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Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life

bbc.com

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Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life

#61

Post by BeetleB »

paublyrne wrote: post #26
jeffdavis wrote: post #11

The main problem with the humanities is that they have been consumed by the political far left. That's sad, because English, history, and philosphy could be great programs. I remember I was struggling to get decent grades on my history papers. I was running out of patience and decided I just wanted to pass. So I just wrote what I thought the professor wanted to hear (far left BS) and started getting B's and even an A…

That's very strange to hear. I'm not sure where you studied but when I studied history at university papers were assessed in terms of argument construction, and how you assessed other historians work, and all you said had to be referenced in some way. Whether the lecturer agreed with your conclusion or not was not the basis of your mark.

While I didn't perceive a leftist bias, I will mirror what the person said: You just need to figure out what they want you to say.

In the first history class I took, the professor was harsh on perspectives that he didn't agree with. I realized it about halfway into the course, and just started trying to figure out what he wanted me to say. Grades improved.

In the second history class, the professor didn't have a particular perspective, but would highly reward positions that required well constructed arguments. If you wrote an essay that had "easy" arguments, you would do poorly. So I focused on "which position would require the most convoluted argument (within the limits of reason)" and would go with it.

Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life

#62

Post by throwaway284721 »

An honest article would say that a humanity degree signals that you're conformist and happy to tolerate boredem just as well as a STEM degree, and a STEM degree doesn't teach anything relevant either. This article says that with a humanity degree you can be just as smug as people with STEM degrees are.

Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life

#63

Post by cowsandmilk »

jaabe wrote: post #21

I’ve seen philosophy, English and history majors work in tech, I’ve never seen the reversal. Personally I’m a little worried about ageism, something that doesn’t even enter the mind space of any of my friends with degrees in the humanities. So maybe there is something to it. I mean, they had much harder times finding jobs than me, and aren’t rigoursly headhunted, but every one of them found jobs.

> I’ve seen philosophy, English and history majors work in tech, I’ve never seen the reversal.

I'm not sure how you define the reverse, but Amazon's head of HR majored in electrical engineering. I would say that's a traditionally liberal arts job with someone who majored in tech.

Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life

#64

Post by overgard »

lordnacho wrote: post #42

IMHO most people should take a STEM degree if they're going to uni. Not because of the labour market, which is a fickle thing. The main reason is that you will be able to pick up a humanities/social science course with the skills you already have at the end of high school. What do people do in those degrees? Read text, think critically, express ideas. And you've not only practised that a fair bit in school, but also…

I also think that STEM degrees teach you to break down problems mechanically and "think like a machine". It also can teach you to be able to project an idea to a logical conclusion even if that end point is uncomfortable or surprising. That might not sound like a skill to a lot of people, but I've noticed people without STEM educations or who aren't self-taught in some sort of similar way aren't always great at doing that. I noticed that the people that dropped out in the first year of CS, for instance, really struggled with seeing the machine as having intentions, or at least anthropomorphizing it more than was useful.

That being said, I also notice that a lot of my STEM colleagues look down on creatives and humanities, which is really unfortunate. It's not about one being better than the other, they both have very useful things to teach.

Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life

#65

Post by 0x445442 »

jeffdavis wrote: post #11

The main problem with the humanities is that they have been consumed by the political far left. That's sad, because English, history, and philosphy could be great programs. I remember I was struggling to get decent grades on my history papers. I was running out of patience and decided I just wanted to pass. So I just wrote what I thought the professor wanted to hear (far left BS) and started getting B's and even an A…

I had a history course like that as well. For papers, I would literally grab a beer and ramble on in the most sarcastic fashion I could muster. I received an A, it was a complete sham.

Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life

#66

Post by overgard »

I think the real problem is that corporations and HR departments have outsourced filtering candidates to universities. Universities were never designed for job training, and obviously we're seeing the consequences of that. I got a 4 year CS degree from a good university, and it was good, but I have to admit I came out of it with a lot of knowledge that I'm really unlikely to use in the real world (how to write a hash map, for instance), while being completely clueless on things that are extremely useful for actual real world work (how to use distributed version control, or how to write shell scripts).

I also have to say, I've been on the end where we interview people and look through stacks of resumes, and I can't say I've ever actually ever cared about the "education" part unless it's really unusual (IE, very advanced degree, or a degree in a field that isn't CS but might be highly relevant to what my company is doing)

I think it's weird that vocational training is so looked down upon. Not everyone is really built to be a knowledge worker or a professor -- we still need plumbers!

Also whatever happened to apprenticeships? It seems like all we have anymore are internships, but, at least from what I've seen interns are rarely given that much mentoring; it tends to be a lot more about toy-projects or "build a thing that would be nice to have but that we're not going to dedicate a full salaried engineers time to".

Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life

#67

Post by quietbritishjim »

chrisseaton wrote: post #35
throwawaymath wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason the US PhD takes five to seven years is because most students enter it without a Master's degree. In the UK it only takes two or three years because they generally need to complete a relevant Master's degree first.

> they generally need to complete a relevant Master's degree first No that's not the case at all - most people do a three-years bachelors and then a three-year PhD. That's the expected route for a PhD in the UK. Doing a masters in between would look like you were starting to drag it out a bit. And the first year of your PhD is worth a masters if you chose to drop out at that point.

For mathematics, all the top-tier UK universities expect you to do a one-year taught masters (i.e. not a research masters) before starting a PhD. This certainly includes Cambridge, Oxford, Warwick, Imperial, UCL and KCL. Cambridge calls its masters a "Part III" or "Certificate of Advance Studies" but it's definitely just a regular masters, albeit a really hard one. Mathematics PhDs in most of these institutions have a sort of informal target length of three years but usually take four years in practice. Funding is usually three years but often four, and the fees are often a tiny fraction of the usual amount in the final year to reflect that there is often a difference.

I have much less knowledge of other subjects, but from the little I've heard the same seems to be true of chemistry and computer science.

In short: I agree with the parent comment, at least for mathematics (and probably for all STEM subjects).

Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life

#68

Post by fallingknife »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #33
fallingknife wrote: post #14

In my experience the liberal arts classes I was required to take were all big 100+ person lecture -> memorize -> test classes. I tend to think a lot of the praise heaped on liberal arts is the fallacy that since these skills are not learned in STEM classes, they must be learned in liberal arts classes. It also seems like those classes are taught at a much lower level. Plenty of people fail out of STEM and go on to be…

> In my experience the liberal arts classes I was required to take were all big 100+ person lecture -> memorize -> test classes The classes you were "required to take" likely were intro classes with large enrollments. What you describe is how many intro science classes are taught at many universities as well. And even many second year science classes. It is generally only in the 300-400 level classes that are within…

Right. My point is that the liberal arts classes are not different and special.

Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life

#69

Post by Apocryphon »

lordnacho wrote: post #42

IMHO most people should take a STEM degree if they're going to uni. Not because of the labour market, which is a fickle thing. The main reason is that you will be able to pick up a humanities/social science course with the skills you already have at the end of high school. What do people do in those degrees? Read text, think critically, express ideas. And you've not only practised that a fair bit in school, but also…

The proliferation of boot camp grads and autodidacts getting hired in industry would seem to suggest that CS does not apply the same way as other STEM degrees- compared to say mechanical or chemical engineering, one need not be immersed in such math concepts since college to get through industry.

Re: Why 'worthless' humanities degrees may set you up for life

#70

Post by leetcrew »

lordnacho wrote: post #42

IMHO most people should take a STEM degree if they're going to uni. Not because of the labour market, which is a fickle thing. The main reason is that you will be able to pick up a humanities/social science course with the skills you already have at the end of high school. What do people do in those degrees? Read text, think critically, express ideas. And you've not only practised that a fair bit in school, but also…

I don't think I would argue that reading itself is as hard as learning and using math concepts, but it is a skill that can be lost. after a few years of mainly reading documentation and forum posts, I feel my skill at reading longer-form content has atrophied.

> I've met plenty of STEM people who knew a thing or two about history, economics, and the arts. It's relatively rare the other way round, though you do get the occasional renaissance man from that side.

most interested people can read pop-history, pop-econ, etc. type books and sound pretty knowledgeable in casual discussions, but all they are really learning is how to parrot a couple popular authors' opinions. I think the real observation here is that humanities are much easier to "bullshit" about than something like math, where it actually has to make sense within a rigorous framework.

I would argue that the type of deep dives into original documents that you do in a humanities degree is actually quite difficult. to do this type of learning well is no easier than learning STEM topics, imo.

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