A degree that provides the recipient with little foundation for income should not be underwritten with tax dollars. You want a teaching or nursing degree, I'm there. If you want a degree in puppetry, not happening.
> Historically, the humanities have been central to education because they have rightly been seen as essential for creating competent democratic citizens. But recently, Nussbaum argues, thinking about the aims of education has gone disturbingly awry both in the United States and abroad. Anxiously focused on national economic growth, we increasingly treat education as though its primary goal were to teach students to be economically productive rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable and empathetic citizens. This shortsighted focus on profitable skills has eroded our ability to criticize authority, reduced our sympathy with the marginalized and different, and damaged our competence to deal with complex global problems. And the loss of these basic capacities jeopardizes the health of democracies and the hope of a decent world.
I know this is Hacker News and any non-STEM field is generally disrespected, but the liberal arts are quite important.
After all, STEM fields have a built in reality check for one's thoughts. If you design an airplane and it doesn't fly, you're forced to develop critical thinking skills so that doesn't happen again. Physical reality isn't going to bend to your thoughts.
One of the most important things STEM provides one is the most important tool to determine truth from garbage - the scientific method. This is applicable far beyond just the physical world.
Another thing I learned from STEM is the opposite of compartmentalization - I learned how fundamentally similar hydraulics, electronics, mechanics, etc., are. The rules, processes, math, methods of solving problems, are all transferrable between the disciplines.
I took an economics course once, and was a bit puzzled by two pages of equations in the textbook until I realized that they were doing the equivalent of a simple derivative. The textbook was written under the assumption that economics majors didn't know calculus. I thought it was rather sad.
[1] This would likely involve a lot of pinning down just what STEM curricula and just what alternative curricula you are considering, unless you're able to establish there is no overlap in the distributions - a premise which I doubt.