I went to a liberal arts school, and the concept isn't about wasting your time studying soft subjects that can't get you a job. It's about being a well-rounded person. The idea is to learn a little about a wide variety of subjects and go in depth on one specific subject. Just because you major in English doesn't mean that you are stuck trying to be an English teacher or a writer... the subject is important, but the process is more important.
I happened to study biochemistry, which was somewhat useful. I purposefully didn't major in CS, because the department wasn't very strong - I could learn more on my own projects (I minored in it). My wife went to a different school, but she studied French (including literature). She's now a doctor, which is a fairly useful career.
Your major doesn't restrict what you can do later in life.
I don't think he is saying that a liberal arts degree is a waste, or that the subjects you study are useless. He is saying that, unless you have a ton of money lying around, seriously rethink that expensive "useless" degree.
If you're wealthy enough or you already have earning power enough that you can decide to pursue a degree or advanced education in something that will not help you earn a living then more power to you, but I suspect that that is a very minor fraction of the population.
However, he should realise that not every country's education system is messed up as in the US; take a look at places like Germany, Australia, etc., where you can get a good education (broad or narrow) for comparatively little.
Compariatively little is still 4 years or so of your life.
You can earn money to make up for whatever you paid into college, but you can never get that time back.
If going to school isn't going to help you earn more, then why focus on it full time? You could do continuing studies throughout your life to broaden your horizons, and focus your youthful studies on apprenticeship, internship, networking or a major that will actually help you earn more.
Opportunity cost is IMO a poor way of looking at this. Four years of my life to make myself a more well-rounded, learned person with greater perspective on life?
Seems like time well spent.
I wouldn't go into crushing debt for it, but if the only outlay was time, sign me the hell up.
> "If going to school isn't going to help you earn more, then why focus on it full time?"
Because life isn't just about money.
> "You could do continuing studies throughout your life to broaden your horizons"
Because juggling full-time work with part-time studies is very, very difficult, and inevitably involves compromises in both. Because some subjects require tremendous time commitment to master.
> "and focus your youthful studies on apprenticeship, internship, networking or a major that will actually help you earn more."
But why? I already earn plenty. If I can take a break from work and pursue a something that I feel makes me a better person, without going into debt for it... why wouldn't I?
I'm not particularly old, but if there's one thing I've learned by observing older folk, is that using earning power as your core optimization metric is a really fast path to a wasted, unhappy life.
You can earn money to make up for whatever you paid into college, but you can never get that time back.
Why would you want to? Four years spent learning about things you care about seems like a pretty good use of ages 18-22.
I'd put it the other way: sure, if you start your career at age 18, you might earn more (depends on a lot of factors), but the money you earn will never let you buy that time back.
I went to a liberal arts school, and the concept isn't about wasting your time studying soft subjects that can't get you a job. It's about being a well-rounded person.
What, precisely, is the difference? I have heard many a liberal arts major justify their major under this categorization - as if well roundedness was an end in itself. I have heard precisely zero engineers, doctors, lawyers or professionals speak about their degree making them a more "well rounded" person.
Moreover, if taking courses in English makes an engineer more well-rounded, shouldn't the converse apply as well? Why are we programmers forced to take courses in English when English majors aren't forced to take introduction to programming?
I agree that your major doesn't restrict what you can do, but it does restrict what you can do easily. For example, I started out in the Computer Engineering department. If I had graduated as computer engineer, I would have had far more exposure to digital logic design than to programming. However, I graduated with a Computer Science degree. Sure, I could do digital logic design (I know the fundamentals, and can work upwards from there), but I certainly can't do it as easily or as naturally as someone who's spent 4 years studying that field. By the same token, a computer engineer probably wouldn't be as good at coding webapps as I am.
> I have heard precisely zero engineers, doctors, lawyers or professionals speak about their degree making them a more "well rounded" person.
English universities talk at length about the personal development benefits of the university experience, even for people reading maths or sciences or engineering.
That's precisely the point I was speaking to. Engineering colleges don't need to use "personal development" as a way to justify their expense. Medical schools, law colleges, and other professional degree programs don't need to do so either. The fact that liberal education needs to refer to something as diffuse and difficult to value as "personal development" should raise hackles in an era when a college education costs almost as much as a house.
It is a common justification for some of the science core curriculum, such as why computer scientists should have to take two semesters of physics, while it'd probably be more useful for future employment to just take more CS courses. General well-roundedness / being an educated person is the usual argument.
Fair enough. But the "personal development" justification is stupid; "well rounded person" is only a little better.
One man's opinion: The purpose of a good liberal arts education is to provide the tools to learn about yourself, your place among other men, and your place in the world (qua God, Nature, Not-God, Tao, whatever).
Such studies have the practical, if somewhat removed, benefit of equipping you to understand what you value, and what you should value, and prepare you to explore how to live well. They also have the more obviously and immediately practical benefit of helping you understand how _other_ people think. Done properly, these studies require great rigor and imagination, which is excellent training for all sorts of things.
Those are the Big Questions, and there is so much crap out there speaking to them that you can easily wonder if there is any hope of getting anywhere on them. The liberal arts schools have made the problem worse by their allergic reaction to "judgment" and "objectivity" -- the conceit that all viewpoints are equally valid makes the whole enterprise impossible. All I can tell you is that, just as we shouldn't judge the great programmers by the 98% of the software crap swimming around us, neither should we judge the great liberal teachers by the swamp of babble hiding them.
I have enormous respect for engineers and technical types -- I'm teaching myself to program, and my graduate studies focused on building my quantitative skills. Your complaint that the "broadening" motivation rarely reaches to the mathy stuff is spot-on. I wish I'd studied more math in college. But my studies in philosophy and political science are foundational to everything I think and do.
So, yeah, I share your suspicion of the diffuse and difficult to value. The shame is that the schools themselves haven't better dedicated themselves to something that would be a lot easier to value.
tldr; "those who do not study the workings of their own minds must necessarily be unhappy" -- Aurelius. But the liberal arts schools chickened out of teaching him, so we're left with "well rounded".
All of these typically require a graduate degree (depending on the engineer). How is spending time during undergrad studying the humanities an issue, so long as you have the appropriate prereq's for grad school?
> Why are we programmers forced to take courses in English when English majors aren't forced to take introduction to programming?
At my school non-science majors were required to take a science class or two as an elective, just like I was required to take classes in the humanities. You could still choose what to take, but I'm sure that some chose to take Programming 101.
> "All of these typically require a graduate degree"
Only the doctor and the lawyer require graduate degrees. There are millions of engineers, accountants, actuaries, and many more professionals who exist solely with an undergrad degree.
Not everyone is like you.
> "How is spending time during undergrad studying the humanities an issue, so long as you have the appropriate prereq's for grad school?"
The core of this argument is the expense of education. The objection isn't that people are getting liberal arts degrees, it's that they're putting themselves into enormous debt doing so, and coming out without any of the skills that would allow them to pay back said debt.
It isn't helpful that your solution seems to be "get skills to pay back your debt by taking on even more debt for grad school!"
The obvious question at that point is: why not just get said employable skills in undergrad and just skip the six-figure debt load altogether?
Don't get me wrong - I'm a fan of liberal arts education, and I think it's something a lot of engineers could stand to have more of. But the idea that people should be going to into ridiculous, crushing debt to get a purely liberal arts degree, while completely ignoring their employability/financial reality, is hogwash.
True, there are lots of professionals with only an undergrad degree. But how many of them required a specific undergrad degree to do that job? To advance in business anymore, it requires an MBA of some kind. How you get it is flexible (right out of undergrad, part-time while working, etc).
These days, requiring a bachelor's degree is the equivalent to requiring a high school diploma from a few years ago. Unfortunately, that means that if you want a higher level job, having just a bachelors isn't enough anymore.
>But the idea that people should be going to into ridiculous, crushing debt to get a purely liberal arts degree, while completely ignoring their employability/financial reality, is hogwash.
No one is saying that people should go into crushing debt for a liberal arts degree. Perhaps people should go to a different school, or work during school. But to assume that you can only pay off their school debts with an engineering degree is silly.
>Your major doesn't restrict what you can do later in life.
Up to a point. Few people are able to learn advanced math on their own, and if you pick a major that avoids math classes, you'll be restricted from any job that requires it.
This isn't an isolated instance, either. I get a lot of this attitude any time I try to apply for jobs. Because I'm not looking to be an actuary or math teacher, my degrees are perceived as "useless" -- even when it comes to applying to programming jobs. (Yes, I can program. Yes, I have some public code to show. I do Python and C, if anyone's wondering. Shameless plug: I'm looking.)
I happened to study biochemistry, which was somewhat useful. I purposefully didn't major in CS, because the department wasn't very strong - I could learn more on my own projects (I minored in it). My wife went to a different school, but she studied French (including literature). She's now a doctor, which is a fairly useful career.
Your major doesn't restrict what you can do later in life.