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Comment by eindiran | Hacker News Reader

Beyond just the perverse incentives for university administrations discussed in the article, this would be quite disappointing. The constant push towards specialization has led to most undergraduate programs losing any liberal arts rounding, which has some obviously negative impacts (eg the perennially-absent ethics and history courses for engineers). With a further reduction in the number of students in the arts and humanities, I imagine this trend would be pushed significantly further (eg the vast majority of voters having last taken a history class in secondary school/never having taken a political science class, school districts following this lead and cutting the already-paltry funding of the arts and humanities for primary and secondary schools). Hopefully the lawmakers see that investing in STEM doesn't need to be at the expense of the arts and humanities.

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Many engineering programs require an ethics class already, and many STEM degrees require TWO YEARS of "liberal arts rounding" classes. I learned nothing in those classes that I couldn't teach myself, but I sure as hell paid a lot of money for them. Additionally, every single university student has had 13 YEARS worth of liberal arts education before they've taken their first university-level class. If 13 years wasn't enough to "round out" a student, then what good will another few years do?

The "13 years" of compulsory education are foundational, but cannot adequately address topics in any depth, at all. A student who has taken "13 years" of math might be able to solve for x and y in a system of equations and calculate compound interest. Two additional years would grant them an understanding of set theory, Bayesian statistics, or calculus. Nearly no ethics or civics is taught during the compulsory period. No philosophy, very little critical reasoning. What we could do with just a little bit there.

> many STEM degrees require TWO YEARS of "liberal arts rounding" classes.

Is that true in Australia? I assumed universities in Australia would be similar to the UK, where all classes are in the chosen subject only?

That is correct, stem degrees in Australia do not include liberal arts rounding.

It depends on the university; at University of Melbourne they do.

As someone who has gone through the Melbourne Model, I don't know if I'd call the semester's worth of breadths in the BSc "liberal arts rounding" in the same sense as people are using it here, mainly because it's a free choice of subjects outside your degree (and most subjects are available). E.g. it's not uncommon to take management subjects as an "employable" breadth.

It varies by Uni. When I studied there was no enforced "rounding", but you only needed a certain number of units of a type to hit a target degree but a higher total number of units was required to graduate.

It was then up to the student what they studied in the spare units (science, language, accounting, Chinese calligraphy, etc) with an option to cram more in or add an extra year for a double-degree.

Sometimes units in different departments were very highly encouraged, such as formal logic in philosophy when doing CS or EE.

In my experience as an engineer in Australia, I did 0 liberal arts rounding. At the time, I didn't see the point. I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it and been quite annoyed by it, especially if it wasn't given through an engineering-specific lens. However, these days I've come to realise the value it can provide.

I did not even have an engineering ethics class.

My comp sci degree had 0 rounding classes. Every class was comp sci or math.

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