Mea culpa: there is a crisis in the humanities

The majority of people want to buy homes and start families at some point, and you can’t do that on $18k per year.

The ”why did I do this” crisis of the middle-aged academiac often goes hand-in-hand with this realization. It’s fun to be frugal in your 20s though.

Median any position is probably not terribly great at it. Agnostic of engineering imo. I do think you need structured practice to get good at anything but I don't necessarily believe that needs to come from a mandated class, i.e. structured self study, nor do I think mandating the class would actually get people to absorb the material. I'd imagine you probably attended some liberal arts classes that had a subset, if not majority, of people who were there simply because it was mandated. Those persons aren't necessarily interested and because of that won't put forth the effort so why waste the teachers time or the students through coercion? Does one really need to master any given skill to "succeed" in life? I think simply being good enough at any given thing you live a good life is a fine bar to set.

One of the things that drove me nuts at university is how much some STEM students mocked a particular set of "...for humanities" math classes without knowing their content. There were some great applications of mathematical thinking that people were shamed about taking.

> the majority of humanities students I've interacted with have been uninspired and unmotivated. I took a good deal of humanities classes and more often than not comments were uninformed and presentations poor quality.

> These students come in at 18 years old, straight out of high school. You put them in college and they want to do the least work possible.

> Most of the time a degree is just a necessity to go into the workforce for whatever field

I don't think your critique of undergraduate education is limited to the humanities. In my experience (I graduated two years ago from a top 10 school where I double majored in CS and history), students were there to have a good time and get a degree by the end of their four years. And, to be fair, I had a good time and didn't have to work nearly as hard as I do now.

However, I saw little difference between the character of history students and CS students overall. There were exceptional people in both departments (top ~5%), a larger percentage of people who generally worked hard and were competent (~60%), and a population that didn't take it seriously and sometimes wasn't above cheating (there was a non-zero population of CS majors who graduated with next to no programming skills).

My school's history department was relatively renowned, though the assignments didn't take nearly as long as CS/math labs. Still, many history profs were doing their best to fight grade inflation and had reasonable minimum standards.

At the end of my spring history seminar, I asked my professor (_the_ expert in a relatively large field) what he thought about going to grad school and strongly advised against it, saying it was a bad idea except for maybe one or two students every year: it is just too competitive to get a good job. So, a ton of history majors went into consulting and will probably go back to school for their MBAs; a smaller group is going (or planning on going) to law school if they can get into a top school; others are grinding in the entertainment industry trying to get their foot in the door. I don't think this is evidence of "uninspired" or "unmotivated" humanities students.

Nor do I think the fact that many history students go on to work in unrelated fields reflects poorly on the discipline: they learned about things they were interested in, improved their writing skills, critical thinking skills, etc.

The fact that their [liberal arts] education was a bad value -- in terms of both time and money -- is less endemic to their chosen major, but to the educational system as a whole.

I taught an engineering course for one semester at a Big Ten university with a prestigious engineering school, many years ago. And I also work with young engineers who have recently graduated from college.

I'm not sure that all of my students and / or colleagues cared very much about the actual subject matter that they were studying, e.g., the math and theory. There was a conventional wisdom shared amongst students, that those topics were just a hoop to jump through, that they would never need in the "real world."

When they do arrive in the "real world," they get so busy with CAD, trial-and-error design, troubleshooting, and bureaucracy, that they forget most of their math and theory within a few months. I'm not sure if this is voluntary or not: Had they been given a work environment with more time to think and to continue learning, would they have retained their interest?

The few who keep those skills are the ones who are devious enough to guard their time, effectively giving themselves time to think. And they volunteer for the jobs that involve theory, which nobody else wants.

Another factor that may affect humanities students is the fact that some majors are harder to get into, and to stay in, than others. Nobody changes majors from to chemical engineering because is too hard. ;-) And it's a one way street too. Once you interrupt the train of prerequisites in most STEM majors, it's very hard to get back on your horse.