems.
What an awful worldview to think that someone could be too young to ask questions about their place in this universe. Or that they’re somehow incapable of appreciating them.
I, for one, hope you never have any say in someone’s education.
> What an awful worldview to think that someone could be too young to ask questions about their place in this universe. Or that they’re somehow incapable of appreciating them.
I mentioned that students should get their humanities grounding in high school. I think trying to push further in college is a waste. What major life experiences have you had at 19 vs 17. Especially if you compare the experiences of getting a job, getting married, having kids.
> What major life experiences have you had at 19 vs 17.
My best friend died when I was 19. Im honestly flabbergasted that anyone would think that any period of time was not worth studying the humanities. If anything, that period of time was maybe the most valuable time to study those in my whole life.
It just screams ignorance to add brackets to life experiences. Who are you to classify when and where someone’s life experiences happen?
What would you have learned in 1 year of humanities studying that you didn’t learn in 4 years of humanities is high school, that would have made a huge difference?
In addition, for such traumatic life events, it is community and relationships that help, more than any particular knowledge.
I am not for banning books.
I just don’t think that 18-22 year olds benefit as a cohort from spending intensive time studying the humanities, when they could be studying all sorts of other things.
By all means read books, talk with friends, meditate, contemplate , read and write poetry.
But to devote 4 years of your life from 18-22 as the primary means, is a waste.
Perhaps a better advisor for you could have helped you with your path, without the collateral cost of shutting down other’s opportunities.
A good advisor, formal or personal, can make a lifetime of difference.
If there was ever a low cost, high return opportunity for improvement it would be treating student advising with much greater priority and seriousness.
On the other hand, I have a BS and MS and wish there had been more room in my major for humanities. And that I'd appreciated better that which I did take.
I paid for the privilege of instructor after instructor ranting about 'dead white men' and 'deconstructing the canon' and other equally made up topics. I cannot imagine a person who could be considered better off by the humanities classes I was forced to take.
Reading the western classics without help was far more beneficial and orders of magnitude cheaper.
A lot of university duplicate primary education. I think it is this way because it generates jobs and revenue, which can be very hard to give up for an institution.
> Do West Virginia kids of modest means deserve the humanities?
Larger question: what is the point of (higher?) education?
If all you have access to is a subsidized state school, do you get to learn a different language, examine history, ponder philosophy, experience and make art? Or is that only reserved for folks that can afford to go to fancy schools?
Are people that graduate with degrees in humanities or even take humanities classes disproportionately more likely to need government support for the rest of their lives?
Yes. Hence the term "starving artist". Have you heard the term "starving engineers"?
Seattle has a large community of artists, always begging for government support, always working at low end jobs to make ends meet. The government funds theaters, the Seattle Opera, the Pacific Northwest Ballet, the Seattle Art Museum, and on and on.
A scarce few make a profit (Taylor Swift), and the other 99% need another source of income than their art. Swift did not attend a university.
What percentage of french literature majors make a living in that field? A few who manage to get a professor of french literature position?
You didn’t answer GP’s question - you just made a needlessly inflammatory comment suggesting anyone with a non-STEM degree is an “artist”. This is patently false, and an absolutely absurd thing to suggest baselessly.
What specific percentage of humanities majors are on public assistance?
> What percentage of humanities majors are working in the field they were educated in?
What percentage of STEM majors are working in the field they were educated in? I know two electrical engineering majors who became lawyers, one who went into insurance, in addition to a civil engineer who went into dentistry.
I'm having a difficult time finding hard data but google seems to indicate the humanities produce a disproportionate amount of unpaid student debt. However, I would be happy to find better data.
If it requires government support for us to have a strong arts and humanities thread in society because the private sector can't keep it thriving, please take my tax money. STEM supports life, but art is the point of life.
I outlined my current career as an English lit grad -- and my wife's as a math grad -- in another post.
But I'd like to talk for a moment about why I think the humanities are important, especially in the context of my own career, because I think the reason I've been successful is often a result -- direct or indirect is perhaps unclear -- of the particular education I received. I was, in fact, a math nerd growing up. I did math competitions. I was two years advanced in school, and by seventh grade I had to go to a different school every morning to go get my math education at high school.
After I was a math nerd -- because, to be honest, I finally had to think about it sometime around calculus, and I didn't really enjoy it once it stopped being pure intuition -- I was just a normal nerd. I played a lot of computer games and went to LAN parties, and I learned about building computers, maintaining a network, and troubleshooting. And I decided pure math wasn't for me, but maybe computer science was. So, I started studying that. I was in a dual-enrollment program with a local college when I was in high school, and I did the first-year sequence of CS when I was 16.
I got bored, though. I didn't want to do my homework. So I decided to go find another major, and did the classic thing where I wandered through various majors trying to find a fit. Eventually, having considered history, oceanography, journalism, and philosophy, I landed on English lit. I liked the critical theory aspects -- it felt like applied philosophy, I suppose.
There's some useful context here: I was an absolute dick. I was always right. I felt like I was better than everyone else. I had done well in math competitions; even though I'd quit studying it, my computer science professors were using the work I'd turned in weeks ahead as examples in class; I felt like I was better than my peers.
My humanities education brought a lot of nuance to what was, before then, a very black-and-white reality for me. I learned a lot about the importance of communication, about how our backgrounds can lead to different interpretations of the same material, and about how to deal with challenging, uncomfortable subjects -- not just intellectually challenging topics, but emotionally challenging topics.
The funny thing is that, in the end, I landed in tech, where I've now been for over a decade. I made my way up to senior engineer, and it was largely on the strength of my communication skills, not my technical skills; the latter were necessary but not sufficient. And I think I have a lot of potential growth left -- growth which will be enabled by soft skills, not hard skills, because the more senior you become, the more the balance shifts toward soft skills.
My point here is that studying in the humanities made me a productive member of society.
Tuition at this school is $23k/year, meaning that it is subsidized by tax dollars. Tax money should be spent wisely. The goal must be to equip students to be productive adults.
Examples in the article focus on departmental finances, but carefully say nothing about the careers of students who graduate from those departments. If the students graduate, and wind up in McDonalds or Starbucks, then the departments are useless.
Also, frankly, if you just want to learn these things, do it free online. Duolingo, YouTube, etc do honestly a great job teaching these. I'm not discounting the benefits of a teacher and a certain educational environment, but where there are so many of orders of magnitude in cost difference it's not obvious to me the value difference is there.
In a sense, non-remunerative pursuits being luxuries, and money being the principle (though not exclusive) means of acquiring luxuries, the answer to your question is "yes". I agree with the article and its concern about cutting opportunities for working class West Virginians, but this isn't the strongest argument to make for it.
> …but this isn't the strongest argument to make for it.
i’m not sure i follow what you’re attempting to imply here. with a topic as vast and as important as society and higher education, there will be many important and necessary pieces to discuss—the gp to this comment that you dismiss is a great example.
i’m just not sure why you would dismiss it because it isnt The One Sole Strongest argument, particularly when it is an important piece to the larger discussion.
> Sounds like exactly what a state school ought to do
Universities aren't trade schools. The moment you treat them like trade schools, they become trade schools and should not be considered higher education anymore.
When a university cuts $800k from its library and keeps chartering jets for executives you know this is not going to be about what is best for society or students, no matter how folksy the president wishes to appear.