Why the liberal arts are important: Learning to reflect

[pelov]

I see the problem here.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/derision

the use of ridicule or scorn to show contempt
b : a state of being laughed at or ridiculed : a state of being derided

Derision doesn't mean taxes, it's actually what I just did to you for your parents' failure in teaching you how to read.

I just did it again.

 

[destrekor]

Yeah, but then again, he is correct.

Honestly, I have no idea how the hell he got anything to do with taxes out of the OP.

Unless yllus cares to state otherwise, I think it's clearly safe to argue that the notion of taxes was clearly not even remotely in mind.



IMHO, as someone who holds a "Liberal Arts" degree, the point is clear: unless you care to get folded back into the education field, as an educator, the career prospects are bleak. Of course, it depends on a few points: do you have background/experience in any other field? do you know anybody of import in some business? or do you know how to market yourself? or do you have interest in pursuing further grad/post-grad education?

It's an important field of knowledge, but it's also highly saturated. There are actually a ton of jobs that you can strive for, depending on specific concentration of studies, but there are far more degrees floating out there than there are available jobs. With the rise in collegiate studies, far more have either specifically set out to study "Liberal Arts" or "coasted through school" getting those degrees for any number of reasons; chief among such reasons is the naive thought that holding a degree, any degree, will get you more jobs than not. This may have been true at one point in time, but with the previously mentioned rise in degrees granted, it doesn't help much anymore.

 

[Train]

The "source of derision" is exemplified by the first two responses to this thread.

 

[pelov]

The "source of derision" is exemplified by the first two responses to this thread.

* Taxes pay for all forms of education, not just liberal arts degrees.

* Liberal arts majors tend to have a harder time finding work.

Apparently, when combining these two the problem you, and other idiots like you, point to is taxes. No, it's fine that we pay for students who go for other majors. That's quite alright (and by the quote in question as well), but it has to stop at liberal arts. And btw, that's because of "taxes" not because they have a harder time finding work.

Your point still doesn't work because you're still applying something that had nothing to do with the article.

You are the epitome of the biggest threat to democracy. Oh yea, I went there. An uneducated, ignorant person with an agenda who's willing to skip over anything he/she reads in order to bark something out which they don't understand. These people have votes too. Why? The hell I know.

 

[yllus]

The govt backs those loans, and lets you deduct the interest as well. Not to mention tuition grants and federal funding direct to the colleges. Your tax dollars are very much in play.

I'm not in support of wiping out all funding/govt back loans for Lib arts, but the Fed should put a cap on the # of certain degrees they will support each year. The country only needs so many unemployed poetry majors. If software engineering ever becomes such a worthless degree, I would support a cap on funding for it as well.

I really didn't have taxes or public assistance as it relates to university admission in mind when I wrote any of this up, but hey, why not keep this going.

While I don't necessarily disagree with the overall sentiment, there is a major problem with your idea of capping the amount of assistance per major. The government would need to index the demand of various majors in order to divide up the total amount of assistance it will provide.

Using unemployment numbers per major is the obvious answer, but that has really strong negative implications and incentives: The government will end up always funding more of what was groundbreaking last year, instead of what will be useful this year (or further into the future). You'll also see significant manipulation of numbers coming out of the various universities, as the administrations will have an incentive to pretend their unemployment numbers are as low as the other departments. Not worth any prospective gains in my book.

This part is also a bit loaded. Do I think highly of my major because I want to affirm myself? Or did I pick my major because I thought highly of it? You can't tell me what my intentions were. Seems to be setting up a false premise to support a weak argument.

Hell, that's just my random preamble for the argument. I thought I'd make it a bit more interesting than "Here's an article, what do you think?" And I think it rings true for a lot of people - I get the smug feeling when I see those articles, and I think my own motivation is that it affirms my life choices.

It's much like how people who buy an Apple, Android or BlackBerry phone tend to rally behind those manufacturers: They do so because a tiny part of their ego is now tied up in their buying decision. They want their phone to be better because it reflects poorly on their decision making skills or intelligence. It's very minor, but it does have an effect.

 

[Train]

* Taxes pay for all forms of education, not just liberal arts degrees.

This is what's called a red herring. Or a "fallacy of distraction"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring

The fact that taxes pay for all types of education is irrelevant. You can still rightly ask that taxes spent on education without an ROI should be limited.

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

Both of those are general, not liberal-arts specific, don't comprise a large part of the average student's aid package (come on, the MAX Pell grant is less than $6k/year, and that's only if your family is destitute), and/or are given to people who have earned them, not handed out to all comers.

I'm not saying that taxes aren't somewhat involved in liberal arts education, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to everything else that taxes pay for, and you'd think that anyone who is willing to say that liberal arts are "very important" wouldn't mind a tiny, TINY percentage of their taxes going to support them. Did I mention "tiny"?

Hey, hey, slow down man! I was just pointing out that tax dollars do go fund college education. Wasn't arguing that it is right/wrong/too much/too little, just pointing out that a component of federal taxes goes to college education.

 

[yllus]

IMHO, as someone who holds a "Liberal Arts" degree, the point is clear: unless you care to get folded back into the education field, as an educator, the career prospects are bleak. Of course, it depends on a few points: do you have background/experience in any other field? do you know anybody of import in some business? or do you know how to market yourself? or do you have interest in pursuing further grad/post-grad education?

It's an important field of knowledge, but it's also highly saturated. There are actually a ton of jobs that you can strive for, depending on specific concentration of studies, but there are far more degrees floating out there than there are available jobs. With the rise in collegiate studies, far more have either specifically set out to study "Liberal Arts" or "coasted through school" getting those degrees for any number of reasons; chief among such reasons is the naive thought that holding a degree, any degree, will get you more jobs than not. This may have been true at one point in time, but with the previously mentioned rise in degrees granted, it doesn't help much anymore.

Maybe part of the problem here is liberal arts majors - which you'd actually expect to be incredibly demanding intellectually - are simply not hard enough today? The second year of my program was renowned for causing about 50% of the enrolled students to drop out (too difficult). Maybe a stiffer filter is one of the things that is required.

 

[Train]

I really didn't have taxes or public assistance as it relates to university admission in mind when I wrote any of this up, but hey, why not keep this going.

While I don't necessarily disagree with the overall sentiment, there is a major problem with your idea of capping the amount of assistance per major. The government would need to index the demand of various majors in order to divide up the total amount of assistance it will provide.

Using unemployment numbers per major is the obvious answer, but that has really strong negative implications and incentives: The government will end up always funding more of what was groundbreaking last year, instead of what will be useful this year (or further into the future). You'll also see significant manipulation of numbers coming out of the various universities, as the administrations will have an incentive to pretend their unemployment numbers are as low as the other departments. Not worth any prospective gains in my book.

Pretty much agree with all of this. My comment was just a thought, and I would probably be against it overall since it would add too much to govt bureaucracy. And too much gaming the system, as you point out. I'd rather see a system wide reduction in govt backing of loans to stop the long run of tuition inflation.

Hell, that's just my random preamble for the argument. I thought I'd make it a bit more interesting than "Here's an article, what do you think?" And I think it rings true for a lot of people - I get the smug feeling when I see those articles, and I think my own motivation is that it affirms my life choices.

It's much like how people who buy an Apple, Android or BlackBerry phone tend to rally behind those manufacturers: They do so because a tiny part of their ego is now tied up in their buying decision. They want their phone to be better because it reflects poorly on their decision making skills or intelligence. It's very minor, but it does have an effect.

I'd hate to think people are fanboys of a major in the same way they are fanboys of Apple/Google/etc, but I guess it could be true. I've probably heard people say something like "I wish I had studied something different" much more than "I should have gotten an iPhone/android/etc" but I guess a bad phone decision is something that only sticks around for ~2 years.

Though I think I feel the same way around other majors I considered but didn't take (Aeronautics was one). So in that sense I don't think the affirmation point applies. (at least not for me)

 

[destrekor]

The "source of derision" is exemplified by the first two responses to this thread.

No, not it is not.

You may find some contempt laced in those posts, but not derision. Contempt as in a sort of scorn, sure, but not ridicule or mockery.

Also: more Liberal Arts degrees are likely funded by parents or student loans, more than anything else.
And most federal funding comes in the form of low interest loans. Which, gasp, means the government makes money on these poor saps - regardless of their success in life. Unless of course they claim bankruptcy (I think...) but, such things are an entirely different beast than the issue of federal loans and grants.


The OP's source of derision stems from a different issue, one I think I basically covered in my previous post:
that of the number of students who elect to pursue such degrees, mainly in the belief any degree will help them so they might as well go for an easier degree.
That, or they truly enjoy learning and want to learn more about what they find most interesting, career prospects be damned.

It's always been viewed as the easier area of studies to pursue, but it wasn't always difficult to land a worthwhile job after graduation. It being an easier degree to achieve, and the rise in manufactured importance of the Bachelor's Degree if one wishes to amount to anything, has resulted in a exponential increase in the number of students pursuing the Liberal Arts field. That is to say, after high school, many students feel pressured to continue on to college asap because that has been beat into them all throughout their early years. They either don't know what they want to do in life and pursue an easier/more interesting degree, or they simply want that degree for whatever reasons. Perhaps they have lofty and naive dreams of what they can do with it, or perhaps they just don't care. Mayhap they even have the goal/dream of pursuing more education in the future, in a more specific and career-catered concentration.

 

[yllus]

Pretty much agree with all of this. My comment was just a thought, and I would probably be against it overall since it would add too much to govt bureaucracy. And too much gaming the system, as you point out. I'd rather see a system wide reduction in govt backing of loans to stop the long run of tuition inflation.

To be honest, if you consider the incredibly huge amounts of wealth being transferred from the young to the old in your country (Social Security, Medicare), I'd be liable to argue that higher education should be 100% free to anyone who can provide the test scores to warrant it. It's not in my opinion a problem in need of fixing.

I'd hate to think people are fanboys of a major in the same way they are fanboys of Apple/Google/etc, but I guess it could be true. I've probably heard people say something like "I wish I had studied something different" much more than "I should have gotten an iPhone/android/etc"

Though I think I feel the same way around other majors I considered but didn't take (Aeronautics was one). So in that sense I don't think the affirmation point applies. (at least not for me)

I think it's the same basic reflex. If a decision you made gets affirmed, you get a little hit of dopamine. If it goes the other way, we tend to minimize or ignore it. We are ultimately intelligent creatures and can overcome this, but history is littered with examples of people hanging on to a belief for too long in the face of clear evidence that they're wrong.

 

[tokie]

If you need to learn how to reflect, then it really isn't self-reflecting is it.

It's more like reflecting in a way someone else taught you and doesn't clarify anything about yourself.

 

[Train]

No, not it is not.

You may find some contempt laced in those posts, but not derision. Contempt as in a sort of scorn, sure, but not ridicule or mockery.

Well that's just splitting hairs.

Also: more Liberal Arts degrees are likely funded by parents or student loans, more than anything else.

Are there numbers to back this up? Are parent funded educations disproportionately higher in lib arts degrees?

And most federal funding comes in the form of low interest loans. Which, gasp, means the government makes money on these poor saps - regardless of their success in life. Unless of course they claim bankruptcy (I think...) but, such things are an entirely different beast than the issue of federal loans and grants.

This is wrong. The govt does not issue the loan, they only back the loan. Sallie mae's investors are the ones earning interest. If the loan defaults, the govt pays in full to sallie mae. The govt now owns the debt. They then sell this debt (at a loss) to a company acting as a collection agency... in this case sallie mae, go figure. Sallie mae then can do things like garnish your wages to collect again. They are essentially making double the money on defaulted loans. It's a big effing scam all around. The top guys at Sallie Mae are stupid rich, and have quite a few congressmen paid off.

 

[yllus]

If you need to learn how to reflect, then it really isn't self-reflecting is it.

It's more like reflecting in a way someone else taught you and doesn't clarify anything about yourself.

That's a very odd statement. It's not like the method in which you learn to self reflect is branded by Valvoline and you can only do so in a specific way.

It's really as simple as the situation the article mentions: Someone angers you, and instead of snapping back at them and possibly losing your job or your freedom (jail), you have practice in taking a moment to realize why they're such a bitch and that you don't need to be angry because it's their head that's messed up, not yours.

 

[destrekor]

Maybe part of the problem here is liberal arts majors - which you'd actually expect to be incredibly demanding intellectually - are simply not hard enough today? The second year of my program was renowned for causing about 50% of the enrolled students to drop out (too difficult). Maybe a stiffer filter is one of the things that is required.

Some are difficult, some are cake.

And there's also the idea that some of the people drawn to those degrees already have the intellectual mindset/thought patterns to make it SEEM easy.

Many people would not be cut out for quite a few of the Liberal Arts degrees. I have a feeling that it is sort of self-limiting: if you don't think a certain way, you probably aren't interested in certain areas of study that require that style of intellectual thought; and the reverse would hold truth to some degree as well, which is to say, if you aren't interested in certain areas of study, you may not even have the necessary intellectual style to cut it in that field.

So it may not be the case that the majority of Liberal Arts degrees are ridiculously easy. On the contrary, it may just be that the majority of those seeking said degrees are simply *wired* in a way that draws them to that school of thought. It's an entirely different world studying engineering or medicine.
And many students, who are more naturally inclined to think in the "Liberal Arts way", may find certain engineering disciplines enticing and highly interesting... but in reality, they simply aren't cut out for the task. Maybe they are, and just can't find it in them to try hard enough... maybe they don't care to invest that amount of effort... maybe, no matter how hard they try, they'll just never "get it."

I'd wager it IS true that -- depending on area of study and the specific school -- some Liberal Arts degrees are easy to the point that anyone with half a brain and a willingness to at least do some course work, will earn said degree and, hell, maybe even earn near a 4.0 in the process.

 

[Crusty]

I have a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science.... so take that...

 

[endlessmike]

I think a large part of the issue is that for most people, a high school diploma isn't enough to get by on anymore. Chances are that you won't graduate and have a job lined up at the Ford plant or the steel mill that will provide a decent lifestyle, and for whatever reason a lot of kids that in the old days wouldn't have been considered "college material" aren't encouraged to consider skilled trades or other valid routes of success.

A college degree (in almost anything) was considered the magic ticket to a decent job, and for a time in the 90's that might have been the case. A lot of people who just felt like they HAD to go to college (and maybe shouldn't have been there) likely settled on liberal arts degrees for a number of reasons. "Don't like math," "Not as hard," "Just want to get out and get a job," whatever. Unfortunately, the negative connotations of these students seem to have become synonymous with these degrees entirely, undermining the students with legitimate interests and reasons to enter into that academic pursuit.

 

[destrekor]

Well that's just splitting hairs.

Are there numbers to back this up? Are parent funded educations disproportionately higher in lib arts degrees?


This is wrong. The govt does not issue the loan, they only back the loan. Sallie mae's investors are the ones earning interest. If the loan defaults, the govt pays in full to sallie mae. The govt now owns the debt. They then sell this debt (at a loss) to a company acting as a collection agency... in this case sallie mae, go figure. Sallie mae then can do things like garnish your wages to collect again. They are essentially making double the money on defaulted loans. It's a big effing scam all around. The top guys at Sallie Mae are stupid rich, and have quite a few congressmen paid off.

Splitting hairs, with someone pulling words and thoughts out of a post, when they never were there in the first place.

Numbers? Nah, I don't deal in numbers. It's a gut feeling.
In truth, I strongly suspect that is truly the case, or else I wouldn't have stated such. As for worthy research to back this up, I either saw it forever ago and don't care to look it up, or it's based on my intuition, which feeds off my personal experiences and what I have either directly or indirectly witnessed in my time in school.

As for the Sallie Mae thing - yeah, I thought something was odd about what I wrote but I didn't really analyze what I had typed. I had thoroughly studied, in bits and pieces over time, various documentation regarding Stafford loans (both subsidized and unsubsidized)... like 6 or so years ago when going through all of those various hoops myself.

 

[Imp]

Maybe part of the problem here is liberal arts majors - which you'd actually expect to be incredibly demanding intellectually - are simply not hard enough today? The second year of my program was renowned for causing about 50% of the enrolled students to drop out (too difficult). Maybe a stiffer filter is one of the things that is required.

I did one of the easiest, if not the easiest, branch of engineering: civil. And we still lost about 1/3 of the class going into second year. We lost fewer from second to third and through third. The material wasn't really that hard, it was just adjusting to the self-discipline and being able to plough through mounds of stupid classes and assignments.

When I went back to the same school for graduate school 2 years after graduating, it looked like they were trying to weed out more people in the later years. My regular course load was 5 classes per semester except through second year when it was 6. When I went back, undergrads were bitching about it being 6 in second, and 6 or 7 in third.

Meanwhile, I knew arts majors cramming all their classes into 1 or 2 intensive days, then working two part-time jobs the rest of the week.

Honestly, all I remember out of undergrad is cramming and making the grade. It wasn't until I got to graduate school when I took 2 classes per semester part-time and worked full-time that I had time to actually learn the material in depth.

I'm for keeping undergraduate as is and just using graduate school to really separate people out. Undergrad is too filled with people who are there just to be there and have a degree.

 

[yllus]

I did one of the easiest, if not the easiest, branch of engineering: civil. And we still lost about 1/3 of the class going into second year. We lost fewer from second to third and through third. The material wasn't really that hard, it was just adjusting to the self-discipline and being able to plough through mounds of stupid classes and assignments.

When I went back to the same school for graduate school 2 years after graduating, it looked like they were trying to weed out more people in the later years. My regular course load was 5 classes per semester except through second year when it was 6. When I went back, undergrads were bitching about it being 6 in second, and 6 or 7 in third.

Meanwhile, I knew arts majors cramming all their classes into 1 or 2 intensive days, then working two part-time jobs the rest of the week.

Honestly, all I remember out of undergrad is cramming and making the grade. It wasn't until I got to graduate school when I took 2 classes per semester part-time and worked full-time that I had time to actually learn the material in depth.

I'm for keeping undergraduate as is and just using graduate school to really separate people out. Undergrad is too filled with people who are there just to be there and have a degree.

I personally believe that the only thing holding an undergraduate degree proves is that you have the capability of sticking to a task over the long term (4 years) to completion. That's actually a very valuable and still relatively scarce trait in a worker.

 

[SphinxnihpS]

I have never seen this many people miss the point of a written work that doesn't have anything to do with Shakespeare.

All this article says is that we train people to fill specific roles, and more often than not this type of training is lacking in History, Art, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Sociology, Anthropology, Speech, Debate, etc. leaving these individuals without the capability for self-reflection, which leads to apathy and a viscous cycle of poverty, which is antithetical to the reasons we train them so, which are of course economic.

In other words, by skipping out on the humanities side of education in order to more efficiently/cost effectively train people, we are breeding generations of fuckwits who don't care, which makes things worse for everyone.

To me the point of the article is fucking self-evident, but then again I had a well-rounded education and am still learning the value of it every day because it gave me the ability to be reflective and discriminatory.

Also, a note: we are not talking about Math/Science vs. English Lit/Philosophy. We are talking about what probably 100% of you people learned in high school vs. what people learn at that level in the ghetto, which is geared to getting a job at the factory or whatever.

Now I am going to go steal a bike.

 

[SphinxnihpS]

I personally believe that the only thing holding an undergraduate degree proves is that you have the capability of sticking to a task over the long term (4 years) to completion. That's actually a very valuable and still relatively scarce trait in a worker.

That might be all it proves, but is that all you really got?

 

[pelov]

I personally believe that the only thing holding an undergraduate degree proves is that you have the capability of sticking to a task over the long term (4 years) to completion. That's actually a very valuable and still relatively scarce trait in a worker.

I hope I'm not one of the few that values education for the sake of learning and being well educated rather than to just get a job.

In a way, I'd argue that this sort of perception of education, one of college > job, is the biggest threat to the liberal arts degrees -- it also makes people far more annoying, but that's a topic for another day.

I picked up and read The Federalist papers a month ago. Why? Because I remember not reading them at all in a college poli sci course. I found the lectures interesting but I really didn't give a shit about the class other than the grade I'd get at the end. I was an idiot and I regret doing that. Had I actually listened to the professor over the course of that semester I would have learned things far more valuable than what I was being taught in the classes for my major.

The end result of an education shouldn't be a job or a diploma. People who approached learning this way were never really educated in the first place

 

[SphinxnihpS]

I did one of the easiest, if not the easiest, branch of engineering: civil. And we still lost about 1/3 of the class going into second year. We lost fewer from second to third and through third. The material wasn't really that hard, it was just adjusting to the self-discipline and being able to plough through mounds of stupid classes and assignments.

When I went back to the same school for graduate school 2 years after graduating, it looked like they were trying to weed out more people in the later years. My regular course load was 5 classes per semester except through second year when it was 6. When I went back, undergrads were bitching about it being 6 in second, and 6 or 7 in third.

Meanwhile, I knew arts majors cramming all their classes into 1 or 2 intensive days, then working two part-time jobs the rest of the week.

Honestly, all I remember out of undergrad is cramming and making the grade. It wasn't until I got to graduate school when I took 2 classes per semester part-time and worked full-time that I had time to actually learn the material in depth.

I'm for keeping undergraduate as is and just using graduate school to really separate people out. Undergrad is too filled with people who are there just to be there and have a degree.

I never finished a Creative Writing class with more than 20% of the first day students. That is an 80% drop out rate per semester.

I take you never saw The Breakfast Club?

 

[mmntech]

I have a bachelor of arts with a double major in history and political science. I'm not too sure if I've really got anything out of it. It did teach me how to write. Critical thinking? A bit I suppose but universities don't encourage that anymore. Too many overtly left wing professors that try to politicize everything. I have days where I regret doing it. I could have started my career much earlier than I did.