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Comment by pisteoff | Hacker News Reader

> people are learning how to value educational degrees based on what they'll actually yield financially and making decisions accordingly.

So why bother learning about the basis of human thought and culture when instead we should be learning about how to make the next iPhone app that won't matter in 6 months. Anything to maximize those profits, right? People be damned, it's the bottom line that matters! Got it.

Only around 25% of people have jobs related to their degree. I'd rather be able read closely, think clearly and critically, and synthesize information then learn about algorithms and data structures. STEM degrees do not give you those skills to the same degree.

I can learn CS crap without a degree program. Tech stuff is easy, people are hard. A world full of STEM majors sounds boring as fuck.

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It seems like this elides the difference between the goals of humanities education and the actual practice and outcomes of humanities education. I honestly don't know if humanities education confers the ability to "read closely, think clearly and critically, and synthesize information" at a rate that's so much higher than STEM education that it makes sense to divert tens of thousands of dollars to a humanities major instead of a STEM one.

Just as some naive first cut at answering this, I looked up GRE scores by intended graduate major [1]. "Physical sciences" (including math) majors average a 151 Verbal and "Humanities and Arts" average a...156, which seems pretty close, and even closer if you squint to try and account for the fact that the physical sciences skews English-as-a-second-language more than the humanities?

Of course, the GRE isn't a perfect proxy for the ability to "read closely, think clearly and critically, and synthesize information", but...graduate schools seem ok with it?

[1] https://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/gre_guide_table4.pdf

> a rate that's so much higher than STEM education that it makes sense to divert tens of thousands of dollars to a humanities major instead of a STEM one.

Likewise, your argument doesn't support diverting funds in favor of STEM programs. From my own personal experience of having both a liberal arts BA and a huge portion of a CS degree, the liberal arts program has improved my ability to think and read deeper and more completely than the CS coursework ever could. It has also proven to have prepared me to face the "real world" better than any of my STEM major peers have been able to.

More and more, and this thread re-enforces it, I think the STEM vs. humanities argument is veiled misogyny. White boys studying science = good, brown girls studying poetry = bad.

The STEM world has no soul and will fail all of us because of it.

> From my own personal experience

In the other direction, my personal experience is that a pure math undergraduate helped me to structure assumptions, evidence, and conclusions in a way that I thought was sorely missing in most of my humanities classes. But I doubt either one of our personal anecdotes is all that convincing to a third party.

> More and more, and this thread re-enforces it, I think the STEM vs. humanities argument is veiled misogyny. White boys studying science = good, brown girls studying poetry = bad.

If you're going to jump to this uncharitable a view of my argument, it probably makes sense for us to just stop here.

>So why bother learning about the basis of human thought and culture when instead we should be learning about how to make the next iPhone app that won't matter in 6 months. Anything to maximize those profits, right? People be damned, it's the bottom line that matters! Got it.

Yes, the bottom line matters because it's paying for your education. If there is no bottom line you will have no education. Consider this, back in the day only the richest people send their children to colleges and universities. How did they become rich? By maximizing profits. So yes, profits come first, after you have those profits you can spend it on nonessential education.

This represents so much of what is wrong in the US right now.

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