qualqual

As I mentioned in a prior post (and which, as you correctly noted, did not adequately recognize the context of the thread), the cost for educating social scientists and humanists is minimal (though certainly not negligible, especially if we aspire to providing a good education rather than a bottom-of-the-barrel and grossly underfunded degree, which is currently the norm). However, I'm wondering what you consider to be tangible benefits? And to who?

The benefits of a degree in social sciences or humanities are ways of thinking that can be applied in various fields of practice. Students in these programs literally learn how to think and argue effectively, especially about social issues and social systems. This goes way beyond the first year sociology class that computer science students are 'forced' to take as an elective. Techies without social science or humanities backgrounds are notoriously bad at thinking about social systems, and end up developing extremely problematic socially-embedded tools and technologies. If we consider many of the problematic tech of the past decade (intrusive surveillance tech, under-moderated social media, crispr genetic modification, etc), they were all designed without such considerations in mind, and have had detrimental effects on society. It's sad that we continue to not 'get it', that thinking properly about human experiences and systems, as informed by specialists who deal with this specifically, is crucial.

This is not only true about tech fields. When social science and humanities graduates enter post-grad programs that actually recognize the value of such prior education (i.e. medical schools that accept students with bachelor or arts, which is surprisingly rare) these students actually tend to perform better. Public policy designed by social scientists and humanists also works more effectively, but instead we have huge lobbies funded by the tech industry and management firms pushing for de-regulation or regulation designed by those technocrats themselves (i.e. sidewalk labs in toronto).

> don't make me foot the bill for some kid to study art history for four years

This is completely false. In fact, the complete opposite is true. Art history students subsidize the cost of education for STEM students.

At least in Canada, your tuition is the same whether you study a STEM field or art history. But STEM has greater costs association with teaching, i.e. lab equipment, lab technicians' salaries, shop spaces, computer labs, etc. Much of social sciences and humanities teaching is based on a JSTOR subscriptions and a computer projector in the basement of a crumbling concrete building built half a century ago in the far corner of campus. 90% of the money that Social Science and Humanities students pay goes to fund the STEM programs.

Student debt is a main driver of poverty and homelessness. Solving the student-debt crisis will reduce the poverty and homelessness and reduce the burden placed on programs meant to deal with those issues. It may be cheaper in the short term to just pay into those services, but why should people suffer before getting relief, when suffering could be prevented altogether?

Also, your impression about what college students actually do is completely unrepresentative of the experiences of those who are grateful for the opportunity to have an education, i.e. the people who would most benefit from having the costs of their education subsidized, i.e. those who go in with few opportunities and come out with many more. The only people who party are those who could already afford to live their lives normally after they graduate, or the people getting degrees in high-return fields (i.e. business and engineering).

Qualitative Data Analysis systems. RQDA and QualCoder are under development, but the pace is generally slow and many features are buggy and remain untested on common operating systems. Some products out there on the market are better than others (I use MaxQDA) but come at a hefty price, even with a student discount.

Also transcription software. Not voice recognition, but software that assists with manual transcription. I'm amazed that no open source alternative to F5 exists out there, since it's a relatively simple mechanism (keyboard shortcuts to denote speaker, paste timestamp, include annotations, etc and ability spool back to rewind 2 seconds).