What Happens When a Poor State Guts Its Public University

There's been the push that everybody should go to college, which is well-intended but misses the mark.

Everybody who can learn and grow from it should go. Those who can't should have access to vocational training. They shouldn't be denied because they can't afford it. The boomers got affordable education that they could pay for with a part time job and graduate debt-free. That seemed to work out well for them and the country as a whole.

As for who should pay for it, as a public good it should primarily be payed for by the public coffers. But treating college as a glorified trade school (clear downstream economic impact) is short-sighted.

As pointed out elsewhere, a significant increase in the cost of education (the actual operating budgets) is the increase in the administrative class. That needs to be addressed as part of fixing the issue with high costs.

Does it? I'm serious. I see people say all the time that incomes of people with stem vs humanities degrees get so cleanly bucketed. But the actual data that I see from the universities I've been involved with are far less clear. The distributions are wide and overlap within individual majors, within BA/BS distinctions, and within STEM/Humanities distinctions. We don't see this sort of discourse about how sad it is that biology majors exist when they could otherwise be studying computer science.

Yes, computer science graduates have higher average starting salaries than music performance graduates. But it does not clearly convert into "humanities graduates get low paying jobs and stem graduates get high paying jobs." It is further complicated by the actual social merit of various jobs coming out of these disciplines. A math major who goes to graduate school to do pure math research gets paid way way less than a math major who goes and does analytics for a trading firm. But... I'm not certain that we actually want the government to push people towards doing analytics on Wall Street.

I work in a front-office engineering role at a successful quant hedge fund, after a decade working in FAANG and equivalents. My wife is a stay-at-home wife/fur-mom.

Incidentally, I also graduated with total debt of about $13k, which I paid off six years after graduating with my first paycheck from Amazon. I know several other people from my English program who are equally successful -- one who graduated from a top-20 law school, one who was the lead narrative designer for Halo: Infinite, several software engineers.

Let's stop this stupid argument about STEM vs. humanities, and talk about integrative learning. (And, let's stop treating university as job training -- but that's a harder battle.)

Addition: Most of great Mathematicians in last two centuries did not graduate with a math degree. That doesn't mean that we should abolish math degrees. People also built cities and beautiful huge buildings before there was a university degrees in architecture and civil engineering. No one will say that we don't want them because of that

I’m also unclear what tax money has to do with anything - why does the funding method matter, with regards to educating students? What, specifically, makes a physics major “better” or more worthy of your tax dollars, than an English major?

A good advisor, formal or personal, can make a lifetime of difference.

If there was ever a low cost, high return opportunity for improvement it would be treating student advising with much greater priority and seriousness.

My best friend died when I was 19. Im honestly flabbergasted that anyone would think that any period of time was not worth studying the humanities. If anything, that period of time was maybe the most valuable time to study those in my whole life.

It just screams ignorance to add brackets to life experiences. Who are you to classify when and where someone’s life experiences happen?

But I'd like to talk for a moment about why I think the humanities are important, especially in the context of my own career, because I think the reason I've been successful is often a result -- direct or indirect is perhaps unclear -- of the particular education I received. I was, in fact, a math nerd growing up. I did math competitions. I was two years advanced in school, and by seventh grade I had to go to a different school every morning to go get my math education at high school.

After I was a math nerd -- because, to be honest, I finally had to think about it sometime around calculus, and I didn't really enjoy it once it stopped being pure intuition -- I was just a normal nerd. I played a lot of computer games and went to LAN parties, and I learned about building computers, maintaining a network, and troubleshooting. And I decided pure math wasn't for me, but maybe computer science was. So, I started studying that. I was in a dual-enrollment program with a local college when I was in high school, and I did the first-year sequence of CS when I was 16.

I got bored, though. I didn't want to do my homework. So I decided to go find another major, and did the classic thing where I wandered through various majors trying to find a fit. Eventually, having considered history, oceanography, journalism, and philosophy, I landed on English lit. I liked the critical theory aspects -- it felt like applied philosophy, I suppose.

There's some useful context here: I was an absolute dick. I was always right. I felt like I was better than everyone else. I had done well in math competitions; even though I'd quit studying it, my computer science professors were using the work I'd turned in weeks ahead as examples in class; I felt like I was better than my peers.

My humanities education brought a lot of nuance to what was, before then, a very black-and-white reality for me. I learned a lot about the importance of communication, about how our backgrounds can lead to different interpretations of the same material, and about how to deal with challenging, uncomfortable subjects -- not just intellectually challenging topics, but emotionally challenging topics.

The funny thing is that, in the end, I landed in tech, where I've now been for over a decade. I made my way up to senior engineer, and it was largely on the strength of my communication skills, not my technical skills; the latter were necessary but not sufficient. And I think I have a lot of potential growth left -- growth which will be enabled by soft skills, not hard skills, because the more senior you become, the more the balance shifts toward soft skills.

My point here is that studying in the humanities made me a productive member of society.

i’m not sure i follow what you’re attempting to imply here. with a topic as vast and as important as society and higher education, there will be many important and necessary pieces to discuss—the gp to this comment that you dismiss is a great example.

i’m just not sure why you would dismiss it because it isnt The One Sole Strongest argument, particularly when it is an important piece to the larger discussion.