Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life
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Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life
#2I have History and CS degrees. The CS experience (at a top engineering school) felt fairly vocational. But being rigorously taught how to research, construct arguments, and communicate ideas in my Liberal Arts degree has been what made me successful past my first hire. I definitely recommend double majoring in a Liberal Arts degree.
Also perhaps there’s a lesson here about the CS curriculum being too vocational at most colleges? Or not needing a 4 year college if it aims to be vocational?
Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life
#3So many people decry taking any career path that isn't STEM-based, but surely one of the things the proliferation of technology and automation should one day enable is a world where someone could be a poet, or an artist, or an engineer, and not worry much about providing the material conditions of their life? I want to live in a world where anyone can be anything.
I still think it's pragmatic advice to avoid (or at least consider carefully) spending 150k on an english degree from a private school, but that's not due to any bias against english as an academic discipline - it's more about how much college costs and how debt constrains future choices.
Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life
#4So many people decry taking any career path that isn't STEM-based, but surely one of the things the proliferation of technology and automation should one day enable is a world where someone could be a poet, or an artist, or an engineer, and not worry much about providing the material conditions of their life? I want to live in a world where anyone can be anything. I still think it's pragmatic advice to avoid (or at l…
“The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”
-- John Adams (in a letter to Abigail)
Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life
#5I have friends from university with degrees in history, classics, theology, that make 3x what I do as a software engineer with a PhD. They work in things like corporate intelligence, risk analysis, planning and operations. Really high-powered serious stuff that makes what I do look rather trivial. They get hired as their companies want diversity of thought and the main job requirement is just being smart, switched-on, and understanding the bigger world (hence the history and theology). It's not about knowing technical details. They wouldn't want a grey man who studied 'business operations' - that's not their style.
Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life
#6I have History and CS degrees. The CS experience (at a top engineering school) felt fairly vocational. But being rigorously taught how to research, construct arguments, and communicate ideas in my Liberal Arts degree has been what made me successful past my first hire. I definitely recommend double majoring in a Liberal Arts degree. Also perhaps there’s a lesson here about the CS curriculum being too vocational at mo…
The problem with colleges teaching vocations, such as CS or engineering, is that they are too often remote from the realities of what is actually needed by professionals working in the field. To be honest, most vocations are better taught by apprenticeship, but we turned our back on that path a long time ago. I know a professional journalist who believes the same of his profession. College is not an especially good way of training someone for a profession, it's just that we have nearly eliminated the other ways of doing so, and thus by default it is pressed into service for a task it is not especially suited for.
Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life
#7I think it’s worth mentioning all degrees are worthless if you don’t know how to leverage them.
If you get a CS degree from a top school just because you see what salaries are, not because that’s what you’re interested in, your career will be mediocre at best.
School shouldn’t be looked at as mandatory and burdensome, it should be a tool that helps you achieve a level of understanding about something that you’re head over heels excited about.
Passion for something will organically lead to a successful career doing what you love.
Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life
#8I think I ended up with the best of both worlds. I received my BSCS from a traditional humanities college. It means I ended up with a lot of CS and math courses, but also things like philosophy and literature. I also sprinkled in courses on accounting, economics, and general business since I found them interesting.
Close to 20 years later, the foundation from those business courses and learning how to write/communicate has done more for my career than any of the CS and math.
Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life
#9I have History and CS degrees. The CS experience (at a top engineering school) felt fairly vocational. But being rigorously taught how to research, construct arguments, and communicate ideas in my Liberal Arts degree has been what made me successful past my first hire. I definitely recommend double majoring in a Liberal Arts degree. Also perhaps there’s a lesson here about the CS curriculum being too vocational at mo…
> Also perhaps there’s a lesson here about the CS curriculum being too vocational at most colleges? Or not needing a 4 year college if it aims to be vocational?
I heard a claim that sounded plausible to me: CS in the US originated from electrical engineering, and so is based on a degree that is based on the ability to directly influence things and make stuff happen - pretty vocational. In Germany CS is derived from maths and places a greater emphasis on the theoretical underpinnings, and yes, the ability to do scientific work and research.
I guess the optimum lies somewhere in the middle: It's mildly shocking to me to hear of US CS bachelors who never heard of complexity (Big-O and all that), while it's also a bit mad that it's possible to obtain a CS bachelor degree in Germany with the only experience in making computers do stuff being 100 lines of Pascal (although that would require a rather arcane set of elective courses, so it probably won't happen all too often)
Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life
#10I am not convinced it is wise to abandon an opportunity for a STEM degree in favor of humanities when it seems like it’d be far easier to DIY a humanities education than it would be to DIY a STEM education.