Is that bad? Humanities departments are already shrinking without any changes because there's just no demand. It doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to me that if you are determined to get a degree in philosophy, which has virtually no job prospects outside of teaching the next generation of philosophy students, you have to go do that at one of a handful of schools that carve out a niche for themselves with a philosophy department.

==philosophy, which has virtually no job prospects outside of teaching the next generation of philosophy students==

Is this true? It seems some tech companies disagree: CA Technologies [1], Y Combinator [2], Google [3]. Is it possible that you are not well versed in what philosophy majors actually study and how well that might translate to a working environment?

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/16/tech-talent-gap-looks-to-phi... [2] https://www.fastcompany.com/40440952/why-this-tech-ceo-keeps... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/08/26...

If that's the case then the philosophy department should have no trouble bankrolling their program with accessibility for all on a combination of some wealthy kids and some majors who snag a job at well-paying tech companies. Or did you miss the class on inductive reasoning?

Maybe you're right. I was simply using examples to question the underlying assumption. You seem to have skipped over that.

I thought Philosophy was essentially pre-law.

Yeah, philosophy was a bad example of a "non-high-earnings" degree.

Sure, there are plenty of whack philosophy programs that lead nowhere. But if you go to a school with a rigorous philosophy program (which doesn't mean only Ivies/Stanford/etc.), you can easily go for a law degree or a finance job afterwards. Rigorous philosophy programs usually involve tons of discrete math and logic classes, and mastering that opens a lot of doors. I only took up reading philosophy material after graduating, but it is very obvious to me that knowing that in school would have helped me with my more theoretical/math-y CompSci classes tremendously.

Not even talking about some other good applications of that degree that I might not be aware of due to not being a philosophy major myself.

As someone who majored in English, I assert that the emphasis on STEM and shift away from the humanities is causing serious problems in our society.

Specifically, having a population lacking in critical reading skills makes everyone more susceptible to propaganda, and less able to critique and assess flawed arguments in writing.

If you want to know why, for example, our political “debates” are shallow circuses of misdirection and name calling, look at the state of the humanities.

Your argument assumes that taking humanities is required to develop critical reading skills.

However attempts to measure critical reading skills, for example in standardized tests such as the GREs, consistently find that STEM majors are better at critical reading than humanities majors!

Secondly, critical reading is not the only required skill for critiquing and assessing potentially flawed arguments. Quantitative reasoning is also needed. For example you can't assess public policy questions about COVID-19 without quantitative reasoning. However STEM courses are far more likely to teach quantitative reasoning than humanities courses.

This critique of your argument is brought to you by someone with a STEM degree.

I think one of the major reasons you see this is that if you're going to go to college and come out with debt that takes you 20 years to repay, crippling you financially while you do [1], any reasonably smart person is going to ensure that they come out with skills that will justify that. If you want people to feel like they have the resources to spend on humanities, it needs to be cheap enough to justify it.

And the truth is, there's no effing reason for a humanities course to put you into that kind of debt. Cheap (often free!) books, a room to meet in, and some small groups for slightly-focused discussion among the students shouldn't be costing on the order of a thousand-dollars per credit hour (per student!) over the course of your compounding-interest loan. It's a terrible value for the money; if it wasn't for the credential nobody would be doing it because if you just want the knowledge/wisdom there are far cheaper ways to get it.

The meat of the below quote: you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin’ education you coulda got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the Public Library.

Quoting the whole thing:

""" CLARK: There's no problem. I was just hoping you could give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the southern colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War, the economic modalities—especially in the southern colonies—could most aptly be characterized as agrarian pre-capital—

WILL: [interrupting] Of course that's your contention. You're a first year grad student. You just got finished reading some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably, you’re gonna be convinced of that until next month when you get to James Lemon, then you’re gonna be talking about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year, you’re gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin’ about, you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.

CLARK: [taken aback] Well as a matter of fact I won't, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of —

WILL: "Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth..." You got that from Vickers, Work in Essex County, Page 98, right? Yeah I read that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us—you have any thoughts of—of your own on this matter? Or do—is that your thing, you come into a bar, you read some obscure passage and then you pretend, you pawn it off as your own—your own idea just to impress some girls, embarrass my friend?

[Clark is stunned]

WILL: See the sad thing about a guy like you is in about 50 years you’re gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you’re gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One, don't do that. And two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin’ education you coulda got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the Public Library. """

https://genius.com/Good-will-hunting-good-will-hunting-bar-s...

And in another movie Tony Stark built an arc reactor in a cave with a box of scraps.

Yes, a comic book hero did comic book hero things in a comic book hero movie. Not sure what point you think you're making.

The point is to demonstrate that if a fictional character in a work of fiction does X and it works out, that does not serve as evidence that a real person doing X will work out in reality.

You can't read a book and understand it unless you pay someone to sit in a class and tell you how to think about what you read?

Do you understand the distinction between "does not serve as evidence" and "serves as evidence against"?

Now in fact it is possible to learn from self-directed study. But your odds of learning are massively better when you get to ask questions, test your understanding by talking with others, and have your ability to explain your understanding graded.

Which means that, on average, people get more value out of going through a book in a classroom setting than they get by reading it on their own.

Whether that is enough value to justify tuition is another story entirely...

Well, that just because it's in a movie doesn't mean it's true.

Few people would get to any sort of level of understanding of that sort of material just by reading it, and just because a movie genius can do it doesn't mean it's easy.

If we replaced all those examples with engineering textbooks, wouldn't it be the exact same, if it not, why? We learn he's an untrained math prodigy later on in the movie, so he doesn't need any education. It would appear a STEM education is a waste as well.

So in order to understand something, you need to a.) and then b.) have someone tell you how to think about what you read? While paying them? You can't wrestle with deep and complex topics unless someone tells you how to think?

Not at all, but having someone who can provide context sure helps with a lot of works - often these works are building on centuries or millennia of thought that they may assume you're aware of and that help place the arguments.

Again I ask, given that textbooks exist, can you make the argument that STEM is any different?

As a STEM major at a large public university, my classmates and I decided that at a meta-level, STEM majors learned how to learn new and complicated things quickly in order to get good grades in classes. Also, as a STEM major, I found attending class less than helpful most of the time. I do remember spending quite a lot of time in either a computer lab or in the library fighting my way through problems. Math, physics, chem, programming. Attending lectures was largely someone regurgitating either slides or a textbook.

I assumed this was true for most people in STEM majors in college, no?

> STEM majors learned how to learn new and complicated things quickly in order to get good grades in classes.

That's a skill that the liberal arts pick up as well.

> I do remember spending quite a lot of time in either a computer lab or in the library fighting my way through problems.

Will did that all on his own, without the need for a college. You're also describing a technical institute.

I don't see any skills there that really require a university either.

I didn't realize we were in violent agreement. I posted a fun quote from a movie I like that was relevant to the parent. You replied with a touch of snark and I felt compelled to defend myself from your comment. And now here we are. Heh.

>Specifically, having a population lacking in critical reading skills makes everyone more susceptible to propaganda, and less able to critique and assess flawed arguments in writing.

1. Humanities does not teach any sort of critical thinking more than other classes, and if anything I found my STEM classes to teach more critical thinking because of more formal systems of proof or statistics needed to back a point.

2. A very large percentage of the population doesn't go to college. If we wait to teach the basic skills in college, it is already too late. This type of thinking needs to be taught in grade school.

>If you want to know why, for example, our political “debates” are shallow circuses of misdirection and name calling, look at the state of the humanities.

Why wouldn't this be a symptom of the market? There is money to be made in controversy and click bait, and that applies just as well in politics.

Wow, I had no idea that STEM education results in people who lack critical reading skills.

You didn't offer any support for your claim, though, which triggers an alert from my critical reading skills.

Did I pass the test? I did major in STEM.

Just 40 years ago it was pretty rare for someone to go to college, so I don’t think you can blame a shift away from humanities on that.

I am not following your argument, is your first and second sentence connected?

why is a mathematican less likely to be able to critique and assess a flawed argument compared to an English major? why is an English major less likely to fall for propaganda compared to a computer science major?

Are universities in the US being used as an expensive stand-in for the failing k-12 education system? At least the basics of that kind of critical reading is something that the english classes in high school should teach.

You don't have to look very hard at all to find people who are participants in and cheerleaders for those debates who have degrees in the humanities. Most journalists, for example.

Funny, I was exposed to more propaganda in university than anywhere else. Are you saying that only humanities majors are educated enough to recognize propaganda?

You're unfortunately disproving your own point.

> Specifically, having a population lacking in critical reading skills makes everyone more susceptible to propaganda, and less able to critique and assess flawed arguments in writing.

Do I need to point out all the flaws in this sentence or can you critically read your own writing?

> If you want to know why, for example, our political “debates” are shallow circuses of misdirection and name calling, look at the state of the humanities.

Would you agree that the majority of politicians are lawyers, or at the very least non-STEM majors? What you're claiming then, is that humanities majors create and participate in "shallow circuses of misdirection and name calling"

Was that the point you were hoping to make?

Is it not the case that most people still do not go to university? Then what is having a few humanities majors going to change?

Political debates are a circus because the political system was designed in a different era that didn't have reality shows and endless mind melting entertainment.

Psychology and the social sciences have another explanation: Politics is mostly about how people feel and has little to do with how or what people think.

Considering that humanities majors tend to believe in socialism does not burnish their critical reading skills and resistance to propaganda.

The reality of the history of socialism is one of failure.

And yes, I do understand that everyone thinks that those who disagree with them are ill-informed and susceptible to propaganda, and those who prefer socialism will think that of me :-)

Socialism in the form of social democracy has built some very very nice countries here in Scandinavian.

having a capitalist country with a large welfare system != socialism

The Nordics are more like socialist countries with a large capitalist sector. We use the regulated market as a tool where it works.

20% of Norway's GDP comes from oil pumped out of the ground and flows to the government. It's enough to cover the deficits of socialism. The others keep enough of a free market to keep things afloat, but are not known for being economic powerhouses. None have tried communal food production yet, for good reason.

Denmark and Sweden and Finland have the same systems without oil.

And yes these countries do use the market in a regulated fashion where it does a good job.

> Is that bad?

It depends on your point of view. Should college be a trade school or should it stick to it's roots of broadening one's horizons?

I found my philosophy classes quite enlightening. They were required for my degree in CogSci.

If my school didn't have a philosophy major, it wouldn't have a philosophy department, and I would never have had those classes.

Also, there are some majors that lead to professional school. English/Rhetoric are often majors of people going into law school for example.

> Should college be a trade school or should it stick to it's roots of broadening one's horizons?

The term "liberal arts" means "free arts". The root of this term is that Athenian society was composed of a small class of free families and everyone else was a slave owned by those families. The free families were wealthy enough to afford a liberal education for their free sons.

Everyone else had to work.

Those are the roots of the liberal arts.

We have robots instead of slaves now. We, as a society, can afford to provide a liberal arts education to everyone. In fact, we already do, for grades 1-12. I think the main issue is that that education fails people who could progress through it faster (and those who need more time in certain areas).

The problem is that universities are neither trade schools nor a place to broaden your horizons. It is a way to get a credential that you can use to signal your worth on the job market.

If testing your skills was done outside of school GRE-style, would all these people who pay many thousands of dollars to get a diploma pay so much? I really doubt it.

>It is a way to get a credential that you can use to signal your worth on the job market.

What a sad state of affairs we find ourselves in that this attitude is common.

It brings up the old joke about being a philosophy major: "Two things to do with a Phd in Philosophy: 1. Teach. 2. Pose the question: ‘But do you know why you want fries with that?’"

College is an investment that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. When you invest that much money, you should expect a ROI. If you can't even put roof over your head or eat with that investment, then it is really hard to say it was a good idea.

Philsophy majors are a common target for ridicule, but the fact of the matter is that corporations go out of their way to hire Philosophy majors to be problem-solvers of various types because they essentially have a degree in critical thinking.

They'd be better off hiring people with engineering degrees (non-software). That's applied critical thinking and creative problem solving all in one.

I really don't know why there's this insistence that humanities has a monopoly on teaching critical thinking.

You realize that there are different kinds of applied critical thinking, yes?

Someone that's good at critically analyzing software doesn't make them good at being able to understand why users might be drawn to a product. Nor does it make them able to design UI that won't frustrate the average user.

Humanities doesn't have a monopoly on critical thinking, but you'd be a fool to believe that it doesn't aid critical thinking. The best software engineers I've worked with were those that came from other professions whom could apply other ways of approaching a problem compared to others.

To put it bluntly, if you hire a bunch of engineers they will design a lightbulb that no one can figure out how to screw in.

What's wrong with software engineers? Surely there's a fair bit of critical thinking involved there, too?

I meant that if employers were looking for people who were adept at critical thinking and software developers didn't fit the bill (the original posters implication) that there was a category of people who would be even more adept at it than philosophers. Sorry if I was unclear.

As a Philosophy major who has succeeded in tech, I think tech would be better off with more humanities people involved. Writing code isn't the hard part, when you are solving big problems.

You certainly add a useful perspective, I am sure. However, by working in tech you aren't doing philosophy, you are doing tech.

"I'm a philosophy major. That means I can think deep thoughts about being unemployed."

-- Bruce Lee

> If my school didn't have a philosophy major, it wouldn't have a philosophy department, and I would never have had those classes.

I went to an engineering school, the only majors were X Engineering, Business, and Nursing. Somehow, we had professors for the humanities classes, so I don't think a major is a requirement.

Philosophy is great, but it's not something you need to go into debt for. Did you learn anything in those classes that you couldn't have learned on your own via books and free lectures on YouTube, etc?

I think you're missing the point of college.

Anything you learn in college can be learned from a book or YouTube. The value of college is the curation the professor provides and the people you are doing it with.

>>Anything you learn in college can be learned from a book or YouTube.

That which can be learned by one-way communication from a book or video are not all that can be learned. Through dialogue and practice one may learn techniques of proofs in math classes, lab techniques in science classes, how to write and edit papers in humanities classes. All the practice that drama, art, or music majors do amplifies what they learn from their books. And so on.

The NFL wouldn't hire college football players who got all their learning from books or YouTube.

It's a net-gain for the school programs that do this well.