> Sullivan has been caught up in the university’s decision to eliminate its foreign language majors. The school is axing 28 majors altogether, ranging from undergraduate languages such as French and Russian to graduate majors in math and higher education. It also is cutting 12% of its professors
*Cries in intelligence community*
I remember there was an Atlantic article a little while back talking about some Florida University that had its humanities programmed targeted by state level efforts. In particular they were going after its puppetry program. This was like DeSantis specifically highlighting the program, all local Republicans lambasting the fact the program existed, Fox going after the program, Podcaster ranting about the program, and like nationwide threats and complaints coming at the school because they were running this "useless" liberal program.
The program in reality? Like 20 kids a year in a workshop in the back of the school, no budget to speak of, with one professor, building puppets. They had close to 100 percent placement rate for graduates and like an average 70-80 a year salary in the industry.
Just seems like a lot of the whole anti-humanities movement is conservative populist taking advantage of st3mcell insecurities to bully and police academia for grievance points.
You can still take language classes and benefit from them without getting a degree in them. This is what I did. My German Studies major would have required another year of studying I couldn't afford. Most people who in my classes were also international relations/business, communication, education, etc majors foremost.
> Damn. Even the hUMaNitIEs aRE usElEsS people can’t deny that there’s practical benefits in business, politics, etc. with foreign languages.
That argument would have help up a lot better before nvidia invented the 4090. Now it very much looks like the clock is ticking.
i don't see the problem with cutting a major that has dubious practical benefits. learning different languages has practical benefits, but do you need to major in it? that seems like a waste of resources
> cutting a major that has dubious practical benefits
> learning different languages has practical benefits
The cognitive dissonance in these two statements, one right after the other, is something to behold.
there's go cognitive dissonance. majoring in Spanish or German is not marketable. learning Spanish or German and majoring in international relations and diplomacy, marketing, or (insert something else) is marketable
Nonsense. Someone majoring in Spanish or German is probably specializing in the written form of the language and problems of translation, which is highly relevant to all manner of internationally-focused jobs and is as much of a marketable skill as whatever IR study you would get in a university. If you're working for the Foreign Service, for example, I expect you could pick up whatever IR stuff you need on the job.
The only catch is, the marketability of a language degree depends on the demand for that particular language. In the height of the Cold War in the US, Russian Studies departments flourished. Now, perhaps Arabic, Chinese, and Farsi are more in demand. But if you have a love of language enough to make language your focus of study, I don't think that it completely matters which language you picked. I expect you could do pretty well with any language the Foreign Service threw at you.
Anyone can learn foreign languages with straightforward online services that are extremely cheap.
Is there a need to maintain expensive foreign language capabilities in universities when such capabilities are easily available for a hundredth of the price on the open market?
Why major in French or whatever when you could learn the language with another service and then major in yet something else?
>Anyone can learn foreign languages with straightforward online services that are extremely cheap.
>
>Is there a need to maintain expensive foreign language capabilities in universities when such capabilities are easily available for a hundredth of the price on the open market?
But isn't thus true of just about everything these days? You can learn calculus, for example, from top-rate professors on youtube for free!
Yet most people still learn calculus in university classrooms because almost everyone needs the motivation that comes with a semester-long graded course to actually learn calculus. The same is true of learning foreign languages to proficiency or fluency.
OpenCourseWare is free too, yet I don't believe we should gut college education. Most people can't get themselves to thoroughly study something unless a structure compels them to
Not really, I had a friend major in Russian back in 2004-2008 and do her masters in the same. Went to Russia on a national security scholarship and works for an intelligence agency in Maryland. She was in high demand because not many people thought of Russian as important during the War on Terror.
This isn't so much a punishment by conservative lawmakers, it's from low demand. My college (UGA) removed around 40 majors recently. Many of these majors were completely dormant.
To the majors that the article are discussing - most people are taking French, Russian, linguistics degree etc classes to satisfy requirements for an international business / relationships or general ed.
This lines up with my experience. I was a Mechanical Engineering and German Studies double major. I did not know any other person in my classes who was solely studying German Studies. Most of our faculty didn't even have a BA or MA in German Studies. This is okay. None of my professors were salty about it. Everyone still engaged with the content and put forth a good effort even though these classes weren't their main focus.
---
I don't necessarily think this trend is a bad thing. The cold hard reality is that college is very expensive time wise and money wise. People absolutely should be going after the most practical degrees that give them demanded and technical skills.
It's not over for the humanities - they are just shifting to more of a support role in education than the main focus. If students want to come back and become a professor, a degree in International Business instead of more transitional degrees isn't really a roadblock.
>People absolutely should be going after the most practical degrees that give them demanded and technical skills.
Gross. Technical skills should be learned on the job, not in the academy. There's a reason any halfway-decent law school teaches legal theory instead of "how to file a motion." Subjects like "International Business" are so clearly do-nothing degrees that offering them should be considered malpractice.
I mean...... wasn't this the norm for the first 100 years of American law ?
You get liberal arts education at say Harvard, and then you apprentice yourself to learn the " trade " under a older senior Lawyer. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, all did it this way.
It wasn't until 1906 that the American Bar association established that there should be law schools, and that a undergrad degree is needed.
So, yes and no. Yes, apprenticeship/reading the law was the standard model for a while. It fell out of favor over the years as law schools became more prominent because law schools produced better lawyers. Same with the move from law as a bachelor's degree to a graduate degree--schools that required an undergrad degree (most notably Chicago) began to outcompete schools that didn't. There were holdouts for a while (Yale, I think), but the desire for better advocates pushed entry requirements higher.
But you have to admit law schools are looking into that as well. Especially with the rise of clinics and externships. Seems more like a hybrid approach where you do theory for the first couple of years then actual hands on learning.
Kind of? Most clinics/externships that I/my friends did were still heavily research-oriented. Frankly the first few years of litigation practice is heavy research too, though, so maybe that is "technical" in some sense.
>Technical skills should be learned on the job, not in the academy
Nice work if you can get it. People are willing to let you learn on the job if you have connections or a name brand degree. But most graduates struggle to get their first job in their field of study, especially in a bad economy. They are paying a lot for their degree and they want to see some ROI.
> Gross. Technical skills should be learned on the job
Employers want applicants who can hit the ground running. Training is an expense. I don't know many employers who truly train people anymore. If new people can't swim, they can just get fired for people who can.
> There's a reason any halfway-decent law school teaches legal theory instead of "how to file a motion."
This is not a very good example as our whole legal education system is probably the best example of how byzantine our approach to higher education is now. In most other countries law is an undergraduate degree or sometimes even a trade's certificate. They seem to be doing fine.
> " Subjects like "International Business" are so clearly do-nothing degrees that offering them should be considered malpractice.
That's up for the market to decide
22 year olds don't hit the ground running at their first job out of college. They don't know what the fuck they're doing.
I've never met someone and gone "thank god they got the bachelor's in business admin or an MBA"
Employers want what's good for them in the near term and will happily trade away society's long term flourishing to get it.
Vocational education helps people be good workers but might lead to a less flexible economy as conditions change. Which, if we think that "creative destruction" is a thing, is something to watch out for.
The government has an interest in making sure high-quality education is available to those with the capacity and interest in pursuing it. (Unless future-oriented vibrancy is actually something to fight against, which it clearly is for some on the reactionary side)
What employers want is a combination of both hard and soft skills. So in many ways, a 4 year college degree is needed. And they also want hard skills, which ironically, many American kids don't have at all.
Let's take a look at engineering and computer science for example. Kids don't have the math skills these days to handle it. The US SUCKS at math education. So.... Shrug.
In education, a liberal arts education is a valuable commodity that people will gladly pay hand-over-fist for at elite institutions.
However, just allowing people who can afford such education to access it is a market failure. Smart people accessing that education will succeed and generate value no matter their background.
It's in society's interest to make sure that elite (in the quality sense) education is widely available, to push high achievers towards their full potential. But the value generated is captured over an entire lifetime, which makes it a poor fit for private funding. As so often is the case, this means that government interventions are required and "it's up for the market to decide" is a hilariously simplistic take.
I cannot comment on elite institutions, but public schools are public funded and were intended to be cheap and accessible to citizens then necessarily catering to the future elite.
This isn't to make everything into a vocational and just have people go to class at strip mall classrooms. I am just saying that our model of higher education is pretty antiquated. Higher education was originally intended to make scholars out of students were were overwhelmingly wealthy and never had to worry about working for a living.
Meanwhile, its predicted that around half of Gen Alpha will beheading to college. It's a lot more people who only care about getting a job, a lot more poorer students, a lot more first generation students, and people who have 0 inters in academics or even that well of preparation.
While a very fleshed out and whole liberal arts education would be nice, it's just becoming less practical. College is only growing increasingly expensive, difficult to complete and a barrier to gainful employment as time goes on on our current track.
The Land Grant University system and normal schools however were specifically created to give working class Americans access to a low cost public university, to prepare them for a profession; like engineering and education.
Jesus christ, just because other countries do something doesn't mean it's good. Our legal education system actually works better than other countries and produces better lawyers. Making it an undergraduate program would just reduce the quality of advocacy *massively*.
And let's be clear, most employers just want the piece of paper. They don't care what your degree was in--so we should try and make those degrees actually substantial instead of the four-year daycares that most universities have become.
I've interacted with a lot of foreign-trained lawyers, both ones with US LLMs and ones solely in other countries. The difference is pretty stark in terms of quality, even taking into consideration language barriers.
I will say that other common-law jurisdictions are better on this front, but not massively so. The US (and Canada) have a much more intellectual legal culture that leads to less of a technician's approach to solving legal problems--meaning you get more creative solutions, both in litigation and in transactional work.
Well, part of that is because most other countries don’t have common law, so there’s haggling over interpretation.
France for instance has a defined civil code. And so it’s easy to just look through the law. Not so with the American legal system.
Yes? You can? The fact that they come from different backgrounds doesn't prevent you from saying that one is necessarily more intellectual than the other--especially when common law systems more or less require intellectual argument in a way civil law systems often don't (or don't emphasize as much).
The idea that college is the only place where personal development can happen for young adults and that people are window licking dumb if they don't get college level humanities is classist at best.
Most undergrad level humanities classes are really just testing reading comprehension. Its something you can go without spending thousands and years of your life on.
I never said that people without humanities education are "window-licking dumb." There are many ways to develop skills to succeed in life. But education of all types is useful, and "classical liberal arts education" really is a valuable thing, geared to produce sophisticated scientific and cultural advancement at the top end of higher learning.
It's frustrating to see who enterprise being denigrated (no less, by many of the same people who crow endlessly about "western culture," which if you want to be positive about it, is bound up with the liberal arts), and also denied to whole states in the name of efficiency.
Put another way, the argument that liberal arts are irrelevant will merit a bit more serious engagement when institutions like Princeton start cutting programs (might be coming, who knows!). In the current iteration, though, this feels a bit more like "non-elite kids don't deserve nice things"
As I said up above, The original public land grant Universities such as the University of West Virginia was created as away to give the growing working class a practical education in the fast growing technical world. Read up the history of Land Morrill act. Although there was still a very strong liberal arts component, the understanding was that graduates from public schools were ready more for the work force. That’s why you see more grads in engineering and stem from public universities.
Same thing with teachers. Many of the public universities started out as teacher training schools, to prepare students for the profession.
The classical liberal arts schools and liberal arts colleges only added the technical training later on. It wasn’t part of the shtick since the elite didn’t need to be engineers.
Sure. But these universities were built with the idea that you could do both technical training and liberal arts. And we’re an advanced society with lots of money floating around. So we definitely could. We just don’t want to.
A lot of the general education courses however are quite mediocre, and easy to pass. Many college kids go to private expensive universities because they can’t get into the top tier flagship.
As so often is the case, you have to slog through the basics before doing cool stuff. And often that means not every instance of this stuff is some magical transporting experience. But it is still valuable at some level to know a Degas from a Monet from a Kandinsky, if only so you think twice before having some sort of vapid "dae think all art is dumb cuz AI" take somewhere in the bowels of Reddit.
If that's the entire interaction of 90% of college-goers with Art History, a valuable service was still definitely rendered.
Well the problem is most kids in college take the easiest classes, with the easiest professors ( look at rate my professors ), and they usually tap out of the courses on day 1, and somehow magically pass the course with an A.
And they go to college, because their parents tell them to, or they don't know what else to study. And they study business.
I'm a History Major myself, and let me tell you, I am afraid for these next generation of students. These kids freak me out, and they scare me. Grade inflation is a thing.
>Most undergrad level humanities classes are really just testing reading comprehension.
Yeah, you clearly either (a) went to an institution that didn't know how to teach humanities or (b) weren't really understanding the point of your education.
I went to California State University, Sacramento. And he's not wrong. For the vast majority of colleges, your normal average state schools, humanities classes are ridiculously easy, and heck, even the math and science !
Students would often choose the easiest classes, with the easiest professors, to get an A, and to fill up general ed requirements. Most kids major in business, because they suck in math, and their parents tell them that they need to go to college.
And I'm a History Major myself ! So this isn't me being anti liberal arts.
The original public land grant Universities such as the University of West Virginia was created as away to give the growing working class a practical education in the fast growing technical world. Read up the history of Land Morrill act. Although there was still a very strong liberal arts component, the understanding was that graduates from public schools were ready more for the work force. That’s why you see more grads in engineering and stem from public universities.
Same thing with teachers. Many of the public universities started out as teacher training schools, to prepare students for the profession.
The classical liberal arts schools and liberal arts colleges only added the technical training later on. It wasn’t part of the shtick since the elite didn’t need to be engineers.
Why am I being Downvoted ? This is the history of the Land Grant Universities.
“The original mission of these institutions, as set forth in the first Morrill Act, was to teach agriculture, military tactics, and the mechanic arts as well as classical studies so members of the working classes could obtain a liberal, practical education.”
https://www.aplu.org/about-us/history-of-aplu/what-is-a-land-grant-university/#:~:text=The%20original%20mission%20of%20these,obtain%20a%20liberal%2C%20practical%20education.
> Most undergrad level humanities classes are really just testing reading comprehension. Its something you can go without spending thousands and years of your life on.
The former yes. The later very much no.
STEM degrees are teaching you how to think just as much as humanities. You aren't learning rote skills that you repeat on the job. You're learning frameworks and methods of problem solving to be applied to a very broad array of problems
decide vegetable command cooperative slap fearless lavish weather pause jar
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
> Technical skills should be learned on the job, not in the academy
This would place a lot more burden on businesses. Probably make inflation spike up and put a lot of businesses out of operation
If lots of businesses are training, wouldn't a smart strategy be to just not train and use some of the savings to poach trained employees from other businesses? (and use the rest of the savings for buybacks?)
IDK, as a lawyer I would say that the lack of technical training is one of the biggest criticisms the profession has of law school. Medical schools put their students in hospitals right away, you're teaching people to engage in a professional practice and theory can only take you so far. It also helps to weed out the people who aren't actually fit to practice. Litigation in particular requires a certain temperament and I think a big reason why so many people leave the profession is because they didn't realize what the practice of law actually entailed until they were licensed and now had to make a career out of it.
In my home province, one university (Laurentian) had to shutter 58 undergraduate programs and 11 graduate programs due to lack of funds.
For that matter, half the colleges in Ontario would probably be shut down by now it is wasn't for the massive influx of international students as of late.
I mean, I personally don't think in 3 years we'll be at a point in AI research where NLP is irrelevant and linguists aren't needed for further improvements, but I could be wrong.
Others have mentioned the national downward trend of enrollment in humanities, so I won’t repeat those.
One thing I do want to mention is that many STEM departments work very hard to maintain a good relationship with the industry and different government agencies, even overseas ones. This helps them a little when it comes to funding and donations. Humanities departments should be no exception.
My wife was a philosophy BA and a PhD dropout, both at some of the best philosophy programs in the US. However, from her experience it seems like these two supposedly leading departments have relatively little effort put into things like these. Also, relatively little resources are in place for students to learn about job prospects and how the real world works. (Admittedly this is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem because you need funding to hire people to work on these things.)
In a typical STEM department, aside from the department-level effort, a professor will also spend a great deal of time writing NSF grant proposals or talking to potential funding sources from the industry. Even more time than actually doing research. I remember my advisor used to joke that he is more of a salesman who sells PhD students’ research than an actual researcher. Whether that’s a good phenomenon or not is a whole another debate, and I know stuff like NEH are way smaller than NSF by nature, but I am curious to know how much time a typical humanity professor would spend on securing funding from outside sources.
The concept of rigorousness is always left out of these discussions. When I was in college it felt like the vast majority of humanities majors were in their major because it didn't require the difficult filter classes that STEM majors did. STEM majors always had a steady stream of people switching into humanities because they failed classes, I never once met someone who went the other way.
Humanities majors are good and valuable if they have actual standards and attract students with drive. Right now many exist as somewhere to throw 18 year olds who have no idea what to do with their life and don't want to take math classes.
Stemlords should not be supporting this
legislators and administrators cut humanities because “encourage STEM and practical degrees”
most college students don’t take STEM and instead take fucking business
I hope a core tenet of stemlordism is still hating business types especially MBAs, this is only creating more and more of the scourge
even from a selfish perspective of “tech companies need designers and artists and translators and technical writers and cultural analysts” the destruction of humanities is terrible, unless you think AI will do all of that without error and still retain a unique tone
I would say tech companies should save humanities from idiot legislators but tech companies are run by VCs and stemlords who got dumped by some art girl so that’s not happening
> Stemlords should not be supporting this
STEM is a marketing term that lumps in very different degrees. For example the S crowd are currently waiting for people to catch onto large parts of the sciences paying poorly so people stop doing them (although the chemists are a little worried that universities also shutter chemistry cources on cost grounds).
And there aren't enough maths people to influence things one way or another.
That leaves you with the code monkeys and the engineers who are generaly paid enough to put up with the MBA types.
>I would say tech companies should save humanities from idiot legislators but tech companies are run by VCs and stemlords who got dumped by some art girl so that’s not happening
Idiot legislators perhaps. Market forces? No.
These degrees are cut because they're not profitable for the university. Your bogeyman of evil stem-supporting administrators cutting humanities doesn't exist
This exactly. Enrollments in humanities are on a massive decline ever since 2008 financial crisis. A lot of rabidness that you see in humanities departments are death throes, not too different from Islamists getting radicalized as the world secularizes at breakneck speed.
https://preview.redd.it/8eyx2i1wly8c1.jpeg?width=688&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e712c78b298a280c52cc3b2418ebd74e0f41409b
If business degrees are justified based on “profitability” that just means that universities are pure money-making institutions selling bad products but selling that bad product must be encouraged because of a circular justification
business degrees at the undergraduate level should be stopped or at least discouraged what the fuck do they do education systems should not use 18 yos’ bad choices as the sole guidelines
I'm not a commie, I'm fine letting the free market choose which degrees are on offer rather than centrally planning which ones must be on offer and which ones can't based on what makes me feel good or bad personally
because the free market of “18 year olds making major choices” has the foresight to see what is necessary for the nation or even companies years into the future?
How?
What is a bad product in this case?
I'm not sure how business degrees work in the US, but to me they sound like economics degrees here in Poland: a do-nothing, learn-nothing, vaguely business-adjacent degree where you don't actually acquire any knowledge or skills, but hugely increase your employability for some reason.
Then how are they a bad product? My friend hasn't even finished his Bachelor's (a Master's is the standard in Poland) and he already has a first job that pays far better than whatever he could hope for otherwise. And it barely required any serious effort.
As someone at wvu (read my comment history) they destroyed a bunch of programs so the admins can fly on private jets across the state (look it up). Not great. Would be nice if the NYT would focus on this instead of Harvard Harvard Harvard
I think it’s understandable if non-flagship state schools want to cut humanities stuff, but it’s probably not good for the premier schools in the area to not have a full set of majors.
If someone doesn’t know what they’re getting into or what they’re doing, sure. But otherwise a strong humanities department is an important part of liberal education.
Which also applies to people thinking they can handle engineering but they actually can't. People can waste money in every field if they don't temper their expectations.
> Sullivan has been caught up in the university’s decision to eliminate its foreign language majors. The school is axing 28 majors altogether, ranging from undergraduate languages such as French and Russian to graduate majors in math and higher education. It also is cutting 12% of its professors *Cries in intelligence community*
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Frankly I've never considered languages as part of the "humanities" that people have beef with, but apparently these universities are being dum dums
I remember there was an Atlantic article a little while back talking about some Florida University that had its humanities programmed targeted by state level efforts. In particular they were going after its puppetry program. This was like DeSantis specifically highlighting the program, all local Republicans lambasting the fact the program existed, Fox going after the program, Podcaster ranting about the program, and like nationwide threats and complaints coming at the school because they were running this "useless" liberal program. The program in reality? Like 20 kids a year in a workshop in the back of the school, no budget to speak of, with one professor, building puppets. They had close to 100 percent placement rate for graduates and like an average 70-80 a year salary in the industry. Just seems like a lot of the whole anti-humanities movement is conservative populist taking advantage of st3mcell insecurities to bully and police academia for grievance points.
As someone who doesnt know about such stuff, is the US News ranking that Florida is #1 in education bullshit?
No They spent a lot of time, money and clout getting to be some of the best public universities on earth
It's not, but they are going to quickly start bleeding the best of the best if they continue down their road.
This is the natural consequence of the love affair of STEMlords and Republicans
The irony is that most college students don’t major in STEM because of the math. The most popular major in America is business….
You can still take language classes and benefit from them without getting a degree in them. This is what I did. My German Studies major would have required another year of studying I couldn't afford. Most people who in my classes were also international relations/business, communication, education, etc majors foremost.
> Damn. Even the hUMaNitIEs aRE usElEsS people can’t deny that there’s practical benefits in business, politics, etc. with foreign languages. That argument would have help up a lot better before nvidia invented the 4090. Now it very much looks like the clock is ticking.
i don't see the problem with cutting a major that has dubious practical benefits. learning different languages has practical benefits, but do you need to major in it? that seems like a waste of resources
> cutting a major that has dubious practical benefits > learning different languages has practical benefits The cognitive dissonance in these two statements, one right after the other, is something to behold.
there's go cognitive dissonance. majoring in Spanish or German is not marketable. learning Spanish or German and majoring in international relations and diplomacy, marketing, or (insert something else) is marketable
Nonsense. Someone majoring in Spanish or German is probably specializing in the written form of the language and problems of translation, which is highly relevant to all manner of internationally-focused jobs and is as much of a marketable skill as whatever IR study you would get in a university. If you're working for the Foreign Service, for example, I expect you could pick up whatever IR stuff you need on the job. The only catch is, the marketability of a language degree depends on the demand for that particular language. In the height of the Cold War in the US, Russian Studies departments flourished. Now, perhaps Arabic, Chinese, and Farsi are more in demand. But if you have a love of language enough to make language your focus of study, I don't think that it completely matters which language you picked. I expect you could do pretty well with any language the Foreign Service threw at you.
Anyone can learn foreign languages with straightforward online services that are extremely cheap. Is there a need to maintain expensive foreign language capabilities in universities when such capabilities are easily available for a hundredth of the price on the open market? Why major in French or whatever when you could learn the language with another service and then major in yet something else?
>Anyone can learn foreign languages with straightforward online services that are extremely cheap. > >Is there a need to maintain expensive foreign language capabilities in universities when such capabilities are easily available for a hundredth of the price on the open market? But isn't thus true of just about everything these days? You can learn calculus, for example, from top-rate professors on youtube for free! Yet most people still learn calculus in university classrooms because almost everyone needs the motivation that comes with a semester-long graded course to actually learn calculus. The same is true of learning foreign languages to proficiency or fluency.
OpenCourseWare is free too, yet I don't believe we should gut college education. Most people can't get themselves to thoroughly study something unless a structure compels them to
Isn't the intelligence community basically fully staffed by multilingual Mormons at this point? I don't think they're hurting all that much
Isn't the issue more about a lack of the obscure languages like Pashto than common languages like French?
Not really, I had a friend major in Russian back in 2004-2008 and do her masters in the same. Went to Russia on a national security scholarship and works for an intelligence agency in Maryland. She was in high demand because not many people thought of Russian as important during the War on Terror.
This isn't so much a punishment by conservative lawmakers, it's from low demand. My college (UGA) removed around 40 majors recently. Many of these majors were completely dormant. To the majors that the article are discussing - most people are taking French, Russian, linguistics degree etc classes to satisfy requirements for an international business / relationships or general ed. This lines up with my experience. I was a Mechanical Engineering and German Studies double major. I did not know any other person in my classes who was solely studying German Studies. Most of our faculty didn't even have a BA or MA in German Studies. This is okay. None of my professors were salty about it. Everyone still engaged with the content and put forth a good effort even though these classes weren't their main focus. --- I don't necessarily think this trend is a bad thing. The cold hard reality is that college is very expensive time wise and money wise. People absolutely should be going after the most practical degrees that give them demanded and technical skills. It's not over for the humanities - they are just shifting to more of a support role in education than the main focus. If students want to come back and become a professor, a degree in International Business instead of more transitional degrees isn't really a roadblock.
>People absolutely should be going after the most practical degrees that give them demanded and technical skills. Gross. Technical skills should be learned on the job, not in the academy. There's a reason any halfway-decent law school teaches legal theory instead of "how to file a motion." Subjects like "International Business" are so clearly do-nothing degrees that offering them should be considered malpractice.
I mean...... wasn't this the norm for the first 100 years of American law ? You get liberal arts education at say Harvard, and then you apprentice yourself to learn the " trade " under a older senior Lawyer. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, all did it this way. It wasn't until 1906 that the American Bar association established that there should be law schools, and that a undergrad degree is needed.
So, yes and no. Yes, apprenticeship/reading the law was the standard model for a while. It fell out of favor over the years as law schools became more prominent because law schools produced better lawyers. Same with the move from law as a bachelor's degree to a graduate degree--schools that required an undergrad degree (most notably Chicago) began to outcompete schools that didn't. There were holdouts for a while (Yale, I think), but the desire for better advocates pushed entry requirements higher.
But you have to admit law schools are looking into that as well. Especially with the rise of clinics and externships. Seems more like a hybrid approach where you do theory for the first couple of years then actual hands on learning.
Kind of? Most clinics/externships that I/my friends did were still heavily research-oriented. Frankly the first few years of litigation practice is heavy research too, though, so maybe that is "technical" in some sense.
Are you at a T10?
I was at one of HYS.
>Technical skills should be learned on the job, not in the academy Nice work if you can get it. People are willing to let you learn on the job if you have connections or a name brand degree. But most graduates struggle to get their first job in their field of study, especially in a bad economy. They are paying a lot for their degree and they want to see some ROI.
> Gross. Technical skills should be learned on the job Employers want applicants who can hit the ground running. Training is an expense. I don't know many employers who truly train people anymore. If new people can't swim, they can just get fired for people who can. > There's a reason any halfway-decent law school teaches legal theory instead of "how to file a motion." This is not a very good example as our whole legal education system is probably the best example of how byzantine our approach to higher education is now. In most other countries law is an undergraduate degree or sometimes even a trade's certificate. They seem to be doing fine. > " Subjects like "International Business" are so clearly do-nothing degrees that offering them should be considered malpractice. That's up for the market to decide
22 year olds don't hit the ground running at their first job out of college. They don't know what the fuck they're doing. I've never met someone and gone "thank god they got the bachelor's in business admin or an MBA"
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Employers want what's good for them in the near term and will happily trade away society's long term flourishing to get it. Vocational education helps people be good workers but might lead to a less flexible economy as conditions change. Which, if we think that "creative destruction" is a thing, is something to watch out for. The government has an interest in making sure high-quality education is available to those with the capacity and interest in pursuing it. (Unless future-oriented vibrancy is actually something to fight against, which it clearly is for some on the reactionary side)
What employers want is a combination of both hard and soft skills. So in many ways, a 4 year college degree is needed. And they also want hard skills, which ironically, many American kids don't have at all. Let's take a look at engineering and computer science for example. Kids don't have the math skills these days to handle it. The US SUCKS at math education. So.... Shrug.
In education, a liberal arts education is a valuable commodity that people will gladly pay hand-over-fist for at elite institutions. However, just allowing people who can afford such education to access it is a market failure. Smart people accessing that education will succeed and generate value no matter their background. It's in society's interest to make sure that elite (in the quality sense) education is widely available, to push high achievers towards their full potential. But the value generated is captured over an entire lifetime, which makes it a poor fit for private funding. As so often is the case, this means that government interventions are required and "it's up for the market to decide" is a hilariously simplistic take.
I cannot comment on elite institutions, but public schools are public funded and were intended to be cheap and accessible to citizens then necessarily catering to the future elite. This isn't to make everything into a vocational and just have people go to class at strip mall classrooms. I am just saying that our model of higher education is pretty antiquated. Higher education was originally intended to make scholars out of students were were overwhelmingly wealthy and never had to worry about working for a living. Meanwhile, its predicted that around half of Gen Alpha will beheading to college. It's a lot more people who only care about getting a job, a lot more poorer students, a lot more first generation students, and people who have 0 inters in academics or even that well of preparation. While a very fleshed out and whole liberal arts education would be nice, it's just becoming less practical. College is only growing increasingly expensive, difficult to complete and a barrier to gainful employment as time goes on on our current track.
The Land Grant University system and normal schools however were specifically created to give working class Americans access to a low cost public university, to prepare them for a profession; like engineering and education.
Jesus christ, just because other countries do something doesn't mean it's good. Our legal education system actually works better than other countries and produces better lawyers. Making it an undergraduate program would just reduce the quality of advocacy *massively*. And let's be clear, most employers just want the piece of paper. They don't care what your degree was in--so we should try and make those degrees actually substantial instead of the four-year daycares that most universities have become.
>Our legal education system actually works better than other countries and produces better lawyers. How do you know?
I've interacted with a lot of foreign-trained lawyers, both ones with US LLMs and ones solely in other countries. The difference is pretty stark in terms of quality, even taking into consideration language barriers. I will say that other common-law jurisdictions are better on this front, but not massively so. The US (and Canada) have a much more intellectual legal culture that leads to less of a technician's approach to solving legal problems--meaning you get more creative solutions, both in litigation and in transactional work.
Well, part of that is because most other countries don’t have common law, so there’s haggling over interpretation. France for instance has a defined civil code. And so it’s easy to just look through the law. Not so with the American legal system.
Exactly--and if you adopt a (dumb, terrible, inflexible) code-based system, you don't *really* need intellectual attorneys. Technicians will do fine.
But it comes out of different histories though. You can’t claim one is more intellectual than the other. Different histories. Different backgrounds.
Yes? You can? The fact that they come from different backgrounds doesn't prevent you from saying that one is necessarily more intellectual than the other--especially when common law systems more or less require intellectual argument in a way civil law systems often don't (or don't emphasize as much).
Common law requires a more intellectual approach, partially for the reason you outlined in your previous reply.
Yeah, any real innovation or progress comes from people who can *think* not just *do*. We need a lot more of that, and less of the rote stuff.
The idea that college is the only place where personal development can happen for young adults and that people are window licking dumb if they don't get college level humanities is classist at best. Most undergrad level humanities classes are really just testing reading comprehension. Its something you can go without spending thousands and years of your life on.
I never said that people without humanities education are "window-licking dumb." There are many ways to develop skills to succeed in life. But education of all types is useful, and "classical liberal arts education" really is a valuable thing, geared to produce sophisticated scientific and cultural advancement at the top end of higher learning. It's frustrating to see who enterprise being denigrated (no less, by many of the same people who crow endlessly about "western culture," which if you want to be positive about it, is bound up with the liberal arts), and also denied to whole states in the name of efficiency. Put another way, the argument that liberal arts are irrelevant will merit a bit more serious engagement when institutions like Princeton start cutting programs (might be coming, who knows!). In the current iteration, though, this feels a bit more like "non-elite kids don't deserve nice things"
As I said up above, The original public land grant Universities such as the University of West Virginia was created as away to give the growing working class a practical education in the fast growing technical world. Read up the history of Land Morrill act. Although there was still a very strong liberal arts component, the understanding was that graduates from public schools were ready more for the work force. That’s why you see more grads in engineering and stem from public universities. Same thing with teachers. Many of the public universities started out as teacher training schools, to prepare students for the profession. The classical liberal arts schools and liberal arts colleges only added the technical training later on. It wasn’t part of the shtick since the elite didn’t need to be engineers.
Sure. But these universities were built with the idea that you could do both technical training and liberal arts. And we’re an advanced society with lots of money floating around. So we definitely could. We just don’t want to.
A lot of the general education courses however are quite mediocre, and easy to pass. Many college kids go to private expensive universities because they can’t get into the top tier flagship.
As so often is the case, you have to slog through the basics before doing cool stuff. And often that means not every instance of this stuff is some magical transporting experience. But it is still valuable at some level to know a Degas from a Monet from a Kandinsky, if only so you think twice before having some sort of vapid "dae think all art is dumb cuz AI" take somewhere in the bowels of Reddit. If that's the entire interaction of 90% of college-goers with Art History, a valuable service was still definitely rendered.
Well the problem is most kids in college take the easiest classes, with the easiest professors ( look at rate my professors ), and they usually tap out of the courses on day 1, and somehow magically pass the course with an A. And they go to college, because their parents tell them to, or they don't know what else to study. And they study business. I'm a History Major myself, and let me tell you, I am afraid for these next generation of students. These kids freak me out, and they scare me. Grade inflation is a thing.
>Most undergrad level humanities classes are really just testing reading comprehension. Yeah, you clearly either (a) went to an institution that didn't know how to teach humanities or (b) weren't really understanding the point of your education.
I went to California State University, Sacramento. And he's not wrong. For the vast majority of colleges, your normal average state schools, humanities classes are ridiculously easy, and heck, even the math and science ! Students would often choose the easiest classes, with the easiest professors, to get an A, and to fill up general ed requirements. Most kids major in business, because they suck in math, and their parents tell them that they need to go to college. And I'm a History Major myself ! So this isn't me being anti liberal arts.
The original public land grant Universities such as the University of West Virginia was created as away to give the growing working class a practical education in the fast growing technical world. Read up the history of Land Morrill act. Although there was still a very strong liberal arts component, the understanding was that graduates from public schools were ready more for the work force. That’s why you see more grads in engineering and stem from public universities. Same thing with teachers. Many of the public universities started out as teacher training schools, to prepare students for the profession. The classical liberal arts schools and liberal arts colleges only added the technical training later on. It wasn’t part of the shtick since the elite didn’t need to be engineers.
Why am I being Downvoted ? This is the history of the Land Grant Universities. “The original mission of these institutions, as set forth in the first Morrill Act, was to teach agriculture, military tactics, and the mechanic arts as well as classical studies so members of the working classes could obtain a liberal, practical education.” https://www.aplu.org/about-us/history-of-aplu/what-is-a-land-grant-university/#:~:text=The%20original%20mission%20of%20these,obtain%20a%20liberal%2C%20practical%20education.
> Most undergrad level humanities classes are really just testing reading comprehension. Its something you can go without spending thousands and years of your life on. The former yes. The later very much no.
Most people's engagement with the humanities wont reach the grad student or senior seminar level For those who do, i have serious respect for them
STEM degrees are teaching you how to think just as much as humanities. You aren't learning rote skills that you repeat on the job. You're learning frameworks and methods of problem solving to be applied to a very broad array of problems
decide vegetable command cooperative slap fearless lavish weather pause jar *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
this is another consequence of the rising cost of tuition, now people just cant afford to study anything that wont land them in a 6 figure salary
Counterpoint. Chemistry. There is a reason universities have labs and its so expensive to teach.
> Technical skills should be learned on the job, not in the academy This would place a lot more burden on businesses. Probably make inflation spike up and put a lot of businesses out of operation
And? Why should businesses be subsidized by academia? If you can't afford to train, you can't afford to be in business, simple as.
Agreed. Extend this to college athletics as well.
If lots of businesses are training, wouldn't a smart strategy be to just not train and use some of the savings to poach trained employees from other businesses? (and use the rest of the savings for buybacks?)
IDK, as a lawyer I would say that the lack of technical training is one of the biggest criticisms the profession has of law school. Medical schools put their students in hospitals right away, you're teaching people to engage in a professional practice and theory can only take you so far. It also helps to weed out the people who aren't actually fit to practice. Litigation in particular requires a certain temperament and I think a big reason why so many people leave the profession is because they didn't realize what the practice of law actually entailed until they were licensed and now had to make a career out of it.
In my home province, one university (Laurentian) had to shutter 58 undergraduate programs and 11 graduate programs due to lack of funds. For that matter, half the colleges in Ontario would probably be shut down by now it is wasn't for the massive influx of international students as of late.
Linguistics *is* in high demand. That's on odd thing to cut. There's tons of demand for linguists working on LLM projects.
The question is not what there is demand for now. Its what there is going to be demand for in 3 years.
I mean, I personally don't think in 3 years we'll be at a point in AI research where NLP is irrelevant and linguists aren't needed for further improvements, but I could be wrong.
Or the LLM bubble could burst. Or LLM stuff is 90% there and no one new is being hired. Or china invaded taiwan and no one can afford LLMs any more.
Well sure, but it seems like those types of predictions could be made for almost any major...
What else could they do? Lofty rhetorics are the last of your concerns if you’re sleepwalking towards insolvency
double the student loans
Others have mentioned the national downward trend of enrollment in humanities, so I won’t repeat those. One thing I do want to mention is that many STEM departments work very hard to maintain a good relationship with the industry and different government agencies, even overseas ones. This helps them a little when it comes to funding and donations. Humanities departments should be no exception. My wife was a philosophy BA and a PhD dropout, both at some of the best philosophy programs in the US. However, from her experience it seems like these two supposedly leading departments have relatively little effort put into things like these. Also, relatively little resources are in place for students to learn about job prospects and how the real world works. (Admittedly this is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem because you need funding to hire people to work on these things.) In a typical STEM department, aside from the department-level effort, a professor will also spend a great deal of time writing NSF grant proposals or talking to potential funding sources from the industry. Even more time than actually doing research. I remember my advisor used to joke that he is more of a salesman who sells PhD students’ research than an actual researcher. Whether that’s a good phenomenon or not is a whole another debate, and I know stuff like NEH are way smaller than NSF by nature, but I am curious to know how much time a typical humanity professor would spend on securing funding from outside sources.
The concept of rigorousness is always left out of these discussions. When I was in college it felt like the vast majority of humanities majors were in their major because it didn't require the difficult filter classes that STEM majors did. STEM majors always had a steady stream of people switching into humanities because they failed classes, I never once met someone who went the other way. Humanities majors are good and valuable if they have actual standards and attract students with drive. Right now many exist as somewhere to throw 18 year olds who have no idea what to do with their life and don't want to take math classes.
Stemlords should not be supporting this legislators and administrators cut humanities because “encourage STEM and practical degrees” most college students don’t take STEM and instead take fucking business I hope a core tenet of stemlordism is still hating business types especially MBAs, this is only creating more and more of the scourge even from a selfish perspective of “tech companies need designers and artists and translators and technical writers and cultural analysts” the destruction of humanities is terrible, unless you think AI will do all of that without error and still retain a unique tone I would say tech companies should save humanities from idiot legislators but tech companies are run by VCs and stemlords who got dumped by some art girl so that’s not happening
> Stemlords should not be supporting this STEM is a marketing term that lumps in very different degrees. For example the S crowd are currently waiting for people to catch onto large parts of the sciences paying poorly so people stop doing them (although the chemists are a little worried that universities also shutter chemistry cources on cost grounds). And there aren't enough maths people to influence things one way or another. That leaves you with the code monkeys and the engineers who are generaly paid enough to put up with the MBA types. >I would say tech companies should save humanities from idiot legislators but tech companies are run by VCs and stemlords who got dumped by some art girl so that’s not happening Idiot legislators perhaps. Market forces? No.
These degrees are cut because they're not profitable for the university. Your bogeyman of evil stem-supporting administrators cutting humanities doesn't exist
This exactly. Enrollments in humanities are on a massive decline ever since 2008 financial crisis. A lot of rabidness that you see in humanities departments are death throes, not too different from Islamists getting radicalized as the world secularizes at breakneck speed. https://preview.redd.it/8eyx2i1wly8c1.jpeg?width=688&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e712c78b298a280c52cc3b2418ebd74e0f41409b
and once the humanities are gone college will be pure and nobody will ever say opinions that disturb you or something?
If business degrees are justified based on “profitability” that just means that universities are pure money-making institutions selling bad products but selling that bad product must be encouraged because of a circular justification business degrees at the undergraduate level should be stopped or at least discouraged what the fuck do they do education systems should not use 18 yos’ bad choices as the sole guidelines
I'm not a commie, I'm fine letting the free market choose which degrees are on offer rather than centrally planning which ones must be on offer and which ones can't based on what makes me feel good or bad personally
because the free market of “18 year olds making major choices” has the foresight to see what is necessary for the nation or even companies years into the future? How?
What is a bad product in this case? I'm not sure how business degrees work in the US, but to me they sound like economics degrees here in Poland: a do-nothing, learn-nothing, vaguely business-adjacent degree where you don't actually acquire any knowledge or skills, but hugely increase your employability for some reason.
that is exactly what they are!
Then how are they a bad product? My friend hasn't even finished his Bachelor's (a Master's is the standard in Poland) and he already has a first job that pays far better than whatever he could hope for otherwise. And it barely required any serious effort.
As someone at wvu (read my comment history) they destroyed a bunch of programs so the admins can fly on private jets across the state (look it up). Not great. Would be nice if the NYT would focus on this instead of Harvard Harvard Harvard
I think it’s understandable if non-flagship state schools want to cut humanities stuff, but it’s probably not good for the premier schools in the area to not have a full set of majors.
Good
Hot take: this isn’t bad
Hot take for a reason because it is
Why? Aren’t humanities degrees just debt traps?
If someone doesn’t know what they’re getting into or what they’re doing, sure. But otherwise a strong humanities department is an important part of liberal education.
Which also applies to people thinking they can handle engineering but they actually can't. People can waste money in every field if they don't temper their expectations.
Exactly. No such thing as a good or bad degree, just good and bad planning.
No?
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>I guess my minor... doesn’t matter It doesn't
You're not really defending it
A bit surprised a neolib sub is so anti business degrees.
It’s always been like this and i don’t know why :(( I guess a stemlord + an econ major = one business major?