I'm not sure that all of my students and / or colleagues cared very much about the actual subject matter that they were studying, e.g., the math and theory. There was a conventional wisdom shared amongst students, that those topics were just a hoop to jump through, that they would never need in the "real world."
When they do arrive in the "real world," they get so busy with CAD, trial-and-error design, troubleshooting, and bureaucracy, that they forget most of their math and theory within a few months. I'm not sure if this is voluntary or not: Had they been given a work environment with more time to think and to continue learning, would they have retained their interest?
The few who keep those skills are the ones who are devious enough to guard their time, effectively giving themselves time to think. And they volunteer for the jobs that involve theory, which nobody else wants.
Another factor that may affect humanities students is the fact that some majors are harder to get into, and to stay in, than others. Nobody changes majors from <redacted> to chemical engineering because <redacted> is too hard. ;-) And it's a one way street too. Once you interrupt the train of prerequisites in most STEM majors, it's very hard to get back on your horse.
V = I * R
I = V / R
R = V / I
When they "design" a circuit, they pull it out of a book. If it doesn't work right, they try randomly varying the values of the components until it sort of works. (Instead of calculating what the correct values should be.)
Take this with a grain of salt, I recently graduated so these are just my thoughts. Maybe in 10 years when I'm 30 I will say it's better to spend your 20s exploring. But probably not :)
Second, engineering has always had a public mission that is not shared by the humanities. Employability, and providing a minimal level of skill, are the purpose of engineering. Engineering says: "We will make you employable in spite of yourselves."
The humanities have not adopted that mission, and say: "You will make yourself employable if you take full advantage of what we offer here." You end up with a mixture of students, some are working barely hard enough to graduate, and a few are turning themselves into the next generation of thinkers.
Of course every field wants to sell itself as a gateway to employment: The world still needs "critical thinkers" and all that.
> These students come in at 18 years old, straight out of high school. You put them in college and they want to do the least work possible.
> Most of the time a degree is just a necessity to go into the workforce for whatever field
I don't think your critique of undergraduate education is limited to the humanities. In my experience (I graduated two years ago from a top 10 school where I double majored in CS and history), students were there to have a good time and get a degree by the end of their four years. And, to be fair, I had a good time and didn't have to work nearly as hard as I do now.
However, I saw little difference between the character of history students and CS students overall. There were exceptional people in both departments (top ~5%), a larger percentage of people who generally worked hard and were competent (~60%), and a population that didn't take it seriously and sometimes wasn't above cheating (there was a non-zero population of CS majors who graduated with next to no programming skills).
My school's history department was relatively renowned, though the assignments didn't take nearly as long as CS/math labs. Still, many history profs were doing their best to fight grade inflation and had reasonable minimum standards.
At the end of my spring history seminar, I asked my professor (_the_ expert in a relatively large field) what he thought about going to grad school and strongly advised against it, saying it was a bad idea except for maybe one or two students every year: it is just too competitive to get a good job. So, a ton of history majors went into consulting and will probably go back to school for their MBAs; a smaller group is going (or planning on going) to law school if they can get into a top school; others are grinding in the entertainment industry trying to get their foot in the door. I don't think this is evidence of "uninspired" or "unmotivated" humanities students.
Nor do I think the fact that many history students go on to work in unrelated fields reflects poorly on the discipline: they learned about things they were interested in, improved their writing skills, critical thinking skills, etc.
The fact that their [liberal arts] education was a bad value -- in terms of both time and money -- is less endemic to their chosen major, but to the educational system as a whole.
And what do you expect? These students come in at 18 years old, straight out of high school. You put them in college and they want to do the least work possible. And since it's all papers, there is not an objective minimum for the work. With grade inflation, a poor quality paper can still pass you. By contrast, with engineering there are objective minimums. The program has to compile and tests have to pass. You have the structure that a young person needs out of high school, and the work ethic develops during this time.
Maybe about 1% of the humanities students actually cared about what they studied, their output reflected that in the form of papers and internships...when it came time to graduate a couple of the motivated students were Rhodes scholars or otherwise working in their field of study. Everyone else was either not doing much or working in another area.
Most of the time a degree is just a necessity to go into the workforce for whatever field, and those in humanities couldn't give less of a shit about what they're studying as long as there's a degree at the end.