2007-12-humanities-student-major_20_programming.txt
Nor can you bullshit being able to write clearly and with style (this is harder than most think, but is not really being taught in English departments *anymore*). Nor can you bullshit having an argument or having knowledge of literary figures, history, etc.... And you certainly can't bullshit having the judgement about human affairs that comes from being a reflective human being.

I agree that English is easier **right now** than hard science degrees, but this has more to do with a degradation in the quality of the people teaching it. I identify two major problems:

1. The research of most people in the Humanities for the last 20 years has the assumption that there are no "real" standards and that any standards of quality are just an attempt to control/oppress. In this situation, yes, bullshit can get you through.

2. This nonsense thinking has prevented good thinkers from taking up careers in the field. Those that remain in the field are either incompetent or people who enjoy playing power games with their students and colleagues.

These problems are being remedied with help from the cognitive sciences. More and more, literary research that is based in the cognitive activity of the brain is reintroducing standards into the field. This is happening not by making English more scientific, but by helping people be able to say things like: "We find this writing  beautiful/we undersand this more easily because of this or that brain activity/capacity". In other words, the pomo world is more and more being forced to face up to the fact that we are mostly defined by our strengths and limitations rather than by the limits imposed on us by others. 

As I said, this sort of work is only beginning to have traction, but, in a sense, the war is already won, because the literary cognitivists are very quickly gaining the political support and financing from upper levels of the universities to set research agendas within university departments.

An example of this sort of research is found in [Mark Turner's](http://markturner.org/) work.

There is nothing that makes the hard sciences inherently "harder" than the humanities. In fact, one could say that the existence of clear cut right nad wrong answers over a larger range of scientific work makes it easier than work in the Humanities (understood that the Humanities are being approached honestly rather than in the way I outlined above).

2009-10-humanities-student-major_150_programming.txt
I sympathize with your concerns, but I'm wondering what kind of world you live in where science is marginalized and the humanities are valuable.

Outside of universities, and only liberal arts ones at that, social science and humanities degrees are universally viewed as bullshit, or lazy degrees. I know that it's difficult to find a job everywhere these days, but do you know what it's like to look for work with a degree in the humanities, even from a highly-ranked college? If engineers and scientists feel marginalized, imagine what it's like for something you feel is important to have no perceived value in the real world. 

Also, do you watch movies? How often does a absent-minded literature professor save the world, or come up with a cure to a deadly disease, or avert a meteor from the earth? The best we get is the occasional eccentric archaeologist in crappy TV like Stargate.

As for history TV shows...trust me on this, no history majors are thrilled about seeing another special on Hitler, nor are we thrilled that Ice Road Truckers is somehow history.

And finally, even if you're ignored, even if you are marginalized, the nature of your pursuits allows you to make real advances in the world. Engineers, scientists and programmers have the benefit of tangible applications to their studies - if no one cares about literature, English majors have nothing to do.

I don't want to marginalize your problems (and I would never ask why calculus is useful) but people don't just take technology for granted, they take EVERYTHING for granted. 

2010-02-humanities-student-major_207_pics.txt
Here's how I think about it:

There's no denying that every major is hard in its own way. And no matter what major you choose there's going to be different kind of people like:

* The True Geniuses: They can breeze through the major and come out with a 4.0
* The Genius Slackers: They can breeze through the major and come out with a 3.0
* The Genius Hard Workers: They work hard and can come out with a 4.0
* The Averages: They work pretty hard and come out with a 2.0-3.0
* The Slackers: They don't do any work but still pull a 2.0-3.0
* The Strugglers: They work their ass off and come out with a 2.0-3.0

In my personal experience at a UC (all anecdotal of course) The reason that engineers and 'hard science' majors tend to get cocky and think that their majors are harder is that they look around their own majors and see ~75% 'averages', 'slackers' and 'strugglers' , maybe ~15% 'Genius Slackers and Hard-workers' and ~10% 'True Geniuses'

Then they look at a humanities major and see still maybe ~10% 'True Geniuses', but then about ~75% ' slackers, Genius Slackers, and averages' and only about ~15% 'genius hard workers' and 'strugglers'.

As a whole, the culture of the humanities, and business majors tend to be much more laid back, and the culture of the engineering majors and the hard sciences tend to be more nerdy/work oriented. (especially Pre-med Bio. There's a whole section of my Campus where you do not want to walk if you are having a good day. The death stares of the Pre-med students will **EAT YOUR SOUL**)

my contribution to the sea of anecdotal and irrelevant examples: My roommate is a double major in Anthro/PoliSci and I'm CS. He gets assigned probably double the homework I do. He just only does about 1/3rd of it.

**tl;dr**: It's not the major's workload that create the stigma that engineering is harder, it's the culture created by the people who are in the major.

2010-02-humanities-student-major_219_pics.txt
Thank you for your detailed and passionate response.  I would never minimize the importance of philosophy & humanities as subjects of study.  I recognize the important role philosophy has played in the history of science, and that "scientist" and "philosopher" were synonymous for most of human history.  

My criticism is directed at my impression of how these subjects are taught in university. I've taken political science, sociology, psychology, and literature courses.  I found value in the readings, but often thought the assignments and grading were highly subjective.  I did fine in these courses and am not bitter about the grading, but I just hold them in stark contrast to the no-nonsense style in my engineering courses.  

I don't find that I need to "defend" what I studied in university.  In fact, I just quit my engineering job and am entering a totally new field in a foreign country.  However, I am very grateful that I studied it and may return to it some day.  

My rant was a little overboard.  What I should have said was this: engineers are accustomed to having their skills quantified in a way that I don't think other majors are.  You can't blame the teacher's opinions or the grading system (usually).  There are facts and you either got them right or you didn't.  The toothpick bridge can hold a 1kg weight or it can't.  These are humbling experiences, and engineers/scientists probably feel they are more battle-hardened than other majors.  

2010-02-humanities-student-major_63_business.txt
I don't think college should be about getting a job. Downvote me if you will but I'm an English major because I am passionate about it and think the humanities are just as important as the sciences - I think all subjects are important, but I prefer English to math, so therefore I will not go into a mathematical field. I definitely believe that if you have enough drive, you will succeed in any field. If a person chooses to be an humanities student, then he or she needs to make a choice to pursue more schooling (getting a PhD, basically). It's not that there aren't jobs available, it's just that they are harder to get. 

Also, while many of my friends suffered on the GRE because of a lack in math skills, I also had many of my more science/math minded friends suffer greatly on the writing portion, so I don't necessarily think that's a fair assessment. People have strengths in different things and should pursue fields that make them happy. 

The humanities are not easier than the sciences; they require different approaches to learning and not everyone will fit in to one or the other.

Edit: I've made my argument. I wasn't necessarily looking for people to agree with me but I am shocked at the outrage and bitterness toward the humanities subject. Never did I once say that math/science are not important; I feel passionately about both. However, the truth is, people in all fields are struggling right now, so I think it's best if we all work together and contribute our strengths and knowledge to our society instead of trying to defeat each other. Also, I think it's a low blow to bash on Geology - even people within the sciences are degrading one another now? Not everyone can or should be a mathematician. All I ask is that people stop unfairly evaluating fields that they don't know about (including English - there is so much more to that subject than most realize, we do not just sit around all day discussing Poe). Anyway, I'm leaving this thread now because I keep hitting brick walls of opposition so cheers for those who can look past their own judgments. I will continue to fight for the important of the humanities and I wish you all the best in whatever field you are in. 

2010-08-humanities-student-major_286_math.txt
Math is not the only course that has that reputation. I majored in electrical engineering and I got that a lot too. My various friends who majored in Math, Physics, EE, ME, aerospace also get those looks. But the thing is, we usually get them from people who study art, international relations, languages...etc. So I wouldn't worry too much about it.

Occasionally, I snap at idiots in bars who ask me if I am a genius because I study EE. I ask them if they are stupid because they study "some humanities or art subject or whatever".

*P.S. Ok, so some people thought that I was getting offended because people thought I was more intelligent than the average. Here is what I am getting at. I am pretty sure that, no matter how much I study literature I am pretty sure that I won't be the next John Milton or Kurt Vonnegut or Homer and no matter how much I study music I won't be the next Kurt Cobain or Freddie Mercury but if I work enough and maybe get lucky, I feel that I might just be able to contribute enough in the field of engineering so that I'll have my name mentioned with the other great people who contributed to the field. I think every person has an affinity toward a certain field that is determined by their lifestyle, and just because someone is an electrical engineer doesn't make them any more intelligent than anyone else.

2010-10-humanities-student-major_347_philosophy.txt
 It comes from science majors who feel their work is ten times more important than humanities and arts majors.  
  
That's because in a pragmatic sense, it is.  Good luck trying to get *anyone* in the public to put medical science or almost any engineering discipline below any subject in the humanities.  That is not to say the humanities are less important in terms of academic pursuits, or that they provide less benefit to humanity as a whole, just that the benefits are largely less tangible than that of science.  Less tangible means less exposure and subsequent interest from the public, which serves to cultivate the academic climate illustrated by the video - which, I would think, has been developing for several years.
  
 Condescending bullshit.  
  
I find it funny that you'd accuse science of condescension towards humanities; the most arrogant people I know are almost exclusively in the humanities.  Journalists appear to be the worst, closely followed by law, if anecdotal remarks are worth anything (they're not, I know)  
  
**EDIT** I should be clear: I am talking about my personal experience regarding arrogant humanities staff/students; I'm fully aware that this changes from country to country and, indeed, university to university.  At the end of the day, I don't see why there should be any friction, as the luddities in key political positions are who we should *all* be angry at.

2010-11-humanities-student-major_199_funny.txt
Actually, I think as a general and broad rule an engineer, programmer or hard scientist can get a job by simply applying for a job ad and no networking, while someone from the humanities cannot. People debate on Reddit whether you can get a job with a philosophy degree - I think yes you can but only through networking, you will never have it so easy as the tech guy, where a company posts an ad for an MSCE certifieded SQL Server engineer, guy shows paper, guy is hired.

Which means engineering, tech, hard science folks can afford to be nerdy, but humanities folks not. 

Which means if a music, history or philosophy student is nerdy, does not like networking, talking to people etc. etc. is a loner type, well he is in a big problem, much bigger than an engineer.

As a hindsight it is perhaps good that I became a programmer or something of that sort. Actually I was much more interested in history and philosophy, but somehow felt it might not be a good decision. This is why - I don't like talking to people, to network and suchlike, and in a history or philosophyfield that would have totally done me in, while in the tech world I can just put out a CV listing certifications and they rush to hire me. Too bad I don't actually like the tech jobs, I'm too much of a philosopher...

2010-12-humanities-student-major_358_DoesAnybodyElse.txt
The longer I've been on reddit, the more I realize that I approach the world in a fundamentally different way that the average nerd. I'm very much a geek in all of my interests - big into things like science fiction and video games - ignorant of sports and most popular culture. I'm also politically liberal, and agree with the hivemind on most major issues - if not always as vocally.

But unlike a lot of redditors, I'm not "left-brained." I suck at the STEM fields (science, tech, engineering, math). I'm definitely a liberal arts type (English degree, minors in history and philosophy).

Over a few thousand comments and arguments, I've developed the following stereotypes about left-brained nerds. Before anyone gets angry and indignant: these are general trends, not absolute rules. What follows is pure pop psychology based on extensive observation, not a diagnosis. Also, while the division mostly lines up with academic interests, it is by no means absolute. There are definitely "right brained" programmers and "left brained" poets out there.

* They tend to be more idealistic. I feel it's because much of their knowledge fits into internally consistent frameworks. As such, they tend to get upset if something can't be reconciled. They're the ones freaking out when people are sloppy with grammar - because to them, inconsistency means the entire system will fall apart. It's one thing to be annoyed by a usage error, but the people I'm talking about claim that tolerating sloppy typing will inevitably lead to a world where no one can communicate.

* They have a greater deference toward authoritative works. To English majors, quoting the dictionary to win an argument is as silly as quoting the Bible. It's not an ISO standard for language, it's just an analog spell checker. Meaning comes from social context, not from a book. There's no language equivalent of Newton's Laws or mathematical axioms.

* Oddly enough, while they have a much higher percentage of science majors, they tend to prefer deductive logic to empirical observation. This is especially apparent in their approach to social situations. They're the people who want to know "the rules" for socializing, a checklist of things they can follow to ask out a girl, or make casual conversation. By contrast, people with social skills deal with people on an individual basis.

These people are **not** uncreative. But they definitely have a more rigid worldview than I do. 

(**EDIT:** I'm not normally one to bitch about downvotes. I don't expect this to be a popular opinion, but I put a fair bit of effort into this analysis and it would be nice to be engaged about it, instead of seeing it hidden. If you think I'm full of shit, I'm willing to debate. But trying to hide me from the view of others, because you disagree, is a dick move)



2011-02-humanities-student-major_34_fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu.txt
i like what i study and i have a knack for it. i know if i had chosen to do something related to computer science or engineering i'd be setting myself up for a far more financially "safe" future, but i don't have any interest in such subjects. i decided to listen to my dad's advice- he told me to do what i love and the money will eventually follow. i don't know, it might end up proving to be flawed advice, but i'm willing to take my chances and believe i'll find a way to make things work even if i hit a few bumps along the way (but let's hope i don't) . and i don't know exactly what i want to do with my degrees yet, which is probably what scares me more than the fear of simply not finding employment. as for now, i'm just going with the flow. 

and i also think that a liberal arts education is extremely handy. i know some really smart science/math majors who are great at what they do, but they can't write, express their ideas or converse for shit. and they don't seem to have much knowledge about things outside their area of expertise either. i'm not saying all or most science and/or math majors are that way, but i've met quite a few. my degrees may not directly lead to a specific career but i'm sure i'll be able to apply what i know to a number of fields. i just don't know exactly which one(s) yet. 


2011-04-humanities-student-major_121_AskReddit.txt
I like this discussion!  I think about it a lot-  personally I am working for my BS in engineering, but I also took AP Lit and AP Lang in high school, and I have a lot of respect for [most] of my English major friends

IMO, it comes down to 3 points I can think of :
•Qualitative vs. Quantitative
•Interdisciplinary-ness
•The people in the field, rather than the field

1. Qualitative vs. Quantitative:
As most of the other posters have said, you can't BS your way through a physics test.  Freshman and Sophomore years in high school I tried in lit, and I still got Bs on every paper.  Junior and Senior year I said "frak it" and didn't read a single book.  Still got Bs.  I'm not saying the work writers and historians do isn't worth while, and I really agree with your opinion that Scientists and engineers make life possible, humanities people make life worth living, it's just that the *majority* is incredibly subjective.

2. Interdisciplinary-ness:
I know it's anecdotal, but it's been my experience that people majoring in science/engineering are able to do other areas, but very few people can go from humanities to science & engineering.  In high school the majority of kids in my AP Physics class went on to do something in Math/Sci/Eng.  The majority of them were also in AP Literature/Language/History classes to look good to colleges.  But I NEVER saw anyone in my AP Literature/Language/History classes who wanted to be a journalist or historian take AP Calc or AP Physics.  I actually got really pissed when, in regular Honor Physics, my friend who wanted to be a writer said "Conjecture: What is the point of studying physics?"  I was like, Fuck you!  You only have to take one year of this shit; I need to take your beloved AP Literature AND AP Language if I want to get into a good Engineering school.  Additional example: LibArts is the biggest college at my school, but Engineering is the most represented college in our bands.  Overall, I feel like the number of technical people that also participate in humanities is so much higher than the number of humanities people that also participate in technical things.

3. The people in the field, rather than the field:
Lastly, I think it's a stereotype of the people in the field rather than the field itself.  Again just personal experience, but I feel like way more kids who don't feel like trying will go into a humanities program rather than a technical program, leading people to stereotype humanities as not that great, so more people who don't want to try go into it; it seems like a vicious circle.

I know a lot of my points are anecdotal, but this is my opinion, and I wanted to let you know how that opinion was formed.  I'm really interested in what you think, and would be excited to discuss further!  

**tl;dr** I think both are equally important, but I think technical areas seem to require more "intelligence", whatever that is.

2011-04-humanities-student-major_580_science.txt
If there is a dearth of science and engineering majors, they will come from Asia or the Middle East to our schools, which they are in droves. Many of them stay and become citizens, others go back to their countries and make them better. Good for them either way.

You're thinking in a very short term point of view.  Right now, students from Asia and the Middle East come to our schools to study **because we are extremely innovative and cutting edge**.   If we slack off in preparation, there will come a time where to get a good education, we have to go to these Asian and Mid East countries to get the good education (because that's where they are gearing up to be the next innovators).  Thus, American innovation and engineering prowess will decline.  Here is where national pride kicks in.  Some one has to be the best in things.  Most people would prefer it is their country.  That is why people want to push science, math, and engineering.

Fuck all you smug assholes that think that science is inherently a better major than humanities or virtually anything else.

Well...I don't think that it is an inherently better major, simply a more necessary one.  If science couldn't cure diseases or increase production of food, what would be the point of having novels and art?  They're very good things to have, yes, but the building block must be science, IMO.

2011-04-humanities-student-major_614_science.txt
Why does everyone always feel like if you're not doing math, you're not doing anything? 
Let's sit down the engineering departments and have them write an eloquent, well-paced, meaningful story/essay/poem, yeah? Let's see how easy it is for them to that. 
Math and Science aren't everything. There's nothing wrong with people pursuing the humanities. If we give up on our histories and our arts and our abilities to convey messages and ideas and passion to each other through language in favor of knowing obscure mathematical formulas or more and more programming languages, what kind of a society have we become? 
In fact, the first graph illustrates that just as few people are majoring in visual or performing arts as are in engineering. Why if that not a problem? I certainly like my technology and advancing medicine, but I don't think it's worth forsaking the arts.
And some people just aren't cut out to be engineers. Do you really want someone like me, who can barely handle trigonometry and can't even grasp the fundamentals of statistics, to be programming your software and designing your cars? Well, if any other area of study I choose is inferior to engineering, why should I even bother pursuing my education?
I know this site is pretty hard-core devoted to programming and all those math-based occupations, but just because it's what YOU like to do and it's what matters to YOU and it's what YOU think should be of highest importance does not, under any circumstance, mean it is.

You should also note that I'm a BS candidate. 

2011-05-humanities-student-major_310_comics.txt
I don't even know where you get day traders / businessmen. I sub to r/science and askscience and such, and see tons of scientists. Everyone else seems to be in engineering or CS. 

And as someone getting their PhD in CS who got a BA in Fine Art, I do think hum majors are a waste. You can enrich yourself in the humanities on your own time or take classes while studying to do something useful. If you are set for life, then sure, going to college to fufill yourself intellectually is a great idea. But for the rest of us getting a degree is our way to get a job. I didn't go to college to learn CS, as I do most of my mathematical and programming learning on my own anyway. I went there so other people recognize that I am adept in my field. 

Hum and art majors are fun and awesome - until you graduate. I've seen it happen again and again. Even if you plan on staying in academia, jobs are so ridiculously competitive in those fields that you are setting yourself up for a struggle for the rest of your life. 

I value the humanities and arts and I do my best to learn about them in my own time, so I am absolutely not saying they are worthless. What I am saying is that there are very few people in this world who can take 4 years of their life off to study 18th century french literature. That's the way it always has been, until many schools started selling these majors, primarily because they are cheap and require little qualification to hand out a degree. 

2011-05-humanities-student-major_353_fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu.txt
Did you ever think this could be because you received greater preparation to study for liberal arts courses as opposed to science? I have friends from both sides of the spectrum and we discuss this misconception constantly. I have friends in econ who constantly complain to friends in history "I wish I could study what you do--I never could do well in those classes" and engineering majors who say the same to English majors.  It is all about the level of preparation you had before/when you pursued your degree. 

How many people in the US (assuming you are American) had the opportunity to go to high schools with strong, challenging math and science programs? How many of those students survive declaring a technical or scientific major in college beyond the first or second year? Our educational system does not prepare students well for the hard sciences or the technical fields. Students that do well in liberal arts usually had a strong background where they learned proper study techniques to handle those classes. The same is true for most students that study in math and science, they've learned how to study in those classes and how to succeed. If they don't learn methods to help them cope with similar problems in the humanities they will struggle.

TLDR; You can't go straight from high school level algebra to Calculus II and you can't go straight from a 3rd grade reading/writing level to college level reading/writing. Also--depending upon the rigor of your program, I really question how many people would do well at your average liberal arts program and say the demanding CORE system of Columbia University or NYU. You need prep!

2011-06-humanities-student-major_12_pics.txt
but culture deems them less worth of our time.

I don't really know if you can make this claim.  There are probably more people devoting their lives to the humanities now than ever before (professors, writers, etc).  The problem is that there are even more people wanting to devote their lives to the humanities.

In the end it's not the total amount of value that matters, it's the ratio of spots to applicants.  Other fields might have no more spots, but have far fewer applicants, and as such it's easier to get a job and easier to get paid more.

If there's one secret to having an easy/good career it's to find a niche that is under-served and be damn good in it.  Simply put the humanities are massively overserved at the moment, and that's why it's so hard to get a job in them.

I mean look at law for example.  There's obviously a high value placed on lawyers by society, and yet it can be pretty hard to land a job as a lawyer, and even if you do there's a long period of overwork in return for an eventual payoff.  This is because law schools crank out way more law students than are actually needed by society.  It's the same situation with humanities majors.  Way more people go into the humanities than are needed.  It has little to do with the value that society places on the humanities, and everything to do with too many people going into the field.

2011-07-humanities-student-major_113_AskReddit.txt
People who go to college and want money study business. People who study business in college learn by and large nothing that couldn't be learned in a 2 year vocational course. At prestigious universities you aren't even allowed to study business as an undergraduate, yet because of this attitude above, roughly 50% of American undergrads are doing a business major. 

The people who work in businesses, the office drones who write copy and memos and do sales should be educated. Not rolled through a degree factory so someone can get their business degree that 'qualifies' them to do something so watered down because of the lack of education in the field that average high school graduates, if put to the test, could succeed at brilliantly. 

Yet that's what they look for on a resume - that line that says 'business school'. They demand, so you obey.
 
When tested, business students generally start off the least intelligent and improve the least throughout the college experience. 

Pushing students to pick more 'useful' majors will not push them towards engineering. The general population is math-phobic and science-phobic and engineering-phobic. I would recommend engineers work to keep it this way - the worst thing that could happen for engineers would be for the general population to figure out that it just isn't that hard, it's just as intellectually challenging as a difficult program in philosophy or history. It requires alot more time and memorization, which is an indicator of dedication and work ethic, and there is a big payout - because the number of people who have spent the time memorizing figures and numbers is small and they are necessary. For now.  

Also the data doesn't agree with you. Taking on a 'useless' degree improves someone's prospects in earning potential significantly more than the debt they often accrue.

What we should be doing is encouraging sharp, analytical humanities and social sciences majors to move into business post-education, because they are truly more prepared for business than business students.

This is so often the case. Pre-law is one of the worst programs to prepare for law school (philosophy, that useless major, predicts the second-best logical reasoning scores on the LSAT, after math/physics). Similarly with business. They have the GMAT instead of the GRE because it's easier. They have easier versions of calculus. If you pick a real topic that exists, is intellectually stimulating and challenging and try to understand it wholly throughout a long invested course of study you will become significantly more intelligent and capable. If you try to prepare for your vocation for 4 years you will probably have papers that say you should be allowed to have a good career. 



2011-07-humanities-student-major_197_AskReddit.txt
This thread is absolutely brimming with stereotypes. As many education-related threads are.

If you honestly think all engineers are hard-working and intelligent while humanities students are coasting through, you are a moron. Are there douchey, lazy arts students? Absolutely! Are there also plenty of douchey, lazy engineering students? Absolutely!

I went to a school that's mostly renowned for its engineering programs. There were *plenty* of drunks, stoners, douchebags, morons, and slackers. But, unlike the people who spout off about art students being shitty people, I realize that not *all* engineers are like that. That's just people. Young people. There will be amazingly talented, hard-working people and asshole slackers in every field of study.

Also, an engineering degree is not some magic ticket to a high-paying job. Sorry. I know that's something nerds love to jerk themselves off to. The job market is tough. It's not like the sciences are this bastion that hasn't been touched by hard times. If you can or know people who will get great jobs right out the gate, that's awesome! But people definitely oversell how any type of science degree will get you *all the jobs*.

I was a humanities student. I'm in education now. But "LOOLOL waiting tables," right, guys? Nothing important about education!

There are shitty people on both sides. There are shitty jobs on both sides. I suppose it just comes with the territory of associating with nerds, of whom I am normally quite fond and consider myself a part, that you'll find a lot circlejerking to nerdier professions. "We're all the smartest and the hardest workers and we'll get paid the most because we're so great!" Be proud of what you want to do. But be fucking realistic and there's no need to be a presumptuous dick to someone who studies other things.

2011-07-humanities-student-major_59_AskReddit.txt
Game_Ender has legitmate reason to be upset however as the implication from pjh11's comment is that people who get degrees because it will get them a job are essentially a waste.

I didn't get that at all. What I got from the comment was that people that could be incredible rhetors, philosophers, artists, and literary critics never become that because of the pressure to go into the "profitable" fields. I'm sorry, this extrapolating that pjh meant that engineering and natural sciences are a waste seems a bit hyperdefensive.

In addition I would say critical thinking is exemplified in the hard sciences as ways to get around current problems, not to simply shut your mind down and plug numbers into formulas.

Of course there isn't a total lack of critical thinking in the sciences, I'm sorry if I came off as saying as much. However, I will contend that the humanities *do* emphasize a kind of critical thinking that is especially geared towards human interaction. Biology majors are unlikely, unless they explore such things in their electives, to learn much about informal fallacies, the three forms of rhetoric (ethos, pathos, and logos appeals), and general communication skills, including diction.

Of course, there are *plenty* of things I will never learn as a philosophy/english double major in regards to physics, engineering, and chemistry. But my original point was that Game_Ender used poor assessment skills in characterizing pjh's argument, which could be improved by the type of critical thinking taught in the humanities.

edit: he clarified what he meant in a later post "My point is that people with talents in the arts would be forced to study subjects that they are not necessarily suited to. Just as I'm sure a gifted engineer would unlikely flourish studying english literature."

2011-08-humanities-student-major_192_AdviceAnimals.txt
That's complete bullshit. Look, I won't tell you the patent laws in the US are great--because they are shit. But laws will always be shit in a huge government. It's important to have lawyers, financiers, and the likes to HELP scientists and engineers get funding, protect their work, and sell their products. 

I will meet you halfway though. I think it's bullshit federal aid is the same for a Comm major as a Engineering major. Moreover, I hate the fact that my polsci degree is viewed as "lesser" than other degrees. But I can't blame anyone for that, it's a function of the system. Liberal arts degrees have been pussified in the past 50 years as they have been made so fucking easy. I had to do honors just to feel like I was getting my moneys worth out of the classes, and even then, it wasn't that difficult (even at a good school). I would like to see the entire education system revamped so we give more financial aid to engineers/compsci/scientists over liberal arts majors. And make liberal art/social science/humanities majors not just some "lol I couldn't get into anything else and daddy is paying for school," but the way they used to be. That is, rigorous reading, writing, logic, and the inability to pass whilst 'winging it.'

tl;dr I disagree with them creating more problems than they solve. But agree that the system should be more inclined to encourage people to go into Science and Engineering because on average polsci majors add less to the world--which is also a fact that frustrates me as a student who truly did engage himself and appreciate the field for its rigor and beauty.

2011-08-humanities-student-major_295_TwoXChromosomes.txt
Um. Well, few points to nit pick. By the way, as a disclaimer. This is basically the point where my agreement with feminism breaks away. 

First of all. You're basically trying to break down the entire idea of a fad. It used to be that all teachers were male. What happened? Women started picking up the job. Men moved to other areas. There wasn't a movement to move women into teaching positions and men out of it. It's just the fact that women found interest in it. Men lost interest. It isn't generic, that's just the way society flows. Why do we dress baby boys in blue and baby girls in pink? Because one person thought it looked slick. Someone else did too. And then it spread. You're no different than a guy who becomes a scientist because its a fad.  Why are vet students primarily women now? Because one woman convinced another woman that they loved animals, and it just spread from there. You did humanities because that's just where the water took you. You not fighting against the stream is more your fault than it is society's fault. You not WANTING to become a scientist is your choice. You didn't want to fight against the stream, so you did what everyone else around you did. This will always be the case whether you are surrounded by engineers, rock stars, or pot heads. Unless you have a goal and you want it, you're going to do what seems natural to you. And what seems natural to you is what you're constantly surrounded by. You can't constantly be surrounded by every viable major. 

For example. Why the hell do we see all these Asians in engineering? Well dads an engineer. Moms probably an engineer. All your Asian friends did well in school. Well shit, now you're an engineer. And all of a sudden, it's a terrible thing that a field is considered Asian dominated. What you are advocating, is basically some Asian guy going, "Hey! What the fuck guys? Why are we stereotyped to be engineers?" This isn't even an Asian guy who is going, "Why can't I be an English major." Its a person who is complaining about how everyone around him is going down one path because that's just their given environment. If your environment leads you more towards humanities, you will do humanities. I grew up in an area where the environment was law. A lot of my friends now study law. In fact, most people's dictate their major comes from their parents. This has more to do with the values that either parent learns in their chosen path which will inevitably get passed down to you. Which means that if neither of your parents were scientists, you're probably not a scientist. I'm an engineer because I was strongly encouraged to be an engineer. Both by my parents and by my peers. Right now, it's mostly men in engineering. Consequently, their sons become engineers. Unless there's a sudden paradigm shift, this is basically what's going to happen. I'm sorry, but women got to the game late (for various reasons). Sooner or later though, as more women become engineers (by sheer number not by %), they too will support their daughters to become engineers and the number shifts back towards equilibrium. But again, if your mom is an engineer, your daughter is probably an engineer. If both your parents are engineers, then you are most definitely an engineer. But if both your parents are engineers, you're probably not a humanities major even if you're a guy or a girl. And this is only because your parents instilled these values into you when you were a kid. Or even better yet. You're an engineer but you drop out of it in favor of humanities. Your friends are probably in humanities and not in engineering. It's human nature to do what people around you are doing. This has nothing to do with gender. It's why high school women in engineering programs is important because it gives women an environment that fosters engineering for girls. This is also the same reason why Michael Jordan's kids rock at basketball. 

As far as valuing different majors. This has little to do with the gender make up. Sure, there are more women in the humanities classes. And humanities is viewed somewhat low on the educational totem pole. But the fact of the matter is that the intrinsic value of science and technology is much higher than humanities. I'm sorry, but that's the truth. You can't put a dollar sign on studying the growth of feminism over time. But you sure as hell can put a dollar sign on building a new jet engine. A lot of humanities in my experience is really, really, abstract. Science and technology? That's easy to do. There's a clear goal. It's not just, "expanding your knowledge," its getting something done. You as an engineering PhD student will have discovered something new. What if you're a philosophy PhD student? Did you discover anything new? Did you discover anything that someone else can use to increase their net worth? No. Instead what you're advocating is that we should be accepting of ALL majors, and we should consider ALL college graduates of high status. But if you're making my life easier by doing some cool shit, I'm going to consider you at a higher level than someone who just writes books. Do you want to know why a lot of science tech PhD students have their tuition waved? Because they're expected to bring money via grants. When the DoD tosses you 10 million dollars for a grant and your school takes half, you've done a LOT more for your school than just paying tuition. Humanities don't get that luxury because they aren't in demand. What you're asking for is that we create equal demand for ALL subjects. But even just by looking at the numbers of students + washout rate, you're going to end up with a number disparity. Why do we like doctors? Doctor might save my life. A humanities major isn't. 

2011-08-humanities-student-major_304_AskReddit.txt
Definitely agree with this. Also, the idea that getting a BS is the only way to ensure a job once you graduate is a little narrow-minded. Is it easier to find good work with a concentration in engineering or accounting? Probably yes. But there are definitely humanities concentrations that will be extremely conducive to netting you a (real, not Starbucks/fast food) job. For example, I'm currently pursuing a BA in French and will go into translation and interpretation once I graduate. The number of translation jobs in the US is expected to increase about 22% within the next 10 years and is a service needed in numerous industries, so finding work is probably not going to be an issue (provided the economy doesn't take another nose dive, but that goes for pretty much any field at this point). Will I be making $100K a year? No. But I'll be making enough to comfortably pay my bills and have some disposable income, which is better than a lot of people in this country. So, prospective humanities majors: don't force yourself to spend 4+ years studying something you hate because you're afraid to end up at Starbucks. Do research about what's going to be in demand and get creative about how to apply your chosen field of study, and you've got half a shot at not being miserable for the rest of your life.

2011-08-humanities-student-major_595_TwoXChromosomes.txt
I used to teach technical writing for engineers, I know the type. 

1. You have to understand that these people have been told from day one that their field is uber-competitive, so they've learned to be in that mindset all the time. It's pretty much the same for scientists -- the vast majority will end up working routine testing jobs (i.e., checking the PH levels of ketchup and whatnot) for a not-particularly significant amount of money (30-50 grand); only a very, very small few will become well-paid professors, bad-ass discoverers, or get high-paying drug-development jobs. They are insecure and in constant competition with each other, part of dealing with that is talking shit about "liberal arts" majors (basic out-group tribe mentality, etc). You should remind them that the managers, administrators, executives, and other people who will be directing them, accepting (and rejecting) reports from them, getting paid more than them, etc., will, statistically speaking, not be one of their own. 

2. Step up and call them out. If you can't justify the value and validity of your choice of major to your friends then there's a deeper problem here. This isn't a gender issue or an ethnic one, though I understand there are elements of both in play here (I'm from a Cuban family and my father is an engineer, so I understand a lot of the cultural bullshit, but those are secondary). This is an issue of added value. It's easy for someone with a technical background to cite the value they add to society and the difficulty of their fields -- simply point out the same to them. Trust me, they would get uppity if they were lumped in together, so don't let them lump you in with "liberal arts" -- force them to be specific. I notice that you never mention your specific major in your post -- why is that and what is it? What do you plan on doing?

3. Remember you're still in school. These kinds of divisions are much less distinct in the real world. I work for an energy company that does all its software in-house. One of the most respected analysts in our T&D department was a History major. I've worked as a technical writer for our T&D department and none of the software developers or other technical people questioned my qualifications -- they needed me and I needed them, and we each brought something to the table. Now I deal with lawyers, economists, traders, and other people with specific training in technical areas, and none of them question me or dismiss me either -- my educational background doesn't even come up. 

2011-08-humanities-student-major_612_TwoXChromosomes.txt
I dated an engineering major for a very long time.  And was a first hand witness to the amount of work he went through.  I always thought it was this way because engineering programs actually try to discourage people from continuing with the major if they aren't good enough to be successful with it.  Liberal arts programs don't usually do this because in many cases a college degree is all they need to get a job (and the jobs they want require masters).  

I guess to summarize, all liberal arts majors can get a shitty office job, but in order to get your dream job you usually have to have more schooling or really excel in your field of interest.  Where as engineering majors can be content and make a decent salary after just an undergrad, but in order to have this, you can only allow the most successful students to secure an engineering major.  

That being said, there are offshoots of both the hard sciences and liberal arts that are more and less challenging and many people falsely equate all of these offshoots with the generalized theory I state above.  I think many engineers would be shocked to learn how hard some of the liberal arts focuses can be and likewise that many liberal arts majors would be shocked to find out how easy some of the hard science pursuits can be.  

2011-08-humanities-student-major_618_TwoXChromosomes.txt
Well, how many liberal arts classes did you take?  I had 2 classes in my major (that I can specifically remember) that were split between science folks and us liberal arters.  One was symbolic logic.  It was filled with engineers, computer science people, and philosophy majors.  It was an easy class, in my opinion.  I did work for it, but not too terribly much.  I got a 100 in the class and set the average for the rest of the class.  Many of the computer science people did endless amounts of extra credit, stayed after class, had me tutor them and ended up getting a C at best.  

The other class was "Environmental Ethics."  It was taught by the head of the philosophy department.  Most of the people in it were civil engineers, environmental science types, chemistry majors, etc.  The 3 philosophy majors got a/b's on the first paper.  The rest of the class failed.  I ran the after class discussion/review for my department, the hard science people read the material and put hours of work in by the end of the semester but were still failing.  And I read over some of their papers and just wondered if they even knew what a logical argument was. 

I think ya'll think that liberal arts majors have it really easy, and some of them do.  But I think you fail to admit that the sorts of skills liberal arts majors excel at often times skills hard science majors lack.  

2011-09-humanities-student-major_531_TrueReddit.txt
What about the people who actually go on to become researchers in the humanities? 

People are focusing on how useful a humanities degree is to the individual student, and whether it's detrimental to society that so many people are getting college degrees, etc. However, I think a pretty big point is being overlooked: society needs history professors.
 
I'll use the subject of history as an example. It's a fact that some (perhaps many?) people who get a B.A. in history don't end up putting it to good use, but we still need the subject to continue to exist. Politicians and journalists need to understand history, as well as the average voter. Therefore, high schools need to properly teach history. In order for that to be the case, we need to fund history research.

You can praise engineering all you like, but a democratic society requires a certain level of general education. In addition, I believe scientific research (whether it's astrobiology, theoretical physics, or history) has value in itself, regardless of its practical application. The kind of people who are unable to see the value of fields like philosophy or history are the same kind of people who are against funding all sorts of fundamental research. 

I support changing the education system in many ways, such as by opening up more vocational schools and providing new opportunities after high school. *But the only way to keep the field of history going is to provide students the opportunity to study it.* I don't see how you can argue against that without advocating a descent into the dark ages. 

2011-09-humanities-student-major_81_funny.txt
talking about the same thing.  what is in the system isn't as important as recongnizing the pattern.  philosophy teaches patterns, it teaches deduction.  Anyone can learn what's in the system -- thats the easy part.   How things interact - thats the fun part.     

I've personally found that physics and math grads and engineers can't see "outside" of things - they can't infer - they often lack critical creativity to develop solutions quickly.   A good person that can break this prejudice is often a strong consultant, particularly a troubleshooter.   They can come in, organize, determine the parts of the system and set a plan to move forward.   I've seen scientists do it, and I've seen history majors do it.     Again, its not about what you studied... It really isn't.  

they (engineer types)  also often lack the "soft skills" that are needed in today's environments that liberal arts students very often have and and can utilize to their advantage.    

now - i'm not saying by any means that engineers and math and hard science is bad - however, what I am saying is that dismissing liberal arts is foolish.   they gain valuable skills to be a liason between the "Scientists" and the "business".    

I run Siebel and Oracle software releases on a portfolio level - my job is less tech and more "soft skills".  My undergrad is in German Philosophy (phenomenology) and English.  I'm good at what I do.   One can have the facts all day long and you can be "right" as much as you want - but if you can't talk to people or are perceived as a jerk -- you will go nowhere regardless of your pedigree.    If you can't communicate clearly to all parties involved, then you need to work on your soft skills.   they are critical.   and, interestingly enough - they are what Liberal Arts majors are often (not always) good at.






2011-10-humanities-student-major_216_TwoXChromosomes.txt
I actually agree with you here. I (I'm XX) won my fifth grade science fair and was a (pretty good) mathlete in high school. I'm now getting a PhD in a humanities discipline (which obviously I now think is just as important as science, but that's not the point of this conversation). It's not that girls aren't succeeding, it's that there are structural issues that inadvertently discriminate against them and drive them away, which means they don't stay in those fields.

My boyfriend (an engineering PhD student) is doing research on gender in STEM fields, and his conclusion is essentially yours: it's the culture of engineering that causes women to switch out. Girls are socialized differently than boys, to value different things. Science, with its belief in being outside the realm of human values, has been very slow to recognize its own entrenched cultural position, and essentially encourages a model where "being good at science/engineering" means being the same sort of student as the professor, who is generally male and white, or if not, acts in a way similar to white male norms. This ends up duplicating the demographic patterns, because certain traits, styles, and value systems are correlated with gender and race because of socialization. It's a vicious cycle, especially when you couple it with resistance to programs to support women and minorities in STEM fields - even my boyfriend said when he was an undergrad he thought such programs were unfair, since he had worked hard. There's an invisibility to these issues for women and minorities *because* of the claim that science is universal, that anyone can do it - there's an invisibility of the ways that other types of socialization just don't provide the support structures in place for middle-class white boys. I do think part of the solution is just a recognition and understanding of these sorts of sociological issues, and modified pedagogies.

In my field it's less of a problem because we're now so self-conscious and self-reflexive about it. On the other hand, the influx of women into the humanities coincided with its wider devaluation (see the comment in this thread about English majors being scorned - that's a pretty historically specific situation). The pink collar effect - things associated with femininity lose status. It's not like my boyfriend and I differ significantly in intelligence, but we do get quite varied responses and assumptions when we reveal our respective fields.

Sorry you got downvoted - I'd say it's mostly because of the "and men are underrepresented in many fields" part of your first post, which, while true, deflects from the issue at hand and doesn't recognize that the fields where men are underrepresented (nursing, elementary ed) are some of the least respected ones, whereas the ones where women are underrepresented are the most respected. It raises the "what about the menz?!" flag that we're used to hearing when any feminist issue is raised - but the point you were trying to raise, which shows up in later posts, is valid.

2011-10-humanities-student-major_729_pics.txt
I'm really frustrated with the whole debate: Who says we can't have BOTH?!?!

I have a theory about why people devalue the liberal arts education:

Now, I honestly think there's too large an influx of students flocking to liberal arts. That said, we can partition the standard "liberal arts major" into three subsections:

**1)** Students who possessed severe passion for their subjects and desired to major in said subjects ever since their freshman year. They were coordinated, dedicated, and passionate--and honestly, these are the type of people you see being successful in their fields. That's obviously a bit of a generalization, but I believe that it largely can hold up to scrutiny.

**2)** The type of liberal-arts major who, somewhere in the midst of acquiring their science degree, decided that they'd lost passion for their subject. Honestly, I've had conversations with people who are disgusted at how flat, dispassionate, and uninterested their science professors are. On a whole, I do believe that Humanities professors tend to be a bit more invested in enticing kids to be passionate about the same things they are--I'm even willing to concede that this might be because there are less tangible benefits to pursuing the humanities, but that's beside the point in this case. Science is, honestly, really fucking fascinating, but as long as the trend continues where colleges care infinitely more about professors publishing and collecting results than actually being competent at teaching, we're going to see a lot of bored and frustrated students.

**3)** The student who, somewhere in their first Bio class or weed-out class their sophomore year, decided that their current course of study was "too hard". I argue that it's only that last type of student that people should have a problem with: the type of person who, when confronted with a difficult decision, decided that it was better to give up and go to a "fall-back" degree. Honestly, though, once you get out into the real world, it's very competitive to do anything with a Humanities BA--if these same people didn't have the work ethic to tough out their original degrees, what makes them think they're going to survive in the harsh climate of entering the job market with an English degree?

I think the best way to encourage growth in the scientific fields is to impose stigma for lax student work ethic and to reform post-secondary teaching standards. But I'm really tired of people trying to start a "war" between Humanities and Sciences: **WE SHOULD HAVE BOTH AND WE SHOULD FOSTER BOTH.** Hell, *especially* in this day and age where it's so easy to just lie down and rot our fucking brains out by watching Jersey Shore for 8 hours a day, why are we discouraging *any* attempt at higher learning, even if it *is* Advanced Native American basket-weaving?

**No TL;DR because I'm a lazy Humanities major.**

2011-11-humanities-student-major_331_science.txt
I'm sure there are a lot of people who couldn't hack it, are slackers, and cheaters who fall on their ass in face of a real challenge.  I realized they probably make up 90% of these dropouts... but I already read 10 years ago that 1/3 of all College freshmen drop out.  Not sure if that is still current (or why it wouldn't be), but I don't know how significant 40% is compared to other fields.

I've graduated with an comp. sci. degree, and done my share of liberal arts course and agree they are eaiser... but often the worst teachers I have had were in the technical and math courses (I often just taught myself).  Even if they spoke great English, they were sometimes as eccentric as the students - can't interact worth a damn or get it across in plain english.  (This is even more important with assignments than with course material.)  And I met a lot of eccentric students who were great at it their fields... but just couldn't deal with regimentation at all.  And I'm working with a guy under me who is way more brilliant than me, but is a 1st year dropout.

The fact is that college isn't for everyone, and those that can't hack it shouldn't automatically be assumed losers.  I often have to have spats with HR because they want to keep replacing the aforementioned worker with "someone with a degree".  Nevermind the candidates have a piece of paper and couldn't program beyond hello world without it taking all night.

2011-11-humanities-student-major_435_AskReddit.txt
To make themselves feel better about themselves. 

Of course there's some truth to it; if you get a degree in English, it's a simple fact that you're not as likely to get a good-paying job as someone with an engineering degree. That much is indisputable. 

But because we're on a site populated mostly by people in the engineering/computer science/natural sciences camp, that's the only side of the story you get. The other side of the story is that, for all of the English majors working at Starbucks, there are just as many CS neckbeards with absolutely no social skills who may have a good job but nothing to spend the money on. 

I think both types of degrees are very important. The problem with liberal arts degrees, though, is that they're often a bad investment. I'm lucky (scratch that, I worked my ass off in high school) that I don't have student loans because I got a really nice scholarship. I decided that I wanted to major in Political Science and German because that's what I'm interested in. I know that I'm probably not going to have the greatest job opportunities when I get out, but I'm okay with that, and I knew that going in. I think the reason Reddit hates liberal arts/humanities degrees can be summed up in three points: people take out $100,000 in loans for a degree that won't afford them high-paying jobs and then complain about it; some people, especially math- and science-oriented people, don't necessarily see art and humanities disciplines as being inherently valuable; and finally, people are just dicks, and sometimes people like to shit on whatever is different from them. 

2011-12-humanities-student-major_229_AdviceAnimals.txt
What's getting to me in this thread is the lack of acknowledgement for the work of all people.

To place one career on a plane above others is to create an inapropriate standard for others to live up to. If hard science or engineering are the pinnacles to which we should strive, and the humanities, social sciences, business, etc. are not equivalent, you devalue their work.

I firmly believe that each of the jobs mentioned in this discussion is essential to our community, and that their educations are equivalent, just in different terms. I will likely catch a lot of flak for it, but I believe that that "living" liberal arts (et al.) students were doing during their degrees was an existential stand in for the time BSc students spent in labs and tutorials. It's starting to sound very cheesy, but I think that liberal arts students REQUIRE that time in the real world to learn and live and pursue their interests in the same way the engineers and science students REQUIRE lab time to learn processes in they're fields.

My science/eng friends would likely kill me, but I really don't care. It is an existential choice to spend your time the way you do. If you are spending in pursuit of a career where you can make a lot of money, then do it, some people will also choose to spend it in pursuit of other personal interests, perhaps unrelated to Audi's in the driveway.

TL;DR
Labs/extra time in class are for science/engineering students what "living" is for liberal arts people.

2011-12-humanities-student-major_283_AdviceAnimals.txt
Couldn't agree with you more. I'm just finishing a graduate degree in political science (I also have a hard science degree), and I often find political discussions with otherwise highly intelligent young engineers and scientists uncomfortable because of the combination of judgmental attitudes and general ignorance about politics. If anything, I think it's a form of thought trap that intelligent, educated people are more likely to fall into than other people. This is a generalization, but it's something I've encountered repeatedly. 

"I'm an intelligent person," an engineer thinks. "A thinking person. I work hard at what I do." And in this they are often correct; lots of engineers and scientists are all of the above. The next step goes something like: "Because I'm an intelligent person, a person with good logic skills, my judgements are usually good." So, in part because of the fact that they work hard and often don't have the time to really dig deep into politics/(insert other field here), there is a tendency to encounter an opinion or set of opinions and either embrace or reject it without really digging into the intellectual meat of the thing, based on the assumption that its underlying logic is immediately self-evident and that as thinking people who do complex work on a daily basis they are intellectually qualified to understand it at a glance. "Political opinion X is correct," they say, without taking the time to contemplate the underlying assumptions or thought patterns of political opinion X or understand its implications in a broader field. And I'm not singling out any specific political opinion here. I think that there are coherent, intelligent arguments for lots of different political opinions, just all too often I hear otherwise intelligent people throwing around Fox News level views like they mean something. 

The liberal arts and social sciences are in an interesting position because in many ways they're public domain affairs. English, history, politics, etc. are things that any American can and probably will encounter on a daily basis. Often as not they're assumed to be fairly shallow affairs that can be understood with relatively little effort; as mentioned before it's often believed that because of their public domain status the underlying structures are immediately self-evident. In part this is because of the admittedly lax standards for students of these fields in many American universities. When you see someone in a liberal arts major drinking heavily four nights a week and blowing off class whenever it's easy to get the impression that these are simple, shallow fields. Really it's an issue of pedagogy rather than any profound truth regarding the intellectual merits of the field.

Anyway, /endrant.   

2011-12-humanities-student-major_599_AskAcademia.txt
I think the focus on generating more STEM graduates is misguided. (sorry, this post came down with elephantiasis somewhere along the line)

First the ~~TL;DR~~ abstract - I think the point we need to drive home is that the STEM mindset and way of approaching problems is a valuable and useful tool for *anyone* in *any* field. To achieve that end, we should take lessons from the humanities, which have already successfully done so (at least, to an extent greater than STEM has).

How many people enjoy learning about history and applying its lessons? How many people graduate from college with a history major? How many of those actually do history as a career? The number drops precipitously on each question. They don't become historians and no one expects them to. It's rightly regarded as a universally useful set of knowledge.

So why is it that if someone is interested in biology, they are expected to become a research scientist? Or that if they like building things they should become an engineer? Knowing how to think in a STEM mindset is just as universally useful as a knowledge of history.

These are useful things to know and understand. We need to get away from the idea that just because you like STEM means you have to go get a career in it. It is useful to have a population educated in STEM whether or not they actually ever go into science as a career.

The problem stems from how they are taught at the introductory level. Biology is taught as rote memorization of facts. Physics is taught as whiz-bang look at what I just blew up. Math is taught as a tool to balance your checkbook. Engineering is presented as some unattainable realm of the highly intelligent, and isn't even taught to the *hoi polloi*.

But biology and physics are about the scientific method and knowing what we *are*. Math is about the fundamental language of the universe. Engineering is about how to rationally approach and solve complex problems. 

When I took it, history was taught as a context, a way to learn from past failures and achievements. It was always brought out to show how things became what they are, and as full of warnings of how to avoid problems of the past. Literature was taught as a way to enter the mind of another culture, separated from you by time or space and better understand them and what they do. Art was taught as a way to express that which cannot be said, or could never be said quite as well.

We need to teach it differently. We need to show people that it's not just a collection of facts, it's a method for getting those facts, for understanding why they are what they are, and for using them to make something new. 

2011-12-humanities-student-major_937_ShitRedditSays.txt
As a double major in the humanities, I will respectfully address your three points. I hope it might change your viewpoint at least a small bit.

1. Growing up, I was a quiet kid as well. I suffered from pretty severe social anxiety up until I was in high school. The classroom scenario that you described is a familiar one, and to me, those people who dominate the conversation are just annoying types of people that show up in any classes. I can assure you that not everyone in the humanities is like that, and some people in the sciences are like that. Some people are just annoying. I don't like those people any more than you do. 

2. I agree with that frustration. I don't presume to know much about science, and it annoys me when I see people act this way. I wouldn't try to tell you anything about the Baker-Gill-Sovolay theorem. But it goes both ways. I frequently have heard people in science try to tell people in the humanities or arts why their opinions about their own subjects are incorrect. So to reverse what you said: "Your knowledge in science wonderful and I respect it. But don't presume to instruct me in Kafka (or whatever else I've been studying in depth)."

3. Not necessarily true. I am graduating soon with a double major and a minor with a high GPA at a major research university. I also have participated in quite a bit of research in the social sciences, hold steady volunteer positions, hold a steady part time job, and will be graduating with honors. I've worked hard. It's true that there will always be slackers that coast by in their classes, but please don't assume that everyone looks at their education this way.

Lastly, why does there have to be such a war between humanities and sciences? I most admire the people who are competent in both areas. They seem to be rare these days, but I know a few who are truly knowledgeable in both, and I think it's wonderful. In fact, I think some of the greatest scientists and greatest writers of all time were well-rounded people in that sense. 

So let's not shame or insult each other for what we're interested in, nor try to instruct each other in subjects we're not familiar in. Does that sound fair?

2011-12-humanities-student-major_987_bestof.txt
I had a lot of conversations with therealprotonk on that thread. And if you read it yourself and honestly think what you just wrote is a logical refutation you don't understand his argument. He never once made an argument about "the man" or any bullshit hippie argument. If you have studied intellectual thought of the 20th century at all and the state of academia you would know that the 60s represented a monumental change in the way humanities and social sciences are taught. Graduating with a defined skill has never been a prerequisite for success until the past couple decades. It used to be a degree in social sciences and humanities was very difficult and rigorous. Firms would know that if they hired you they could teach you quickly. In fact, many jobs in Finance and Economics still follow this model. The industry of Financial and Economic jobs barely rely on you to have any knowledge of the fields. In fact, most jobs that hire students of Finance are also open to hiring political science, history, and other humanities students if they show an interest. The reason is the industry is so wide in Finance that what you learned is likely barely relevant. They just want someone who was able to get a strong degree. These days degrees like Economics and Finance (Even Math and Physics, although less so because most people who pursue these degrees don't want to go into consulting). But as I was saying, these firms are willing to hire students of Econ, Finance, Math, Physics (etc) for consulting, financial analysis, investment banking (and the likes) even though the students learned nothing in school that will directly help them. That is because these degrees mix the quantitative and qualitative skills (as well as a way of thinking) that these firms know will help them in quickly learning the material and rising to the top. The social sciences and humanities used to command similar respect in teaching strong analytical skills, back when the curriculum was difficult and demanding. Before, as therealprotonk described, the academic reforms and post-structuralist movement of the 60s watered down the social science pedagogy. As a point of fact students from Ivy schools who major in liberal arts and humanities are still able to receive strong offers from myriad firms because they know that they haven't let their curriculum be softened. I obtained a degree in Finance and Honors Political Science. The combination of the two led to my being hired in a top investments firm where I was taught basically everything I know. 

You aren't even listening and are just perpetuating the general belief. As someone who has studied the social sciences strongly, I am frustrated by the poor standards of students in the field. These days a STEM student can pass a philosophy/theory course but a philosophy/theory student can't pass a STEM course. This didn't used to be the case. The change, once again as therealprotonk said (you didn't read or understand him) was a maligned incentive system. While STEM majors receive MASSIVE donations due to the pragmatic research they do, social sciences don't receive donations since whilst they do teach, they don't create awesome new computers/engineering (etc). So they began accepting way more students, filling classes up, and the like so that they could make more money. This allowed the fields to continue to pay PhD students and professors at the cost of making the degrees lose all prestige and competitiveness. Whereas engineering schools due to their high donations don't rely on undergraduate wages, so they can still be selective.


This turns out good for people like me though. I have extremely high skills in liberal arts and social sciences as well as investments. When my interviewers realize that, even though I only went to a state school, I am easily able to get great jobs.

2012-01-humanities-student-major_233_todayilearned.txt
The defensive last line made me laugh. I agree, not everybody can do both, but I would claim that the human brain is flexible enough that, given the complete elimination of one side (which really, I hate doing this whole "aligning people as math or not math" technique but here we are), the other side could and would fill it in some way or another. I am a STEM person, but I do believe I am competent enough in my analytical skills, critical thinking and reading. If I was called upon or inspired to become a "humanities major" job, I feel I could. Similarly, I think that many humanities majors, given proper training, could become engineers; they just choose not to, for whatever reason.

I think the only point of difference that I can find between the two groups is the difference in levels of education given to both sides *for the other side*. That is, you can't become an engineering major without doing at least a few English classes (rudimentary though they may be); you can, however, get through a Philosophy major without ever touching Calculus or Physics. That's why I had to put in the qualifier "with some training". 

Personally, I loved my Art History, Psychology, and English classes that I chose to take in college. However, I just felt compelled to go to the sciences and become a doctor. How much energy did *you* invest in the sciences before rejecting them ?

2012-01-humanities-student-major_981_politics.txt
As someone who has studied both in engineering and in the humanities, engineering students tend to fail miserably at understanding the humanities in the same way that many in the humanities tend to lack an understanding of math and the sciences.  This of course is a broad generalization, but one I've found personally to be somewhat true. Ever have that class in mathematics where students weren't ever going to go into anything which really required math, and they would ask things like "do we really need to know this?", or "is this going to be on the test", or "oh my god I'm never going to use this shit!"?  Well did you really get Marxism jammed down your throat?  There are plenty of people taking Algebra right now who are very upset that they have to learn about logarithms or the guass jordan elimination method too.  I'm not saying you're one of those closed minded people but it's possible. 

Also unlike those classes one is required to take for engineering, those in in the humanities don't really have a "right" answer.  They tend to encourage people to critically think about, as well as learn about new material.  What tends to be more important then is how well a student can argue and relate to the material, while demonstrating a comprehensive understanding of the material as well. Engineering students tend too often to think far too literally. Vagueness is something they're not as easily comfortable with in my experience. 

2012-03-humanities-student-major_108_AdviceAnimals.txt
I'd agree with that, definitely. I'm not saying that the chance of getting a good job is the same. I'm more concerned with people asserting that it's practically impossible to find a good job without majoring in a science field. 

The way I see it, if you're going into engineering, of course it's going to be easier to find a job out of college. More demand for that specific major? Most definitely.

I think that the liberal arts majors who expect themselves to coast through with *just* their degree are the ones that get stereotyped. 

English within itself is a vastly broad major. Since there is no distinct "path" that it sets you up with (aside from aiding you in mastering your critical analysis/writing skills), you must work hard toward applying such a major to exactly what you want to build a career out of. This also explains why getting an internship (for a magazine, editing office, etc.) is immensely important for a liberal arts major (and all majors as well).

I can understand wholeheartedly that majoring in English/liberal arts isn't by any means "easier" or just as "in demand" as STEM disciplines are. But with that being said, I think it's foolish to believe that someone who decides to build a career out of something that's not science-related is doomed to a sub-par/below average lifestyle. 

2012-03-humanities-student-major_959_MensRights.txt
I personally see no need to get women into stem majors, women should do what they want.  But they can't go around and talk about how they are doing so much better than men in college when the area they are dominating is humanities and liberal arts

And they certainly can't complain about unequal pay when they compare their pay for teaching fifth graders or nursing (which actually pays damn well) to the pay of an engineer or a theoretical physicist.

Though women in their 20's to 30's make more than the average man so they don't really have anything to complain about there, after that it's their life choices that effect their pay.

Your assumption that STEM courses are inherently harder, btw, is opinion. In the 2009-2010 class, women made up 47.2% of J.D. students. In 2011-2012, women represented 47.0 percent of all matriculants to med school. Or is law school or med school too "easy" for you?

It's not opinion.  STEM majors are harder and require more brainpower than the average liberal arts major.  Why do you think so many people flock to liberal arts degrees and end up paying thousands for a college education and then come out of school and can't find a job anywhere but starbucks or macys.  They hoped they could take the easier road with less intensive work and make good money and they were wrong.  Very few people give a crap about your undergrad degree in 19th century history.

There are plenty of literature teachers, history teachers, social workers and so on.  Society has a higher demand for scientists and engineers because they produce more value for society.  These jobs pay a premium over other jobs because of the barrier to entry and their difficulty and because so many people avoid them because of the difficulty.  Are liberal arts important for being a well rounded society, sure, but liberal arts majors aren't going to get us Energy independence and past the problem of peak oil.  History majors aren't going to figure out how could fusion works or how to power the future or how to cure cancer or any number of things that will advance our society over the coming decades.  Are liberal arts Important, yes, but as a whold driving the scientific progress of society, ehh not so much

I don't know how you could think with a straight face that liberal arts majors on the average are anywhere close to as hard as the average STEM major.

And the two majors you use to try and make your point: Law and medicine, are perhaps the exception to the rule if not outright STEM majors themselves.  I mean come on.

Men aren't generally physically stronger than women, look at that wrestler china, she's stronger than some men.  That's essentially what you are doing.  You are trying to rebut something by citing the exceptions to the rule rather than the average case


Being good at theoretical physics or many other engineering functions requires significantly more intellect and brain power than memorizing historical facts and writing papers on/teaching history.  

I'm not saying women aren't intellectually capable of doing STEM majors, plenty are.  I know quite a few women engineers.  I just know far more male engineers. 

They just aren't interested in it.  They don't care about it to the same degree as men seem to.  Or they would rather work in another profession that is more interesting to them whether that's teaching, nursing, social work or medicine.

Lets look at those two majors though:

Law is not necessarily a STEM Major but i would hardly consider it humanities or in the same league as an english or HR major.  Law may not be math heavy but the logic needed for a good lawyer is up there with the logic required to be a good mathematician.

as for medicine, i don't know how you could say medicine isn't STEM.  Medicine is science and increasingly so with every passing year.  Even in your statistics though women still weren't the majority.  More than there used to be, sure, but not enough to support the view that women are dominating and more enrolled than men in hard and difficult majors.

**TL;DR**

Women are fully capable of doing STEM majors if they want to, however lets not kid ourselves here, the average liberal arts/humanities major is not on the same level of difficulty as the average STEM major.  

2012-04-humanities-student-major_190_AdviceAnimals.txt
I'm an electrical engineering undergrad, and 90% of the time when someone give me that "Whoa, your major must be super hard" look, I come back by saying it isn't really all that difficult, it's just a lot of extremely specific information that most people have never been, nor will they ever be exposed to.  

A good example is the Humanities major.  Most people entering college have been exposed to culture, know some basic things about art, could hold an intelligent conversation about it, and could probably do a decent analysis of a particular.  This is completely untrue about most things in electrical engineering.  I don't expect that *anyone* entering college could tell you what a gray code counter does, and in which cases it's better than a binary counter at a hardware level. But that's something that everyone that graduates my program should be able to know off the top of their head, because once you've been introduced to the principles behind it, it's extremely simple.  

Does that mean that electrical engineering is a more difficult major than humanities? Maybe.  Maybe not.  It does mean that it's probably harder to do well in, or possibly to graduate from, since you have no middle ground, and are 100% incapable of BSing your answers.  

Does it mean that electrical engineering majors tend to learn more? Probably not.  Other majors go way deeper into their respective subjects than electrical engineering undergrads do.  We're expected to understand a whole host of subjects moderately well, whereas other majors are expected to learn one subject *extremely* well.

2012-05-humanities-student-major_1278_SRSDiscussion.txt
I graduated with a liberal arts degree, but many people I know are STEM-oriented.  I see a lot of this from both sides.

First of all, you don't have to defend anyone against anyone.  Literature isn't going to fold up and die just because some 20-year-old doesn't care for it.

Secondly, I seriously doubt that an engineering major is a "shitlord" just because he thinks music is silly.  STEM people tend to enjoy empirical results and immediate usefulness.  These are easy to come by in the hard sciences and much more nebulous in the humanities.  When there isn't one *provably* write answer, it's a lot easier to get bogged down in rhetoric and emotion, which is anathema to people who like things clear-cut.

And there are in fact good arguments against both the "usefulness" of the study of areas of knowledge in the humanities, as well as the academic disciplines that study them.

That said, of course, it's very difficult to have any kind of "what are we doing" discussion that wouldn't eventually benefit tremendously from some strong grounding in philosophy.  You can parrot epsilon-delta proofs all day, but you can't talk about what a proof *is*, and thus what it means to be provably right in a mathematical argument and not in a literary one, without dragging yourself away from STEM and back into the humanities.  But often STEM people don't really care about that, because they don't need to, because the things they do and build still *work* without having to examine the nature of proof or argument.

2012-06-humanities-student-major_1092_AdviceAnimals.txt
It's actually incredibly easy to talk to people. With the exception of those like yourself, almost everyone out there is just waiting for a chance to tell you all about the shit they think about all day. All you have to do is get them going. Start out asking people about the useless shit, I know it feels cheap but it's the best way to go. What do you do for a living? Where do you go to school/what do you study? Then you can start moving on to the deeper shit. Oh your a humanities major, what made you decide on that? Do you like it? And even further: When did you know that you were going to be a scientist. There are so many topics it's really easy to just talk about shit. Often I find it's only truly hard when you begin to be extremely judgmental of the questions you want to ask or the things you want to say especially if you feel guilty for talking about yourself. If you find that people are more shy and not so ready to give you anything don't feel bad about talking about yourself. Who really cares anyway? Presumably this is a stranger and the worst thing that can happen is they wont like you. The truth is these are just openers it's impossible to detail how to speak in a conversation but once you get comfortable it becomes a lot easier and you shouldn't worry too much about the openers because most people aren't as judgmental of you as you may think they are. 

2012-07-humanities-student-major_1020_SRSDiscussion.txt
I'm basing a lot of this on my partner, who has a PhD in a STEM field, and his friends and colleagues. He feels like he didn't get much of an education in the humanities or social sciences past the high school level and now really regrets it - he was smart enough that he could "test out" of some of those requirements. Mostly, though, it's that he became convinced that people who were interested in that other stuff were just not smart enough to cut it in his field. That's a culture problem within STEM fields - this notion of antagonism, as if to assert the validity of the sciences you have to denigrate the humanities (this, by the way, is also gendered). So you can *choose* to take courses outside of STEM, but many people are by then already convinced that it's worthless. I think even worse than just not having had that education is their easy dismissal of people who have - they might not have taken any theoretical physics, but they'll trust what theoretical physicists say about it. But they will not trust what sociologists who have spent their lives studying gender say in the same way. Valuing certain types of knowledge and not others is a broad cultural pattern that is about a lot more than just gender - I think [this article](http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/09/0082640) talks about our single-mindedness about STEM education to the exclusion of others beautifully - but gender gets caught up in it, as the things we devalue societally tend to be the things we associate with the feminine.

2012-07-humanities-student-major_182_SRSDiscussion.txt
Is this honestly happening a lot?

The way I see it, humanities are mostly hated upon,
because they dont teach skills that make you monetary valuable to the market.

You can argue about that too, but what is discussed here is a complete different point.

I dont really see it , that someone, for example, would post a study about some sociological fact,
whatever, and people dismissing it, cause its "soft science".

In discussions posting a study or statistic, is the best you can do, it basically is the "hard science", in these cases,
as opposed to hearsay, and personal anecdote,
and from what i read, most accept it as that.
I mean what better thing should there, some mathematical proof why crime rate is high among a certain demographic ?

I think what is criticised, is not the content of the field,
but that a lot of people go into these fields, but dont really have a plan what to do with it.

And honestly I really think this is a bit of a problem.
Our eduction breeds a lot of students who are mostly taught writing good essays, but not a decent foundation (or interest) in the hard sciences,
while at the same time stilltelling people they should go to college,
and get a whitecollar-job.
(And I include myself in this perspectiveless demographic).
This really is a problem, and I dont think it should be denied,
out of personal sensibility.

2012-07-humanities-student-major_184_SRSDiscussion.txt
 Why do you think Reddit so easily dismisses non-quantitative scholarly consensus?

As a person who is what I suspect is demographically typical of Reddit, that is straight, white, cis, atheist, leftist, adult male in my late 20s, I feel I might have some insight on this one. Furthermore, I'm a college student who has had my mitts in both hard science, and humanities/social science in recent memory, that is I am formerly a Computer Science major, presently an Asian Studies major, Computer Science and Philosophy minor.

So why are the humanities so readily dismissed by use science kids? Firstly, a big part of it has to do with the fact that many in college study in the science fields as a means to acquire a career. It doesn't help that nearly every class I had in the computer science department made some sort of jab about employment opportunities for this or that humanities major. For instance, everyone I know who is studying Computer Science right now is doing it because it will afford them work. Every single one of them, full stop.

Second, and this one really confuses me, but for as long as I can remember, I had this impression that people who can't hack it in science, study the humanities. That there's something about the study of a qualitative field of study that is intrinsically more difficult than that of the humanities and social sciences. This attitude is pervasive at my school in the STEM majors, otherwise intelligent and reasonable people scoff at the idea of studying something that isn't a quantitative science.

I'm embarrassed to say, that I felt much the same way until I started studying the humanities myself. I didn't even realize I was doing it, or what was wrong with behaving and thinking like that. I guess it's some sort of STEM-privilege that provides the framework for an attitude like that. I now recognize that I'm utterly out of my depth when I get to talking to someone about a field I'm largely uninformed about, whereas before I would have engaged willingly in conversations about fields that I knew little about, having this weird attitude, like "oh, I can do math, I can totally talk about the geopolitical and sociological ramifications of China's one child policy. I mean, I can read and develop opinions on stuff, that's all these kids do anyway right?"

tl;dr - My theory is that people who study STEM fields are simultaneously under the impression that their field is more difficult than non-STEM fields, providing the idea that they are more intelligent than those in said non-STEM fields. This attitude is then reinforced by authority figures and role models from those fields.

Was this helpful? Informative? Awful? Anything?

2012-07-humanities-student-major_390_SRSBusiness.txt
One of my favorite parts:

Gender disparities in a major are not the product of sexism, but rather the differing preferences of men and women. The fact that engineering departments are filled mostly with men does not mean they discriminate against women anymore than the fact that English departments are filled mostly with women proves that English departments discriminate against men. The arts and humanities have well over 60 percent female students, yet no one seems to view that gender disparity as a sign of sexism against men. Deep down, the Obama administration knows this, since it is planning to impose its gender-proportionality rules only on the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math), not other fields that have similarly large gender disparities in the opposite direction.

Many women are quite capable of mastering high-level math and science, but simply don't find working in such a field all that interesting. As Dr. Sommers notes, many “colleges already practice affirmative action for women in science,” rather than discriminating against them. Susan Pinker, a clinical psychologist, chronicled cases of women who “abandoned successful careers in science and engineering to work in fields like architecture, law and education,” because they wanted jobs that involved more interaction with people, “not because they had faced discrimination in science.” Far from being discouraged by society from pursuing a career in math or science, these women had been strongly encouraged to pursue such a  a career: “Once they showed aptitude for math or physical science, there was an assumption that they'd pursue it as a career even if they had other interests or aspirations. And because these women went along with the program and were perceived by parents and teachers as torch bearers, it was so much more difficult for them to come to terms with the fact that the work made them unhappy.”

Yes, as an unhappy STEM feeemale I will happily tell you that I'm unhappy because after 8+ years of studying biochemistry I've realized I don't have a penis and am not interested in science. It's not actually because the academic career track assumes you'll have a wife to take care of everything at home while you're slaving away for tenure. Yep, it's all due to personal *interest*!

2012-07-humanities-student-major_646_gue.txt
I feel like very frequently people on r/gue interpret proposals excessively literally or consider extreme logical extensions of the proposal, instead of actually thinking through what the OP may have actually intended or what sub-topics would generate the best discussion. It's one thing to say the proposal is narrow and to extend or generalize it, but to just take it literally and shoot it down immediately for being so just stifles discussion.

I don't mean to criticize you personally (or even disagree with what you've said at all), but I think there is a great deal more interesting discussion that can be had on this topic than simply going to absolutes and saying that because not everyone should become a literary critic the case is closed.

If I were to interpret the question I would say that it's more a question of how valuable various degrees or educational backgrounds can be to people in non-technical areas: that is, as far as people who *aren't actively engaged in a technical field* are concerned, will they be better prepared for their own lives and to contribute to society by a science education or one in the humanities?

Obviously someone who wants to spend their life in engineering or science or medicine had damned better well know what's what, but would it be better for HR staff to have the analytical mindset granted by science education, or the improved understanding of people and situations that can come from literature?

While in reality there's no reason that there has to exist a strict dichotomy between the two, we can still probably agree that there are people who would benefit more from a background in the humanities than in science. From what I observe, American society today is set up so that most of the bright young ones go into some sort of STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) field. Prolonged study in virtually any of the humanities is a recipe for poverty: whereas virtually every STEM Ph.D program I've ever heard of provides a tuition waiver and stipend for its students, very *few* humanities programs do the same.

We can even see this attitude in (many) people's notions that degrees in English or History or Philosophy are good for getting a job at Starbucks or Barnes & Noble, and nothing more. All of this serves to marginalize the influence that a serious study of the humanities can have on our lives.

2012-07-humanities-student-major_813_IAmA.txt
Wow, you are a huuuge fucking shit.


 Why do you privilege STEM fields over African American studies? Sure we could use more black people in STEM fields, that'd be great, but you know what? You don't put a burden like that on individual fucking people, it's not individuals' responsibilities to comply with your desires, nor more than it is a woman who is an art major's responsibility to major in finance-- if there's an inequity of blacks in the sciences/business (or women in the sciences/business), that's for a whole fuckton of sociological and cultural reasons. It's very easy for a white male to say 'You should just major in this because we have some inequality in the statistics here and you could fill it by just bumping it a bit over this way." Nonononono. If disparities in which demographic groups majored in what were that easy to solve... 



Why can't it just be a facet of your identity, rather than define who you are?

You don't... you just don't fucking know what American Studies is. It's like majoring in history/sociology, and it gives people a better sense of who they are and their place in history. Do you have a PROBLEM with HISTORY/Sociology as a MAJOR? OP shouldn't have to explain his academic interest to you. You might as well tell me to not major in American Studies or European Hist because my culture shouldn't define my interests.  You talk as if racism is only a problem because people IDENTIFY themselves as black or whatever, as if the causes of inequity are people who are minorities simply not fitting in. Can you say white privileeeeege? White people dominate the fields that are race neutral...  maybe you think about fields in terms of whether they are race neutral or not because white people, as a dominant majority, don't have to think about their race and so they think other people focusing on it is silly?

Finally, yes, there is a dearth of African Americans in the sciences, and in higher ed in general. There should be more. But in general, African Americans as a demographic group on average have more difficulties in terms of having access to resources and high quality education. There is still racial inequity of educational attainment, and this largely stems from inequity of social class due to historical inequity, among other factors, and none of these issues have easy resolutions (although hey, maybe an African American Studies major could point out how this inequity came about, how it manifests itself, and offer solutions about how to resolve it!). Maybe when these problems are better tackled, minority representation in higher education and non-humanities fields will increase.

 What makes your comment so ridiculous is that you're talking to a guy who despite all odds went to Harvard. He wasn't some guy struggling through school and deciding to major in a social science to be able to pass. No, he's probably gotten better grades than most people have gotten in both science AND humanities classes in their lifetime, he rocked it in school and he pursued his calling. I just don't see the relevance of criticizing him for being a scholar of the humanities.

2012-07-humanities-student-major_843_lostgeneration.txt
That is why I hate non STEM people (not all of them, but the ones that say shit like that). a) Those aren't even that bad. How many accountants and mathematicians do you actually know? The few I know like to go out and party just like everyone else. I don't know if you ever read Something Awful, read XKCD, or listen to Jonathan Coltrane, but they all got degrees in computer science and then when on to be (successful) artist. So yeah, I would be happy with a world full of STEM majors because at least they have an employable skill but can still make art if they choose to. b) STEM is so much more than that and it feels dishonest to represent it by the two most "boring" fields, which is what I frequently (not always) see people on reddit do. They tend to respond by "I'd hate a world full of accountants" or "Yeah, I guess I should just work all time and have no personality or ever enjoy anything ever". I don't know maybe they really see the world in those black-and-white terms, but if they don't they are being dishonest and if they do then I'm not really sure what they were learning about getting their liberal arts degrees.

The point is that the humanities, and other less "employable" fields are useful to humanity, too, and we shouldn't change education into something that is just there to churn out more office drones.

Don't get me wrong, I think science, math and whatnot are awesome, but just because something doesn't directly translate to a salary does not mean it is a useless field, and everyone having a STEM major in college wouldn't actually solve any of our unemployment problems.

For many of these jobs, the cost of mistakes is very high. Sure I could learn to be a doctor if someone gave me the training. A few people might loose some limbs in the process but I'd get it eventually.

No one is saying tihs about medical jobs. But for middle class paper pushing jobs, I don't need a degree in middle class paper pushing.

2012-07-humanities-student-major_86_EngineeringStudents.txt
It will probably be pretty tough for you, unless you're already an "A" student who's developed good study and learning habits.  Engineering mathematics and physics courses are pretty intensive, and in most colleges, Physics I for engineers is not the same as Physics I for other majors, so don't be fooled by what other students tell you if they're a liberal arts major.

An introduction programming course is usually quite manageable - but there is a huge caveat here - if you are wired for programming, you will do okay.  Some people, however, are simply not wired for programming.  They can't follow the logic, can't think in "step" terms, can't understand what's going on in the slightest - for these people, even an intro course in programming becomes a living hell.

If you find yourself in this category, try finding some good programming tutorials online, see if you can wrap your head around it.  If after significant effort and multiple avenues, you still find yourself lost - you should probably find a major that fits you better.  I've seen people like this try to continue in CompE - it doesn't end pretty.

Okay, that being said, as far as textbooks go, it's usually quite optional for programming courses, as you can almost always find whatever information you need through online sources.  For other STEM courses, it's usually mandatory and genuinely necessary.  For the general math courses, you might be able to get away with grabbing them from your library and taking photos of the pages.  For the science and engineering courses though, don't try that - you'll need to read and cross-reference extensively.

As far as a laptop is concerned, for most colleges, you don't need one in class.  Unless you need one in general, I'd say save your money and don't buy one until you start classes and see what you really need.

Good luck!

2012-08-humanities-student-major_630_AskEngineers.txt
 Point being, a possible route into research for you might be to look for a similar job as I had as a support staff at a lab that does work you are interested in. 

I don't really agree with this. The OP seems to be clear that he's interested in the math and science of engineering, and a research career, not so much in getting his hands dirty as a technician.

The OP asks:

 Is a career in research (industry, not academic) feasible without a PhD? Will I be more limited in terms of compensation, advancement, general success, or will these largely depend on my intelligence and how hard I work regardless of whether I get a PhD?

Sure you may be doing 70% of the same work as a grad student (depending on the lab), but you don't have a career trajectory and they do. Not that there's anything wrong with being a technician, it just something to keep in mind. You should know working your way up from support staff to a true research position is pretty much impossible in academia. The only way to do that is to get your PhD, no ifs, ands, or buts. Previous experience as support staff will certainly help you get your foot in the door, but 1) it sounds like the OP already has an advisor and 2) it just gets harder the longer you wait to get a PhD.  It is REALLY hard to do your PhD in your mid-late 30s with multiple kids. 

 America (if you are American) is being flooded with more PhDs of all fields than there are posts available

This is very true for liberal arts fields, but is less true for fields which have a lot of industry R&D. So it's more true for Civil (relative to other engineering disciplines), for example, but not true at all for EECS. If you get an EECS PhD, you can definitely expect to get a good paying job in industry. However, tenure-track academia positions are hard to get regardless of your department.

2012-08-humanities-student-major_679_circlebroke.txt
Fuck.

So, I wanted to put together a similar post, but I've gotten really sick of the STEM jerk that pops up at the mention of anything remotely in the territory of the liberal arts/humanities. If it doesn't have an easily quantifiable return on investment as a field, it is apparently useless to the rest of society.

[This thread](http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/ya43v/rainbow_drama_stem_vs_liberal_arts_hippy/) and what it [links](http://www.reddit.com/r/ainbow/comments/y71vx/lets_talk_about_misandry/c5sy5fb) to was the latest thread to pop up. The comments made by the alleged SRSers in /r/ainbow are a little loopy, but the defensiveness of the STEM jerk is just aggravating.

Man, liberal arts majors are cranky.
They must've had to wait on some picky customers today.

Clev*er*.

This kind of jerk is something I take personally and should know better because I've spent years trying to qualify what I do in research so that it sounds more credible to someone outside my field. For someone to say that they could put together a sociology journal article with just some software and a stats textbook ignores the whole qualitative/ethnographic side of sociology (though I do mostly quantitative research) and underestimates the amount of work it takes to get something through the review cycle (ho ho but it's not going to be published in *Nature*). 

It's smug in the same way someone looks at a couple of abstract paintings in the gallery and says their kid could do that.

Shit, sorry for the whine. 

Also, it took a little digging to find, but of course Interior Semiotics gets brought up.

2012-08-humanities-student-major_689_AskAcademia.txt
It's funny that you asked this now - A week ago, I would have said no, not really, but this week I just finished teaching a writing across the disciplines workshop for faculty in which we had a sudden eruption of hostility.  We were discussing the differences in writing conventions between different disciplines, which is important because we often tell students we are teaching them "academic" writing, when we are usually just teaching disciplinary writing - writing in history or biology or whatever (very confusing for students).  

I brought in a Math paper for us to look at to start a discussion about how writing in different fields can be very different, and the humanities people FREAKED OUT.  They got very judgmental and blamey, very certain their way of writing was the correct way  and that STEM fields were fucking it all up.  Then the STEM people started deriding the humanities for the whole postmodern, language is socially constructed, must examine/disclose subjectivities position, and the discussion went all to hell.  

As a humanities person myself, I was dismayed that more people couldn't take the position that different fields have different ways of constructing knowledge and that they by necessity have different languages for getting that work done (i.e. plenty of humanistic theories tell us that language is epistemic, so I found it curious that more humanities people couldn't accept that premise).

2012-09-humanities-student-major_1307_technology.txt
Maybe, maybe not. More than anything there is a lack of educators in the field, because many of them can make more money elsewhere. At least with this money we might be able to encourage more people to start teaching in the STEM fields, which may in turn encourage more people to show interest and take them seriously. Compared to the arts teachers, my college has a real problem getting STEM teachers, and there is always panic if one quits or retires. Less teachers means that the students also have less variety when it comes to choosing a teacher with a teaching style that works for them and works with their schedule. Up to date equipment is another important thing for many of the STEM majors, but it's all very expensive. No, having newer equipment won't make a student smarter or more interested in the subject if it's just not meant to be for them, but it will make it easier and more fulfilling for those that are dedicated to obtaining a STEM degree. I'm a biology major dreading transfer, because I know I'm going to be playing catch up in the advanced labs at universities.  Some of the transfer students I've talked to for advice said that a lot of the students end up dropping out of STEM majors when they transfer, because many of the colleges just aren't preparing them properly due to poor funding. 

On top of the above, STEM majors on average spend longer in school, which  means it costs more to obtain the degrees. The guidance counselors at my college expect the arts majors to spend 2 years in college prior to transfer if they are going for a bachelors or higher, but all STEM majors are expected to spend 4 years in college prior to transfer. We all get the same amount of financial aid from the school regardless of major. I maxed out after 3 years, so the last 2 semesters I've fallen behind schedule and came very close to dropping out, because I just can't afford it. I'm not alone either. I've had a lot of my STEM major peers end up in the same situation, but they just gave up(especially so for the older students and those with families that depend on them). I'm not about to throw away the last 3 years of hard work, so I'm holding on by a thread until my financial status improves or until I am able to transfer and put myself in debt with student loans. It sure would be nice if there was more funding for students with STEM majors on the college level.

2012-09-humanities-student-major_333_AskWomen.txt
As far back as I can remember, authority figures told me that girls aren't "good" at science and math like boys are...and that girls were better in subjects like English. This proved to be very discouraging. In high school, I didn't see many fellow females in my science and math classes beyond the classes that were required. It really is a shame because the more I read and look at research, there really isn't that big of a difference of what boys and girls are capable of learning. It's just a matter of how they're socialized.

Girls tend to be encouraged to pursue subjects like languages, humanities, social studies, nursing, teaching, etc. Boys tend to be encouraged to pursue subjects like math, science, business, technology, etc. This is a major part of the reason behind the discrepancy. 

It has been changing, though. Slowly but surely, more women are making their ways into STEM fields. Still, it can be a bit discouraging for some.

When I started college, my major was Computer Science. In several classes I was either the only girl or one girl out of two or three. In some ways, it did feel very much like a "boys' club," and that was sometimes intimidating. I felt like the people I worked with in my classes didn't respect me, my intelligence, or my abilities. 

I ended up changing my major (not because of the guys) to Psychology/Neuroscience. I'm happy with this. I have always loved science. Even though I was always told that girls aren't "good" at science, that never stopped me from pursuing it and enjoying it.

2012-09-humanities-student-major_373_comics.txt
Dear STEM-majors,

You guys are useful. You make life more comfortable for a lot of people. Good for you. Okay, I've given you your cookie, now sit down and listen to me.

I'm not denying the biiiiig scawy reality that non-STEM majors have more difficulty in the job market. I'm not lazy either. Despite what you STEM-majors think, some subjects are thought-provoking and take work. Have you tried to draw a nice picture recently, STEM-majors? I don't know, it takes a lot of practice and effort. But so many other people do this silly art, so it's useless. How is this silly non-STEM major and their silly art doing anything worthwhile? Well, I won't judge what worthwhile is, but I will say that it takes years of practice to refine one's skills - composition, perspective, color, shading, and so on. Art is challenging too, even if it isn't a math problem. A lot of effort goes into it, and for some reason this doesn't resonate with STEM-majors.

Oh, STEM-majors, practical abilities are peachy keen, but I just can't bring myself to face the glory that is STEM. I would be bored and unhappy. I would rather apply myself to, in my case, languages and social sciences. A lifetime of STEM would give me little happiness. I plan to love my job, not just tolerate it. 

So I get my degree in something non-STEM. And fuck, I'll still have my pride if I end up working at Starbucks (hmmm, reminds me of a tired old jape against non-STEM majors, this situation). It's not my degree that I think is the issue. Don't worry - it's not just you engineers and scientists enforcing it, but everyone. Somewhere along the way, people started to undervalue the immense effort, time, energy, and passion behind the arts. We keep saying that teachers need more respect and then turn around and criticize potential teachers. We enjoy successful artists in music, movies, and television, but we scoff at those attempting to contribute to these fields. There *is* a space between getting your degree and having success, and it seems that not getting a well-paid job immediately is frowned upon when in reality, STEM-majors are on quite a different path. Not everyone will get that high salary out of college, which is just *fine*. 

In the end, what I can't stand is non-STEM degrees being trivialized.

Thanks,

MissSophie

2012-09-humanities-student-major_552_antisrs.txt
If I say "water is wet", a STEM major might say "What about ice?"

One thing that has happened to me is, in a conversation about music, I have said "Abbey Road is a great album", and the STEM person that I was talking to started arguing about how the word "album" doesn't apply to something that I downloaded onto my computer. So instead of talking about music, we are talking about the correct terminology for different forms of media storage.

Yeah, I wouldn't call this a product of being a STEM major, I'd say it was a product of __being incredibly socially awkward__.  

I don't know a single person who works where I work as a software engineer (multinational 50k-employee corporation), that can't handle a social situation with deft.  Maybe most of the really awkward, verbally meandering types are filtered out in the modern corporate world, where _everyone_ needs to be somewhat sociable.

Maybe it's the STEM majors you hang out with?  Maybe friends from childhood who went that direction, and  never grew up socially?  

[EDIT]  - This argument is a bit dumb to begin with, because when you use words like "STEM-splainin", you're telling me that you're coming from a position of antipathy.  Both STEM and the Humanities are useful, one shouldn't disparage the other--I have found __both__ personally very useful/interesting.  I love me some fucking Philosophy (among other things).

2012-09-humanities-student-major_571_antisrs.txt
One issue I agree with is that STEM people often make fun of liberal arts as a whole, even though liberal arts includes things like econ and poli-sci. I can understand making fun of people with "gender studies" degrees or lit degrees, but it's a bit of a stretch to include some of the others along with them.

I think most of our presidents had degrees in history/poli-sci, and while it's not technically the highest-paying job, it's at least one of the most significant and well-known. I think for degrees like those, the potential *pay* often isn't the most important factor. Lawyers *do* tend to make a lot of money, assuming they can find jobs. The fact that the job market sucks right now shouldn't really count against them, especially if they have a passion for that subject. 

Especially for psych/philosophy majors -- it's not like those people expected to make $150,000 a year right out of college (or ever). Most likely, they just genuinely enjoy those areas of study, the same way science people enjoy science, and math people enjoy math. It might be harder to find a job for them too, but I don't think that's necessarily their greatest focus.

STEM people tend to focus on the fact that jobs are plentiful and the pay tends to be good (depending...). My issue is, I suck at math and science, and never took much of an interest in them, so I'd hate the coursework and probably end up hating whatever job I got in that field. My stepdad's a history major who has a job in a completely unrelated field, and he's been making six figures for most of his career. My mom never got a degree, and she's making even more than him. 

So when it comes down to it, I think the arguments from both sides tend to be pretty stupid. I could make fun of a lit major for getting a pretty worthless degree -- but if that degree ends up getting them a job as a journalist, or if they somehow become a best-selling author, then I'd look like an idiot. And if we consider the fact that maybe they just enjoy the subject regardless of potential earnings, most of the arguments against it go out the window. Not to mention that many STEM majors I know haven't found jobs yet, and many have found crappy jobs.

In terms of coursework, STEM majors generally have it harder. In terms of starting pay out of college, they generally have it better. In terms of availability of jobs, they generally have it easier. But if somebody majors in lit just to get a better understanding of the writing process, and *hopefully* make some money from it, what's the issue?

Though I'd agree that a major in "gender studies" is pretty ridiculous no matter which factor you're looking at. 

2012-09-humanities-student-major_641_SRSDiscussion.txt
I'm an art student, and I grew up in a community of artists. 

This whole STEM superiority thing enrages me. My best friend is in astrophysics (or something similar. She tries to explain it and I understand about every third word) and she started university doing engineering. Which is of course, the most noble of pursuits and obviously the hardest degree ever /s. 

As an art student, I was doing way more work that her and her classmates. 

I routinely pull 40 hour work weeks at school. I live and breathe art. The fact that so many people just brush it off as stupid or as pretentious bullshit enrages me. They are missing out on so much. They also refuse to recognize that all their video games, all their tv shows and yes, even a lot of their porn is the result of non-stem people. The arts and humanities not only understand culture, they create and shape it and this fact is too often neglected.

As a rabid feminist, I also get super annoyed when shitlords demand "proof". The sources I have at my fingertips are pretty much entirely cultural theory or similar. Because it isn't **science**, it obviously doesn't count and I'm an idiot etc etc etc. The fact that my main area of academic study is masculinity and maleness in the latter half of the 20th century means absolutely nothing to them. Because it isn't **science**. 


I'm angry now. I'm going to go watch art21 and forget reddit exists. 

2012-09-humanities-student-major_677_TwoXChromosomes.txt
1) they can't handle the coursework - not true
2) they have no jobs lined up after college - very true
3) they're intellectually inferior - not true at all

The fact that you're letting these guys bother you so much is worrying. As an English major myself, I was always looked down on - and I continue to be in the professional world. If you can't handle that, then maybe you should switch back. The tormenting will only end when you end up in an arts-oriented workplace, and many of them aren't really hiring. 

There are things you can do to show them that you're smart--try asking them some of your homework questions, to see what they'd come up with. Try reading them one of your readings, and seeing if they could interpret them. Most STEM majors think that liberal arts majors just read all day, with no analysis or critical thinking. Prove them wrong. 

You need to sit them down and talk to them. Have a serious conversation. Awkward? Yes. Worth it? Yes. They're shitting all over your hopes and dreams and making you feel like an idiot. This is not okay. Your self worth is obviously fragile, and you shouldn't allow them to imperil it any longer--it'll only get worse.

The fact that their teasing makes you question your choices perhaps indicates a twinge of regret. There are ways that you can still pursue STEM while a liberal arts major--it doesn't have to be one or the other, as you may think. You can audit classes, take one class per term in the STEM departments, etc. Not allowed? STEM departments will always bend the rules for a woman. Trust me. If you're a female who wants to take calculus or chem, they'll let you in. I learned computer programming while at university as an English major, and that's why I was able to get a job after I graduated. 

As a liberal arts major, you either need to have a) a wealthy background, connections, cash for endless unpaid internships OR b) technical skills to get a paying job after you graduate.

2012-09-humanities-student-major_907_AskReddit.txt
Good enough statistical evidence does, but that evidence isn't really very good. Just a few examples:

- Science courses are often graded on a curve, whereas humanities rarely are. Add in science often being a highly competitive field filled with some of the best and brightest, and you have a recipe to skew GPA's.

- People generally choose humanities because they are either very good at it, or like it a great deal. There's not a lot of reason to be, say, a Philosophy major, unless you're very good at it or very passionate about it. I would argue that both of those traits tend to lead to performing well in those classes.

- It doesn't really address a fundamental issue, which is whether professors are (or should be) grading people on an absolute scale, or on a relative scale. In other words, in an English class, if almost everyone writes a brilliant essay, does that mean that the prof gets pickier and still gives out the roughly same number of A's, B's, etc. or do more people get higher grades? Do the people who didn't do so well get judged even more harshly in comparison? Most prof's don't have this down to an exact science in the humanities, and there's going to be a fair bit of variation.

I could go on, but my point is that it's not something you can easily prove one way or the other. You'd have to conduct multiple studies controlling for a wide variety of variables, and even then it would be tricky.

One [interesting study](http://web.phil.ufl.edu/ugrad/whatis/LSATtable.html) I saw was about the highest performing undergrad degrees on the LSAT. Physics and Philosophy were #1 and #2 respectively, but Biology ranked even below English (Bio was 12th, English was 11th).

Now, the LSAT isn't the be all and end all of tests, but it's pretty challenging and I think encompasses a lot of what people usually mean by intelligence.

2012-10-humanities-student-major_1075_funny.txt
Okay, so we're moving onto defining what it is to live a worthwhile life.  I'm not going to put words in your mouth, but to me life is worthwhile when there are things to do beyond base civil interaction.  Do you plan to have sex literally all the time when not working?  As an obvious proponent of the STEM majors you recognize that people have a refractory period and are not always going to want to have sex?  And we haven't even moved onto the process of finding people to have sex with to begin with.  To me, life as a human being is not purely about finding food, finding mates, and working on infrastructure.  If it is for you, that's fine but I seek something more out of the world.  Culture is important.  Culture is beautiful.  You say that liberal arts education hasn't existed for most of human history but neither has STEM- formally at least.  The university system is a relatively modern invention in the timeline of human history. Before this point, people learned from their elders.  They gathered their understanding of the world through observation, experience, technical knowledge, and stories passed down from generation to generation.  It's only because such stories and knowledge were passed down that we were able to build up our infrastructure and our society to the point it is at today.  That's what liberal arts and science education were for most of human history.

I'm not saying STEM majors are somehow less important or inferior to Liberal Arts majors.  We need STEM majors to build our society and advance our technology.  However, we are not robots.  We cannot find enjoyment in simply working and basic physical enjoyments only entertain for so long.  Why do you think art and music developed intuitively?  Culture in all its forms contributes to our society.  It makes the world beautiful and makes it worth living in.  We need all kinds to make the world work.  The only thing we do not need are the narrow mindsets of people like you, other Pro-STEM-only posters on Reddit, and even Pro-Liberal-Arts-only posters saying one is better than the other.  They're not.  They contribute to society in different ways so just stop comparing them altogether.

2012-11-humanities-student-major_1077_SRSDiscussion.txt
I'm also a STEM major so I understand how you feel. If I weren't a physics/math major I probably would have been an english major, but financial issues would've driven me to med school regardless.

SRS makes fun of STEM neckbeards in the same way they (used to) make fun of redditors as virgins. Its a catchall and fits in with easy stereotypes about most redditors. I don't think anyone is actually making fun of someone because they study STEM, but its an easy thing to tack on. Its not fair but thats a problem with internet discussions.

That being said, there is a legitimate issue with a possible closed mindedness of STEM majors. If you go to college and all you study is science and math you may lose the opportunity to broaden your horizons in how you see the world economically and socially and in terms of who you interact with. Most colleges though seek to remedy this by requiring a lot of electives and that certainly helped me. Also being able to study the humanities in college is a privilege and I'm sure those who study it are probably aware of that.

So yes, the stereotyping of STEM majors is wrong, most STEM people are not creepy neckbeards and its wrong to lump them all in like that, but when people want to circle jerk they probably don't have that in mind.  

2012-11-humanities-student-major_1085_SRSDiscussion.txt
The way you write about it, it's almost like you think there's a straightforward binary choice between STEM and arts/humanities/social sciences. Like people are thinking, "well, I could major in physics and be guaranteed a job, but I'd rather do poetry because I like it and I've got rich parents who will support me even though I'll be less employable." Which may be the case for some people, I guess, but you're ignoring the fact that not everyone is equally good at both STEM stuff and the arts/humanities/social science.


I have always been relatively terrible at maths and science. In high school, my lowest grade was in biology, and I had to drop down from the highest level of maths to the lowest ("easiest") level or risk failing out. I got nearly perfect SAT scores on the reading and writing components, but my maths score was way lower.


So, when I was applying for university, my thought process wasn't "fuck STEM, I want to do what I enjoy, even if means I'm unemployable!" Instead, my thought process was, "I am, and always have been, good at social sciences. My maths grades, and the level at which I took maths, makes it unlikely I would get into a decent STEM courses. Even if I could get in, it would be to a relatively bad school compared to where I could go for social sciences. Also, I hate STEM because I suck at it, and I suck at it because I hate it, and I don't want to be miserable for the rest of my life, but that's a moot point BECAUSE I CAN'T FUCKING GET IN TO A DECENT STEM COURSE WITH MY GRADES ANYWAY!"


I ended up doing a degree in international relations at the best univeristy for that subject in the world, and now, one year out, I have a salary that I can live off without any family support. Where would I be now if I decided to go with the traditional "STEM good, humanities and social sciences bad!" attitude reddit spouts?

2012-11-humanities-student-major_1111_SRSDiscussion.txt
As a former STEM major with a bachelors who works in a STEM field, who also happens to somehow manage to not hang out only with STEM majors to circle jerk over how much better we are than everybody (for no objective reason) I need to ask, ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!

The amount of STEM majors I know who work in their field is equally as low as the people who majored in art/humanitees, only humanities majors can do their work (visual art, writing) in their own time.  STEM majors rarely have home labs.

My job is awesome, but I also know that it is rare.  I know this because of other STEM majors I went to school with trying to find jobs related to their fields.  Not to mention all the damn emails going out about funding cuts should this fiscal cliff thing happen in congress.  Who knows how many jobs will disappear.

I grew up in a diverse neighborhood and went to public school with many kids who were themselves immigrants, or first generation.  Some went into STEM fields and some went into the humanitees.

I have a friend who has bachelors in English literature who makes double what I do and goes on extravagant business trips while working in her field.

I mean, the amount of assumptions you make is overwhelming.

I do not accept that people with STEM majors have an easier time finding a job, I don't accept that immigrant families all behave the same way, and of course I don't consider studying a humanities or social science field a privilege.

Lets also mention how many corporate positions hire from humanities/social science fields.

I also think that it's important to mention that the work that people in the humanities and social science fields do is no less valuable.  It's an artificial system of value that places a higher monetary cost on certain types of work, and lower value on others.

I mean, I wish that I had the time/inclination to go into this further, because this touches on so many issues, but I don't.  There is so much silliness in this post.

2012-11-humanities-student-major_1112_SRSDiscussion.txt
Who's making fun of STEM majors? At least, who in the Fempire is. I know a lot of people like to joke about nerds or whatever. But I don't know anyone that actually looks *down* on someone for being a STEM major.

I'm a humanities major because I'm just not good at STEM. I'm really interested in humanities, and want to have a career in that field. I don't really know why this is a privilege (beyond just being privileged enough to go to college in the first place). Its not like my parents are super wealthy and able to support me if it turns out I don't get a career in my chosen field. Once I graduate I'm pretty much on my own. 

Yeah, I've chosen a field that isn't going to allow me to earn the kind of money I could be earning in a STEM field, but I don't understand why choosing a relatively low-paying career field and deciding to give myself a lower standard of living makes me privileged. By that logic, I could say that anyone who is able to compete in STEM is privileged, because they are able to make more money than me. 

Also I know plenty of humanities majors that come from lower-income immigrant families, so I don't really agree with your point there. I even have a professor of Art History whose father is Japanese (I don't recall where her father is from). She actually said in class once that part of the reason she decided not to go into a STEM field was that she didn't want to be seen as fitting into a stereotype of Asians (you know, "Asians are good at math.").

From reading the other comments I see that people do make fun of STEM majors in SRS sometimes. But whenever I've seen it its not the STEM major they're making fun of. Its the ridiculous perception that these people are somehow *better* than non-STEM majors, and that their ability to use "logic" makes them superior to "emotional" women. 

2012-11-humanities-student-major_1121_GradSchool.txt
I'm pretty surprised no one here realizes how grating it is for science people to constantly jerk about how stupid/unsuccessful humanities majors are. This is r/gradschool, can't you guys just pretend to be in the same boat for once for crying out loud. its_your_their is being pretty reasonable by expressing their discontent, with the exception of bringing up whose getting paid more, although it's pretty relevant. Science people talk about how they're doing it for the love of it, not the money, but humanities people apparently study useless disciplines so who cares if they're doing it for the love of it or not-- all of a sudden the science jerk doesn't care about intrinsic value. So then it's funny to mention how they'll all end up earning minimum wage. You don't see humanities students knocking on scientists, despite the fact that they manage, defying the science jerk's own logic, to make more money than what people would predict. Humanities people are told by everyone that what they're doing is pointless. I think they understand better than science people sometimes that it's about the love of the discipline, not how much you make, hence why you barely see any future historians saying 'hurr hurr physics? Have fun in your mom's basement."

Sure, it was "just a joke," sure, it was just there at the end of that quote or whatever. You could have left it out. The fact that it's "just a joke" doesn't make it any less of an underhanded, offensive comment, and OC chose to include it for some extra laughs.



2012-11-humanities-student-major_1195_circlebroke.txt
Uhm, okay, so why the BEEP BOOP STEM mockery, then?

It wasn't supposed to be STEM mockery, it was STEM-jerk mockery.  I'm absolutely fine with the STEM fields and anyone who wants to study them.  I quite enjoy a lot of them.  What I was mocking was the utilitarianism and "STEM = God, liberal arts = stupid bullshit" circlejerk that's so common on reddit.

Just say Hey, majoring in liberal arts is the prerogative of the wealthy, and leave it at that, instead of dismissing people who, rightly, realize that pursuing a BA in English or psychology or sociology would be disastrous for them, and, perhaps validly, resent people who have the freedom to choose a career that is (admittedly) more fun than sitting at a computer and validating code?

Two reasons:

1.  I *don't* think liberal arts is the prerogative of the wealthy.  Certain fields might be - classical studies, for example. People can find success in that field provided they're extremely talented and hard-working, but it's obviously much more difficult to make a living as a Aristotelian scholar than a medical doctor.  But liberal arts includes a huge variety of disciplines, including the ones I listed above and more, some of which can absolutely be lucrative.  Hell, technically math and science are included in liberal arts, but that's pretty much a semantic distinction.  And anyway, college education *in general* is the prerogative of the wealthy.  Some people can't afford it at all and have to make do.

2. Think of it this way - stop picturing some hipster rich kid with a Bachelor's in Basket Weaving or some bullshit.  Picture instead a teacher in a low-income school working their damn ass off to educate high school kids.  It's understandable to resent the spoiled hipster.  But when you participate in the "everything but STEM is worthless and stupid" circlejerk based on the image of some spoiled brat, you're also dismissing all those other people who *are* contributing greatly to society, working their *ass* off at it, and are hardly being fairly recompensed for it.  *That's* what I'm objecting to.  It's a massive, insulting, unfair generalization.

2012-11-humanities-student-major_1237_AskReddit.txt
I just wanted to say that I hate this line of thinking. Math and science are seen as superior to humanities and social sciences, the reason being that many new jobs today are math and science oriented. However, this degrades the worth of humanities and social science degrees and pushes many college students to choose between a major they enjoy but uncertain job prospects or a major they hate but decent earning potential. I don't see how that's helping anyone.

My SO is getting his degree in computer engineering because he enjoys computer engineering. He will graduate this May and already has 3 job offers with a starting salary of around $80k.

I got my degree in psychology because I enjoyed learning about psychology. I am interested in what makes people tick. I got a job a few months out of college doing consumer psychology statistical analysis for a tech company. I make $35k currently.

I earn less than half of my SO, but I'm happy with my choice of major and happy with my job. I make enough to live pretty well and enjoy what I do. Sure, I could have studied engineering and be making way more money, but I would have been and would currently be miserable. 

Most of my coworkers, including the ones who are making $200k right now, studied the humanities or social sciences in college; communications, sociology, art history, psychology, and international relations are the majors of our top 5 highest paid board members. Only one of these five people is over the age of 35. Despite popular belief, these majors are not "useless outside of academia".

2012-11-humanities-student-major_211_Economics.txt
Part of the question is why don't colleges price degrees differently already? Why is a BA in English Literature priced the same tuition as a BS in Computer Science? Why aren't schools embracing market principles when applying costs to different degrees that obviously result in different outcomes? Why do they need the government to enforce regulations to make the changes? I suspect that there is a reputational cost - students and educators might be outraged if one degree costs more than another at the same university. Or it could just be tradition.

One thing I am just not sure about is who is subsidizing who? Are liberal arts major subsidizing STEM majors, i.e. the cost of providing a STEM education is higher than providing a liberal arts education? Or is it vice-versa? The author thinks liberal arts majors would be paying more. I think it is actually the opposite. Where liberal arts majors would be paying more is in acquiring loans to pay for college (assuming no government guarantees and a private loan market). Since their expected income is lower than the income from STEM majors, acquiring financing would be more difficult. However, this could be offset by the cost of their education also being smaller.

So, in my ideal free market for education, there would be no government loan guarantees and degrees would be priced differently. STEM degrees would be more expensive, but STEM majors would have an easier time acquiring financing from private lenders because their income is expected to be higher. Liberal arts majors would have a more difficult time acquiring private financing (due to lower expected income), but this would be offset by a lower tuition since (again this is my assumption) providing a liberal arts education is less expensive.



2012-11-humanities-student-major_770_atheism.txt
AHHH LOL ENGINEERING LOL I'M SO SMART AND RATIONAL LOL STUDIES OF HUMAN INTERACTION ARE IRRELEVANT TO MY **RATIONALITY** BECAUSE I'M A CONDESCENDING ASSHOLE LOL.

ALSO WHY DON'T GIRLS LIKE ME??? STUPID FRIENDZONE.

edit: We le STEM majors are so discriminated against and looked down upon (and rather unfairly in my opinion.) And when you look at the people who criticize us, it's always either people who didn't even go to college (scum of the Earth plebs amirite?) or liberal arts majors. What does one even do with a liberal arts degree in this day and age of SCIENCE and enlightenment? They may as well have just taken all that money they payed for college and burnt it. There are literally no jobs anywhere that a liberal arts degree will help you get. It's not that STEM majors think that they are better than everyone else, it's that they are. In fact, it's been proven that STEM majors are better at being humble and gracious than all other groups of people in the world. So the sentiment that "we think we're better than everyone else" is completely false, we are humble enough to not think that despite being better than everyone else. (it's too bad my professors can't see my true genius and innovation. I blame them for my bad grades and for not letting me count playing vidja games as "class work")


2012-12-humanities-student-major_1300_todayilearned.txt
As a masters in teaching student (my undergrad was history/geology), I can say that this is definitely true. Not only is it true, but college education classes are almost entirely a waste of time. I learn more in 5 minutes at my internship than in days of classes. Also, the classes are considerably easier than anything else I've taken. The fact that teaching students tend to have low gpa's is even more telling when you factor in the ease of the classes they take. Not only that, for my masters program, I had the highest GRE score out of the entire 51 person cohort. I did not make any effort to do well on that test. They are scraping the bottom of the barrel. 

I can tell you why this is the case, too. Teaching, in the US, has absolutely no prestige attached to it. Not only that, the government often finds itself having to pay teachers the same, no matter what field they go into, regardless of what they need. I am going to be a science teacher, I am one of 6 out of my cohort. My state has a horrible shortage of science teachers, but they can't increase salaries for science teachers as a draw because they would be sued by everyone else. Bullshit, vicious cycle that will not improve until more people value education and actually spend time thinking about how to fix the problem. What makes it even worse is that teaching students tend to be less intelligent and capable than STEM majors (or even the harder liberal arts degrees), and they are also the ones who end up making the classes for other teaching-students. The sorts of books I've read for this degree are just terribly written garbage that don't actually have a point. No practical knowledge given. 

Ugh. I can go on and on and on about how screwed we are. 

2012-12-humanities-student-major_79_AskReddit.txt
Okay so we have a really talented journalist, right? He sucks at numbers, can't do shit, can barely pass high school Algebra, forget Calculus. But because there's no chance of him ever being happy or successful at his job because STEM majors are the only people who can ever be happy or successful, he decides to become an engineer. So he studies his ass off, manages gets a job, then spends the rest of his life unhappy and wishing he could be writing stories about the day's news.

Then we've got this kid who loves Math, maybe a modern-day Einstein. He likes Rubix Cube's, he likes to code, he is curious about the world and how it works. But he can't find a job where he can do any of that, because by the time he's graduated from school the STEM occupations are filled with middle-aged engineers who don't even like their job. So his talent is lost and under-appreciated. Hell, by the time he gets to college he might be hearing 'There are too many people in the STEM field, you'll never get a job. Just go Liberal Arts or you're going to end up on the street.'

But everybody should go into STEM, right? Fuck what makes you happy or your own definition of success.

Tl;Dr, you like math and sciences, go into those fields. It will be great and you'll love it. You don't? Go into a field that interests you. It will be great and you'll love it. Depending on the economy or modern technology you may or may not find a job but nobody should judge you for what you love to do.

2013-01-humanities-student-major_1520_personalfinance.txt
Yeah, I'm not trying to downplay the fact that the system is fucked up, and needs to be fixed. It definitely does. But the system did not force you to go to a school that costs 42,000/year. That was your choice, and that was my point.

I was actually in the exact same situation as you. 5th year, funding ran out. Had to get an 18,000 loan at 10%, to pay for the year. 

Luckily I got decent job, as did my wife, and we're on par to pay our student loans off completely by April 2015. It'll be about $70k in 6 years, which frankly is pretty pathetic now that I look at it like that.

________________________________________________________________________

The thing that bothers me about the cost of education, and this isn't a popular opinion on reddit, is that it really discourages people from going to school just to learn. I mean, basically what is developing is people are saying that the only reason to go to school is to go into the STEM fields. And if you go to school for anything non-STEM, you deserve to be poor and broke. I feel like this is bad, because while an artists' or musicians' contributions to society may be less measurable than an engineer or doctors, those people are still just as important. I would hate for our university system to devolve into a vocational school for STEM fields. Liberal arts are very important, and just because our economic system doesn't reward as much as STEM fields doesn't mean they aren't. And I say this as an Engineer.

2013-01-humanities-student-major_199_circlebroke.txt
I think it's interesting double standard. Most non-STEM people will happily admit that they're no good at STEM without trying to insult everyone who is.

I've known a couple of people who are very talented at writing or art or something like that who will say something along the lines of "Wow, math was really hard for me, I hated it in high school, you must be smart in order to be a Physics major. I could never do that!". But I've yet to meet a single person who is talented at math or science and has said "Wow, I really did poorly in English class, you must be really smart to be an English major, I could never do that!"

The prevalent non-STEM attitude towards STEM seems to be "That's great you are good at it, but I'm not, but that's OK". The converse attitude seems to be "You're pathetic for only being good at liberal arts, and I would be better than you at liberal arts if I considered it worthy of my brilliance".

If you did poorly in a STEM class, it's because it was too hard. If you did poorly in a non-STEM class, it's because the subject was pointless. 

The self-satisfaction that most of le typical redditor STEM majors displays can really get on my nerves sometimes. Engineers and scientists may improve the world by the stuff they work on, but so do liberal arts people. I design airplanes for a living. When I get home, do I sit around with my hand down my pants while reading scientific journals and looking at engineering drawings? No! I read books, listen to music, play games, and otherwise enjoy the benefits afforded to me by all of the smart and wonderful non-STEM people who created those things that bring me entertainment and enrich my life. I'm glad that the authors whose work I enjoy went to college and became English majors and wrote kickass books. World needs art, otherwise what's the point of having science? Helping us sit around being bored and miserable for a longer time and in more comfort and convenience?

2013-01-humanities-student-major_310_AdviceAnimals.txt
Liberal Arts major here (English Lit/Philosophy), and amen to needing Math in the liberal arts degrees. In Florida it is possible to get away with not taking College Algebra for fuck's sake if you're not STEM. I've gone through the Calc series, differential equations, as well as Physics I and II, Chemistry, and Bio/Microbio. My colleagues? Usually Liberal Arts Math I & II (think math history), and MAYBE College Algebra. They tend to have a sweeping ignorance of Math and Science, and it can be maddening when such subjects come up. I used to tutor math for a local college. The non-STEM people drove me up a wall because they had ZERO interest in learning the material.

The other thing that is maddening is talking to engineering majors, as their knowledge of the humanities is often extremely wanting. Seriously, half the time it is like talking to the most arrogant, money-obsessed, little science robot that ever was. Humanities majors often get shit for not knowing science, but I always wonder why we consider it ok for college graduates of any major to have gaps in basic knowledge.

As for job prospects...looking around my department it's pretty apparent which students are going to get the kind of jobs they want, and which aren't. The technical writing majors are going to have a decent time. The creative writers (largest section at my school for English) don't really want traditional jobs for the most part. They seem to be fine with living on a prayer. In Lit most of us are going to stay in academia, or just teach high school if that doesn't pan out. Some go toward law. There's a lot of options, and the employment stats aren't too bad for those in the humanities. I always figured that if you wind up as a barista you simply lacked ambition (the market doesn't help right now, but still).

2013-01-humanities-student-major_335_AdviceAnimals.txt
I can't speak for the above, but it is often my experience when speaking with engineering/math majors that, among many humanities, the areas they were most lacking were in history and literature.  Example, the movie title Prometheus is an allusion to the Greek myth about fire being brought to man.  Most of my liberal arts friends could make that connection in a heartbeat, but many of my math and science major friends needed some explanation.  It is also fairly common for me to hear that the most recent, non-textbook read by these friends is Harry Potter or something similar (Hunger Games, etc.).  While I'm not ragging on those books and I'm generally happy to hear that people are reading at all, it should be noted that those are children's/teen books and are not appropriately challenging and nurturing for an adult mind.

Now, I feel that the core of this issue is:  what is more important?  Objectively, one could argue that knowing how to manage your money, invent and build, and understand the natural world around you is more important than picking up on some context clues, and I would agree that being unable to do those things is gravely insulting to one's own role as a functioning adult in society.  But I must say that it is especially irritating to talk with someone that doesn't understand their own history and culture beyond what they see on TV and hear on the radio, and this is often the feeling I got when speaking to many math and science-oriented majors.

2013-01-humanities-student-major_399_Teachers.txt
I'm not really sure if this is what you're looking for, but I'm going to tell my story:

I was a great student in high school. I'm assuming that by "top talent" you mean the kids who do well in high school and go on to do well in college. Most of my peers are becoming doctors, lawyers, and scientists. I started out my college career in physics because I like science and I wanted to do a "hard" college major. I think that among well-performing students in the US there is a lot of competition to take on the majors and professions that are viewed as very intellectual and extremely difficult.

I'm pretty sure that most of the honors students at my high school saw teaching as "too easy". It's something the "normal" kids go to college for because they can't handle getting a PhD in neurosurgery. If you go to any med school or tech school you will find this attitude that views liberal arts, history, business, and education majors almost as poorly as they view dropouts. (Not saying that having a bad view of dropouts is acceptable either. There's a story about that if you want it.)

I think that one of the major problems for teaching in the US is the "elitist" attitude of medical and other STEM fields, and the way that well-performing high school students fall into that attitude. I know that I definitely did. I didn't start out in teaching because I was so conceited that I thought I would be "wasting" my potential if I didn't do a subject that was touted as extremely difficult and male-dominated. I felt like it was my duty to enter a field with a reputation for being difficult. I think that most of the people in my high school honors classes felt the same way. Now that I've realized what's going on I think that's a horrible attitude to have. I don't know why so many people feel that way.

tl;dr: Smart high school kids think that STEM is cooler because it has a big reputation, and they want to show off how smart they are. Being a teacher doesn't let you show off how smart you are to your peers.

(edit: accidentally a word.)

2013-01-humanities-student-major_723_SRSDiscussion.txt
i dropped out of a stem field and found liberal arts to be much more useful for "figuring out the world" (and for organizing my life so that i don't have to spend time with mofos i want to punch in the face every day). stem people are often experts in lucrative fields and therefore think this "expertise" extends to any sort of punditry whatsoever. stereotypically, they show adequate modesty in their field because that's what they read about so they know their place. humanities/social justice wise, they don't read anything at all and look down on people who do. because they know nothing of context and complexities in the humanities, they assert their opinions blindly but somehow think their careerism/opportunism entails that their opinions are superior even wrt shit they know less than nothing about. it's depressing, pathetic, and will lead to a future that is even more of a futuristic dystopia than the present. because it's so easy to take stem courses online, i know calculus, physics, eecs etc. i wouldn't expect people to be interested in my analysis of "the world" if i didn't know anything about major aspects of it. stem people have no such qualms. like others have said, when i tell stem people i do english and philosophy, they start talking to me like a child or a charity case. it's simultaneously laughable and sad. many of my friends are stem people (check out my stem friend! i totally have a stem friend, guys!), though, and it has taken extracurricular projects and calling out the "mansplaining" every time for them to be sufficiently intimidated by me instead of assuming they're the ones who have to condescend.

2013-01-humanities-student-major_726_SRSDiscussion.txt
I don't know about Prime, I'll answer about the fempire in general.

My background is as a cisgendered bisexual male Comp Sci/Math grad. This is a part of the fempire that has always pissed me off. The fempire discussing STEM is a lot like how society discusses veganism. "All vegans are sanctimonious" because the only vegans people know are the small fraction that bray loudly about it, the decent majority just do their thing and don't hassle anybody. 

It works similarly for STEM people and the humanities. I've lived in the South and the Pacific Northwest. In the South STEM is bigoted, but no more than the rest of college students. In the Pacific Northwest people are in the Pacific Northwest and so treat one another with love and respect, STEM people included.

Treating it as a response to reddit, the feeling makes sense. Reddit is hostile to the arts, more STEM people agree than feel like saying "as a STEM person, you're being shitty" (generally when I tell people to stop being shitty about this stuff I don't identify myself as a STEM person), the appearance comes out that the mean STEM people are making "anthro major= future barista" jokes. 

As rhetoric, the fempire (Prime in particular) is positioned terribly on this. Before I knew the nature of Prime, this is the attitude that turned me away from the fempire. The large majority of STEM people (those who aren't hostile to SJ causes) will just go "oh, you hate what I am, bye then."

2013-02-humanities-student-major_1064_TwoXChromosomes.txt
Well, I'd say that human society *does* need people to analyze (and create) literature. But in either case, that's not the only thing people with English and related degrees do. My dad majored in English for undergrad, and he is a professor in a humanities field; he has a job from which he can pretty much never be fired, gets paid to write interesting books and travel the world lecturing, and makes plenty of money. My best friend is a screenwriter, and writes for a video game company. Many of my friends who majored in English are teachers; it's pretty tough to argue that that's not an important job. And then of course, there are even people who cross over into more STEM-related fields with that sort of degree, such as technical writers.

As a note, my personal career path is about as STEM-related as it gets...I am a software engineer about to go back to school to pursue a graduate degree in physics, and plan to continue working in industry. But that kind of path is not for everyone. Some people are not good at math or science, or don't enjoy those subjects-- or they don't enjoy the careers that go along with them. Conversely, I would be a terrible screenwriter and have absolutely zero desire to ever do anything like that, but I'd be pretty sad if everyone else felt that way too, and no more TV shows and movies got made.

There's a place for both types of careers (and people) in our society.

2013-02-humanities-student-major_1120_AskReddit.txt
Liberal arts *degree* =/= Art major. We need to distinguish between a degree from a liberal arts school (i.e. you choose a major but are required to have a broad education), a degree in liberal arts (i.e. that liberal arts is your major; you have no specialty), and a degree in one of the liberal arts (i.e. a major in one of the humanities such as fine arts or history).

Personally, I believe a liberal arts education is far better than a science only education. Why? Because science is far more than merely collecting and compiling data. You need to actually interpret it and then be able to communicate that information. You need to be able to relate it to increasingly complex systems, which often include social influences. That is something many science students without liberal arts degrees simply cannot do. While the trend in recent years has been to push strongly for science and engineering and to denigrate anything else, that trend is swinging back at universities because more and more companies are complaining about the quality of their new hires. I am involved in teaching undergraduate science students a crash course in social and economic concepts. Many of them struggle to put two sentences together or form a coherent argument.

If you don't take my word for it, then maybe you'll listen to the [raging anti-business hippies at Forbes.](http://www.forbes.com/sites/vivekranadive/2012/11/13/a-liberal-arts-degree-is-more-valuable-than-learning-any-trade/) And [again at Forbes.](http://www.forbes.com/sites/collegeprose/2012/10/29/does-your-major-matter/)

Basically, that article would be a strong argument for eliminating *easy* degrees. But are all liberal arts degrees easy? The author obviously thinks so, and I would agree that some are, but then there are easy STEM degrees out there as well. I completely reject the author's claim that one can learn the equivalent of a history or philosophy degree online. I suspect he would fail miserably if actually pressed to do so himself. 

On the other hand, I strongly agree with eliminating the vague 'liberal arts' majors that lack and specialty.

TL;DR: Mocking non-science is trendy, but increasingly less so. Many employers actually prefer liberal arts degrees to straight science degrees.

Edit: Added tl;dr

2013-02-humanities-student-major_1446_TrueReddit.txt
I like this article, but I wonder if it's not a little deluded?  

The problem seems more that the market, for jobs that require a liberal arts degree of one sort or another, has become saturated, even super-saturated.  The *direct* effect of which is to require years of low- or unpaid internships, and only a *secondary* effect is that only the already wealthy can afford to pursue such careers.

And this is only the natural consequence of offering a liberal arts college education at relatively low cost -- the most popular majors are, predictably, the ones that (generally) lead to the lowest-paying jobs out of college.  And while I'm certain many of these majors are, in their own way, *difficult*, they are not *restrictive*.  There are few college students who couldn't succeed in one of the general humanities majors; whereas only a very small percentage could succeed in one of the engineering or scientific majors.  Which, not coincidentally, tend to be better-paid out of college.

The title of the article is not misleading.  The Boomer generation is out-of-touch with economic reality when it comes to college education, but only because they've come to be out of touch with every other economic reality as well.  The younger generation, who have to live in that reality, need to learn to compete within the "quality" problem of a hyper-educated workforce that doesn't have enough to do.

2013-02-humanities-student-major_697_circlebroke.txt
Neuro is one of those things that you have to get an advanced degree in if you want a job in the field. There are no "neurological engineers" (yet) and lab techs are all grad students. If you can find a neuroscience job that only requires a Bachelor's degree, please share it.

 But the point is that by completing a physics PhD or whatever you've demonstrated that your IQ is at least 130

"IQ" is a meaningless number that only measures how good you are at taking a certain type of standardized test. If you meant "intelligence" and not "IQ", there are plenty of brilliantly insightful liberal arts majors out there and plenty of unintelligent STEM majors - people who can spit back formulas, but don't have a good conceptual grasp of the material.

 in which case you probably make a good analytical generalist and there are jobs that will pay for that.

The humanities are just as analytical as any of the STEM subjects; that's what bothers me the most about the STEM jerk: the assumption that qualitative and quantitative subjects are mutually exclusive. I suggest you read up on Semiotics, Structuralism, Formalism, and especially Russian Formalism to start with (my experience is mostly in lit, so that's what you're getting here). Surely history must be analytical as well, though: all those primary sources don't just magically Voltron themselves into a textbook, do they?


2013-02-humanities-student-major_728_circlebroke.txt
Alright, I'm going to go against the grain a bit here, but hear me out.

I'm studying undergrad engineering right now, and the whole anti-"artsie" (as we call students studying arts) mentality is very pervasive here as well.

However, I'd pose that, from my experience, engineering pranks like this (ones that poke fun at arts students) are not motivated so much by some haughty STEM elitism, but by rivalries between faculties that are intended to build spirit among students within those faculties.

During frosh week, the arts students like to yell at us "build a bridge and jump," while we chant back "write a poem and cry."  The point is not to foster a deep-seeded hatred for each other, it's really just for fun and spirit building.

I understand that some people on both sides of this "rivalry" will take it far more literally than it's intended to be taken, but the core of it is not to perpetuate the STEM-jerk.  Reasonable people do not think this way.

As many of my friends like to put it: "Everybody just needs to chill."  Arts students are smart people.  Engineering students are smart people.  There's no real purpose in getting actually worked up over how "stupid" each other are.

Small, harmless pranks like the one depicted here shouldn't be taken as proof of the "le almighty STEM" jerk.  That kind of stuff comes out when people express their beliefs whilst actually being serious.  The people who did this are not being serious.  

2013-03-humanities-student-major_1312_SRSDiscussion.txt
i don't think anyone here is going to ever argue that non-STEM fields are useless since many of the arguments made here are informed by critical or feminist theory. the reason STEM fields are being pushed is because there is a dearth of people trained adequately in them. that's why they pay so much higher. tons more people major in psychology or business than do in physics or computer science.

there is a very prevalent culture, at least in the united states, that eschews math and numbers (i'm sure as a b.s. in math and economics, you've encountered this before--i certainly have) which likely contributes to this phenomenon. the effect of this is that well-qualified people who might otherwise be very successful and enjoy STEM fields a great deal are getting repelled from it before they even give it a chance. i can't tell you how many people i have met who say they hate math without actually having studied it very much (not to say people can't dislike math, just that i think a lot of people don't actually know what math *is* and reject it before becoming at all familiar with it). i'd argue that a lot of people in STEM fields have a similar reaction to non-STEM fields. i really wish people didn't so staunchly compartmentalize themselves into their disciplines and ignore anything outside of them...

perhaps what you're advocating for is that people in STEM fields become better versed in the methodologies and rationales present in other disciplines? if that's you're point, i wholeheartedly agree. as we see extensively on this site, some STEM students vehemently oppose anything they don't deem 'useful' in the sense that it doesn't lead to a clearly-defined, well-paying career path. if some of these students were better informed in the humanities and social sciences, chances are racism and sexism wouldn't run so rampant in their cultures.

2013-03-humanities-student-major_1346_SRSDiscussion.txt
I'm a grad student in an interdisciplinary field (most people in my program come from some sort of fine arts, film studies, or production-oriented background). I'm also presently working as a videographer on a web series covering a set of projects funded by a big grant for a regional arts council. These projects also emphasize interdisciplinary work, because they combine artists with more STEM styled scientists (biologists and dancers, sculptors and geographers, psychiatrists and thespians, etc.)

Something that I've seen in both of these settings is that STEM professionals collaborate really well with people who don't come from that area, and vice versa. Academic-wise, social scientists (and artists, to some extent) are engaged in their own disciplines through methodologies which have to be just as rigorous as STEM-work in order to qualify as producing knowledge (data-collection and analysis is a bitch, whether you use quantitative or qualitative methods, and lots of social scientists use both). Maybe people in humanities have a tougher time of it with the subjective nature of their work, but there is a lot of work and discipline that goes into these so-called "soft" subjects. This is especially true  after you get past the undergrad stage, where most of what you do is terrible, no matter what it is - you're new, after all.

My advisor has a background in industrial engineering, and currently teaches courses on performance art as activism and qualitative participatory research methods. Another faculty member at my school has a background in science and technology studies (STS) and computer science, and I learned so much continental philosophy from him in a basic intro course for the program.

With these projects I'm filming, I see people who are applying different backgrounds and perspectives to public issues, and that intersection of perspective informs and strengthens everyone's contribution. People know both areas (STEM and non-STEM) are important, but they act ignorant when they treat them like opposing teams. But you can't build anything people would want to live in without an understanding of engineering *and* design. 

Tl;DR Valuing STEM against non-STEM creates a false dichotomy and is only good for self-validation (if you never want to work with other people).

2013-03-humanities-student-major_1500_explainlikeIAmA.txt
You know how when you write up that perfect code, find the perfect lab results that support your hypothesis, or finally finished that previously-thought impossible proof? You feel that way because the way your brain is wired, it finds pleasure in the logical and the mathematical. Now, I'm sure you're aware that not all people are the same, yes? Take you and your lab partner. You guys paired up because he was good at setting up experiments, but not so great at data collection, and you were the opposite. Your labs really only worked out because you had each other to balance yourselves.

Well, on a much larger scale, people whose brains are wired to enjoy STEM related fields and people whose brains are wired to enjoy Arts related fields are lab partners, in the lab or existence. Look at it this way, our STEM friends are the lab partners who are really good at "setting up the experiment" so to speak. This isn't to say the Arts people couldn't, they just realized they're not as skilled in it. But the Arts friends are really good at the post lab write-up. They are able to capture what happens in the experiment (life) like no one you've ever met. They even do it through all sorts of different media, be it writing, art, music, dance, etc. 

So, I think I'm done rambling, but my major point in all of this is life is one big lab, and what good is conducting an experiment without documenting it afterwards so that we may share our findings? If anything, we've got an ethical obligation to. And what good is being able to write up the experiment if there's no one set it up well? We need to embrace our differences, and only then can we have a truly rich human experience.

2013-03-humanities-student-major_734_AskWomen.txt
Sorry, I beg to differ though. People think quantum physicists and theoretical mathematicians are *smart*. Sure, maybe you have no idea what they do, but that is a different kind of thing than I think the humanities experience. And not at all, I think, why STEM fields are "more highly respected," nebulous as that is.

I can offer personal experience. It seemed to me in college like the answers you give in the humanities don't matter. There wasn't ever *one answer* or a *right answer* just various shades of the right answer, and the way you were graded, or how highly respected you were had more to do with what sort of (in my opinion) BS you wrote in your paper and not what you actually said. In contrast the sciences and maths were right or wrong, there's no two ways about it. It seemed less subject to the whims of whoever was grading or reading your paper and more subject to straight reality.

To me, that made those fields more *real.* I was studying something *real*, humanities majors were not. Hence, your outcome.

EDIT: I should say that on top of *real* I mean *accessible* or objective. They were something that I could learn sort of on my own through logical thinking and not something that seemed to depend on the way my professors taught the subject. I don't mean to say that the humanities aren't real, because that's obviously not true.

2013-03-humanities-student-major_752_AskWomen.txt
I've never met an engineering major who couldn't get at least a 3.5 in any humanities course, but I've met PLENTY of humanities majors (men and women) who can't pass STEM course.

Both require a lot of work, but my math classes require a hell of a lot more work for me than any humanities class ever did.

That said, a lot of people just kind of plow through them and I know plenty of people in my classes who are really not as smart as you'd think.

There is a definite answer in many STEM fields and that's harder to get to than the nebulous papers you can get by with in the humanities. It's like... yes, the answers are hard, but they're so hard nobody can say exactly what's wrong with a slightly bad critique or theory.

This is why quantitative work makes progress. You can't make progress if you can't agree on an answer.

Language is much harder, *but* you max out your knowledge in theoretical terms when you are fluent. You can read the literature, but frankly... nobody cares. I speak three foreign languages, and people realize that takes effort, but beyond translation, they serve no use.

I think women shy away from these fields because it's no fun to be the only woman in a study group. It's uncomfortable. (See: all the threads advising women to go into a STEM field to meet men. THANKS GUYS.)

I for one will encourage my kids to get at least one math/science related degree. I enjoyed my humanities degree but it did not help me even in a very relativistic, qualitative field.

2013-03-humanities-student-major_914_CFB.txt
VT does $400+ million a year in STEM funding, has a top 15 engineering school with half a dozen top 10 departments, a top 5 architecture school ranked number 1 as recently as 2008, and most of our business and science departments are in the top 50-60 with a few stellar programs (geology). In the 1970s, we expanded beyond the polytechnic (A&M) curriculum, and yes, our humanities are both very young and very weak, which greatly shafts our overall ranking.

Nevertheless, even by the absurdly unreasonable USNEWS rankings, VT is still better than half a dozen existing AAU institutions. We're tied with Michigan State and Iowa, and ahead of Indiana and Nebraska. We do more research than 20+ AAU schools. Maryland is a bit ahead of us and also has great engineering, but they're certainly nothing like UNC Chapel Hill, UVA or Michigan. I'd say VT is better than Rutgers than most of the things we do well (obviously inferior in humanities), but lesser *overall* due to weakness in the soft and liberal fields.

I don't know enough about Cinci to argue for them, but I know that they do a lot of good STEM research. I encounter them a lot in my field, and I consider personal experience far more valuable than a hierarchical rating system devised by a bunch of communication majors working for a magazine that can be bought at a supermarket for $3. If the ACC grabs one more Big East team, I'd personally pick Cinci.

2013-04-humanities-student-major_452_worldnews.txt
Why not just leave as much of these social, societal and domestic issues to the states and local communities, and just keep the standardized curriculum/ assessments to keep the the country on par for progress?

Because we're not a loose coalition of largely independent states? Because the education system is the very core of a sustainable economy? Because that economy is no longer highly localized, but quite the opposite, highly intertwined across the nation?

I'll get downvoted to hell by all the liberal arts and humanities fans on this, but I'll be honest here, the reality of the world we live in is that it's the STEM disciplines that manufacture the goods, drive technology, and ultimately *make* the economy go. I'm not disputing the necessity of diversity in education and in ideas, but the fact remains that we're not going to get out of this financial mess by educating generations of historians, artists and what-have-you. So from where I'm standing, the necessity for a nationwide standard for STEM education is pretty frikkin' obvious.

Now this isn't really a problem because STEM fields deal with universal absolutes and it's really easy to directly *quantify* what's right and what's wrong. There isn't anything subjective here, which lends itself very well to standardized education. When it comes to Math, Physics, Chemistry and Biology, you would intentionally want every single kid in this country to be learning the *exact same* material before they graduate high school (hopefully) on their way to college.

Our mistake has been trying to apply the same approach to highly subjective liberal arts and humanities disciplines. There's no reason for this. Have the DoE implement nationwide standards for STEM, but leave everything else to states and local communities. End result? You make sure that bigoted idiots don't remove *the facts* from the education system, but at the same time you spur the kids' creativity by giving liberal arts and humanities teachers much more leeway in the way they teach their respective non-STEM courses. Problem solved.

Point I'm trying to make is that you can't be absolutist about this.

2013-04-humanities-student-major_636_circlebroke.txt
And the second point is where it just becomes a huge "no, just stop." If you're unhappy with your major and you're getting to the point of experiencing depression of cynicism because of it, just stop. find something you want to do, change your major, take a semester off to find yourself, or just play the field and maybe even * gasp * take a non-STEM elective!

Well... I'm not sure if it's that easy. Getting a major in Engineering is really fucked up because it's not only about really hard subjects, you usually have to deal with douche professors that usually don't give a fuck about you.

And all the professor I had were really conservative, homophobic and sexist - I currently dropped a subject due ~~to a gay/transexual joke~~ various reasons including a gay/transexual joke a professor did, I'm honestly considering in taking this to court, but that's not the point. 

From all the peers I have, I notice most of them are really closed minded, most of them have zero knowledge of anything that's not Facebook memes, this includes any type of non-mainstream music or even relevant political news. Most of them have no stance towards controversial issues (we had a debate about legalization of weed and abortion), so in the end you start to realize that Engineers are really smart. But that's about it.

In the end the whole Engineering mind set is something that you're kinda forced into as you get through your classes, it's a sum of a bunch of factors that goes from the environment they were brought up (most engineering students are intelligent and have some sort of sense of self entitlement because of that), from the fact that the subjects are rather broad and hard and the people that teach you about that are really big pretentious douchebags. 

Sadly most colleges don't give a fuck about thinking outside the box, they don't give a shit that their Engineering students become mindless douches to get into the market, but I honestly think that if these courses had more humanities classes, all these students could become better people for society - I can say that for myself, the few classes I had about Philosophy and Cinema made me learn to analyse things that no STEM class could've ever achieved. 

2013-04-humanities-student-major_648_circlebroke.txt
Yeah, that is how I feel at my university. The kids who do the most complaining, really in any field, but particularly in the sciences are the ones who aren't actually that good at it. I always think: Maybe if you spent more of your time studying and working rather than taking "study breaks" because you are "so stressed", then you wouldn't be so stressed because you'd be doing better. Second: if you hate it so much, and are so bad at it, why not think about another field?  I know plenty of kids here that are perfectly happy with their science classes and do well in them. They might occasionally say that a test was particularly tough, but they usually just keep their heads down, work hard, and live a pretty normal college life; drinking included.

This isn't limited to STEM fields though. I am a double major in Government and Psych with a minor in philosophy. People bitch all the time, pull "all nighters" where literally a solid 60% of the all nighter is talking about how they are pulling an all nighter, eating food, drinking coffee or taking "study breaks". People procrastinate, complain about unfair tests, stupid professors etc a bunch in my programs too. And maybe that is only cause I go to a school that has more rigorous and respected programs in the social sciences and humanities than in the hard sciences. But I think it is just a general college student/teenager/young adult problem. It is a difficult portion of your life, and you are starting to develop your own adult identity independent of your family and parents.

Particularly at highly selective universities, pretty much all the students were valedictorians, 4.5 GPA students, president of their high school, captain of their debate team, the star quarterback and did hundreds of hours of community service. And now they are thrown into a university where everyone is like that, and shock of all shocks, they might not be the smartest person in the room anymore. Everyone defines themselves so much on their accomplishments and position at the top of the heap, because they've always been the best in their town/middle school/high school etc. Its a classic big fish small pond to a small fish in a big pond situation. It is a lot easier to blame your struggles on unfair professors, tests, or the fact that your major is so much harder than others than stop and accept the fact: maybe I may be smart, talented and hardworking, but others are even more so. I think this is where a lot of "STEM is better" angst comes from.  

2013-04-humanities-student-major_676_circlebroke.txt
Honestly, I think that a lot of the super over the top STEM types on reddit are the ones who suck at it.

To be completely honest (even though I'm using my troll account, but fuck it, I'm drunk), there's a lot to that.  I went to a community college during my first two years for a degree in IT.  Even then, at the young age of 20, I knew there was nothing special about it.  Sure, it was "STEM," but even *I* knew that the T in STEM is really nothing all that special.  When you break it down, technology and its practical applications are derived from science, math, and engineering.  Anyone can be a "technology" major and get a job resetting passwords at a help desk for a couple bucks above minimum wage.

Even though I knew this, I remember sitting in the dining hall, trying to work on an essay for English Comp II, when this neckbeard sitting across the booth asked me a question.  "What do you say to a liberal arts student," he asked.  I didn't say anything, just looking up from my laptop and binked.  "Yes, I would like fries with that."  Punch line.

Even then, before I knew what Reddit was, it left a badge taste in my mouth.  I mean, come on.  We were both IT majors at a community college.  While an applied associates in "network whatever" is probably more useful than a bachelor's in Green Technology of Women's Studies, to lump all of liberal arts (which includes all linguistic majors as well as things like finance, depending on how broad your definition is) just sounds laughable.

A year and a half later, I graduated with a 3.97 GPA and an inflated ego.  Like this guy, I thought that doing fairly well as le STEM major meant I could tackle anything.  Then I transferred to a four-year university...

Sure, I did alright as a Computer Science major, but my ego was starting to buckle under the pressure of the image I created.  Yeah, I was that guy who constantly posted to Facebook about how art majors are idiots or how English majors would spend the rest of their lives working at Starbucks.  Then, after being kicked in the ass by *actual* science courses like Physics (passed, but not with flying colors), I learned just how silly it is to brag about being le STEM.

Basically, what I'm drunkenly trying to type is that most of the BRAVE STEM majors you see bragging about it on reddit are guys like me who don't understand how hard these courses actually are.  Just because you know some trivia you learned from listening to TWIT and Security now doesn't mean you're a fucking scientist.  You have to earn it, like those of us who actually finished college did.  And when you do, you won't go bragging about it on Internet message boards like assholes.

2013-04-humanities-student-major_719_circlebroke.txt
I think that worldview has changed since the financial crisis in 2008. With the constant reporting of the student loan "crisis" (it kinda is and isn't at the same time) they always interview the Art History major with $100k from some no-name institution and talk about if they'd known better, they would be not have picked Art History. So Reddit immediately thinks that ALL Art History majors are financial wrecks that will be forced to take any menial job after graduation. 

So if humanities degrees are worthless, then the opposite must be true. How about Le STEM degrees. The glorious contributions of the scientific minded are hard to overlook, like the iPhone...wait, what's that? Steve Jobs only attended one Le Physics course and attributes a lot of his success to taking calligraphy? Oh John Ives is a designer that's been praised for Apple Product's artistic quality. DAE HATE APPLE?

The people complaining about how "easy" the humanities have it are also drawing from their own personal anecdotes. They fail to point out that their humanities friend could also be failing their class. They fail to take into account that those people truly dedicated to learning are equally as busy as the STEM major. Writing a *great* paper takes longer than 3 days. I've written Economics papers that took all semester. And Psychology papers that should have taken all semester instead I did in 3 days (and the quality difference is obvious).


2013-04-humanities-student-major_874_changemyview.txt
Some clarification questions:

Your whole argument seems to be predicated on the fact that you're accruing debt by going to school.  If you get a scholarship, pay your own way through school, or are the child of independently wealthy parents who agree to pay your tuition for you with no strings attached, and therefore graduate with no debt, should you still major in a STEM field?

Now, some points for you to consider:

A large percentage of people do work that is not related to their college degree, so choosing a major is not necessarily correlated to working in that field.

There is probably only a finite number of jobs to be had in STEM fields, and there are jobs in other fields that need to be filled that require degrees outside of STEM fields.  

"Should the taxpayers really pay your bills for you just because you didn't want to take a field that would require more work than you?"  This is blatantly false; you're assuming that non-STEM majors are easy or fun, and ones that you consider worthy are "real work."  I think people tend to think of subjects that fall outside their field of strength to be harder.  This is not reserved for liberal arts students who think doing calculus is hard.  I've heard a lot of engineers gripe in my day about having to learn a foreign language or write a paper.

What's your incentive to be practical?  I guess it's your internal motivation.  If pragmatism is important to you, pursue it.  It's not important to everybody, and economic fulfillment is not the only type of fulfillment.  Teachers get fulfillment from working with kids, and they sure as hell don't get it from money.  

I mean, to say that the existence of liberal arts majors/careers is unilaterally irresponsible on an individual basis and also harms the rest of the country is somewhat shortsighted.  We need people in all fields to keep the world running, and they all need training in those fields.  The world does not run on science and tech alone (...he...said...on...Reddit...?), so although those things are important, they're not the be all and end all of education.

Source:  A handful of years as a high school and college teacher with three degrees, two in a social sciences field and one in a tech field.  Had jobs in the educational and private sectors.




2013-04-humanities-student-major_880_changemyview.txt
I think that different people value different things, and living in the society we do, we are allowed the freedom to place certain values on certain things. While one person may value natural sciences more than art, I don't think that another person has to shame them or discredit their decisions to pursue a degree in something that they don't value. If they make the decision to study and take out loans for their sociology degree, then yes they shouldn't be forgiven and they should need to pay back their loans eventually. (In my opinion the whole cost of colleges in the higher education system is flawed (in the US)). Another point is that many of these degrees, whether they be in STEM fields or humanities will NOT guaranteed future jobs in the same fields that they spent years studying. There shouldn't be complaints regarding people with degrees in humanities, because:

1) They have as much freedom just as you do to value whatever they choose.
2) They know the amount of debt they're accumulating and they should be responsible for it.
3) A degree in a certain field doesn't always translate to one's future career/jobs. 

No one should be judged as being better for choosing to major in biochemistry because in the future they might be working at a low-paying job unrelated to their studies while someone with a degree in a social science (economics is a social science too) might be working in a financial firm or somewhere they weren't initially aiming for and making much more than the science major. A lot would depend on who you know and your past experiences I suppose.

2013-05-humanities-student-major_1604_changemyview.txt
I'm actually going to partially agree with you, but I'm also going to try to CYV

For context: I just graduated with an undergraduate degree in History, one of the most "Non-STEM" fields there are.

I fully agree that if two dudes of equal intelligence and work-ethic went to the same university, and one took History and the other took Engineering, and both were just working for the degree, that the Engineering student would probably work a WHOLE lot more than the history student. While the engineering student studied late into the night and worked on projects night after night, the History student spent his nights playing video games and watching Indiana Jones before slamming out a good 65% paper the night before it was due. He studied a few days before his exams and rocked out a solid 70% average, while his buddy slaved away night after night for a respectable 80%. 

I fully agree with this interpretation, and I think at this level, you're right.

BUT! BUT BUT BUT BUT BUTT, this is not true across the board. While it is undeniably true that to JUST GET A DEGREE, there is a lot more work to do in STEM fields than in Humanities fields, I would argue that those students AT THE TOP of their fields in the Humanities or any other Non-STEM program would do an equal amount of work to the top STEM students. 

Yes, if I just wanted a degree I could have had a very, very easy time getting through my history program. I could shit out a decent essay in 3 hours, no problem, and that is exactly what a lot of students in non-STEM fields do. But, there are many students (like myself) who want more than to just "get a degree". We want to learn, we want to teach, we want to do masters degrees or PhDs, and for us few, "scraping by" is not enough.

In my time at university, I wrote two honours theses, received several academic scholarships, and maintained an A average. While I was in the same classes as many people who "shit out essays", I also put in hours of work every single day.

See, the thing about Humanities courses especially is that getting an A+ is nearly impossible (some teachers differ, but generally speaking). While it is easy to get a B or a B+, once you start getting into the A range, the amount of hours of work you put in start to mean less and less. To make an A- paper an A+ paper takes day after day of hard work sometimes, with absolutely no guarantee it will pay off. I have put weeks into final papers which, at the end of it all, turned out not to be what my professor was "looking for" when he assigned it. 

My best friend is in Mathematical Physics. He goes to a different school than I do, but we keep in contact over Trillian. Every single night during our degrees, we were on there working and talking. While the nature of our work was different, we were both there every single night until early in the morning. While he was solving complex problems, I was doing background research into the Haitian revolution. While he was waiting for programs to compile, I was scanning through online archives trying to find documents which just maybe would boost my 89% to a 90%. 

The thing with STEM is that it is very structured. This isn't a critique or anything, it is just the nature of the beast. Students in STEM programs have to work hard no matter what. A student getting a 70% in a STEM degree is going to work a lot harder than a student getting a 70% in history. BUT, I would argue that a student who is getting a 90% in a STEM degree is doing just as much work as a student getting a 90% in a history course. The RANGE of grades in STEM and Non-STEM courses works differently. At the lower end of the grade scale, NON-STEM courses are quite forgiving, while STEM courses are brutal (hence the high drop out rate in fields like Comp Sci, Biology, or Engineering). But, at the top of the range, everything is pretty equal.

If you have any more specific questions I would be happy to respond.

2013-05-humanities-student-major_1709_EngineeringStudents.txt
I'm a cs major who is planning to minor in English, so I've seen both sides of the fence. The thing is, speaking from my experience thus far, both of these disciplines can be very hard, though they hard in different ways. While cs is hard in a quantitative sense, English is not, and I feel that engineers only respect the quantitative sort of difficulty because they are left-brained by nature. In math/science classes your grade us a direct numerical assessment of your performance. It's binary: you either know it, or you don't. In the humanities, an assessment of your work will always have some sort of subjectivity factored in, which, compared to the previously mentioned binary nature of grading in stem, might seem like bullshit. My own philosophy on this is that you get out of a class what you put into it. Sure, you can get a decent grade on a paper by starting it the night before and bullshitting most of it, much in the same way that you can cram for a physics final a few nights before and still get a decent grade, and then realize three weeks later that you couldn't solve a problem involving rotational momentum to save your life (I might be projecting for this part). Some of the most interesting classes I've taken so far are in the humanities...I feel that these classes make you a more educated person about the world, which will never, ever be a negative in life.

2013-05-humanities-student-major_1728_college.txt
Are you aware of the CIP classification system?  The government has already sussed this out.

http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cipcode/Default.aspx?y=55

I think you are confusing the term "liberal arts" for "humanities."

I also think ranking them by difficulty or rigor is a non-starter.  The judgments are subjective.  What's easy for one person can be hard for another.  I did great in stats but struggled in some of the subjects you're calling "easy" because I just didn't have the head for it.

What is interesting is that your hard-easy continuum is not too dissimilar from the amount of consensus in each field.  Consensus in a disciplinary/feild sense means how much scholars in that area agree on methods and theories. In hard sciences, scholars pretty much agree.  In the humanities and fine arts, there may be a lot of dispersion of opinion.  Social sciences fit in the middle.  It doesn't make a field "easier" or "harder," but it does mean that you may have a lot more variation in what is taught in low-consensus fields, and instead of encountering "one and only one correct answer" types of mental tasks, students may encounter a lot more opportunities for interpretation, argument, and let's face it, just pure bullshitting. I think that contributed to why people may think of certain courses as 'easy.'  You can't bullshit on a Calculus exam; you might be able to in your comparative lit course.

2013-05-humanities-student-major_1750_EngineeringStudents.txt
I don't think it's right to assume that people in other majors don't know, going in, that their job outlook isn't as set in stone. I think they do in fact recognize this and, for that reason, the fact that they continue their liberal arts major isn't something "illogical" but is more a badge of courage/determination. 

If every person in college went ahead and avoided the majors your "idiot friends" are studying, then we would no longer have universities-- only technical schools.

Higher education serves a much more significant role that merely teaching people technical skills-- it holds the keys to leagues of information in the fields of history, art, and literature.

Years from now, people might scknowledge our technological feats but I'd argue the greatest success of humanity lie in the arts-- the arts are the attempt to describe the human condition, they are entirely human and serve no other purpose other than the intent to say something about the human race.

Engineering may be fascinating, but at the end of the day it's mere educated manipulation of the physical world for our benefit-- it is may have beauty in its complexity and depth of understanding, but it lacks the innate, often inexplicable beauty, central to the human condition, that the arts and sciences attempt to explain. 

TLDR; Engineering=the cool lambo you've always wanted, Arts= the beautiful countryside you're going to drive it through. 

2013-05-humanities-student-major_257_engineering.txt
["The STEM-Shortage Myth"](http://prospect.org/article/stem-shortage-myth)

The Economic Policy Institute [published a report](http://www.epi.org/publication/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill-labor-market-analysis/) yesterday on the supposed shortage of professionals in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). You've probably heard of the crisis by now. America is not producing enough STEM degrees. This will be the death of innovation and global competitiveness. We must reorient higher education to convert more liberal arts students into STEM students. And so on.

The problem with this alleged crisis is that it is not real. As the EPI report lays bare, the common wisdom about our STEM problem is mistaken: We are not facing a shortage of STEM-qualified workers. In fact, we appear to have a considerable STEM surplus. Only half of students graduating with a STEM degree are able to find STEM jobs. Beyond that, if there was an actual shortage of STEM workers, basic supply and demand would predict that the wages of STEM workers would be on the rise. Instead, wages in STEM fields have not budged in over a decade. Stagnant wages and low rates of STEM job placement strongly suggest we actually have an abundance of STEM-qualified workers.

The EPI report tends to focus on the relevance of these findings to guest worker programs and other immigration issues. The tech industry has long suggested that it cannot find STEM workers in America and therefore needs immigration changes that will enable it to bring in more workers from abroad. Skeptics have rebuffed that the tech industry really is just interested in cheaper STEM labor and that its proclamations about a dearth of STEM-qualified domestic workers is just a convenient cover story. This report provides ammunition to the latter camp to say the least.

2013-05-humanities-student-major_269_changemyview.txt
While I agree that science and engineering majors should be taught about ethical implications/limitations/past failures of scientists, I don't think that STEM majors as a group are 'poorly educated' with a huge ego. Being narrowminded and arrogant is not limited to any one major/specialty. 
That said, let me share my experience as a STEM major that absolutely despised liberal arts requirements. I almost failed English 101 because I couldn't structure essays correctly. I wanted to take a class on Shakespeare instead, but couldn't -university requirements. I was forced to take an art class to graduate. I wanted to take drawing but had to take art history instead because drawing did not count as one of the gen ed requirements. Liberal arts requirements are not there to open anyone's mind. If anything, they're there to force you to accept and regurgitate someone else's view. Using the same arguements you're using that STEM are uneducated and need a different viewpoint can also be used on anyone else - business majors who will be the bosses of engineers, policy makers who will decide environmental policy, etc. If anything, STEM people at least understand constraints and limitations of the natural world (unlike certain economists). 
As for autodidactism - I read books on my own, and learned quite a lot from the internet. Yes it's not rigorous and structured but neither is life; a lot of the Greats were autodidacts as well. What determines a well rounded person and thinker is not whether they got an A on an essay it's how curious they are about life and autodidactism can be seen as a 'proxy' for that curiousity. If I read Jane Eyre in a class in high school I probably would have hated it. As it is, I read it on my own and it's one of my favorite books.

2013-05-humanities-student-major_281_changemyview.txt
You seem to bring up several different points in your post which need to be addressed separately:

    1 - Understanding existing progress in philosophy can help discuss and expand on these concepts.

I think this one would be hard to argue against. The reality is that the world is a complex place full of difficult ideas. As with any field, the ability to offer constructive input about one field or another depends on your understanding of that field. A person that does not understand politics will not have much insight to offer when having a political discussion with someone that has studied the field for years. Similarly, a person that does not understand material properties should not expect to have much input when discussing the concrete to use in a bridge with an engineer.

    2 - STEM fields do not prepare students to critically think about broad philosophical questions.

Most STEM programs emphasize rationality and formal logical thinking. By contrast many liberal programs will avoid formal discussion on these topics. In that sense I would argue that a STEM major is better equipped with the facilities of critical thinking and is less likely to have the raw knowledge necessary to utilize those facilities to make certain deductions. By contrast the liberal args major is more likely to posses the raw data necessary, but there is a greater probability that this raw data may be backed by a mistaken interpretation of some fundamental aspect of rationality.

In both situations there is a missing component that can lead to a whole lot of problems for each of these individuals. Noticeably, the problem with the STEM major is more likely to stand out; any mistaken impression that this person would have would be trivial to detect by anyone that has studied the background material. However, these problems are also easier to point out due to ample citable evidence that directly contradicts the claims.

By contrast the problem with the liberal arts major is significantly more difficult to address. A person that understands the material they are arguing about will generally avoid basic pitfalls of contradicting known data, however a mistaken understanding of the processes of logic and rationality can lead them to arrive at a conclusion that is just as, if not more mistaken than that made by a poorly informed STEM major. 

In other words, while you are partially correct in that a STEM program will not necessarily prepare a student to answer complex philosophical questions, I would also argue that it would do more to ensure they have the critical thinking skills to both understand the challenges presented by these questions, and to notice their own lack of understanding.

    3 - STEM majors are more likely to have ego problems accepting that they are wrong

I would argue that ego problems abound in all fields, be it STEM, liberal arts, or anything else that a person spends years studying. However, anyone that spends any significant amount of time studying any sort of science should very quickly be exposed to the most likely infinite nature of knowledge. With this sort of foundation I would venture that a STEM student is quite likely to accept that their ideas outside of their own field may not be accurate.

Of course you can expect some ego within the context of their own field, but I would also venture to say that this sort of ego is at least somewhat merited.

2013-05-humanities-student-major_289_changemyview.txt
 Finally, I would readily concede that one can ethical conversations without a liberal arts education. It's possible, but also likely very ignorant.

Ooh, harsh. 

To be blunt, I think you're overestimating the value of your education. Just how many layers do you think there are to any given philosophical discussion? For a good number of topics, anything significantly deeper than a normal exchange will get you nowhere ("you" being an average person: reasonably intelligent, educated, and open-minded). You can have an "ignorant" discussion, exchange a few ideas, and then stop, or you can have an "advanced" discussion where you just keep tacking on layers. Either way, you're not getting anywhere. Hell, I'd say most of the time the "ignorant" discussion is cut short by an early realization of futility rather than a lack of new ideas. It's logical to think that continuing to dig further into a subject is beneficial as a mind-sharpening or view-widening exercise, but after a point it just becomes masturbatory. I would also argue that a good portion of liberal arts education in majors such as philosophy or literature occurs beyond this "masturbatory" level.

You seem to underestimate STEM majors, and people in general. I know a very narrow-minded, self-righteous mechanical engineer. If he was a philosophy or English major, maybe he wouldn't be such a prick. Maybe. The way I see it, philosophy and English are more of a filtration process; they remove bad bits of a narrow-minded individual as the individual progresses. As a result, I would agree that socially narrow-minded people are more likely to come from STEM disciplines. I would say that these people are a minority, however. And by that I mean two things: most STEM people are not narrow-minded, most narrow-minded people are not STEM. Narrow minds are generally lacking in deep education of any sort. Another point: the effectiveness of this filter varies. For some it may be very enriching, and that's great. For people who are already decently open-minded and curious about the world, it will still help, but how much? 

People can learn things outside of a university setting. A university will make things more rigorous, but rigor is not necessary, especially for such abstract subjects. We live in the information age; outside opinions and controversial topics are presented constantly. Do you think science-y folk just brush them off? People of science are taught to apply logic and skepticism to new information, and they are taught not to immediately discount new ideas (within reason). These methods of thought are widely applicable to other facets of life. The concepts used to teach STEMs are different, but the point is that any form of education can/will challenge your views and open your mind. STEMs might not discuss "the meaning of life" as much as a liberal arts major, but people with different interests than you are not poorly educated. They just have different interests.

2013-05-humanities-student-major_293_changemyview.txt
Passion and emotion are not mutually exclusive with rationality though. These are real, measurable properties of a human being, and they can be discussed in a rational fashion and used to draw rational conclusions. In fact the science of psychology deals with with analytically analyzing these properties, and then providing this data for use with logical models of the world.

Even the "fuzzy-feeling-humanities" aspects of our society eventually come down to a set of measurable stimuli. Granted, these stimuli may be beyond our current level of scientific understanding, but there is nothing to suggest that they will forever be outside the realm of logical analysis. 

I would say that the stereotypical STEM major is trying to live in a world where these problems have already been solved, and assuming that we as a species have access to these "formulae of life." Meanwhile, the stereotypical liberal arts major is trying to live in a world where these problems are to be treated as abstract concepts, and assuming that there is no "formulae of life" to be found. 

Both approaches have their own shortcomings and benefits. The STEM major might be more ready to notice patterns in existing data that the liberal arts major might miss, while the liberal arts major will be more willing to accept new data that the STEM major would pigeon-hole under some existing branch of knowledge.

2013-05-humanities-student-major_315_changemyview.txt
The classics, the classics, the classics.  With the amount of preaching you do about the classics they might as well be your bible.  You made an argument "for real"?  Where?  I'd like to see that.  Let's go through.

Critical thinking?  If you think STEM majors don't teach critical thinking, I suggest you try one.  It may not be critical thinking in the "what is the meaning of life" fashion (which I'll get to), but seeking the truth is the basis for the sciences.  

A toolset for answering meaningless questions?  All universities that I know of require more classes than those to accomplish your major.  Usually these include philosophy and the like.  However, what is the point?  Personally, I love philosophy, but it's not for everyone.  I don't believe the ability to ask (not answer - because nobody can answer these questions) does not make you a better person, perhaps more rounded.  But what they lack in asking futile questions, they make up for in hard facts and abilities.  The opposite can be said of liberal arts majors.  

Holy shit, touchpads?  That's your example of modern technological marvels?  What about the space station?  This phone that I'm writing this comment on?  Or the internet, where you can voice your biased views under the guise of asking for someone to convince you otherwise.   You severely underestimate the impact that those working in STEM fields have on the world.  Now I'm not saying that they are the most important people, just that STEM fields as a whole have significantly improved our quality of life.

Belief that they are a part of the most important questions in our society?  Where do you get this?  You don't even offer anecdotal evidence.  You just say it as though it's true.  However I can provide even greater evidence of liberal arts majors believing that they are a part of the most important questions in society.  You.  You actually think that not having studied "the classics" means that a person is not capable of critical thinking or philosophical discussion.  That's bullshit.  The great thing about philosophy is that anybody with a brain and language can ask "what is consciousness?", "Why do I exist?".  Remember that the great philosophers didn't have access to "the classics" so why do you think they are so imperative to critical thinking?

Edit:  And your condescension is only merited if you feel that I am beneath you, which you obviously do.  What's the word for believing that you are more intelligent and important than everybody else?  Oh yeah...

Edit 2:  Also I forgot to tell you how funny I thought it was that you think "booting up code academy" is equivalent to getting a computer science degree.  It really reveals how little you know about what goes into computer science.  I get the feeling that you believe that learning to program is rote memorization, and programmers are drones just pumping out memorized code.  Programming takes an incredible understanding of logic and structure as well as ingenuity, and creative problem solving.

Edit 3:  Oh, and obviously you're one of those CMVers that just posts to voice your opinion, not to have your opinion changed. Basically you already firmly believe that STEM majors are subhuman scum while liberal arts majors are enlightened beings of a higher metaphysical plane.  So I'm done.  You aren't interested in having your views changed, just reinforced and voiced.  I wonder why that is.  Is somebody having doubts about the major that they chose?

2013-05-humanities-student-major_316_changemyview.txt
 Look: would you want someone with no engineering background building a bridge? Probably not. That's all I mean by ignorance. Not that STEM folks are stupid, but that they are missing out.

Reducing STEM to building bridges isn't exactly fair. You don't reduce philosophy to "talking about stuff" or literature to "reading books." You say STEMs are missing out? So are you. Some liberal arts education gives a person a deeper understanding of humanity, morality, and other abstract concepts. I acknowledge that. But you should acknowledge that science education has comparable effects. In addition to their understanding of bridges or whatever, STEMs will have a deeper understanding of the inner workings of the world and universe. That is wholly due to their scientific education. 

 I don't care what you study, you still have to have some idea of what meaning is in life. Not in the abstract for everyone, but for you as a person with a life to lead. 

Well you're also an anomalous, highly organized arrangement of atoms in the form of a bipedal mammal who lives in this world, in this universe, according to these physical laws. Maybe *you* should learn a bit about those? If you think every STEM should learn a good amount of liberal arts, surely you must think every liberal arts student should learn a good amount of science? 

If that's how you feel, I'm not sure why anyone would go to great lengths to CYV because this V that you want C'd is mild and reasonable. I'm assuming that's not how you feel however, since you specifically said STEMs were poorly educated. In that case I can only assume you're biased; you inflate the importance of your subject while neglecting the potential value of others.

2013-05-humanities-student-major_495_politics.txt
There's no rational reason tuition costs should be so high, outside of an expanding loan bubble. 

This is the double-edged sword.  People complain about high student loan costs, but also the high cost of tuition. 

They go hand in hand.  

Tuition has done nothing but increase because of the overwhelming supply of student loan funds.  It will continue to do so until there is a culling of students willing to pay the increase.  The market correction, which would SLOW the increase in tuition, would be rising student loan rates or lowering the number of people who could receive student loans. 

But by giving everyone loans, and making them cheap, the universities are just going to keep making the costs high and higher. 

So perhaps the solution is to put price caps on universities?

So get off your 'DAE le STEM?' high horse and try to be grounded for one second.

I'm not on a STEM high horse. I never mentioned STEM. There's a massive gap between STEM covering all manner of sins between STEM and some liberal arts field with a low chance for decent earning/job placement.  Business degrees, for one. 

Besides, if those options opened up, people who aren't cut out for STEM will leave the major and Lovely Snowflakes like you will get to enjoy those courses without the interference of lesser minds.

Dude. Fuck you.  You don't know me.  I was a music major (performance and education) for 2 years before I switched over to finance.  I was never in a STEM field. Get off of YOUR high horse and quit making assumptions. 

2013-05-humanities-student-major_643_changemyview.txt
Regardless, I'm using STEM fields as an example because the market for them is not nearly as saturated as the humanities and it's an easy example. My main point is not that people should just pick any field that gets them money, but rather they should perhaps do some research on the job market in their field if their main concern is getting a job.

The people who are graduating college now were told since they were kids that if they got good grades in school, and went to 4 years of college, they could get a job and stay in the middle class. So they went to school. And now the job isn't there, and they're mad. 

Your response seems to be "if you're unemployed after college, don't complain, its you're own fault for picking the wrong major". And you are offering STEM degrees as an example of a better choice than humanities degrees. I am saying that the unemployed college grad with a history degree probably would not have been better off with an EE degree.

So, if the history degree and the EE degree are both bad ideas, what should this hypothetical unemployed grad have done? If there is no degree that they can get that will give them a good chance of getting a comfortable, middle-class job, then they do have something to complain about. 

On your second point, people that don't perform well in the jobs may get hired early on, but eventually will get weeded out in the private sector if they can't meet the company's desired level of expertise. People expect results, and you can only fake results so far.

So, if you're not really interested in engineering, you can't be successful as an engineer? That sounds reasonable. Maybe that hypothetical incompetent engineer should have pursued some other type of education.

 This is a fault of the professor then. Nowadays, students have way too much power with instructor rating systems and what not. Tests aren't necessarily supposed to be easy, and if you can't hack it because it's too hard or you aren't willing to study, then you shouldn't be able to pass. And on top of this, the types of mathematical knowledge that one needs to become an engineer doesn't change, it's not something that you can fully dilute just because some students complain. If a student needs to understand the concepts behind bridge stress, they have to understand the concept and the calculations required for. This is not a subjective measure. And in the result that the quality of education does become watered down, then it will end up driving higher requirements for higher such as further education - as seen with other fields.

I think we agree that its a good thing for engineering programs to have high standards. I think we also agree that not all students can pass a rigorous engineering program. So, I'm saying that I don't see any point in pushing people who can't or don't want to live up to these standards into these programs, and I don't see how the text I quoted challenges that. 

2013-05-humanities-student-major_928_SRSsucks.txt
Well, although the linked comment is nuts, be careful with blanket condemnations of the humanities. It's probably true that, in general, STEM types are better in the humanities than humanities types are in STEM courses. This largely has to do with (a) the fact that there are lots of weak humanities and social science departments, and (b) weaker students can slide by in the the humanities and social sciences, but can't slide by as easily in STEM. The very best students in the humanities and social sciences are, so far as I can tell, just as good as the best STEM folks, but the humanities and social sciences are burdened with a larger bottom bit of the curve.  


Personally, I see STEM types march into philosophy courses all the time, say really stupid things with the utmost confidence, then fail out. And I'm not talking about saying some un-PC stuff about gender or whatever; I'm talking about saying absolutely dopey stuff about epistemology, the philosophy of science, the scientific method, induction, hypothesis formation, falsifiability, etc. Saying stupid things about those topics is to be expected...saying them with dogmatically, as if you get to speak *ex cathedra* since you're in a STEM department is something else.  Of course that doesn't happen in every case, but it's far from uncommon.  (It's also important to note, however, that there are a lot of philosophy classes that no one could really fail...they're definitely the softest of the soft...)   


The humanities and social sciences have stronger bits (e.g. economics, analytic-style philosophy) and weaker bits (I won't single them out by name here, but I *will* say that some parts of philosophy are pretty weak...)  These SRS types are morons because they've been immersed in the rottenest, most highly-politicized parts of the humanies and social sciences, not because they've studied the humanities and social sciences at all. 

2013-06-humanities-student-major_1295_TrueReddit.txt
...how valuable the most fundamental gift of the humanities will turn out to be. That gift is clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature. 

I hear sentiments like this a lot from people defending the humanities (also the liberal arts) and it seems to me that they are implying that theirs are the *only* disciplines which confer such benefits.  It is as though they believe engineers are incapable of thinking clearly about problems outside their particular specialization or that mathematicians can only write clearly in their arcane notations.  This, I believe, is quite false.  Clarity of thought and expression are goals of all disciplines in higher education; I would go so far as to call them a lowest common denominator.  It is my belief that a STEM education does not advertize the development of vague qualities like "clarity of thought" because they assume that their students will achieve them as a matter of course.  If a student fails to meet these implicit expectations, that student will have to transfer to a field that offers more direct guidance towards achieving such standards.

I also have a problem with portraying English--or more generally the liberal arts and humanities--as somehow mutually exclusive with more technical disciplines.  There is nothing stopping a computer programmer from reading literature as a hobby, or a physicist from philosophizing.  Of course this works both ways, and an English major may have chemistry as a hobby.  The difference, as I see it, is that chemistry is a more often considered a profession than a hobby, while reading literature is virtually unknown as a profession.  Choosing a technical major over the humanities, therefore, has essentially no opportunity cost.  Forgoing a humanities degree will in no way limit the rewards you can get from reading literature (or playing music, or studying philosophy, etc) but the lack of a technical degree is going to make it a lot harder for you to benefit from chemistry (or electrical engineering, or statistics, etc.)

2013-06-humanities-student-major_1433_SRSDiscussion.txt
There does need to be a rethink of the anti-STEM circlejerk that goes on in this community. I think there are fundamentally five problems with the STEM hate.

**1.** All STEM people are not shitlords. People in SRS tend to forget Albert Einstein (who was a vigorous anti-racist campaigner), Carl Sagan (who was an environmentalist and anti-nuclear campaigner), Charles Darwin (who was an abolitionist and had NO affiliation with the field of Social Darwinism), Alfred Russel Wallace (who went even further than Darwin, decrying colonialism, supporting women's suffrage and socialist policies) and even recent cases like the people at FtB and Atheism+, majority of whom are probably STEM, when decrying STEM. Furthermore, there are probably Non-STEM people who are shitlords, yet still they often don't figure into the discussion. Economics is technically considered non-STEM yet still some economists can be downright asshats.

**2.** STEM does not make people shitlords. Generalizing a group of people, IMO, is almost never okay but it is even worse when you generalize a group whose attribute is irrelevant to your criticism. Remember the fedora incident? It was deemed wrong to attack a group of people for wearing fedoras, even though the majority may have been shitlords. Wearing a fedora had nothing to do with their shittiness. Similarly, STEM has nothing to do with shitty ideas.

**3.** IMO, there is no such thing as unjustified STEM privilege. From what I see, STEM people are not likely to have privilege over others for their STEMiness. In fact, STEM people are more likely to have less privilege, especially when younger by being bullied. I see no inherent advantage that people gain for merely being STEM majors in college that is unjustified. *Note:* I say unjustified because differences in pay and wealth could be justified. E.g. if STEM majors are paid more on average than marketing executives, I would have no problem with that since I think STEM improves the lives of people in a much more substantial way than marketing and ads.

**4.** The reaction against STEM superiority thinking is often countered with Humanities superiority thinking. Too often, I see comments which argue against belief in the superiority of STEM by countering that Humanities is really better than STEM. I have seen comments which say that to be an art student is more work, or Humanities is harder because the questions have no real answer. Here's one comment:

The "hard sciences" give us an understanding of the universe. The arts give us an understanding of ourselves. The latter is ultimately more important.

[Here's the entire comment and resulting conversation.](http://www.reddit.com/r/SRSDiscussion/comments/ucco2/as_a_stem_major_how_can_i_explain_to_fellow_stem/c4u5qqe)

Frankly, anger at STEM superiority has been replaced by Humanities superiority.

**5.** I forget. If it comes back, I'll post it here. *Edit:* Came back. One of the things you said was:

I know that a lot of scientists, especially older generations, tend to view social issues as a "distraction" from more "meaningful" work.

Thing is I know a lot of social justice types who claim the same thing in reverse. My parents and siblings shit on NASA constantly because "there are problems down here. Why are we spending the money up there?" My mom used to doubt my field asking "how would it help people?" Even MHP brought up the same argument when talking about the Brain initiative that Obama started. Yes there are problems in the world, but don't shit on my profession, especially when it has brought benefits galore to humanity.

2013-06-humanities-student-major_1521_SRSDiscussion.txt
4. The reaction against STEM superiority thinking is often countered with Humanities superiority thinking. Too often, I see comments which argue against belief in the superiority of STEM by countering that Humanities is really better than STEM. I have seen comments which say that to be an art student is more work, or Humanities is harder because the questions have no real answer. Here's one comment:

The reality is that they are better for different things.  I rarely see someone trained in, for example, history arguing that they are better qualified than a physicist to understand say, relativity.  But I really do OFTEN see STEM people claim to understand concepts like gender, class, etc better than those trained to in the social sciences and humanities who have spent years learning the subtleties of these things.

There certainly is a certain amount of Humanities superiority as you put it, but in the sense that "our fields are more important" but I don't think that is ever what this has really been about in my opinion.  It is about the tendency of STEMers (at least on reddit) to dismiss the humanities as irrelevant *even to subjects which they deal with* in favor of some kind of psuedo-science that they justify with vague references to "logic" and "reason."

I am an ENORMOUS supporter of the sciences by the way.  I think a lot of the conflict between the arts and sciences just comes down to inter-departmental politics, desire for funding, etc.  But I don't think both sides represent themselves the same way in the conflict.

2013-06-humanities-student-major_1529_Economics.txt
Everyone studying STEM was how Korea went from a war torn shit hole to a industrial powerhouse. In the 1970s Korea heavily subsidized Engineering majors, making it the only affordable choice for the majority of Koreans who just lost everything from a destructive war. For much of the 70s the majority of Korean graduates were engineer majors. When you have engineers doing factory jobs, you find that those factories quickly become the most efficient factories in the world. Although the East Asian tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand) aren't the best innovators due to their rote style education, they can sure make production very efficient with engineer trained factory workers. 

The real value in STEM is the capability to innovate and improve on existing designs. It's much easier for an engineer or scientist to improve production, improve a product, or create a new product than some English major. New production methods, new products, more efficient use to technology leads to new businesses, new jobs, more jobs, higher value chain jobs. Accounting majors who learns to minimize cost and reduce tax liabilities does not create jobs, new business creates jobs. I agree that liberal arts and a well rounded education is important, but a balance is needed. Right now there are too many people in the United States with soft skills and not enough with hard skills from STEM education. Soft skills are great to add value to a business and have a multiplier effect on business value but hard skills from STEM education is what creates the most jobs. 

Increasing the amount of STEM graduates doesn't diminish the value of a STEM graduates in the long run. While the labor market is segmented, STEM graduates don't need to go directly into the field they studied for. A STEM graduate can go to nearly any field and make it better because STEM education teaches graduates to learn, improve, and innovate. It also provides the advance math skills adaptable to the finance field and the technological skills to be early adopters of new technology.

2013-06-humanities-student-major_1539_Economics.txt
 A STEM graduate can go to nearly any field and make it better because STEM education teaches graduates to learn, improve, and innovate. It also provides the advance math skills adaptable to the finance field and the technological skills to be early adopters of new technology.

Enough positions? That's because STEM graduates narrowly focus on looking at a job in what they studied specifically. Look at jobs dealing with Asia, QC, production, marketing, business development. Companies dealing with Asia want STEM graduates for these positions instead of MBA. Car companies, heavy machinery companies, any company that manufactures their own products want engineers for QC, for production, for marketing, for business development. It doesn't matter to them what kind of engineer. 

Jobs that most people think companies prefer business majors in reality prefer STEM graduates. In most cases STEM graduates have more industrial knowledge than business majors. Most entry position that says they want a business major or liberal arts major can also be done someone with a STEM major. 

We're in a globalized market, that includes the labor market. In Asia 90% of the professional expat jobs prefer STEM majors. A lot of those companies looking for STEM graduates to send to Asia are American or European companies. I don't see a shortage of positions for STEM majors in the world labor market, there may be a shortage in certain localized labor markets but overall there's an enormous amount of unfilled positions.

The labor market has a delay. The time it takes for people to move to where the jobs are or for companies to move to where there is an abundant labor supply means that the obvious effect of increased STEM graduates won't be seen for 10-15 years.

2013-06-humanities-student-major_448_news.txt
It's certainly a complicated issue, but not one that I believe is easily summed up by a student's lack of appreciation or internal drive.

Because I have about 15 friends that were all top 10% who declared pre-med when they started college. Of them, only 1 actually ended up taking the MCAT (and got accepted into med school). The rest switched to business or lib. arts. It was mainly o-chem, calc 2, and physics that did them all in. Did they just not have a true passion for it? Maybe if they did they'd have passed o-chem at least on their 2nd try right?

Even in my own major, psychology. In my lab alone, stories include a pre-med, a comp sci, and engineering student. I'm the oddball, I knew I was never going to be able to succeed in STEM from like 7th grade, but lib. arts is quite the STEM refugee camp if you ask around. And definitely not unmotivated or dumb people either. Just unfortunate weed outs.

This is why I think it's hilarious that people actually think there's a BIAS towards humanities, like the majority of people in them are actively choosing them. Do STEM majors actually think philosophy majors think they wouldn't make 7 times as much money if they were in engineering? Do STEM majors actually think psych and history students are not fully aware that Comp. Sci. is lucrative and in high demand? These aren't secrets, they don't need to be convinced. It's why psych students say they'll get a masters, it's why 99% of philosophy majors will say they're going to law school. They're looking for a backdoor into success because the obvious route of doing STEM didn't come to fruition.

All ranting aside, I think proponents of STEM should seriously think about making their programs less rigorous in order to guarantee graduation rates (5 years maybe, this would probably be the least effort), or a do a serious overhaul of how primary education to better prepare these kids for the fast paced and heavily challenging ordeal that is college STEM. Either way, there's a reason people avoid it, or don't make it, and I don't think it has to do with internal drive or passion.

 

2013-06-humanities-student-major_531_circlebroke.txt
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2381

Joking aside, I am an engineering student, and let me tell you that employment rates and average wages had almost **nothing** to do with my decision to go into that field of study. I went into engineering because I like math, science, and designing things. I have a *passion* for it. I also have an interest in literary theory, psychology, history, religious studies, sociology, politics, feminism, philosophy, etc. You know, the dreaded and useless humanities fields. I study these subjects on my own and discuss them with friends, some of which are in these fields and others like me who are self taught. I would never say this would compare to actually getting a degree in a humanities field. I would hate to lose the ability to study either engineering or humanities. They both mean a great deal to me. 

To answer your question, why Reddit loves STEM majors, I think it is because the benefits of science and engineering are much more immediate and obvious. You just have to look around and see computers, refrigerators, cars, etc. To see the benefits of the humanities you have to look under the surface. It takes more thought. Of course, the average STEM bachelor isn't going to invent the refrigerator of tomorrow, but Redditors take the simple minded approach of Science=products I can see=Great Benefit to humanity therefor BSc=Great Benefit to humanity.


2013-06-humanities-student-major_544_circlebroke.txt
 You can get into MIT's econ program with a math BA

I'm speaking in terms of a terminal degree. I'd expect that those in math programs can go on to do a lot of interesting things in postgraduate study. As far as the investment firm example goes, there are probably lucrative jobs that may favor English majors (though may perhaps be less common), such as marketing and technical writing. I'm not too knowledgeable in this area though, so I could be wrong.

From a completely pragmatic standpoint (in regard to income, employability, job security, etc.), the vast majority of both STEM and humanities degrees are fairly useless compared to professions that require skilled labor, i.e. trades. However, a certain amount of satisfaction arises out of being fairly knowledgeable in a topic of interest. If somebody is completely happy with their history degree, even in face of the costs, I think that it has quite a bit of use. 

the only reason why a college premium exists for these majors is because college just screens out people who are stupid or who can't sit still for 4 years, and employers value this information.

I agree, but this is true of most non-vocational degrees.

The STEM jerk wouldn't be so bothersome if it weren't so extreme. I understand that it's only natural that people would champion STEM on a website filled with STEM students, but the level of animosity towards humanities students is ridiculous.

2013-06-humanities-student-major_548_circlebroke.txt
I'd say this is the most uninformed, inaccurate, and biased post I've seen in circlebroke in a long time. Your data is terrible, the inferences you make aren't just, and in the process you alienate STEM majors by saying that they are inherently worthless. Let's go through your post.

In all honesty, people with bachelor's degrees in science don't know shit about their respective fields aside from the basics. Bachelor's courses generally don't keep students updated in current research in the fields and (for the most part) don't teach students much more than basic research methods.

I'm not sure why you bring this point up in the first place. While there are *some* people who graduate with a STEM degree don't know much about their major, the rest have taken 4+ years of specialized classes in their field and you don't really spend four years in college just to learn the basics of your subject. This is true for all majors, STEM and non-STEM. Those that graduate with a degree and a good GPA are going to have a decent amount of knowledge in their field. That doesn't mean that someone with a Bachelors degree is going to be an expert, but no one is arguing that. If you can provide empirical evidence that "people with bachelor's degrees in science don't know shit about their respective fields aside from the basics" then, by all means, share it.

A scientist is somebody who contributes to the pool of scientific knowledge by conducting research and publishing papers.

Ah, I see you are a definition creator now, although not a very good one. Let's see what other, professionally created, dictionaries have to say about what defines a "scientist".

---------------------------------

[Merriam-Webster](http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scientist): "a person learned in science and especially natural science"

[The Free Dictionary](http://www.thefreedictionary.com/scientist): "A person having expert knowledge of one or more sciences, especially a natural or physical science." 

[Oxford Dictionary](http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/scientist?q=scientist): "a person who is studying or has expert knowledge of one or more of the natural or physical sciences"

[Dictionary.com](http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/scientist): "an expert in science, especially one of the physical or natural sciences."

[AskDefine](http://scientist.askdefine.com/): "One whose activities make use of the scientific method to answer questions regarding the measurable universe. A scientist may be involved in original research, or make use of the results of the research of others."

-------------------------------

Nowhere in any of those definitions does it say a person can only be considered a scientist if they write conduct research and publish their research papers. Don't try to make up definitions just so you can make a point in your very biased post.

Let's take a look at [unemployment rate by major](http://www.studentsreview.com/unemployment_by_major.php3).

Oh my god what a shitty source. A whole **seven** people responded that they got a job with an archaeology major. I'm not a scientist (I mean I haven't even published a research paper yet) but I can tell that such a small data size will not lead to accurate results. 

How about we look at a reputable source made by scientists. [Here](http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/Unemployment.Final.update1.pdf) is a good source. 

Some of the highest unemployment rates belong to engineers?

Not really. The highest unemployment rate of an experienced college graduate is 6.3% in electrical engineering technology (not to be confused with electrical engineering which is at 5.2%). While that unemployment rate, along with the other engineering unemployment rates, is not bad, it's not incredible either. There are plenty of other majors with lower unemployment rates. But no engineering major is even close to having the worst unemployment rate.

The sad fact of the matter is that you can't really do shit in your field with a BSc in most STEM disciplines. There is essentially no use for somebody with a bachelor's degree level of knowledge in science. If you have a BSc in Chemistry, the only way you'll be able to contribute to scientific progress is by cleaning beakers, for the most part. 

And where did you get that insightful bit of information from? I honestly don't even know what to say about that. According to the Georgetown study, an experienced college graduate with a degree in either the life or physical sciences will make on average 60k a year. I'm pretty sure you don't make 60k a year cleaning beakers.

The fact of the matter is that [over half of recent STEM graduates can't find jobs in their fields](http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-05-24/news/bs-ed-stem-20130524_1_stem-jobs-math-workers).

You're twisting the words of this article to make your point. What it actually says is "over half of students with STEM degrees each year are unable to find STEM employment **upon graduation**." It takes time to look for a job I guess. Students shouldn't be expected to walk off the stage from graduation right into a desk. It can a couple months to find a career no matter what field you are in. 

Yes, my cheeto-encrusted pals

That is just rude and adds nothing to the discussion.

 A physics major generally makes no greater contribution to society than a philosophy major, especially by Reddit's standards, as they are not involved in any form of scientific innovation. They work the same desk jobs as humanities majors.

Seriously, where are you coming up with this shit? Here's a resource for you to look at, [careers using physics](http://www.spsnational.org/cup/profiles/degree.html). The people with a BS in physics, what can they do? "Aircraft Commander and Instructor for the C-130 Hercules, USAF", "Core Technology Scientist", "Electro-Optic Engineer", "Applications Engineer", "Etch Manufacturing Tools Project Leader", etc. It doesn't really seem like they're doing desk work that a humanities major would also be doing. It seems as if, just maybe, they are doing something to contribute to society by using what they learned while getting an undergraduate degree. Shocking, I know.

And it's funny that you didn't bring up the biggest point of the whole STEM circlejerk, the wages. From that georgetown link I brought up earlier, on page 16 we can see earnings for experienced college graduates in different fields. 

Here's the top five (actually six) for you:

1. Engineering - 81k

2. Computer and Mathematics - 76k

3. Industrial Arts - 71k

4. Architecture - 64k

5. Business - 63k

6. Health - 63k (Tied with Business)

And the bottom five:

1. Education - 43k

2. Psychology and Social Work - 45k

3. Arts - 46k

4. Humanities and Liberal Arts - 50k

5. Agriculture and Natural Resources - 50k (Tied with Humanities and Liberal Arts)

It's clear that technology, engineering, and mathematics are at the top as far as income earners are concerned. Science is at 60k, right in the middle, but not in a terrible position. All of the majors in the low spots are the ones criticized during the STEM circlejerks. The point that is usually made is that it makes *economic sense* to be a STEM major, if you have the skill set to succeed in one of those majors. While the unemployment rates may not be spectacularly low, if you succeed at being a STEM major, you are much more likely to see a big paycheck than if you were to be a successful humanities major. 

And on a final note, let me make this point **absolutely clear**: I have nothing against non-STEM majors. I do not participate in the circlejerk myself and I don't think it should be brought up as much as it is. In fact, I don't think it really needs to be brought up at all. I think that humanities majors do contribute to society just as much as STEM majors, just in different ways. The fact that teachers are the lowest paid major shows you that pay scale doesn't correlate to societal contribution. 

EDIT: formatting

2013-06-humanities-student-major_552_circlebroke.txt
I corrected myself quickly on that one. My mistake.

You didn't though. The link is still in the main part of the post and your post still takes information from it. It would be better to strike that part of your post since it isn't good information. It should've been obvious in the first place that archaeology doesn't have 0% unemployment and it discredits from the rest of your argument by leaving that in. I understand you made a note about that at the end, but saying that someone found a better source for unemployment statistics doesn't correct the bad statistics you put into your post. 

Calling somebody with only an undergrad degree an expert in any field is a slap in the face to those who have dedicated their lives to it.

I'm questioning whether you even read my post. I clearly said "Those that graduate with a degree and a good GPA are going to have a decent amount of knowledge in their field. That doesn't mean that someone with a Bachelors degree is going to be an expert, but no one is arguing that."

Generally, this goes for all majors, the first two years of undergraduate are spent learning the basics of your major. The last two years, especially senior year, are spent specializing. I know in electrical engineering there are a number of different specialized course routes you can take. For example, you can specialize in controls systems, signals processing, optics, power systems, and a number of other areas. While someone who got their bachelors degree in electrical engineering won't know everything about *all* of those fields, they'll have quite a bit of knowledge in *one* of those fields.   

Just as the shitty archaeology statistic I posted has a sample size of 7, you're giving me a sample size of 11 here.

The point of that source was not to say "every physics major gets a job in their field", it was more to say "there are jobs for physics majors out there" and to disprove how you said "They [physics majors] work the same desk jobs as humanities majors." Physics majors can and do get real jobs that involve real scientific innovation. 

Obviously people who decide to get Humanities degrees aren't doing it for the money.

You use too many absolutes. There are some people who get humanities degrees just because they want to learn about the subject and get a job in a related field, but there are also people out there who are just under the impression that "any degree = high paying job".

Remember, most people go into college when they are 18. At this point, a lot of them don't care about the money because their parents pay for everything. It may not be until later that they realize they would have rather done a major that would get them a higher paying job. Money may not be immediately relevant, but it almost always becomes relevant at some point or another during one's life. Again, this doesn't happen to all hummanities majors, but there are a number in that boat.  

Industrial arts is actually generally taught at art schools, so it's safe to consider it an art. It'd be quite a stretch to consider architecture a STEM subject as well

I'll agree with you here. They aren't STEM majors. Although they do rely more on math and technology than other BA majors do.

and STEM majors often end up taking up the same jobs that humanities students do

You keep bringing this up. I'd really love to see a source on that, other than you just speaking from your biased viewpoint. 

making it puzzling as to why people on Reddit champion STEM students as more valuable to society

There's another thing you keep bringing up that I'm just not seeing. There are some people who think humanities majors are worthless, but they'll get downvoted because even those participating in the STEM circlejerk don't agree with that. 

Don't believe me? Let's look at the two posts you pointed out in your original post. Since this is a circlebroke post, the point is to criticize whatever is trending on reddit. Let's see what is and what isn't trending in the posts. 

The top comment of [this](http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1fuzah/its_an_antiintellectual_moment_according_to/) thread:

It's an economic decision, pure and simple. When the cost per credit doesn't vary from one major to another, going tens of thousands of dollars into debt studying a field with no job prospects doesn't make sense.

I've got a degree in music, and it's led me to a stunningly mediocre career in retail guitar sales. I'm back in school now for engineering.

This guy probably had a passion for music and, according to you, he obviously didn't choose to be a music major for financial reasons. But now he's having money problems and, although he may have liked his field, he'd rather have a job that makes more money. Is he bashing humanities majors? No. Is he saying that with his music degree he wasn't contributing to society? No.

Now let's look at the most downvoted comment:

Fuck the humanities. We need more scientists.

Currently sitting at -10, the lowest of the thread. Even those jerking about STEM clearly disagree with his sentiment, contrary to what you said in your post.

The top comment of [this](http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/medqw/grade_inflation_might_be_the_reason_kids_choose/) thread:

I know a number of people who freely admit that they have or are currently bullshitting their way through humanities degrees. Not cheating, just spewing random buzzwords all over paper for essays, semester after semester. I've never heard an engineer say that.

Now there's some circlejerking for you. You could've brought up this comment in your post to show the circlejerking, but instead you just decided to jerk over how STEM majors aren't able to get jobs in their fields.

The most downvoted comment isn't particularly insightful, so I'll just leave that out. 

The biggest problem I had with your post is that instead of pointing out the actual circlejerking going on, you decided you'd rather do a 180 and jerk right back in their face. Point out reddit's flaws. That's why I come to circlejerk in the first place. But don't stoop to their level, throwing out bad statistics, making uninformed inferences, and refering to STEM majors as "cheeto-encrusted". That's just childish and not what this is all about. 

2013-06-humanities-student-major_797_philosophy.txt
It's so strange how people think that anyone can do philosophy, but STEM fields are really hard and only unique geniuses can succeed with even a C average in engineering. It's the classic "humanities is easy cuz it's just your opinion and STEM is hard because it's facts" circlejerk that you see all over reddit.

I have an MA in philosophy and I'm 2yrs or so (depending on internships) from a BS in mechanical engineering. It's fucking ridiculous how easy this shit is compared to philosophy. It's just formulas. The amount of critical thinking necessary to do well is pretty goddamn low.

Yet these people think that laymen (read: they) should have their views on philosophical issues respected because it's easy and thus they're right. They equate 'getting a good grade in an undergrad course' with 'actually being correct'. How fucking childish and ignorant. When I graded papers, people said a lot of horrendously wrong things, but if their logic was good and their argument was creative, it earned a good grade. I had *several* students support *mandatory abortions for the poor*. Holy shit, crazy, right? But if you start with certain basic assumptions (the questioning of which is outside of the scope of the course), then you can say, 'yeah, this follows from those'.

I feel like philosophy professors should just start laughing in the faces of people who say stupid shit in philosophy classes then berate them for their shitty reasoning, maybe then people won't think philosophy is so easy. Maybe they'll be scared of pontificating without some sense of rigor. Maybe they'll be scared of polluting the minds of others with their silly ideas that they didn't think critically about yet.

It's frustrating. I feel like people want to outsource critical thinking. They come up with a shitty idea and rather than figuring out themselves why it's shitty, they ask other people. And this makes them lazy. It makes them unable to analyze their own ideas. And it makes them dependent on others for help.

/rant

2013-07-humanities-student-major_1204_changemyview.txt
So really the main problem sounds like you are kind of arrogant. You've taken a few courses in economics, psychology, and philosophy and you did well in them. Good for you, I definitely think STEM does teach people to think critically and gives you skills beyond plugging and chugging through equations. 

The thing is, you've hardly scratched the surface of those 3 fields and probably have gone more in-depth in yours than any other and are claiming equivalency in rigor. That's not a fair assumption at all and if you're going to claim superiority of STEM you should try to apply the actual rigors required of claims in STEM fields. Electives without pre-requisites are still usually basic classes no matter how high a course number they are assigned in my experience. What you should try to do is get into classes that have a pre-requisite and see if you can get in without it and still get an A. 

As for the elitism, learn to appreciate what comes out of the fields you look down upon. The entertainment industry, video games, books, etc. all exist not just because of STEM but also because of the humanities. Great movements pushed through not because of STEM majors but because of people like MLK Jr who  was a minister or Ghandi who studied law. Look at TED talks and the kinds of people they invite. It's not just scientists. It's novelists and actors too and they actually have some very inspiring lectures. 

As for believing you can do everything a non-STEM major can do, I'd say put up or shut up. Assumedly I'm a fellow STEM major (I think medicine counts) and I laud my friends in the humanities for the kind of work they have to do. Examples are: Can you do community outreach and save lives of children in bad home situations? Can you deconstruct a video game's cutscenes and tell me why there's ludonarrative dissonance? Could you teach a class of middle schoolers and get them all to have Bs and As? Are you able to balance the finances of a restaurant and tell me how much of food we can order and still satisfy demand without losing profit considering waste from the kitchen and unfinished or unsatisfactory meals that are returned? 

Your answer would be "of course, if I chose to learn those things" but you didn't and you can't at the moment so really your capability is worth nothing. It's so easy to believe you have capability when you are successful in one area but no one is an expert in everything and that is why your college courses focus you into one field. That is also why experts in different fields confer with each other and work together. You're not the first person to be intelligent and you're not the first person to be capable. Also some people don't go into STEM fields because STEM is sometimes really boring and dry, not because it's hard. 

2013-07-humanities-student-major_1213_changemyview.txt
I just graduated with a double major in physics and philosophy and a minor in mathematics. I received highest honors in both majors and I'm going to an ivy league for my PhD studies in physics starting this fall (not trying to brag to strangers on the internet, just trying to give some credential to my opinion). I do not share your view. Having seriously studied both STEM and humanities subjects, I've come to feel that in many ways STEM subjects are *significantly* easier (especially engineering, no offense). I feel that this is true in both coursework and in actual research (which I also have experience with). I struggled far more in my philosophy courses than in my physics and math courses. The reason is that STEM courses are extremely formulaic; if you figure out the pattern, you can get an A every time. In my humanities courses I spent far more time and effort for the same payoff. Philosophical concepts, for example, are generally far more abstruse and difficult to grapple with than physics concepts (try reading Wittgenstein or Sartre some time).

In the end though, I agree with some of the other replies: different people are naturally gifted in different areas. If you find engineering difficult and humanities easy, perhaps you should have chosen a different field (kidding; you should do what you believe is best). I suspect, however, that you only think philosophy is easy because your experience is limited to introductory courses.


2013-07-humanities-student-major_1271_changemyview.txt
 Society is better able to use a large number of STEM majors. As society advances, it will continuously increase in demand for STEM majors to repair and create technological infrastructure. On the contrary, the demand for humanities majors won't scale any faster than linearly

Not everyone can study engineering or computer science. The more engineering majors you have, the less valuable each one will be and more competitive  

STEM majors aren't some golden tickets for a job. You'll realize aside from engineering, most majors don't lead directly to a job and that you'll have to compete for one already. 

 STEM majors learn marketable skills. Engineers and doctors solve problems using science. Scientists apply critical thinking to understand the workings of the universe. Graduates with humanities degrees don't have much to contribute to the betterment of society in comparison.

Any major as long as you have taken the pre-med requirement can attend medical school. I know many people who have studied non STEM majors, who learned many valuable skills such as how to communicate effectively and think critically (I don't understand why you think this is STEM exclusive, especially when Bio/Chem majors are set on rote memorization) How does analyzing literature or studying philosophy not teach you critical thinking? 

You're focusing way too much on college majors. Undergraduate is meant to educate you and help with your first step, not define you. Don't look at it in such binary matter where STEM is defined to be one thing, and non STEM is defined to be another. 

It's up to the individual to make something of oneself and contribute to society. Look at the Ivy Leagues, considered to host the brightest students in the country. Most of them aren't STEM majors, but they will probably accomplish more than your average joe who studied biology at a no name college. 

2013-07-humanities-student-major_1281_changemyview.txt
I think the most important aspect of this argument that tends to be ignored is the purpose of undergraduate majors. The main argument of the STEM field side seems to be that the purpose of higher education and of the college major is vocational training. With the exception of very specific and focused degrees, I would argue that this isn't the case. 

As I've seen it, the purpose of higher education is to teach an individual to think in certain ways. Take for example a course in math. Most colleges require quite a bit of math for an engineering major. Much of this education is either tangentially relevant or applicably useless given the current ability of calculators and programs such as Wolfram Alpha. Even for someone majoring in math and thinking of pursuing a PHD, many of the courses they take will be less than relevant given the incredibly specific nature of mathematical research. The purpose instead is to teach the kind of critical thinking and problem solving abilities that would be useful in the field. 

While I think the introduction to a field is definitely helpful, it's certainly not critical. You will see liberal arts and humanities majors in design firms and STEM fields. In many of those positions the ability to write eloquently and argue your position might be just as useful as technical knowledge. You see a lot of colleges nowadays stressing writing skills within their engineering program. 

One of the best ways to describe this is with the missile analogy. Let's say you're an engineer at the pentagon working on missile designs. You're incredibly knowledgeable about airflow, fin design, and motor design. Maybe your boss understands cares about these things. His boss however is only concerned about three things, how far the missile goes, how fast it goes, and how big a whole it will make when it hits. Technical aspects of any field are important but equally important are real applications of those technical aspects. Diversity in viewpoints and was of thinking an looking at problems are just as important as specific knowledge. Specific knowledge can always be picked up far more easily than critical thinking. 

TL:DR In most cases, studying in certain fields is not vocational training. Major teaches you how to critically think in certain ways. This is what's important in most fields.

Also: Princeton's website claiming that half their med-school acceptances were not hard science. 

http://www.princeton.edu/majorchoices/myths-about-majors/

2013-07-humanities-student-major_1290_changemyview.txt
STEM majors learn marketable skills. 

And humanities majors don't? For the record I have degrees in political science, French, and journalism. I learned a foreign language, how to do statistical analysis, how to research complex issues and explain them clearly and simply to average readers, how to use various multimedia applications, how to do basic web design and coding, how to use video/still cameras, how to manage social media accounts for large organizations, how to write well, how to edit well, how to interview people, etc. 

It's not like humanities just involves reading and writing. I certainly have marketable skills and I've had very good luck so far in the job market, as have many of my similarly educated colleagues. 

Engineers and doctors solve problems using science. Scientists apply critical thinking to understand the workings of the universe. Graduates with humanities degrees don't have much to contribute to the betterment of society in comparison.

You'd be surprised that that people in other fields use critical thinking to understand how the world works. As a journalist with a poli-sci background, I am always looking through spreadsheets of data to identify trends. I write stories that people read, hopefully informing them about a particular issue. What I do is not easy, and I would argue that by participating in "writing the first draft of history," as we like to say, I am certainly contributing to the betterment of society. 

Society is better able to use a large number of STEM majors. As society advances, it will continuously increase in demand for STEM majors to repair and create technological infrastructure.

I don't disagree that STEM majors certainly have better job prospects on average, but that is only what the current job market is hungry for. Once things become even more automated and firms realize they don't need as much human capital, I suspect things will be tougher for more STEM majors. 

On the contrary, the demand for humanities majors won't scale any faster than linearly. 

One thing that I learned during my stint as a copy editor for a scientific journal is that scientists and engineers really can't write for shit, and are often terrible at explaining their ideas and findings in simple language. That's why people like them hire people like me, because they need help with that. Maybe the demand for STEM majors might outpace the demand for humanities majors, but they certainly rely on the other. I need scientists and engineers to make devices that allow me to do my job more efficiently and they need me to explain their findings to the public or to help them write about their findings.   

2013-07-humanities-student-major_1350_college.txt
I wouldn't think of the entire spectrum of college majors as being either artsy or STEM.  You could easily be happy choosing something that offers decent career prospects that isn't art or STEM.  Most majors aren't either, so you have a lot of options to consider.  Think about the careers you can see yourself in, and take some time to talk to professionals in those fields if you can.  Think about the pros and cons of different careers, and think about what you ultimately want your life to look like.  

And you won't have to give up art if you choose not to major in it.  Everyone is able to take classes outside their major, and you may be able to double major or complete a minor.  You can study something you love while you also study something that you could find steady work in.  

Furthermore, be careful not to buy into all the hype associated with STEM degrees.  Engineers and CS majors tend to do very well, but hard science majors aren't much better off than liberal arts majors when it comes to salaries.  A bachelors degree in biology or chemistry isn't actually as valuable as you might think, because there are a limited number of jobs which require that kind of specific skill-set and knowledge.  The majors which tend to lead to decent jobs post-graduation are those tied to a specific career--like accounting, nursing, engineering, etc. 

You may want to apply to a few out of state schools and see what kind of non-loan aid package they are able to offer you.  If you are a high-achieving student with good test scores, you might get a decent scholarship to reduce the cost of out-of-state tuition.  If you don't, and you don't choose a major with high earning potential, then taking out loans to afford out-of-state tuition is likely a poor choice.   Plenty of people in their twenties and thirties are heavily burdened by student loan payments because they chose to borrow more than they could reasonable afford given their career paths.  

  

2013-07-humanities-student-major_1477_AdviceAnimals.txt
Do you have a source for that claim? Because every article and study I've seen in recent years has said the exact opposite.

[This article](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2012/05/15/best-top-most-valuable-college-majors-degrees/) shows the top 15 earning majors and not a single one is in the humanities. They all fall under either engineering or science.

Similarly, [this article](http://www.forbes.com/sites/troyonink/2012/01/24/college-is-still-worth-it-but-jobs-and-pay-depend-on-major/) highlights a study which examined unemployment rates by major. The only two above 10% are architecture and arts. And the third highest belonged to humanities and liberal arts.

I also think it's quite inaccurate to state "number crunching can be taught on the job fairly quickly". The reason these majors are in such demand is because of exactly the opposite. These are highly specialized fields that *require* a lot of time and work to succeed in.

What do you even mean by "number crunching"? If you're referring literally to performing rote algebraic calculations, then yes it will be impossible to find a job. But that's not something that someone can major in. What is learned in these majors simply can't be learned on the job. Knowing what forces act on a plane through flight, the differential equations used to model these interactions, and which numerical methods to use since there is no analytical solution is hard. Like years and years of study hard. Knowing how to code an efficient algorithm and implementing it into a electronically secure system delivering interactive web pages from the Javascript to the Pagelet to the Servelet to the database and back is hard. The same could be said for whatever other math and science based field.

I'm sorry if I come off as defensive. I just don't like years of my and my peers' hard work being trivialized. I don't claim that I could take a job in the humanities and learn it on the job. I can read scholarly articles on literature or architecture and follow along, but understand I couldn't do what they did. Yet people claim math and science are just robotic memorization and recitation, when even reading my work back in undergrad would be like a different language to them.

2013-07-humanities-student-major_99_AskWomen.txt
I think I might be a bit late to the game, but I personally think this is such a complex question and answer. Therefore, I won't be able to cover everything or might not include something that you think is relevant. 

1. These numbers are very dependent on what schools you are looking at and in specific regions. Overall, looking at an engineering school or military academies, the numbers are extremely different. I worked at the Air Force Academy for a bit of time, not only is it a STEM college for the most part, but it is also a military academy. I think the percent of women were the highest it has ever been at around 18-20%. They only have 4,000 cadets. So there were less than 800 female cadets. This made a huge difference in the way that females were treated, viewed, and how they fit into the college dynamic. Now let's look at my college, University of Oregon. Females were about 52%, still less than the average but much closer. Then again, if you were to go into the STEM section of UO that number drops significantly and raises in the humanities area of the college.

2. I think overall there has been a shift in education for men and women over the years. Overall, I think women have been entering college in higher numbers because of the rationale that this is the only way they will be able to enter the professional workforce. That unless they obtain a college education, they will end up becoming a stay at home mom or end up working at a cashier for a grocery store, fast food place, etc. Most women choose not to go to trade schools or entering the military, and therefore to pursue a better job/career they go to college.

3. Now you may be thinking, the evidence that you just gave says that women go to college for English, History, Teaching, etc. Why aren't we seeing those number changes within the STEM fields? Honestly, we are! They are just slowly increasing, and it is going to take a lot longer for those to reach the same levels as other fields. 

There are a lot of reasons for that. Too many to put here, but I'll try and highlight some of them. Women are typically discouraged from STEM fields early on, fewer famous female scientists to look up to/idolize, women who would excel in STEM fields are more likely to excel in many other fields as well and therefore have a chance to choose a field based on interest. The list goes on. 

4. I worked with lots of freshman while at college. I was an RA and I did Academic Advising for freshman. Honestly, I would say about half the people who go to college straight out of high school shouldn't. Both male and female. They aren't ready for the academic rigor to truly succeed in college. They don't know what they want to do and end up taking out more loans/using more parent's money to "find themselves" for the first few years of college until they are forced to choose a major. The maturity level isn't there yet, this happens most frequently with males, but there are many immature females too. 

I covered a lot, and there is probably stuff I didn't say that are probably all relevant too. I would interested in knowing your thoughts, ideas, or just telling me I'm wrong is cool too. 

2013-08-humanities-student-major_1098_AskReddit.txt
People tend to do things for power and prestige. STEM study and work doesn't do that over the short term because it seen as a bit nerdy and it's relatively challenging work. You can actually lose status pursuing it because it seems nerdy and it takes up a lot of the time you might put into developing your social circle. If the cultural aspect of that seems off then you can catch up on The Big Bang Theory, it's on TV all of the time and they mock nerds almost exclusively. Broadly speaking, studying for STEM work isn't that appealing to most people and they pursue power and status in other ways. On the other hand, if you aren't especially good looking or a social butterfly then you play the long game and go into STEM work to get your power and status later. This serves to reinforce the stereotype that STEM is full of nerds because it is. But what of the female nerds?

As for gender specific stuff, women can certainly pursue status through study and work and they do. There are more women in college now than men and that's also true for law school and they are getting really close to parity in medical school. Women also have the traditional option to marry into status which men don't generally have. One other factor is that men are expected to be the primary provider for their families while women are encouraged to pursue their interests. That's where female nerds tend to go. I had an advanced math class in college for my STEM work and it was a massive sausage fest as was every other course in my major. The class before that was some sort of art history class and it was almost all women.

Now, I don't have a great perspective on how women in STEM roles tend to come off in terms of social standing. I can say that I know a young woman with a doctorate in astrophysics and I think other women and quite a few men tend to find that intimidating which can make thinks awkward and ultimately less desirable for other young women. The flip side of that is a man studying the humanities isn't going about an especially masculine pursuit and isn't likely to gain much power or status there. He isn't going to be making much money either so that's 2 strikes.

The problem here is that women are served poorly by the idea that they don't need to provide for themselves and men are served poorly by the expectation that a lot of their worth comes from the size of their paycheck. As a society we only seem to have a problem with about 1/2 that equation which is why young women get STEM scholarships and [young men get criticized for pursuing their interests](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704409004576146321725889448.html). . . but that's drifting into another extended rant no one is going to read.

2013-08-humanities-student-major_292_SRSDiscussion.txt
I have to respectively disagree. As an undergraduate in a STEM field at a large, southern STEM university with required humanities courses, these courses offer students (especially sheltered, white, male students) another point of view on life. I think there's a reason college-educated people are more liberal, and it's not a liberal bias in college education. For these students who have never seen anyone who doesn't look or think like them before, they are thrown into a literal melting pot of cultures and schools of thought. They, for the first time in their lives, have the ability to experience empathy if they so choose. Lord knows I know plenty of people who have chosen not to and surround themselves with others who look and think like them and spout off some of the most racist things I've heard in my life (my university has a big racism problem). But if they're forced to take *one* class that challenges their way of thinking, some amazing things can happen. 

On another page of thought, I'm a student who could have easily (and almost did) gone into a humanities or art field as I did STEM. I chose STEM because while my passions lie in the humanities and arts, I find myself bored without the challenge of hard sciences. My specific major allows me some outlet in approved courses in the arts (I took my required CAD class in computer-aided fashion/textile design, etc) but my only humanities/soft science outlets are my required humanities. This is how I've gotten the opportunity to take some of my favorite classes which really explore my interests, such as Current Social Problems (gave my final presentation on college rape culture) and Women and Literature (combo lit/women's studies class). I hope in my last year to take a class on small religions and cults. If I didn't have the opportunity of required humanities courses, I would be driven crazy. 

College *is* about studying a specific field, but I think that undergraduate specifically is also about broadening your view of the world and changing the way you think. Humanities and additional breadth courses won't change anyone's opinions on anything, but they provide the very important *opportunity* to make that change. And if it gets that one boy in engineering from a small farming town to stop complaining how the only reason he doesn't have a scholarship is affirmative action, or that sheltered Christian girl in my sorority to tentatively ask me how she can learn more about feminism, I think it's a good place to start. 

2013-08-humanities-student-major_757_changemyview.txt
 To elaborate, I am a college student with many friends who are majoring in non-STEM majors.

Your friends might still not be representative of the whole.  I'm an English major and I know many kids who work very hard and don't work very hard at all.  It's important to go into this conversation acknowledging the fact that the information you have about humanities students may be wrong or slanted due to the people you have by chance or circumstance been exposed to.

 I hate to stereotype but I go to a fairly reputable university where there seems to be an obvious separation in the quality of the student body amongst STEM and non-STEM majors.

Once again, it's worth noting that this will differ from college to college.  I daresay that the STEM vs. non-STEM programs will compare more or less favorably if you go to MIT or Cal-Tech vs. Brown and Amherst.

 For one thing, I notice that the work load of Art History or English majors requires far fewer hours of intensive studying than does a more math-intensive subject such as Electrical Engineering. 

I might just go to a college with a particularly intensive English program, but it's a common complaint here that there are not enough hours in the day to read all of the material assigned in our classes.  I would say I usually read and analyze about 400-500 pages of material a week.  Then I also have to write plenty of papers.  Believe it or not, when you're staying up late at night studying systems, crunching numbers, looking at reactions or writing code, and you're thinking "there is no way an English major could ever do this," English majors are thinking the exact same thing about STEM majors in relation to the library and a half we read each semester, and the dozens or hundreds of pages we write in papers.

 I was hoping someone could explain to me how expertise in these subjects contributes to our society in a way comparable to STEM focused subjects.

This is a simple, yet complicated question.  I would argue that the humanities are in a large way the reason we have provocative and high quality art.  Personally, if I couldn't go to the movies and watch stuff like LotR or crack open some Steinbeck now and again, I think life would be a lot less worth living.  While STEM majors allow us to live longer and more efficiently, art makes life something more than just an efficient ride to our inevitable deaths.

**Now for a bit of babbling:**

Being an English major is not easier, it's just easier to fake.  Reasonably smart people can blow through it without doing any work, because unlike STEM stuff, there is no objectively right or wrong answer.  A good argument can make up for not having done any actual work.  That being said, I don't think that this means the major itself is easier.  A sport isn't easier than another one because it's easier to cheat in.  I think a person who honestly tries to educate themselves in an English major or Physics major will find a similar degree of difficulty in the coursework; if only for the fact that there is always more to learn.

2013-09-humanities-student-major_107_Economics.txt
In my experience, the problem with a lot of humanities programs is that they aren't very rigorous.

There's a couple reasons for this. For one, if an unqualified person cruises to a degree in art history, they probably aren't going to kill someone by their ineptitude. An engineer or a doctor might, hence these fields are a lot more challenging. The vetting process occurs early on, in undergrad.

The other reason is that many humanities professors seem to have some qualms about grading systems in general. They view education as just that - education, not a credentialing process so you can get a job. Whether people agree with that mentality or not, I do believe it's one reason that fewer people get failed in humanities classes.

As you've said, many college degrees, even STEM degrees, are more about proving your mettle than actually learning the specific skills you will use on the job. So STEM majors get hired partially because their majors were *hard.* And people who flunk science classes move to the humanities, where they pass. The humanities get the bottom of the barrel, and this is reflected in their employability.

I'm not saying this is the whole reason for the better employment prospects for STEM majors. Obviously there's a high demand for their skills. But I do think the rigor of the program is an important factor that gets ignored. Sure, we use iPads and Kindles all the time, but someone has to create the content that makes those devices worth using. There are a lot of jobs that require skills in writing and reading.

IMHO, we shouldn't be pushing for fewer people to go to college, as a lot of people on this subreddit seem to think. We should be trying to make college more affordable, and also make business, social science, and humanities programs more challenging.

Also, to everyone who says "Well I'm 20-something and I have a job and so do my friends," fuck off and go take a stats class.

2013-09-humanities-student-major_1208_bestof.txt
STEM does focus on specific skills - but they certainly do also focus on teaching you how to think.  It's a different context than liberal arts degrees, but even in STEM you learn about human interactions, etc.  Your customers are nearly always humans and a good engineering education stresses this.

I will say that you're 100% right in that this doesn't mean liberal arts degrees are useless.  They can focus more on the human interaction portion (including writing) because they don't have to do the technical stuff.  And we need those people in the world.  But don't think that liberal arts degrees are the only ones that teach you to think.

Engineering (my major, and what I'm familiar with) gets a bad rap about not being creative.  I happen to think (obviously biased) that in order to be successful, you have to be incredibly creative, but with an amazing amount of constraints.  Anyone can design a bridge that will hold up cars.  It's actually not that difficult.  Engineers build bridges that are feasible to construct, cost as little as possible, and are as safe as possible.  Working within those constraints can be incredibly difficult because not only are you working with all the physical limitations of the universe in general, but you also are working with the limitations of humans and cost, and all these other things.  If you're not creative, you're not going to do a good job.

STEM degrees can totally teach you how to think - just in a different context than liberal arts.

2013-09-humanities-student-major_1241_bestof.txt
Fuck off with the attitude.

Most of your points are just plain wrong

Really, because I only essentially made two points. 1) Engineering Degrees don't teach you skill sets for a specific job. And they certainly don't. Computer Science and the work you do with it are entirely different things for example.

And 2) Engineers do better on law exams, despite you saying that liberal arts is superior in that regard.

those graduating with engineering degrees are probably smarter overall on average

You mean, they're better thinkers? Sure, you can argue that engineers are naturally just smarter since its a lot more competition in it. But that still means students in STEM majors have better thinking skills. If the question of which path will foster thinking skills more, then there isn't really any solid quantitative way of showing it.

engineers tend to have low GPAs, so they need to score higher on the LSAT

I actually imagine that for engineers, law school is much more so a secondary option, and so they don't put into much effort for it as other majors which have a dominant amount of people who want to specifically get into law.

And unless you actually have some metric to prove the statement that liberal arts majors is "like training for your intellect" and is superior in that regard to STEM majors, then you're position is even worse than mine.

Now, why do you think engineering is better than liberal arts, if that is your position?

I never said this. But seeing you're quick to make it personal here, I am gonna guess you're the butthurt one here.



2013-09-humanities-student-major_159_TumblrInAction.txt
Well the liberal arts are really wide ranging, everything from rooted things like Poli Sci History and Psychology to the more ethereal topics of Philosophy and Theology to Literature and Classics to the Fine Arts and then to Cultural Studies. Hell even Economics and Business are sometimes lumped in. And I think that each of them has their worth, and have no problem with any of them being something you would study. The problem with them stems from 1) People are encouraged to hyper-specialize in their chosen field and 2) this hyperspecialization has led to students of those fields detaching their study from all else. You don't see this alot with PoliSci students that go to liberal arts schools, cause we're often forced to take classes in the other disciplines. I've had to take Language courses, History courses, Sociology courses, and Culture/Religion courses. Its made me integrate my studies in International Relations into a wider context. However, you will see those in some of the Cultural Studies or, quite sadly as they could be great in any field, Philosophy fields become introverted into their field, which then makes them convinced that only their field matters. 

The classical example of this is the Philosophy major who cannot function in a job because he was "trained to be a thinker, not a doer", but more modernly, you'll see people with Cultural Studies degrees or Gender Studies degrees who struggle to find a job. If you have an Art or Theatre degree, you can find a job. You will always be able to find one, even if its teaching some High Schoolers. But people who have hypercompacted their education into a single field and one that doesn't have much cache or practical actions find it difficult to reintegrate themselves into working society. So whether they be Philosophers or Asian Studies majors, they then become angry at the world due not to their major, which would be fine, but due to the fact they limited their education. Look a Liberal Arts degree can get you places, as the whole point of having one is to prove that you have the critical thinking skills necessary to work as an academic or as a bureaucrat. Even a theatre  and history major such as my father has found work at non-profits looking for associate directors, because he showed that his degree (and his experience in the field of HVAC Construction) suited him to solve problems, even though he had never worked in the office before. But if your entire undergraduate career is spent by you complaining or by you acting as if you are inherently superior to someone, well thats why we have the Liberal Arts major stereotype.

(By the way, I love having weekends, unlike some people that are STEM majors. I figured I should add some confrontation in this, as I'm tired about being lorded over by STEM majors about how inherently superior they are, but thats another topic)

2013-09-humanities-student-major_214_SubredditDrama.txt
why it is that women are less likely to enter STEM fields and what human factors (such as shitty, sexist engineers and computer scientists) might prevent a woman from becoming a STEM major. 

I think the unhealthy environment might be a factor. Do you think that a reverse scenario plays a role in the low percentage of boys doing English for example? Personally I think there should be some kind of program to get more girls into STEM fields (like there is already), I also think there should be some kind of program to get more boys into humanities subjects, especially English. 

^^copypasted ^^comment ^^follows...


There is an [interesting article](http://eng.kifinfo.no/c62967/nyhet/vis.html?tid=62538) I saw a ages ago about this kind of thing. The gender gap (in interest in subjects in schools) is much wider in rich countries than in poor countries (the example given is Ghana). There isn't a big difference between boys and girls interests in different subjects in Ghana, but obviously there is in the US.                                                                                     Relevant quote...
"The pupils in Uganda and Ghana show great interest in science studies and technology. One possible explanation may be that youth in these countries see knowledge as the road to a better life," says Jensen.

When it comes to the gender differences he points to the fact that youth in Western countries to a larger degree can choose their own identity. Gender seems to be an important factor in this process. In other countries, however, factors like parents and family background are a bigger part of a person's identity.

"In Western countries, self-realisation and developing one's own identity is important. But in poorer countries a career within the natural sciences and technology can be a way out of poverty. Other needs come first, and that might cause boys and girls to respond more similarly," Ullah adds.


2013-10-humanities-student-major_1033_personalfinance.txt
I'd like to say two things to you. First, money is only money. You can't go to jail from it. You can't lose your doctorate from it. Your doctoral thesis will always be there. Money is fickle. Economies (money) have completely collapsed and people still kept on living (see the Weimar republic). Sure it will take time to solve but you have permanent things that you got by trading temporary things. You'll get through this.

Second, thank you for studying humanities. The field isn't as lucrative as some fields like STEM majors, but we as humans have to always be challenged as to what it means to be human. I'm a STEM graduate, but I don't learn what it means to be a human from my work, or graduate school. I just read Rabbit, Run by John Updike. That book taught me more about human emotion and relationships than any engineering course ever has. The way Updike described a young man's struggle with responsibility and a longing for the past in which he was a basketball star resonated with my own emotions and struggles. I say all of this to say: your work is important and critical. We need humanities. We need constant reminders that emotions are complex, and rarely pure and simple. 

This situation is temporary. Your work is essential to our culture, and your achievements are here to stay, no one can take those away.

2013-10-humanities-student-major_1430_nottheonion.txt
 Found a STEM Major.

Really? What ever could have tipped you off? LOL, my username is Lhopital_Rules after all. :)

And I should add that for me personally and many other people (though I qualified my statement by saying that there were STEM geniuses who sucked at humanities), the humanities are simply easier. In high school and college, I did better in humanities overall. SAT highest score? Writing (760). Second highest? Reading. Linguistics? A. Calc III? B-. Topology? Withdrew from the class.

Why am I doing math then? Because it's more interesting. I got bored with the humanities not only because they were less interesting to me, but because they weren't challenging enough. (And no, I don't view writing a paper to conform with your professor's political ideologies as the right kind of challenging.)

I'm not saying that the people in the humanities like STEM or would do STEM if it wasn't so hard. I get that their interests lie in the humanities. I'm just saying that it is, in general, harder. Or at least, for some strange reason, most STEM majors find humanities much easier. Whether that means that it's objectively harder seems to be the natural conclusion to me, but it could also mean that people inclined towards math and science tend to also just have a natural ability in the humanities. 

 It's pretentious to say "My classes are simply harder than yours."

I also have known people who found humanities easier *and* were good at math, but went into humanities subjects because they were more interested in them. That's fine. In fact, any choice is fine. I'm not trying to argue that someone is or isn't copping out. I'm just saying that science and math are objectively harder. Or at least that those who can do science and math usually find humanities easy, but not vice versa. Make of that what you will.

EDIT: Last thing. The difficulty of something doesn't have anything to do with the importance of something. In this time of crappy political leadership and waning morals, I think that in some ways humanities and social science majors (those who can write well, who know history, who know human interactions, who know economics, who can inspire us, who can give us hope) are more important than ever. Perhaps more important than math and science. But it's a balance. I understand that it hurts people's feelings to say that one is more difficult than the other (as a general rule), but I'm not in the business of sugarcoating things. I'll let someone who's more knowledgeable in human psychology attend to that.

EDIT #2: Fixed grammatical errors (yes, I feel the irony). Typing on my phone.

2013-10-humanities-student-major_61_funny.txt
 Society should have no obligation to instil sweeping economic reform to allow people with no in-demand skills to prosper.

Yeah? Want to gaze into your crystal ball and tell me which skills will be "in-demand" 40 years from now? I'll save you the trouble. You can't. If you could you'd be rich by now because functional divination is the *only* skill I can predict actually will be. Who determines what's "in-demand" anyway? "The market?" Because last I checked, the guys who are supposed to be experts at understanding that are engaged in Economics, a *social science* that requires input from anthropologists, cognitive psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists to actually produce meaningful predictions.

Any third rate country can crank out engineers by the dozen. India and China do it and they're good enough at it to get the job done cheaply. Over time they'll get good enough to do it well too like Japan did. Japan also adopted the STEM ALL THE THINGS strategy and once they hit the point where they couldn't refine and tweak things to success their economy hit a brick wall that they still haven't crawled out from under. None of them have built their countries up to glory and greatness the way the Western world has (and I say this as an Indian.) When Indians look at America they don't marvel at how skilled the engineers are. They marvel at how creative and inventive the designers and business mavens are. This is because though they can crank out engineers all day, they can't get a decent liberal arts institution to save their lives though. (And believe me, far fewer people in both countries would be dead or dying if they had more decent political theorists and historians among. But that's for reasons we don't need to get into here.) Moreover, most of the best engineering programs in the country are at liberal arts institutions that prize balanced, holistic educations with broad distribution requirements. Who do you think is going to *teach* those classes?

 it is entitled to think that anyone should have the obligation to give you a high paying job even though you do not have any of the traits

This is where you're being stupid. Kyokushin dude explained to you that *he already has a high paying job.* I didn't major in STEM and I do too. This is because my ability to bring a broad range of expertise from a variety of fields is itself in demand. Especially in a world where most people with my technical aptitude tend to overspecialize. I've dazzled people by bringing urban planning principles to legal department management because nobody in corporate legal departments knows a damn thing about city planning or design and would never think to find parallels between managing their workloads and managing traffic flows. I do, because I learned political science and history which let me put my fingers in a lot of pies. Fancy that. It turns out that the business people actually doing the hiring have a better understanding of what's in-demand than the self-aggrandizing STEM majors who want the world to revolve around them. (Note, I said "self-aggrandizing STEM majors." If you interpret that to mean "all STEM majors" then that's an argument for more focus on reading comprehension in your STEM curriculum.)

Those who have the aptitude, and work ethic to study something like engineering, nursing, or computer science get paid accordingly

Oh please. You make it sound like these things are hard. Go to any top 20 school and pretty much any successful humanities major would clean up most of these occupational training programs. The ones who wouldn't hack it in STEM wouldn't hack it as English majors either. In fact, my English and Literature classes for distribution requirements were some of the hardest I had. And that includes putting them up against Organic Chemistry and Biology (which I also took.) 

2013-10-humanities-student-major_634_badhistory.txt
Physics student, so can chime in here. STEM students feel that their major is harder and more rigorous than those who major in the liberal arts, particularly since STEM fields are very math heavy. As a result, it can lead to a certain arrogance where a STEM student feels like since a liberal arts major is easier, that he can become an expert in it by taking a few classes in the subject or reading an article or two online (it doesn't help that many students feel this way by default). I don't see the reverse (liberal arts majors thinking their majors are harder than STEM majors) very often for some reason, so this could be why this whole scientist masquerading as a historian thing might be more noticeable. 

As for whether a STEM major IS harder than a liberal arts major in general....depends on what majors you're talking about I think. At my school, the stigma is that applied math and environmental engineering are laughably easy, while physics/applied physics, pure math, and biomedical engineering are among the hardest. This could also have to do with the particular requirements at the school, both in difficulty of each individual class and the amount of classes required (the reason biomed is considered challenging is because you have to take a lot of mechanical engineering classes, as well as biology and chemistry classes on top of that). Mathematical rigor comes into play as well; pure math and pure physics require a great deal of mathematical rigor (particularly in general relativity and quantum mechanics), while some other engineering majors might not. As for whether liberal arts majors are easy or hard, and which ones are easy or hard, I would have to say it might depend more on the the professors in the department overall, more so than in STEM majors. Namely, which department gives out more homework or papers to do, and which department grades easier/harder. This unfortunately can lead to the misconception that certain FIELDS are easier than others; really, students are comparing classes and undergraduate majors, which can be very different than the level of difficulty of working in the field for a living.

2013-10-humanities-student-major_680_changemyview.txt
 They are also based in truth and fact.

What constitutes "truth" and "fact"? What's a reasonable threshold to use?

 STEM majors are demonstrably useful: they have countless practical applications

Why is something with immediate practical applications "good"? What constitutes "good"? Why?

 I'll also never use any of this ever again.

You're conducting a science experience, you'll be testing on human subjects. What rights do they have? What responsibilities do you have?

Without consulting any philosophy text written on the subject, can explain to me how humans go about making a decision? How can we build AI without that knowledge?

What scientific research should get public funding? Why?

Without studying any of the history of logic (which was written by philosophers), could you develop a new computer language?

And on and on and on.

I really don't get the hatred that some STEM majors have for humanities majors. I mean, you don't like your humanities classes. They're not for everyone, that's fine. But when people try to argue that the humanities haven't done anything for society and don't continue to contribute to society in a myriad of different ways it usually becomes apparent very quickly that they neither understand where a lot of stuff in their own fields come from, or what people who work in the humanities actually do.

The humanities are also focused on making the world a better place, they are also contributing their time, efforts, and talents to help out humanity. Why is going about it in a different way such a bad thing?

2013-10-humanities-student-major_684_changemyview.txt
**tl;dr at bottom**

[Here's](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States_by_occupation) a list of all 44 U.S. presidents, with their occupations.  How many were engineers?

Just *one* - Herbert Hoover.  (But I'll be generous, and give you Thomas Jefferson too.)

How many lawyers? 23.  (A bunch of soldiers and farmers, too.)

There have been [8 Secretaries-General](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary-General_of_the_United_Nations) of the United Nations.  How many engineers?  Zero. (although a few economists, do you count those?)  Lots of diplomats, career politicians, and lawyers though.

How about Prime Ministers of England, how many of those men were engineers?  Just one - Margaret Thatcher, also the only female.  The rest are a mix of career politicians, lawyers, businessman, and humanities majors.

How many people in the 113th Congress had engineering degrees? [11 - out of 435](https://www.asme.org/career-education/early-career-engineers/me-today/me-today-march-2013-issue/engineers-in-politics).  In the 112th Congress, there were only 9. 

I could keep going but I'll stop and make my point: *why do STEM people rarely become "leaders of the free world?"*  If STEM people are so superior, why don't they realize the importance of taking over powerful offices and actually pushing society forward?  

Perhaps STEM people are just ill-suited for the kinds of interpersonal skills that successful leaders have to have  - maybe your average engineer is bad at running a campaign, bad at shaking people's hands and making a good impression, bad at convincing people to give him funds for television ads.  Whatever the skills are, perhaps STEM people just don't have them when compared to other types of people.  In other words, STEM people need non-STEM people in order to have a functioning society, because STEM people may lack the interpersonal skills to keep society working.  

Or, perhaps, STEM people just don't care about political careers.  STEM people would rather cure diseases, build new technologies, make exciting discoveries - no time to run for President.  If true, this is not a positive for STEM folks, it is a negative.  Political leaders play hugely important roles for the progress of human society and to the extent that STEM folks dismiss political careers as a waste of time, they are wildly ignorant.   

If STEM people are inherently superior to others, then why aren't they leading us?  Why are STEM people so rarely in the upper echelons of leadership? Either they possess inferior social skills, inferior leadership abilities, or they possess an inferior understanding of the importance of politics and leadership positions.  


**TL;DR:**
So there's my challenge to your point of view: STEM people serve many important functions, no doubt, but they aren't leading our society.  Whether they *can't* lead or *won't* lead, the truth is that they *don't* lead (except for rare exceptions).  And I think this marks them as *inferior* or - at best- *equal* to those who *do* lead.  And who are our leaders?  Mostly non-STEM people.  

2013-10-humanities-student-major_716_changemyview.txt
I think your biggest problem is that you've distilled the world down to engineers and comp lit majors and left no middle ground. Now you can make a case (maybe) that comp lit is a less important discipline than engineering, but you've grossly oversimplified both STEM and the humanities. 

I could just as easily make the argument that someone studying law with the goal of one day becoming a judge is far more valuable to society than someone who studies theoretical physics and will spend their life doing research that will likely have very little applicability in almost anyone's everyday life (and very well might not be applicable to much of anything for the foreseeable future). 

The problem with your worldview is that not all STEM fields, nor all humanities fields were created equal. Some aspects of each field of study are more "applicable" (I hate that word) than others. Pure math *for math's sake* is arguably less useful than studying English for its own sake, since most anyone can get through life without much more than basic math skills, but if you can't read or write, you're pretty fucked. It's when you apply these fields that you start to see practical value. 

The STEM fields appear to have more value to society because they are largely applied disciplines, whereas the fields we call "the humanities" are more likely to be pure academic disciplines. Of the four: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math; Technology and Engineering are both applied disciplines, whereas Science and Math are both pure, academic disciplines, and of those two, most of the "sciences" majors are assumed to be tracking to professional disciplines (e.g. Bio--Med School). The most commonly cited humanities fields in these types of arguments are usually things like History and English Literature, which are purely academic disciplines, on par with Math. 

In short, the reason it looks like humanities are less useful than STEM fields is because the STEM fields are biased towards applied studies and pre-professional tracks, whereas the humanities are largely pure disciplines which must them be applied, either through further study or personally, by the student. 

(As a note: I take immense satisfaction from the irony that your argument deriding humanities for being "just vague, unformed ideas, splattered with complicated language" is based largely upon unformed ideas of your own about both the humanities and STEM couched in vagueness to protect your point and, I might add, misuses complicated language on more than one occasion. Also, you present an anecdote as evidence when a real scientist would understand that that is not an adequate sample on which to pass judgement. You have become that which you deride.)

2013-10-humanities-student-major_730_changemyview.txt
Im going to use the tried and true practice of assuming you're correct and drawing the logical consequences. 

The assumption: STEM fields are superior to humanities fields.

The first consequence of your view is logically that everyone should be a part of one of the STEM fields. Because they're superior it would be a waste of potential to choose otherwise. 

Now either you agree with this statement or you don't. More than likely you don't but let's pretend you did. 

I would paint a world where there are only STEM people. There would be no books, no TV shows, no movies, no economists, no video games, no music, no sports, no chefs, no teachers. No designers, no artists which means every website would look like it did during the 90's, everyone would wear gray robes because there's no fashion, and all buildings would be square because there are no architects. No businessmen, no politicians, and the list goes on. 

If this were an in person argument at this point you would  probably be interrupting me saying that my conclusion doesn't actually reflect you view.

Again I think there are two cases. Either you think that those people are valuable but STEM people are *more* valuable or those aren't the people you're talking about. 

If it's the latter then you're probably taking about fields like "_______ studies", philosophy, literature, communications, etc. If that's the case then you're not talking about all of humanities. Therefore you need to reevaluate your view and I'm sure someone from within one of fields will be happy to defend it. 

If it's the the other case then we need to look more closely at what "superior" means. Does it mean more valuable in the sense of our species survival? If that's the case then there are plenty of STEM people who aren't contributing to that end goal.

The CS person who wrote candy crush isn't contributing to humanities survival, the engineer who designs weapons isn't contributing to our species advancement, the physicist who runs the pumpkin launching event is really only doing it for the fun of it. And the mathematician (which is my field) only contributes to humanity by accident. 

By contrast the person who studies the nuances of culture and human interaction trying to find the root of prejudice and inequality is actively working toward making the world a better place.

The upshot to all this is that although STEM people as a group are more valuable by this measure the correlation doesn't imply causation. 

So let's try the measure you defined in the OP. If you define superior as "more useful" then we run into a specialization problem and ultimately a contradiction. 

 The only thing a Lit major can do when my toilet is clogged is explain how the backed up feces is symbolic of the mire of societal expectations or something retarded like that.

Within the context this is absolutely correct. Asking a writer to explain the spectrum theorem is also pretty much a lost cause. 

However, the same is true if the problem is outside the specialization of STEM. Asking an electrical engineer to prepare foie gras is just as much a futile effort.

We live in a world where most people have knowledge that is a mile deep but only a few inches wide. If you decide to measure someone's value by something that you specialize in then you'll reach the conclusion that you're superior every time.   

2013-11-humanities-student-major_1080_LadiesofScience.txt
(Girl, BS/MS CS)
Point the first. You're right--it's too early to panic. IMHO, freshman year should be about taking lots of different classes and figuring things out. Like the fact that you miss science: that's an important data point, no? While it's true that I personally never changed my major, I was also one of the few in my group of friends that never did.

Point the second. STEM secret time: *everybody* feels like everybody else has got things down. I promise you this. Sure, there's always this one guy who just knows everything ever, but there's only one of him. [1] There's way more kids just keeping their heads down and going to office hours when they need help, which is maybe quite a lot. And though I never did a survey, I think most people in STEM don't think of themselves, necessarily, as "math people". I certainly didn't. I did well enough, because I worked at it.

Point the third. One thing we're beginning to recognize about women in STEM is that the sort of women who'd do well in STEM are "globally gifted"--[they're also talented in the humanities.] (http://www.news.pitt.edu/women_STEM) As a kid, I was pretty good at math and science, but I was so *very* talented at English that everyone just assumed I'd grow up to be a writer of some kind. Nobody actually steered me away from STEM at any point... but I got a hell of a lot more encouragement and support for my writing. Hell, my verbal SAT score was well above my math score, which is unusual for the sciences and which I was a bit self-conscious about for a while.[2]

Conclusion from points 1-3: ***You should definitely check out the sciences***. It's early enough for you to switch; the fearsome nerds of STEM are not any more talented than you, and anyway diligence is better for STEM than talent; and, because of crappy societal reasons, while you may not have actively been *discouraged* from STEM, you may not have actually been *encouraged* much in that direction either.

The most important thing you need to do now, IMHO, is focus on math. No matter what branch of the sciences you end up in, math is going to make or break you. You need to get into the highest math track, and you need to get there ASAP. How you do that will depend on your particular situation and how your school is set up. Go talk to a guidance counselor. It's not too late to do this, but you do need to act soon.

[1] Also, in my college, that one guy? The *other* story about him, aside from his genius, was that he allegedly treated office hours like lectures: he'd go to every one, for the whole duration, with questions prepped ahead of time. So even that one guy puts in effort, albeit not necessarily where you can see.

[2] I ended up minoring in English, and today I consider my mad writing skillz one of my most important professional strengths.

2013-11-humanities-student-major_1761_programming.txt
  Usually, they are highly qualified but extremely cheap labor. 

As humanities majors?  I'm sorry, but I live in the *real* world. And this just isn't true. At best in terms of productivity humanities majors will be doing work that is equivalent to untrained unskilled labor, by and large. (There are a few very rare exceptions but they're not worth considering here in general.)

 Their position in the job market is best described as somewhere between a rock and a hard place,

Yes, because even with their exceptional investment in their education, their work qualifications are indistinguishable from the same skillset required to ask, "Do you want fries with that?"

Not to say that most STEM grads are really any better off. But there's a *qualitative* difference between the things a humanities major's internship will be asking of him as opposed to the things a programming grad's internship will be asking of him.  A humanities major will be spending time as a gofer, or else personal assistant; observing the life and work environment and politics of the field.  A programming major or architectural engineering major on the other hand will be putting their hands in on actual projects; producing actual goods and services for clients.

The presence or non-presence of the degree makes no difference in the quality of work provided by a PA to a professor or newscaster.  It does, however, make a vast degree of difference to the architectural designer or the code monkey peon. 

And that's why one gets paid while the other doesn't; the former *is already working* -- whereas the latter is *still learning how to work*.

2013-11-humanities-student-major_336_Economics.txt
I think it might be because you are clueless. First of all, not everyone is cut out for a STEM degree. I work in higher ed, I run success analytics data, and over the past few years I've seen a massive spike in students running themselves into the ground and into extreme debt failing and retaking STEM course for degrees they simply aren't cut out for. 

Humanities are actually important to society. All of those 'worthless' degrees you talk about? Maybe not super lucrative in today economy. But I remember an economy that fully supported people with humanities degrees, and they didn't have to go massively in debt to get them. Society was much better off with a good chunk of the population that knew about history, sociology, psychology, political science. And another chunk that barely scraped by financially making really beautiful art. They never intended to get rich, but we once had 'starving artists' that weren't literally starving. 

Again, we were much better off.

Right now we have a very broken economy that is a result of a very broken system. And you want to blame everyone but the people that broke it. You want to point fingers at the people who suffer and blame them.

Even if you are very wealthy, even you are suffering from the loss of people who study under those 'worthless' degrees. Society is much richer the more rounded it is.

2013-11-humanities-student-major_337_Economics.txt
The heartbreaking thing is that, in the long run, society will suffer because people aren't getting degrees in humanities. We need our historians, psychologists, sociologists. We need our artists. We just won't know it until they are gone. And maybe then we won't even notice, we'll have just fallen into a new kind of dark age and future generations (if enlightened) will look back on us and pity us.

I remember an economy that supported humanities degrees. I remember when people didn't have to go into extreme debt to get a degree. I remember when a humanities degree would land you a decent job. I remember when 'starving artists' weren't actually starving. 

The economy and system is severely broken right now. And we are all suffering for it. Every one of us. Even us in highly technical trades/lucrative fields suffer from the loss of academic diversity in our society. 

And the final nail in the 'just go out and get a proper degree' coffin:

Not everyone is cut out for a STEM degree. I work in higher ed, I run success analytics data, and over the past few years I've seen a massive spike in students running themselves into the ground and into extreme debt failing and retaking STEM course for degrees they simply aren't cut out for.

*from my comment in another part of this thread, didn't feel like retyping*


2013-11-humanities-student-major_36_news.txt
This is a great way to regulate a population. This whole emphasis on STEM is about creating a generation of students who believe the "science and technology will save us" and "objectivity and rationality are the only reasonable ways to see the world" memes. But this is how America has in many ways always been- create problems and then seek out the solution to problems through the same mechanisms that created them (cf fiscal policy of the last few decades). I'm not all-out-anti-STEM by any means (I'm typing on a computer after all), but in the big picture this is about creating an **economically productive and politically docile citizenry**. What better way to massage the masses into such docility? And it's easy. You don't even have to be overly anti-humanities; just reeaaalllllyyy for STEM. Eventually no one looks to the humanities, and you can say, "See, students just aren't interested in this stuff anymore. Better cut funding and support STEM so we can save 'our future' 'together' 'by our bootstraps'." It's not that what people don't know won't hurt them, it's that people won't know when they're being hurt; but they'll feel it and have no way to express it or make sense of it outside of the math/science/positivist lens they've been taught to see the world through. When we keep fighting wars for the same reasons, creating enemies to justify research and development of defense technologies (for example), we just won't be able to understand why these things keep happening... so we'll keep producing, extracting tech-building materials from Africa and exploiting cheap labor in SE Asia through "proven" neocolonial practices ("hey, we know what works; we're scientists.")

**TL;DR** Producing a generation of STEM-only-minded and profit-driven young people is about maintaining extant systems of power, not so much improving lives or life situations. 

2013-11-humanities-student-major_419_AskReddit.txt
Believe it or not, the professional world isn't entirely made up of Scientists, Engineers, and Businessmen. Almost half of all entry positions don't require a specific degree at all. Just that you have one.

People value Liberal Arts majors. History is a subject that everyone in America grew up studying, and as a result most employers at least respect the degree. It's a degree that is essentially the study of people and change over time. This is a soft skill, but in many fields, such as Engineering or IT, these soft skills are actually lacking. Profoundly. Engineering firms are plagued by inept management and business practices. Plagued by employees who lack communication skills. Engineers make a lot of money right out of college, but they hit their ceiling pretty fast, even with a Masters degree. Employers see a History or International Relations degree and say 'Hey, this kid can write and is an expert in a field I'm not an expert in." That might sound very basic, but 40% of entry positions don't require a specific degree at all. 

It's a degree that opens doors to jobs in government (pretty wide field right there), consulting, analysis, research, technical writing, law enforcement, etc. Not only that, but people with History degrees frequently go on to become Lawyers, Doctors, Politicians, Professors, Teachers etc. 

It's also the perfect degree to get if you want to do a double major with a hard science. If you're doing business a double with International Relations works better, but with History it will at least make you stand out amongst competitors.

2013-11-humanities-student-major_636_changemyview.txt
I sympathize with your general dissatisfaction, but simply *not teaching* these things is not the way to go. It doesn't really achieve anything other than a brief personal ego boost for what is, essentially, thinking of the children.

-----------

From a practical sense, it just wouldn't happen. If you cut philosophy departments from the public education payroll, they'll just re-brand themselves or integrate into other fields. This doesn't really change anything and only serves to create a hassle for the government, the schools, the professors, and the students. It will cost more money to implement than it would save.

You can't put blanket bans on fields of study. Determining what fields are "useless" is a completely subjective process. At the point where STEM enthusiasts ban public funding of philosophy, there is no reason that any powerful group could ban or defund any other field for whatever arbitrary reason, like classes on Soviet Russia or evolutionary biology. It isn't a healthy precedent to set.

-----------

The important thing to realize is that no field can exist in a vacuum. If you don't believe me, go to a page on Wikipedia and click on the second link in the article that directly leads you to another Wikipeida article. Click the second link of this article, and keep doing this over again. Watch how the subject slowly changes as you click through the articles.

Let's try Adolph Hitler as an example.

* Adolph Hitler
* Germans
* Ethnic group
* Identity (philosophy)

Okay, I know. Some people may say that history is a cheap shot. It's generally considered a humanities field.

In that case, let's try the page for a Boeing 747.

* Boeing 747
* Airliner
* Airline
* Travel
* Location (geography)
* Point (geometry)
* Topology
* Connectedness
* Topological space
* Mathematics
* Number
* Counting
* Enumeration
* Computer science
* Computation
* Information processing
* Observation
* Data
* Level of measurement
* Quantitative research
* Mathematical model
* Mathematics (we hit a loop, so we use the first link instead)
* Quantity
* Magnitude
* Order theory
* Glossary of Order Theory
* Lattice (order)
* Supremum
* Subset
* Set (mathematics)
* Mathematical object
* Philosophy of mathematics
* Philosphy

To say that philosophy does not deserve receive the support of the public education system is an absurdly short-sighted claim at best. The field of philosophy deserves to be taught in public universities just as much as any other field, as no field can exist in a vacuum.

---------

Now, some argue that those pursuing *degrees* in philosophy and other fields should not be eligible for public *scholarships* funded by taxpayers. However, that is a completely different debate that goes unstated in your original post.

2013-11-humanities-student-major_814_books.txt
I think your "friend" (ahem) comes off as a bit pompous in a few spots, but overall I think his heart is in the right place, and I agree with the main thrust of what he said.

I think that there has been far too much emphasis on STEM subjects in colleges and universities in the US over the last 30 years or so, and not enough on the humanities (which are more important, in my opinion). American culture is suffering for that. And I say this as someone with math and engineering degrees.

There are too many kids going to college today because they feel that they have to in order to get a "good job," and they are often selecting majors that they have no real interest in other than the prospect of a job with high pay upon graduation. How happy are those people going to be trudging off every day to a job they hate but put up with because of the money? It's almost mercenary.

I always advise young people to major in a subject that they like and have a genuine interest in, not to pick a major just because of job prospects. So many professions that were "hot" at one time fall out of favor, so people end up changing careers quite a bit these days. College should be about education, not job training. If you really enjoy a certain subject and are good at it, you'll find a way of making a living off it. It's also more likely that your education will stay with you forever that way.

We need more writers, artists, poets, and philosophers. Without all that we might as well be cows, just waking up and chewing cud to get through the day. I hope your friend sticks with English, he seems to have a real passion for it. Good luck to him.

2013-12-humanities-student-major_103_OutOfTheLoop.txt
A lot of STEM types form circle-jerks about how their major makes them more employable out of college than people with liberal arts degrees. This is most certainly true, but on Reddit they take it to an unnecessary level of self-congratulation. I'm guessing the people behind the jerk are usually college students who feel really smug about their choice of major. Coupled with the fact that many university STEM programs are sausage fests full of socially maladjusted and sexually frustrated dudes who never seek outside perspective, the Internet provides an outlet for them to feel superior. They seem to get really pissed off because STEM majors are a lot of difficult work and they see other people around them partying on daddy's dime for a basketweaving degree or whatever. 

There's also the related "logic" jerk where certain individuals come into a thread to debate something or other, and consider themselves as some kind of Vulcan atheist scientist superhero, one of only a few people who is capable of rational thought. So they love to shit all over social sciences and arts and use their superior "logic" abilities to discount anything they perceive as "soft science." For some reason this type seems to intersect with Ron Paul Libertarianism. They also seem to gravitate to things like Men's Rights Movement which is some sort of reaction against feminist circles, because they see themselves as persecuted by the interests of women, minorities, etc. These aspects all come into play when you see people on SRS and Circlejerk making fun of the STEM jerk. 

As with all things on Reddit, there are literally millions of people to account for so this is kind of a blanket generalization. But I've witnessed it enough to say that there is some truth to it.





2013-12-humanities-student-major_1136_TumblrInAction.txt
I don't think it helps that video game development has been a software *and* hardware engineering thing for a very long time. Do you know what field traditionally has low numbers of women signing up? That's right, Engineering!

I think this is the same issue STEM has been dealing with for decades: a lot of women aren't signing up, and the ones that do tend to go into the biological sciences. Biology, Ecology, etc. Lots of research fields. A lot that go into science don't even go into STEM. They become Anthropologists and other soft science majors.

So at the root of the issue, women aren't really being inducted into a major part of the industry, which is the computers user to make the games. Which limits their role to artists. And since fewer girls grew up on video games, because in the 80's and 90's it was seen as a boy's toy much of the time, there's fewer women today who view gaming as a serious career choice, even if they're qualified.

But back to STEM, because I think this is a larger issue people rail against, especially the radfems: nobody is unwelcoming to women in STEM. The problem is not STEM itself. The problem is the number of people signing up. Women are not introduced to engineering from a young age. Men are. Girls might play with Lego, but that's the closest they get, and they're hardly the same as K'nex, unless you get into advanced Lego projects. Most people don't. Most girls aren't encouraged to. A [Computer Engineer Barbie](http://www.neowin.net/images/uploaded/81HMv7bi6ML._AA1500_.jpg) isn't going to change that. You need a toy that teaches mechanical or electrical engineering, logic gates, circuits, etc, to young girls before they'll even think of approaching Engineering courses. As it is, they grow up feeling an affinity towards stuff they've been given an affinity towards via enculturation.

In short, women are *choosing* to not go into STEM. It doesn't tickle their fancy. As a result, the number of gaming jobs is cut in half for women. And good luck finding a designer or writer who hasn't played a lot of games. Remember the woman writing at BioWare who said games need a "skip gameplay to get to next cutscene" button? Gamers *hated* her for missing the point of the game. Nobody wants that. We want the opposite. Fewer scenes, better writing and exposition via gameplay.

My point, if I'm getting it across, is that this is a symptom of a larger issue that people *also* blame on the people in the field. But the problem starts much earlier.

**TL;DR:** If you raised your kids to not play video games and steered them clear of basic physics exploration, then of course they're not going to major in that.

Please, stop majoring in some useless field like English or Liberal Arts and then complaining that more women didn't get into STEM. If you're not a STEM major, it's not really your damned business in the first place. If it bothers you so much, stop lamenting it and go back to school. Be a STEM major yourself if the need is so bad.

2013-12-humanities-student-major_1346_AskReddit.txt
For whatever benefits the rich and powerful, of course. The decline of humanities isn't the same thing as the rise of STEM; rather, it is a precursor of the eventual reduction of STEM to a corporate bitch. 

It's pretty obvious why they're first getting rid of fields that are for teaching students how to create content independently (art, music) and teaching students the tools of social and cultural critique (humanities, philosophy, history). It's an Orwellian project to eliminate the means, theory, history, and even the language of resistance against power.

After the sections of the academy that are openly hostile to Wall Street are dead, the next targets will be those that do not make it any profit. Space exploration? Theoretical physics? Climate science? Environmental engineering? Research into rare medical conditions? "Lol, no funding for you, useless eggheads!" But pharmaceutical research for boner pills? Engineering drones and bombs that kill more ~~political enemies~~ terrorists for less money? BS evopsych rationalizing the dominance of the current elite? "Sure, go right ahead! Your work is an important contribution to humanity!" 

It's already happening. The STEM crises you hear about in the news media? It's all a myth. The job market for STEM workers is often terrible, and real wages are falling across the board. The business interests just see fit to start a hulabaloo every few years so that they can get a glut of cheap, disposable STEM workers to pay shit wages to, because even now some things just require too much refined skill to be done by a robot or an Indian national. It's all part of the plot to erode the middle class away, and the irony is that the smug STEM jerkers didnt pay enough attention in humanities class to obtain the tools of social critique to see what is happening to them.  



2013-12-humanities-student-major_17_AskMen.txt
One thing I don't think you're accounting for is that in going out and getting college degrees and trying to foster a career is that women are putting off getting married, having children, and that whole shtick. They might not be getting married because they don't have the time to get into relationships.

As for college graduates on average tend to make more than non college graduates, look at the average wage for the social studies/ humanities major, which tend to be mostly women. Eh, like less than or average to $30k at my school. You're not taking into account a weighted average due to gender in each school of study and their respective wages out of school or 5 years into their careers. 

Also, with guys, it's a bit harder to improve your graduation rates now because it's not really a systematic or rule based problem. It's more nuanced in the fact that it seems to be based on behavioral differences between the "average guy student" and the "average *good* student." In school it's all about focusing for long periods of time, sitting still, being quiet and disruptive, which some kids cannot do. It's probably not because colleges or advisers are sitting kids down and saying "Well Billy, it seems here like you'd like to be an engineer, but there's not a lot of happy guy engineers out there. It's a woman's job. Why don't you look into home economics or nursing?"

2013-12-humanities-student-major_500_pics.txt
Let's be realistic here for a second about stuff, and in the interest of honesty, I'm a history major who works in IT.

Yeah, most people who major in a liberal arts degree are never going to use it to earn a living focused solely on that field.  With an English degree, unless you have the right connections or are graduating from a top university, you probably won't be working as an editor/writer professionally.  Women's Studies?  Not unless you want to get into the rather crowded non-profit field which again requires getting the right connections.  Philosophy?  Well who could have anticipated the collapse of the Philosophy market?  History?  Not unless you want to teach or be a Park Ranger or popular history writer.

In fact, for the most part I would guestimate a good 65-85% of all Liberal Arts majors end up doing something other than what their degree educated them for, the jobs in those fields are very competitive, few and far between, and simply not going to happen for the most part.

As for you high and mighty STEM majors?  Well, let's also be honest, your jobs are fickle and market dependant.  Sudden crash in the field in your area and you're out of work.  Also just because you're a STEM major doesn't mean you'll get work either.  A 2.0 with no extracurricular activities and quality portfolio of work means no fancy job.  I once worked in a Tech Support call center and more than one guy in there had a Computer Science degree because they weren't impressive in their field at all.  

So yeah, the reality of the situation is:  Liberal Arts majors, unless you get a Masters Degree or higher or simply stand out among your peers, you aren't going to be working in the field.  STEM majors, unless you shine, you aren't going to be top dog in your field either.

2014-01-humanities-student-major_1121_politics.txt
I hate this. The whole "you deserve your debt because you didn't go STEM" is such a bonkers way of looking at the world. 

STEM is fine, but we don't need STEM degree holders. An engineer from India will be just as effective as an Engineer from the vast majority of American universities, but will be significantly cheaper. When you go STEM, you shoehorn yourself and, thanks to a lack of demand for most STEM fields (and the push to import cheap foreign specialized labor), you pretty much put yourself into the same pickle that you're claiming people with Liberal Arts degrees get you.

But what's a liberal arts degree get you? Critical thinking. Graduate school is where you specialize, but doing undergrad in the liberal arts (English and History come to mind as most prominent), you learn tangible skills that you don't learn in math and science courses, skills that prepare you significantly more for what you're going to face in life. You'll be a lot more successful pursuing your MBA, too.  

Of course, being lazy in college is something entirely. Someone who goes STEM and is lazy will face the same problems as someone who does liberal arts. But promoting math and science at the expense of literature and history produces thoughtless worker-bees. Chinese students may outperform American students in memorization, but that's not what really makes someone successful, is it?

2014-01-humanities-student-major_1259_politics.txt
The fact that I had to google what STEM elitism is determines otherwise. Additionally the fact that I'm a dual major in economics and political science would make me a pretty shitty STEM elitist. Your aversion to talking to people you disagree with, doesn't help solve any problem, it exacerbates them. I'm in no way undermining the value of a degree in the liberal arts. Hell, I'm getting two BA's. I'm looking sheerly from the perspective of a labor economist. There's a serious demand for science and math majors (particularly engineers and doctors). There will be serious problems if these labor shortfalls aren't met. Public works will only continue to deteriorate, and the state of healthcare will decline as the number of providers drop, and those consuming healthcare increase. What i'm suggesting is. It's stupid to make high school students feel compelled to go to college and assume 160,000 dollars of debt, and 4 years of forgone wages (assuming a private school, with no financial aid), knowing damn well they don't have the tools or interest to succeed in a field that requires an English or marketing major. I'm pointing out the jobs for those majors don't exist in a vast quantity, and we are over saturating the labor market in these fields. (These are some of the majors I know people take when they don't know what they want to do). By over saturating the labor market, you are undercutting the wages of those employed in those fields, and those who aren't employed in that field have debt they won't be able to pay if they aren't employed in that field. Advocating for a system like that is insanity. I hope you respond in kind. I don't argue for the sake of being an asshole, I can learn from people. I learn from every argument. And it makes me, and those who argue and debate with me, better more well rounded people. 

2014-01-humanities-student-major_1303_TiADiscussion.txt
It's mostly because STEM degrees are (more or less) inherently practical and are a decent investment of time and tuition money, whereas liberal arts fields generally aren't. Add to that the fact that ridiculous postmodernist circlejerks don't really happen in science fields - in fact, they're not even tolerated. 

A STEMinist is trained from the onset to cut through bullshit and rely only on objective facts to analyze situations and draw conclusions. In most liberal arts fields of study this isn't necessarily the case, so when the Women's Studies majors of the world rely on faulty stats and appeals to emotion and other stereotypical campus activist rhetorical techniques, it immediately sets off bullshit detectors and drastically lowers the STEMinist's opinion of the person spouting said bullshit. Over time this becomes a statistically informed bias against liberal arts majors.

Add to that the low entry barrier and rampant grade inflation in many liberal arts departments, where a CS major working his ass off scrapes by with a 3.1 while his Eng Lit friends get 3.8s-3.9 for free-associating through papers - the resentment isn't entirely unearned. Watching liberal arts majors struggle through basic math courses to get their math prereqs done while you're easily acing your lit or philosophy requirements doesn't help the image either. 

A lot of this stuff has an empirical basis too. STEM departments have the highest attrition rates on most campuses, and most grade inflation studies demonstrate that liberal arts departments grade way more leniently. And it's no secret that STEM majors are way more likely to get hired and will earn way more than the average liberal arts majors.

Part of it is a circlejerk, part of it is the fable of the grasshopper and the ant, with the ant wondering why the fuck the grasshopper wasted his college days playing makebelieve, then complaining about how he can't find a job and whining about SJW bullshit on the internet.

2014-01-humanities-student-major_1317_TiADiscussion.txt
It's not even true for people majoring in stem fields who don't seek out libraries for information. This all depends on the university you are studying and what options they give you and not so much what subject you're taking.

Sure, STEM can be a lot more time-consuming and often people in some STEM fields are very focused on doing well in them and not other things for whatever reason (often people in life sciences who want to do medicine will go beast mode on biology and nothing else). That being said, different universities offer other options. 

Personally, I've been doing a major in biotechnology and another major in geoscience. They only had overlaps within my first year of university (intro physics, chemistry, ecology, etc. . .) but after that they are strung apart and I have to power through them both. I also fill in some other liberal arts courses for some breathing room from all the math and 3d model stuff that drains your brain so I can write an essay or read a book to study instead. In general, you have to get to some level of specificity in any subject to be useful in it for a career, even if it's as a professional lecturer or researcher. A PhD in english will have plenty of tedious specific detail, the same way one in anatomy would too. Also, there are always other outside principles you need to understand. As a geologist/biologist I'm always reminded that I can't do my work without also understanding physics, chemistry, and mathematics, and I'm also expected in some situations to understand psychology and sociology as well as ethical perspectives and political policy. 


2014-01-humanities-student-major_1359_TiADiscussion.txt
If you define practicality as how much money you make after getting the degree, then, sure, STEM degrees might give you a better return. Some people manage to feed their families, otherwise, too. They might not make as much money or make it as early on in their life but they've already decided that what they're doing is worth it. So, it depends on how you define practicality. 

You can use facts to analyze situations in humanities, too. It's just harder to quantify those facts. Historians and political scientists do use a lot of data to back up their research or to look for trends. The results are obviously up for interpretation but you can learn a lot about the relationship between different variables, like poverty and literacy, and make a more informed decision about how to change these trends if your into political science. 

That's a personal example since that's what I studied. I'm sure there are others, though. 

I agree that Liberal Arts students probably get graded more leniently. 

However, at the end of the day, we're still using the same measuring stick but just marking it differently. If that sound weird, I'll explain. 

An engineering student who gets a C or a B is still likely to get a job because, as you said, they're graded harder but still probably competent and intelligent. 

Likewise, getting good grades in Liberal Arts might be relatively easier, but you often have to have a higher GPA to get into certain programs in the Humanities.  

Everyone complains, though. Not just non-STEM majors. It's a tough out there and even if your major sets you up for a very specific job, it's not really easy for anyone. I understand that people should probably not complain, though. Liberal Arts students might just have to wait a while for the job they really want.  

2014-01-humanities-student-major_1376_TiADiscussion.txt
 You could replace that with any other liberal arts field

I'll have to disagree with you. Yes, things like Women's Studies may be useless, but I think some fields in liberal arts, particularly psychology (disclosing bias: I am a psychology grad student) have some pretty huge practical applications. Yes, you'll have to get a graduate degree, but if you want to go into these fields, it can be worth it.

 And if I'm not a fucking barista I can afford to give them food, too.

Yeah, it *is* possible to get a degree in liberal arts and not be a barista/burger flipper. It can often require getting a graduate degree.

 willfully choosing it because "STEM is too hard" is just fucking despicable. 

You know another potential reason not to choose STEM? Because the topic doesn't interest you. I was a bio major at the beginning of college, because hey, money is everything, right? Yeah, I realized that the field did not interest me in the slightest, and I had no passion for it.

 you can shit out a paper on Melville based on other peoples' analysis and get at least a B.

I'd love to agree with you, because I know a lot of people who have no difficulty with it, but I've edited papers for a number of engineering majors... I was like reading a fucking two year old's writing. So yeah, you can claim this all you want, but I've seen it go the other way. Individual experiences may vary.

One last thing: if you're wondering why there's some anti-STEM sentiment from liberal arts majors, it's because you guys are insulting, condescending, and with your dick so deep in a high horse that it's disgusting. You want to do a job that couldn't interest you less simply for the money, because you feel that that's the most important thing in the world? Fine, go for it. Some of us would rather not do something for a living that is essentially whoring yourself out for money.

2014-01-humanities-student-major_1520_AskReddit.txt
Education elitism is definitely a thing.  

The demographic of reddit is a great example in itself.  

It's not a shock to learn that a lot of people on reddit are either STEM students or people working in STEM. A lot of people in STEM, particularly here, are pretty well-known to scoff and look-down on people studying anything at University/College that isn't STEM, but they miss the point.  

1. Not everyone **wants** to pursue STEM. For some reason, that is looked down upon, because how dare people have different tastes.  

2. Not everyone **can** pursue STEM. Some people just aren't that way inclined. There are people out there who just cannot understand maths and science, no matter how much you drill it into them. They're not "retards", they're just different.  

3. If everyone studied STEM, where would our bus drivers be? Our waiters? Our English teachers? Our Police Officers? I could go on.  

4. Following from #4, if everyone did study STEM, the job market would be so saturated, that people with degrees in Physics and Math would still end up as bartenders.  

5. With STEM education elitism comes a lot of hypocrisy. I've lost count how many STEM people I've seen on reddit say shit like "The Arts are pointless and useless" and yet on their comment history, they frequent /r/literature and /r/books.  

It's a shame this elitism exists. What STEM people make the mistake of, when they get into an argument, is that they end up comparing STEM with Liberal Arts, as though they are comparable. "Engineering is so much more important than Painting." Who said it wasn't? How are they possibly comparable? Why are you comparing them?  

People should be able to choose what they want to do without being judged, when it comes to education.  

If someone decided to study Media Studies at University/College, why shouldn't they? As long as that person knows that career prospects are limited and hard to come-by, just leave them to it.  

On the other hand, of course, there is the Liberal Arts graduate who studied Art History, and complains when they're not in their dream job 4 months after graduating. Yes, those Liberal Arts graduates are silly and deluded, but please, for fuck sake, stop raising your nose into the air scoffing "Hahahahaha good luck flipping burgers forever."   

I majored in Linguistics and Creative Writing, and although that can be laughed at, I'm starting a Teacher Training post-graduate course at the end of this month. I've always wanted to teach, and English is my favourite subject. Don't jump to conclusions and call my degree "useless" and tell me I'll be working at McDonalds forever.  

Just because you study STEM, it doesn't mean you're more intelligent than those who don't. You're not. You just have a different *kind* of intellect. You're just different, like we all are.

2014-01-humanities-student-major_1734_TumblrInAction.txt
I never used to have a problem with art degrees, but after SJWs and even meeting some at my school, I'm starting to wonder why art classes are in college anyways. I taught myself Photoshop on my own from a young age, and if I really enjoyed art (I don't) I'd probably have learned to draw or paint or- you get the idea- from a young age, too. Just like I started tinkering with computers. At the very least, perhaps art should be treated like a trade and not something you get a diploma for.

But the deeper issue is people who are dismissing STEM. Anyone dismissing it has to be wholly ignorant. My solution? I suggest that, if they don't like STEM, maybe we should take away all the benefits STEM has brought the world from them and see how they feel about it afterwards. Computers? Check. Anything derived from math, including architecture and angles and proportions? Check. All manner of chemicals? Check.

These people wouldn't survive three days with their Macs and their Houses and their Shampoo, and they have STEM majors to thank for that. And if they're the sort who say "All STEM majors are dudebros!", then congrats, they've just postulated that men built the entire world and everything important to them. But I guess they wouldn't understand that, because they never took a Logic course.

2014-01-humanities-student-major_1828_college.txt
I have degrees in both English and biology, so I know how both sides of the fence look and operate. In fall, I will be attending an interdisciplinary Environmental Studies graduate program.

First of all, the humanities are less quantitative and more qualitative. I have known people who are very quantitatively minded and had a really hard time reading a text and disseminating "big picture" information from it, but loved math problems because there's only one right answer (which isn't necessarily true in higher-level math, I know). Same with biology. I knew people who, like me, were very qualitatively minded, and had trouble with some of the equations in genetics or ecology, or had trouble when they took statistics and chemistry. But the biological concepts and, more importantly, their implications were easy to grasp.

So I don't think you can say STEM degrees are "harder" than liberal arts degrees. It depends on how your brain works. 

Also, it's important to note that ANY college degree--even an art or business degree--confers a basic knowledge set that will help you in the professional world. 

While biology--science--is my ultimate career path, I would not take back my English degree even if I could. It was a tremendously valuable experience, and while it may not have given me much in the way of SPECIFIC skills, I can honestly say that it did help me learn to look at texts, institutions, human behavior, etc. with a critical eye that I was not taught in my biology program (as awesome as biology is).

I think the problem is that most people mistakenly believe that money equals value, so a college degree that doesn't allow you to get into a high-paying profession is worth less than one that does give you the big bucks. This speaks to a problem with our society's priorities more than it does with the actual college major. If I had my way, there would be a greater emphasis in humanities and the social sciences in all degree programs. In a world full of humans, fields relating to human behavior and interaction are invaluable in any context.

2014-01-humanities-student-major_543_writing.txt
While I am not disagreeing with the general points you make, I am unsure why you believe that STEM fields dont do this. Having been through advanced degrees in both STEM and non STEM fields, I have experienced first hand the weird bias in the liberal arts that informally states STEM fields create a sort of "creature" that cant think creatively.

STEM fields use objective facts to support arguments (no different from an English major or a lawyer). The answers are not always "cut and dry" -- hell thats the basis of the scientific method -- are your arguments supportable? The definition of "right" changes over time merely supported by hard, objective truths. But the argument that being a STEM major is not a "creative" process couldn't be further from the truth. While the expression may not be in the flowery language/vehicle that a creative person might exhibit it, the way of getting to an answer that has eluded people for centuries is no less creative than coming up with the Mona Lisa - You literally have to think of something that NO ONE ELSE has ever thought of. In fact, there is written documentation of all the failed attempts before you. (Think Journals and papers)

Regarding the argument that you need to pull thoughts together from different fields -- as you start getting into the advanced degrees, you realize that STEM is just an artificial way of thinking. Most majors start coming together towards the doctoral programs - Physics is significantly affected by biology which is impacted by Chemistry and yes, if you expand your mind - metaphysics and philosophy can come into play as well. Easy ways examples of this: Robotics is a mixture of physics trying to mimic biologic functions, the latest theories say that the universe is itself a simulation (akin to what the ancient hindus describe the world as (maya)) and they are creating transistors out of organic compounds - and we are already ignoring fields like bioethics.

2014-02-humanities-student-major_1010_Frugal.txt
I think there's a bit more nuance here than often gets addressed: The majority of degrees in unhireable fields, in my experience, are being awarded to students who probably oughtn't to be in college to begin with, but not for financial reasons. Too many students are pushed into college because "you have to go to college to get a good job," and when they get there, they can't find a field they think they can succeed in, so fall back on a field that seems easy -- English because they "like to read," or business because they "want to make money," or history, or many of the humanities or social sciences. The problem is twofold: We not only end up with far more students than openings in jobs looking for these degrees, but we end up with a dilution of talent within the degree programs.

I have an English degree, and without the intent to sound arrogant, I was a stronger student than most of my peers. I don't mean that I was more diligent by any means -- I *wasn't* -- but far, far too many of my fellow students simply should not have been in college. I would guess that a *majority* of students would answer "I like to read" when asked why they were studying English. That shows a lack of focus and suggests that the student has chosen a major simply because there was no other major that seemed accessible to them. These are people who should be studying at a vocational school, learning the trades, or pursuing other fields entirely. But enrolled in the programs they gravitate toward at university, they devalue both the learning experience and the degrees they are awarded.

The reality is that there are almost no fields which are useless at a university, no avenues of study without value. We *need* people studying English, studying history, studying business and psychology and sociology and cultural anthropology. These are all valuable fields in their own right: The humanities guide us and keep us grounded to our humanity in a way that raw science doesn't. But we don't need *so many* people studying these fields. Mind you, we don't necessarily need the people studying English to up and study computer science or biology or physics or mathematics, either -- you'll find just as many unemployed chemistry and math majors as you will English majors, though those who are employed probably make more money. But if you just took half the English majors and moved them into engineering, you'd end up with an oversaturated job market for engineers, and you'd have a lot of really shitty engineers to boot -- it would get a lot harder to determine someone's quality based on their degree, and grad school might become to engineering what it is to the humanities. (Of course, it would take a few years for that change to happen -- but don't think that the grade inflation that afflicts the humanities is anything but a result of overenrollment within the fields by poor students. That grade inflation would poison engineering departments once university administrators -- and worse, donors, especially donors with children in those engineering programs -- caught wind of plummeting GPAs.)

Sorry for the wall of text. This is a touchy issue for me, and I think the general public approaches it very badly. I worry sometimes that our cultural STEM obsession in the United States -- though I don't know if you're from the U.S. -- is going to end very badly.

2014-02-humanities-student-major_1428_berkeley.txt
Looks like your tl;dr is STEM students are selfish and humanities students are "stupid". 

Also, you do know that for every point you argue in here, there's a counterargument for it, right?


We actually care about doing well in school and making a living for ourselves. 

- Humanities majors have more onus on them to get better grades. At least in CS, not even being asked for your GPA is the *norm*. In any other area, *especially* humanities, your GPA *must* be listed, and it *must* be above a 3.0 or goodbye to any decent job or grad school.

were lazy in high school and didn't take math and science seriously

- Someone can similarly say STEM students didn't take history or English seriously. To lack knowledge of the past is to repeat it, and to lack knowledge of English and law is to create extremely poorly-written contracts with loopholes and vague language.

I can assure you that most English majors would get their butts kicked in Math 1A or 1B, or even maybe the 16A and B series

- STEM majors equally get their butts kicked, and the same could be said for English majors in their own lower-divs, where they learn the harsh reality that is college-level writing and analysis. Also, STEM majors and R&C - pretty sure you could say the same that way.

Many don't understand basic logic and economics,

- Econ is considered to be within humanities.

since there's no concrete answer to any question, you can make up whatever you want

- As far as I know, not if your grade depends on it. You can't just "make something up". Have fun with your D - signed, the professor/GSI.

 The stakes are a lot higher. 

- The stakes for a legal contract are at least as high. One loophole and someone can hack, say, your tech company and say, "Look, it's totally within the realms of your (poorly-written) contract!"

Not going to bother commenting on the rest.

There are many reasons why STEM majors are not humanities majors, and one major cause is dislike of papers and essays. Can *you* do that? Problem sets are easier than papers - at least you can split up the problems, or work on it with your friends. But in a class where *everyone* has a different paper, it's all on you to write dozens of pages, by yourself, with no clear guidelines about what is right and what is wrong. 

You know who I respect? Those who can do both a STEM major *and* a humanities major and still have a high GPA. 

I am fully STEM, and a STEM double major at that - but until you yourself have tried the difficulty of the humanities (how well did *you* do in your R&C? AP tests don't count; those were a piece of cake, especially for STEM.), your argument has many loopholes as a poorly-written debate. And *that* is what humanities students can do better than STEM can.

P.S. You can't argue that on average, humanities students have better social skills than STEM students do. Wonder why that is...?


2014-02-humanities-student-major_492_college.txt
I teach biology, which is a STEM field, and I think we're overrated.  The high-paying parts of STEM are Technology and Engineering.  The science and math parts might be foundational, but we're not that much more lucrative than the humanities or social sciences.

The STEM versus non-STEM debate is a retarded waste of time.  A lot of people assume that STEM means, "sleeves-rolled, real-world, practical skills", while the humanities and social sciences mean, "ivory tower bullshit."  This misses the obvious fact that a lot of the skills I teach will never be in high demand, but also that the humanities and social sciences can teach you a lot about writing, problem solving, and research.

Fundamentally, if you want to survive in the economic wasteland of the twenty-first century, then you need to develop one or more skills that are useful to other people and cannot be easily learned.  You can do this as a software developer, painter, statistician, writer, engineer, musician, or any number of other professions.  Start honing a craft from day one, choose a major that helps you find ways to improve your craft, but don't trust college to get you where you need to go. Give yourself an independent study assignment every semester, where you figure out what's required to master that craft, and if you don't know what you want to do, then give yourself an assignment every semester where you try to figure it out.

I checked your previous posts and it looks like you're a non-STEM person trying to fit into a STEM-shaped hole.  Someone who is clever can be decent at any job, but will never be great at a profession that doesn't speak to him or her.  Go out and be great, the world has enough life-long mediocrities for the moment.  All those positions are filled.

2014-02-humanities-student-major_569_TheRedPill.txt
Well first off, being in a STEM major...it's spelled "concentrations." 

I think it begins from high school. If you're an athlete you're going to college on a sports scholarship and definitely not majoring in a STEM field. Conversely, if you were more of a nerd, STEM is your field of choice. The rest major in the liberal arts/soft sciences/business where only connections will lead to employment. 


Now, the reason that you see most STEM majors as betas/omegas is due to the feminist and family indoctrination. Just be yourself, get money and you will get the girls in the end. Society has conditioned these already 'less manly/confident' men to be the beta providers. They believe that "brains and brawn" are mutually exclusive. They establish all of their self worth from their knowledge/success and believe that's how they will get women. They neglect other aspects of their lives and pour their souls in their studies and research.  


That all being said, there are a lot of alphas in STEM fields. It's actually like any other field, the "alphas" rise to the top. However, there are much more opportunities for "betas" to make bank as well. Luckily, as a former fat nerd I realized my mistakes prior to university and got my shit together. Getting burned by my first LTR led me to the red pill. Besides, I don't know about you, I've got some girls in my easier STEM electives (bullshit nutrition courses) who are pretty fine. The fact that the rest of the guys have that much lower SMV makes me stand out even more. 


It's all up to you. If you want to live well for your entire life, go into a STEM field (something applicable that can get you a job - NOT a general bio degree) or try to gun for medicine/dentistry. Sure, you give up your 20s, but if you play your cards right you can have your cake (get laid semi-regularly) and eat it too (really high SMV in your 30s). Look up polymaths from the Renaissance, they believed that you should be well versed in everything: language, science, philosophy and that you should be both intellectually and physically capable. Besides, having meaningless 1 night stands with low-mid SMV sluts is useless to you in the long run (the higher SMV ones are dating the older rich established guys). I'd rather work to reach my peak and get the next wave of high SMV 20 year olds later on in my life.

2014-02-humanities-student-major_82_AdviceAnimals.txt
  its the only reason they force STEM majors to take classes like art or a language. they wont willingly let you get out of it because they lose tuition from that. even if you show them you took it in high school, they'll just tell you that its not good enough anyway.

This is a giant load of crap.

As a STEM major myself, the reason that schools require STEM majors to take humanities and for liberal arts majors to take some math and science courses has do to with the premise of a *well-rounded education*.

As a teaching assistant for 6 semesters, I learned that the average STEM major's total lack of ability to effectively communicate in any kind of written media is simply breathtaking.  A trait I see you've seemed to inherit.

As an added note, I'd like to add that I took 10 courses in high school that I received university credit for; that's what AP and IB programs are for.  If you felt that taking a *high school level* class in high school was good enough to get *college level credit*, then you're sadly mistaken.  These advanced programs exist in order to allow high school students to take courses at a college level, and *prove* that their mastery of the material is at a college level via passing the exams.  If you didn't do that, that's on you.

2014-03-humanities-student-major_1012_circlebroke.txt
You know, what you said really just made me realize something.  One of the things I am so thankful for in my slightly older age now is that my university MADE me take a lot of humanities courses, even though I was a bio major in undergrad.  I *HAD* to take 3 semesters of English (vastly improved my writing), philosophy and ethics (vastly improved my ability to think critically and argue a point of view), 4 fucking semesters of a foreign language (...okay, that one was a miss on me because I suck at languages but should have been useful), history (experience in researching diverse topics), and art history (my appreciation for beauty that I didn't know I had until... maybe 5-6 years ago).  

None of those courses, btw, were easy by any stretch of the imagination.  I probably averaged a low B with all those 'fluff' courses.  By contrast, I graduated with high honors from the number 2 school in the country in my field for post-graduate work. (I swear that's not a humble brag--that is just to say I'm not stupid and the classes were indeed very challenging for me because it wasn't something I intrinsically understood, in contrast to my chosen field.)  It makes for a well-rounded person and I never really thought about it until I saw the whole circlejerk about STEM fields.  My girlfriend is always surprised when I throw a weird tidbit of knowledge or help her with her presentations and ask pointed questions as a total outsider to her field.  

Sorry for the wall of text... just what you wrote kind of kicked something loose.  It's never too late to learn something new though!  Just like it's not too late to appreciate what you did learn, apparently! 

2014-03-humanities-student-major_1117_magicskyfairy.txt
We STEM majors actually care about doing well in school and making a living for ourselves. We work hard to learn difficult and marketable skills (the curves are way harsher in engineering courses than in English), and we are intelligent, logical, and disciplined. Time management is way better among STEM majors than humanities majors.

We don't waste our time protesting something political, like the liberal arts majors at my school (UC Berkeley) do. We are smart to realize that yelling loudly and occupying buildings is illogical: the opportunity cost is huge, and the tie would be better spent on doing well in school, gaining marketable skills, and pursuing activities that won't land us in jail.

We know how to work the system and laugh at those liberal arts students who complain about getting shitty jobs and complain about the system being stacked against them, etc. You know, I took out a lot of student loans too, but I'm not worried b/c I know I could easily land a six figure job on Silicon Valley. I bet you many of the people complaining about "gentrification" and "google buses" in San Francisco were lazy in high school and didn't take math and science seriously. Serves them right for not pursuing higher education in a rigorous degree. Many of these protesters don't understand basic microeconomics, that gentrification is happening because demand for housing is exceeding supply, and this is a result of zoning laws. The problem is the government, not "techies."

We are more intelligent about social issues, economics, and politics than many humanities majors. And many STEM majors are also good at writing and public speaking, whereas few humanities majors are strong in math and science. So we're better rounded and more intelligent. STEM majors are in demand, and IT is the future of our de-industrialized economy. Employers are demanding workers who are strong in quantitative skills, and are creative, innovative, and have strong public speaking skills. I can assure you that most English majors would get their butts kicked in intermediate calculus. History majors would get destroyed in organic chemistry, whereas I've aced my way through History and English courses.

Even President Obama has said we should get more people interested in math and science b/c the value of a liberal arts degree is diminishing. Advanced manufacturing, like prosthetic research, telecommunications, alternative energy, etc, are the industries of the future.

And the funny thing is, b/c we're more intelligent, we STEM majors have a more logical and nuanced perspective of politics than many liberal arts majors. Many don't understand basic logic and economics, which is why they approach every issue from such an emotional vantage point. We transcend emotions and thus are more fit to be political leaders than they are.

It's very easy to bs through humanities courses b/c since there's no concrete answer to any question, you can make up whatever you want. In science, however, you have to be very precise. The answer is either right or wrong. The stakes are a lot higher. If we're designing a bridge, a wrong calculation, however minor it is, could cause the entire bridge to fall apart, resulting in many deaths. Doctors need to learn very precise and specific knowledge when they offer diagnoses and perform surgeries. They can't afford to get one thing wrong. This is why grading in science is so harsh. In contrast, the stakes aren't as high in the humanities and you can afford to get things wrong, and since everything is a shade of gray, you can bs your way through essays and assignments provided that you can write well.

As a result, science is more meritocratic whereas grading in liberal arts courses is very subjective. You just have to agree with your instructors. Also to do well in science, you need to build up a hierarchy of knowledge (algebra 1 to linear algebra, chemistry through organic chemistry, etc), whereas with liberal arts courses, you can get through most of them without any background knowledge. Science builds upon skills and concepts we learn in previous courses.

Humanities courses are only "rigorous" when there's a lot of reading and memorization involved. Basically, it's hard only because you have a lot of busy work. In STEM, there's a lot of busy work in addition to learning a lot of difficult concepts at a rapid pace. Our tests don't require you to simply regurgitate material you memorized: they require you to internalize the concepts and use your brain to apply them to unconventional situations. Honestly, it's not uncommon for us to study 7-8 hours a day, and sometimes much more if we have a project. In comparison, humanities majors have a lot of free time. STEM encourages students to build up their mental chops, which makes us very marketable. Humanities majors only know how to recite facts. In STEM, you can't just be hard working: you also have to be SMART to survive.

The only liberal arts majors I respect are philosophy and economics. Economics is very rigorous on a mathematical level, and many philosophers were also mathematicians. Everything else is pretty much bs.

Also math and engineering majors tend to also kick ass on various graduate school admissions tests, like the GRE, GMAT, and LSAT. Look that up. It's a fact that math is more rigorous than humanities. And people who are competent in math (whether or not they like doing math) are superior intellectually to those who aren't.

I think humanities majors have NO right to complain about poor job prospects because they willingly CHOSE a major that isn't marketable.

Our economy is undergoing de-industrialization and structural shift, meaning that most future jobs will be in the service sector. These jobs require people who are competent quantitatively.

There is excess of supply of English majors than there is demand for them. It's the opposite in IT: many companies are even sponsoring apprenticeships where they train community college students in tech skills.

People should suck it up and take harder classes if they want a job. It's fine to take English or History classes for fun or for a minor, but treat it like a hobby. Don't major in it if you know that you can't get a good job when you graduate in it. Is someone who plays music for fun inferior to a music major? I think not. Therefore major in a science subject, and take humanities courses for fun if you like learning those subjects. I'm saying this b/c most of the time, even humanities majors don't find jobs that they find enjoyable. So better to find a job you don't like that pays well than a job you don't like that doesn't pay well. So suck it up and major in engineering.


2014-03-humanities-student-major_1201_Automate.txt
I judge fields by effectiveness. Economists are meant to stabilize the economy.
They aren't. Ergo they don't know shit.

Um, no, they are meant to advise on how to run a government and a market, however, many times, they aren't listened to, or they are are wrong, because people can be wrong, its not new, lets take a look at some of your other posts.

Engineers do their jobs. I can fly through the fucking sky and phone fucking Antartica thanks to them.
They are doing their jobs.

And it took them forever to figure that out, man has tried to fly since time immemorial and we only relatively recently figured it out. They failed a BILLION times over to correctly fly, and if you looked in the 19th century, you could say "Engineers haven't done their jobs, I can't fly" and you would be wrong. Also, using a phone has the same long winded speech

Doctors do their fucking jobs. I can lose both my legs and not die.
They are doing their jobs.

Hardly ever does that happen and many people still die from cancer, among numerous diseases they haven't figured out. This argument is bad because they really have not done their jobs at all.

Economists are usually ideologue commerce majors

cute

math skills of a monkey

Says the obvious liberal arts major.

 logical reasoning abilities of a close minded conservative.

Ah I see, so your ideology is better than the ideology of an entire group of thousands of people and you think it is because its a strawman stereotype you made up.

 I know people who are econ majors.

Again, the logical thinking of an obvious liberal arts student. "everybody I know are all the economists in the world"

Any kid from podunk elementary university doing electrical engineering is about 10x smarter than the twats I know.

Maybe then you need to get out of your drum circles and pickup a book, stop smoking weed and learn something, many economics majors are smart people, the fact that you talk about all of them as if they are stupid because they don't agree with your women's studies class does not make them stupid.

2014-03-humanities-student-major_1616_circlejerk.txt
Whoa whoa whoa here. I'm an English major and I have some issues with these claims. I made a 34 on my ACT and a 2320 on my SAT. I scored the lowest in math and science, but they were still above average scores. I started out college as a math major, but I switched after English because I felt like I was in the wrong path. I'm now on my way to becoming an ELA teacher. It won't land me a six-figure job, but I knew that starting out. I made a very informed decision to sacrifice salary for job security, helping others, and most of all doing something I liked. The United States still lags in literacy rates with the rest of the developed world, and I hardly think you can argue that we don't need literacy. You wouldn't have gotten anywhere in your STEM fields if you weren't learning critical thinking, close reading, context clues, etc. Mathematics can only take you so far; we communicate with language and language isn't logic-based. You'll find humanities more apt at interpreting nuances and ambiguity than your logic driven STEM majors.

Furthermore, all subjects are hierarchical, not just STEM and everything else. What's harder for some people will be easier for others. There are many types of intelligence. Logical/mathematic is one, but there's also musical, visual, verbal, existential, and more. You can't compare one objectively with another. Also, there are plenty of fields that cross over in regards to the liberal arts/STEM divide. Sociologists would do poorly if they couldn't interpret data, but also if they did not have the critical thinking to asses the context of the studies and the verbal skills to explain them.

We're becoming more technologically advanced and there are greater needs for the STEM fields, no doubt. But the United States has been progressing to an information/communication economy. Liberal Arts majors become the teachers, the administrators, the politicians, the social workers, the therapists, the communicators, the writers, the philosophers, editors, journalists, lobbyists, lawyers, etc. You cannot say one field is more important than the other, for all are integral. Moreover, why would you want to? You could argue that we need medicine more than art, and you could make valid claims for that, but in the end we want both anyway so why discriminate?

You remind me of this teacher I had in high school. She was our Chem I and II and calculus teacher. She cherry picked me out right away because I showed a propensity for the STEM subjects, and she got me and a partner all the way to International Science Fair. It was a wonderful experience, but do you know why I was chosen? My partner was far superior at science and especially at research but she had trouble communicating, explaining, assembling information and asking the right questions. My teacher always made remarks like you did about how STEM fields were more valuable but in the end she needed my silly verbal skills anyway. Boy, was she mad when I switched to English.

Anyway, that's all I got on the subject for now. Hope I changed a little of your view!


2014-03-humanities-student-major_1661_circlejerk.txt
WE STEM MAJORS ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT DOING WELL IN SCHOOL AND MAKING A LIVING FOR OURSELVES. WE WORK HARD TO LEARN DIFFICULT AND MARKETABLE SKILLS (THE CURVES ARE WAY HARSHER IN ENGINEERING COURSES THAN IN ENGLISH), AND WE ARE INTELLIGENT, LOGICAL, AND DISCIPLINED. TIME MANAGEMENT IS WAY BETTER AMONG STEM MAJORS THAN HUMANITIES MAJORS.

WE DON'T WASTE OUR TIME PROTESTING SOMETHING POLITICAL, LIKE THE LIBERAL ARTS MAJORS AT MY SCHOOL (UC BERKELEY) DO. WE ARE SMART TO REALIZE THAT YELLING LOUDLY AND OCCUPYING BUILDINGS IS ILLOGICAL: THE OPPORTUNITY COST IS HUGE, AND THE TIE WOULD BE BETTER SPENT ON DOING WELL IN SCHOOL, GAINING MARKETABLE SKILLS, AND PURSUING ACTIVITIES THAT WON'T LAND US IN JAIL.

WE KNOW HOW TO WORK THE SYSTEM AND LAUGH AT THOSE LIBERAL ARTS STUDENTS WHO COMPLAIN ABOUT GETTING SHITTY JOBS AND COMPLAIN ABOUT THE SYSTEM BEING STACKED AGAINST THEM, ETC. YOU KNOW, I TOOK OUT A LOT OF STUDENT LOANS TOO, BUT I'M NOT WORRIED B/C I KNOW I COULD EASILY LAND A SIX FIGURE JOB ON SILICON VALLEY. I BET YOU MANY OF THE PEOPLE COMPLAINING ABOUT "GENTRIFICATION" AND "GOOGLE BUSES" IN SAN FRANCISCO WERE LAZY IN HIGH SCHOOL AND DIDN'T TAKE MATH AND SCIENCE SERIOUSLY. SERVES THEM RIGHT FOR NOT PURSUING HIGHER EDUCATION IN A RIGOROUS DEGREE. MANY OF THESE PROTESTERS DON'T UNDERSTAND BASIC MICROECONOMICS, THAT GENTRIFICATION IS HAPPENING BECAUSE DEMAND FOR HOUSING IS EXCEEDING SUPPLY, AND THIS IS A RESULT OF ZONING LAWS. THE PROBLEM IS THE GOVERNMENT, NOT "TECHIES."

WE ARE MORE INTELLIGENT ABOUT SOCIAL ISSUES, ECONOMICS, AND POLITICS THAN MANY HUMANITIES MAJORS. AND MANY STEM MAJORS ARE ALSO GOOD AT WRITING AND PUBLIC SPEAKING, WHEREAS FEW HUMANITIES MAJORS ARE STRONG IN MATH AND SCIENCE. SO WE'RE BETTER ROUNDED AND MORE INTELLIGENT. STEM MAJORS ARE IN DEMAND, AND IT IS THE FUTURE OF OUR DE-INDUSTRIALIZED ECONOMY. EMPLOYERS ARE DEMANDING WORKERS WHO ARE STRONG IN QUANTITATIVE SKILLS, AND ARE CREATIVE, INNOVATIVE, AND HAVE STRONG PUBLIC SPEAKING SKILLS. I CAN ASSURE YOU THAT MOST ENGLISH MAJORS WOULD GET THEIR BUTTS KICKED IN INTERMEDIATE CALCULUS. HISTORY MAJORS WOULD GET DESTROYED IN ORGANIC CHEMISTRY, WHEREAS I'VE ACED MY WAY THROUGH HISTORY AND ENGLISH COURSES.

EVEN PRESIDENT OBAMA HAS SAID WE SHOULD GET MORE PEOPLE INTERESTED IN MATH AND SCIENCE B/C THE VALUE OF A LIBERAL ARTS DEGREE IS DIMINISHING. ADVANCED MANUFACTURING, LIKE PROSTHETIC RESEARCH, TELECOMMUNICATIONS, ALTERNATIVE ENERGY, ETC, ARE THE INDUSTRIES OF THE FUTURE.

AND THE FUNNY THING IS, B/C WE'RE MORE INTELLIGENT, WE STEM MAJORS HAVE A MORE LOGICAL AND NUANCED PERSPECTIVE OF POLITICS THAN MANY LIBERAL ARTS MAJORS. MANY DON'T UNDERSTAND BASIC LOGIC AND ECONOMICS, WHICH IS WHY THEY APPROACH EVERY ISSUE FROM SUCH AN EMOTIONAL VANTAGE POINT. WE TRANSCEND EMOTIONS AND THUS ARE MORE FIT TO BE POLITICAL LEADERS THAN THEY ARE.

IT'S VERY EASY TO BS THROUGH HUMANITIES COURSES B/C SINCE THERE'S NO CONCRETE ANSWER TO ANY QUESTION, YOU CAN MAKE UP WHATEVER YOU WANT. IN SCIENCE, HOWEVER, YOU HAVE TO BE VERY PRECISE. THE ANSWER IS EITHER RIGHT OR WRONG. THE STAKES ARE A LOT HIGHER. IF WE'RE DESIGNING A BRIDGE, A WRONG CALCULATION, HOWEVER MINOR IT IS, COULD CAUSE THE ENTIRE BRIDGE TO FALL APART, RESULTING IN MANY DEATHS. DOCTORS NEED TO LEARN VERY PRECISE AND SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE WHEN THEY OFFER DIAGNOSES AND PERFORM SURGERIES. THEY CAN'T AFFORD TO GET ONE THING WRONG. THIS IS WHY GRADING IN SCIENCE IS SO HARSH. IN CONTRAST, THE STAKES AREN'T AS HIGH IN THE HUMANITIES AND YOU CAN AFFORD TO GET THINGS WRONG, AND SINCE EVERYTHING IS A SHADE OF GRAY, YOU CAN BS YOUR WAY THROUGH ESSAYS AND ASSIGNMENTS PROVIDED THAT YOU CAN WRITE WELL.

AS A RESULT, SCIENCE IS MORE MERITOCRATIC WHEREAS GRADING IN LIBERAL ARTS COURSES IS VERY SUBJECTIVE. YOU JUST HAVE TO AGREE WITH YOUR INSTRUCTORS. ALSO TO DO WELL IN SCIENCE, YOU NEED TO BUILD UP A HIERARCHY OF KNOWLEDGE (ALGEBRA 1 TO LINEAR ALGEBRA, CHEMISTRY THROUGH ORGANIC CHEMISTRY, ETC), WHEREAS WITH LIBERAL ARTS COURSES, YOU CAN GET THROUGH MOST OF THEM WITHOUT ANY BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE. SCIENCE BUILDS UPON SKILLS AND CONCEPTS WE LEARN IN PREVIOUS COURSES.

HUMANITIES COURSES ARE ONLY "RIGOROUS" WHEN THERE'S A LOT OF READING AND MEMORIZATION INVOLVED. BASICALLY, IT'S HARD ONLY BECAUSE YOU HAVE A LOT OF BUSY WORK. IN STEM, THERE'S A LOT OF BUSY WORK IN ADDITION TO LEARNING A LOT OF DIFFICULT CONCEPTS AT A RAPID PACE. OUR TESTS DON'T REQUIRE YOU TO SIMPLY REGURGITATE MATERIAL YOU MEMORIZED: THEY REQUIRE YOU TO INTERNALIZE THE CONCEPTS AND USE YOUR BRAIN TO APPLY THEM TO UNCONVENTIONAL SITUATIONS. HONESTLY, IT'S NOT UNCOMMON FOR US TO STUDY 7-8 HOURS A DAY, AND SOMETIMES MUCH MORE IF WE HAVE A PROJECT. IN COMPARISON, HUMANITIES MAJORS HAVE A LOT OF FREE TIME. STEM ENCOURAGES STUDENTS TO BUILD UP THEIR MENTAL CHOPS, WHICH MAKES US VERY MARKETABLE. HUMANITIES MAJORS ONLY KNOW HOW TO RECITE FACTS. IN STEM, YOU CAN'T JUST BE HARD WORKING: YOU ALSO HAVE TO BE SMART TO SURVIVE.

THE ONLY LIBERAL ARTS MAJORS I RESPECT ARE PHILOSOPHY AND ECONOMICS. ECONOMICS IS VERY RIGOROUS ON A MATHEMATICAL LEVEL, AND MANY PHILOSOPHERS WERE ALSO MATHEMATICIANS. EVERYTHING ELSE IS PRETTY MUCH BS.

ALSO MATH AND ENGINEERING MAJORS TEND TO ALSO KICK ASS ON VARIOUS GRADUATE SCHOOL ADMISSIONS TESTS, LIKE THE GRE, GMAT, AND LSAT. LOOK THAT UP. IT'S A FACT THAT MATH IS MORE RIGOROUS THAN HUMANITIES. AND PEOPLE WHO ARE COMPETENT IN MATH (WHETHER OR NOT THEY LIKE DOING MATH) ARE SUPERIOR INTELLECTUALLY TO THOSE WHO AREN'T.

I THINK HUMANITIES MAJORS HAVE NO RIGHT TO COMPLAIN ABOUT POOR JOB PROSPECTS BECAUSE THEY WILLINGLY CHOSE A MAJOR THAT ISN'T MARKETABLE.

OUR ECONOMY IS UNDERGOING DE-INDUSTRIALIZATION AND STRUCTURAL SHIFT, MEANING THAT MOST FUTURE JOBS WILL BE IN THE SERVICE SECTOR. THESE JOBS REQUIRE PEOPLE WHO ARE COMPETENT QUANTITATIVELY.

THERE IS EXCESS OF SUPPLY OF ENGLISH MAJORS THAN THERE IS DEMAND FOR THEM. IT'S THE OPPOSITE IN IT: MANY COMPANIES ARE EVEN SPONSORING APPRENTICESHIPS WHERE THEY TRAIN COMMUNITY COLLEGE STUDENTS IN TECH SKILLS.

PEOPLE SHOULD SUCK IT UP AND TAKE HARDER CLASSES IF THEY WANT A JOB. IT'S FINE TO TAKE ENGLISH OR HISTORY CLASSES FOR FUN OR FOR A MINOR, BUT TREAT IT LIKE A HOBBY. DON'T MAJOR IN IT IF YOU KNOW THAT YOU CAN'T GET A GOOD JOB WHEN YOU GRADUATE IN IT. IS SOMEONE WHO PLAYS MUSIC FOR FUN INFERIOR TO A MUSIC MAJOR? I THINK NOT. THEREFORE MAJOR IN A SCIENCE SUBJECT, AND TAKE HUMANITIES COURSES FOR FUN IF YOU LIKE LEARNING THOSE SUBJECTS. I'M SAYING THIS B/C MOST OF THE TIME, EVEN HUMANITIES MAJORS DON'T FIND JOBS THAT THEY FIND ENJOYABLE. SO BETTER TO FIND A JOB YOU DON'T LIKE THAT PAYS WELL THAN A JOB YOU DON'T LIKE THAT DOESN'T PAY WELL. SO SUCK IT UP AND MAJOR IN ENGINEERING.


2014-03-humanities-student-major_359_AskReddit.txt
So the thing with STEM that most people (from both sides) don't really realize is that STEM education is more like a job training type deal. You study engineering to become an engineer. You study chemistry to become a chemist. But with liberal arts, you don't really study that to do that. You don't really study women's studies to become an expert on well, I guess women studies. There's no direct job title that waits at the end of your education. 

As a result, a lot of majors end up being considered useless because the path of that major to employment isn't always obvious. I know English majors who end up working in marketing. I know psychologists who become counselors. And I know language majors work in technical sales. As an engineer, people are directly looking for your degree. With other majors, people are looking for several types of degrees. College for STEM is job training. College for other majors is about learning something interesting. 

My advice is honestly, whatever you really like doing, go study that. You're not going to be a good engineer if you don't love doing it. You're not going to be a good writer if you don't love doing it. Go find a major where the bullshit associated with it doesn't dissuade you. Because it's the bullshit dissuasion that leads people to unemployment, not the major itself. 



2014-03-humanities-student-major_390_circlebroke.txt
**Let me start a counter-jerk here.** If you're a STEM major, you may find my opinions to be disagreeable. But please read this entire post.

I honestly despise the pro-STEM circlejerk on Reddit because it's just a complete orgy of nerds who lack all sense of self-awareness. I go to a pretty highly-ranked university and even here you can just see that, across the board, humanities majors are generally better people than the engineers. They're well-rounded, know how to actually communicate, and possess at least the slight amount of self-awareness to understand that it's completely dumb to evaluate entire academic disciplines as "useless".

I'm currently a Comp Sci engineer but I've always felt like a humanities major who happens to like graph theory, algorithms, and programming. I'm not just saying this to be an edgy special snowflake: I've tried to "get down" and integrate with my fellow engineers many times, and it's near impossible. STEM majors have an extremely terrible, predictable, and exhausting personality type. Many of them are emotionally immature and have stilted, diseased opinions on the world. If you ever hear someone deny the existence of racism, argue the superiority of the male sex, or proclaim the goodness of Social Darwinism -- guess what? That person is probably a STEM major.

STEMlords think that they already understand the humanities so they never bother to learn it, and as a result they have no capacity for critical thought on any matter outside STEM. Perhaps it is because of some sort of past traumatic experiences of bullying that these poorly-balanced nerds have grown into vindictive manchildren who are so insistent that what they're doing is useful.

Don't get me wrong. There are plenty of well-rounded engineers. But these engineers are the ones who understand the value of the humanities. They understand that the purpose of a liberal arts education is not to become a useful little money-making machine but to pursue what you're passionate in, to enrich yourself and become a better person, and if you like philosophy, then study it! and if you like physics, then learn it! 

But it's completely wrong to think that the typical STEM major you'll see at any university -- the ugly, unkempt bespectacled loser who can't talk to people and has terrible worldviews -- is a better person than the humanities scholar. The STEMlords who continue to assert this false superiority are just delusional and insecure lifelong losers.

2014-03-humanities-student-major_411_circlebroke.txt
I'm a math major and it's just...ugh I'm with you. You're counterjerking really hard but I just can't disagree with you. Most Humanities people I know are just really fantastic people. Can hold conversations well, have great senses of humor, are very respectful and just generally pleasant people. Every piece of shit I've met thus far though in my education has been a STEM major -- usually computer science majors hilariously enough. 

Just elitist is the best way to put it. Superiority complex to the max. Oh man how many times I've heard "lol it's just a word, who cares if I say nigger or cunt" from these people if they offended someone. It's just ugh. There's always exceptions like you said though. I know quite a few engineers and scientists who are my best friends (just realized how much this sounds like "but im friends with a black guy!" lol) and they're great people but I haven't met a single non-STEM major who I couldn't hold a conversation with.

Just take solace in the fact these people will not a job anytime soon. They don't grasp that getting a degree doesn't get you a job but a job *interview* and at least half the STEM people I know will have their interviews [go something like this.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULqAIbjCsXE) Also take solace in the fact most of these STEM jerkers are first year students or in high school.

2014-03-humanities-student-major_445_circlebroke.txt
I'm glad you made this post. College students who think that their choice of major makes them better than everyone else are incredibly annoying, but the counterjerk in this thread is really out of hand (even though it's kind of satisfying to jerk against STEM on this site). I had a lot of the same biases against engineers when I was in school (as a math major, lol, but at a liberal arts school), but the reality is that most of the successful engineers I have met since I graduated, including most of my coworkers, are wonderful, engaging people with a wide range of interests. The humanities may help steer you in the right direction, but there's nothing about reading books that inherently makes you a better person -- it takes a real drive from within to make the lessons you can learn from the humanities really set in. Not to mention that it's kind of classist to presume that only people who are able to spend 4 years of their lives studying the humanities in an academic setting are interesting, fully actualized people, and everyone else is somehow lesser.

I do partially agree with the parent post, though: I think it's unfortunate that a lot of STEM students get so caught up in STEM that they lose sight of the world around them and devalue any knowledge that does not fit within a few very narrow domains. And I do think this makes someone a worse person. But that's far from every engineer/scientist out there, and all the most talented people I know have had multiple interests and multiple proficiencies. 

2014-03-humanities-student-major_464_AdviceAnimals.txt
This is why we don't take unsourced statements, even if they sound like common sense, as fact. The reality is that humanities degrees [outperform those without degrees](https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/5bgczqc0nefsx68bj4u4) in both median income and lower unemployment rates.

The problem is that people look at some humanities major working at Starbucks, and believe (since that is likely the only art history major they interact with on a regular basis) that this must be emblematic of all humanities majors. They don't factor for the possibility that that humanities major may still be in school, or that it takes a while after college to get a career.

There are numerous jobs out there that simply want you to have a degree and don't care what it is in. Hell, I used to date a woman with her MA in women's studies and there was only one person in her cohort who wasn't in the upper $30k low $40k in income.

Now, I know what you're going to say. "Engineers make more!" Yes, they do, but that isn't the argument. The argument is that "a degree in Art History isn't going to open many doors for a career." It is. Maybe not careers that are as lucrative as the "This degree corresponds to this one job" degrees, but it's better than if you have no degree at all.

Of course, somebody will come in and be like "Oh, but the student loans they pile up won't offset the increased earnings." Again, we should all be better informed about this. When you hear people talking about "$100,000" in student loans, they are talking about outliers. They are usually news anchors who have a profit-motive for sensationalized stories. People with six figures of debt make up 3% of the total borrowers. The real median loan debt for a person with an undergrad degree? [In the $20-$30k range.](http://www.asa.org/policy/resources/stats/)

tl;dr The unemployability of a humanities degree is grossly overstated, as is the public's idea of student loan debt.

2014-03-humanities-student-major_517_offmychest.txt
I feel that, as a STEM major, sciences are very demanding. Typically, a second year STEM student take on average 20 or so units. That is a hell of a lot of work.

In contrast, whenever I go to parties, which I can't do often because of the workload, I see artists and humanities students who are constantly partying. Why? Because they don't need to work as hard. And many of them do it because they don't WANT to work hard. Now I know that this is a straw man fallacy. Not all english majors and humanities majors are slack off, potheads. But that is what the majority of science majors feel. 

Now, here comes my proposal. I am a neuroscience major. This is a quite demanding and requires me to take many science classes. But, at the same time, I don't have to get TOO 'deep' into these sciences. This major allows me to explore more into non-science majors. Because, to get into Medical school, which is what this track is basically offering, the MCAT Is what is really important during college. And, to be honest, you really don't need an advanced understanding of these science fields. 

Therefore, I think that many STEM majors should also consider taking Humanities. Many of the STEM majors I have met are BORING AS HELL!! They cannot appreciate music, empathize with people, understand world contexts, etc. because they look their noses down on these fields.

I am currently taking a Cultural Anthropology class and a World History class. And I find these classes hella interesting. So if someone tells you off about your choice of major, ignore them because they don't know what they are missing out on.

2014-03-humanities-student-major_733_changemyview.txt
I don't disagree with everything you've said, but I do disagree with your conclusion. 

 We don't waste our time protesting something political, like the liberal arts majors at my school (UC Berkeley) do. We are smart to realize that yelling loudly and occupying buildings is illogical: the opportunity cost is huge, and the tie would be better spent on doing well in school, gaining marketable skills, and pursuing activities that won't land us in jail.

No? I find it rather hard to believe that no STEM major is politically active. Non-STEM students may have a greater propensity to engage in such activity than their counterparts, but it is certainly not unique to them. I also find it slightly amusing that you say this in what amounts to a sociological essay about something that that I very much doubt affects your own life in any material way. 

 We are more intelligent about social issues, economics, and politics than many humanities majors

Not in my experience.

 And the funny thing is, b/c we're more intelligent, we STEM majors have a more logical and nuanced perspective of politics than many liberal arts majors.

Maybe. But it is usually just as wrong as anyone elses. The major difference (pun intended) I've seen is that liberal-arts or humanities majors are less likely to exhibit a pretense of knowledge - they admit and understand that *they do not understand*. Most engineers and information technologies personel I know have no such self awareness, and claim definitive knowledge on subjects they have *at best* a cursory understanding of. 

 The only liberal arts majors I respect are philosophy and economics. Economics is very rigorous on a mathematical level, and many philosophers were also mathematicians.

I'm glad my field has been able to live up to your standards. 

 Also engineering majors tend to also kick ass on various graduate school admissions tests, like the GRE, GMAT, and LSAT.

That is true, but concluding that STEM majors are better at law than people who studied law in undergrad is not an accurate assesment. I suspect the reason this occurs is that only STEM majors who feel especially confident in their ability to pass the test take it, whereas a far greater number of non-STEM majors (who are obviously underqualified) take it even if they feel unconfident. The grades of the STEM students are, in a sense, inflated. 

 And people who are competent in math (whether or not they like doing math) are superior intellectually to those who aren't.

According to you. I could just as easily claim that "people who are competent in econometrics (whether or not they like running regressions) are superior intellectually to those who aren't." This kind of statement does not mean anything because intelligence is not so quantifiable as that. 


2014-03-humanities-student-major_743_changemyview.txt
That glut in the liberal arts might also be attributed to the glut in colleges, everywhere. The value of a bachelor's degree has been decreasing while more and more students are encouraged to go to college when they aren't sure what they want to do. Given that, it seems reasonable that a student who isn't absolutely sure about college might pick something that doesn't sound so intimidating as biological engineering or computer science. There are way more art majors than jobs for artists, but they didn't pick that major for financial gain- they're doing it because they love it, and art is still valuable and worthwhile. 

I think the big difference here might be that, as a liberal arts major, it becomes easier to cheat the system. I would be spending a lot more time studying too if I read every single book listed on the syllabus, but I've also learned how to get away with it. Then again, you always hear about those kids in math/science who "just get it" and it's super easy for them too. Then there are good test-takers no matter what the subject who will skate by. At any rate, that anecdotal evidence doesn't hold true for a lot of English majors I know, as well as film majors, political science majors, and international studies majors. It's the running joke at my school that mass comm is a breezy major, but 1. They tend to get hired pretty quickly (our mass comm school is 3rd in the nation) and 2. undergraduate degrees vary. I guarantee a law school student will learn just as much time as a med school student. Just because some fields are less strenuous does not mean they all are. 

That being said, I would like it if universities and colleges worked to make the different disciplines more interconnected. Students learn much better if they are able to make connections between concepts, and logic-based fields benefit from creativity and vice versa. After all there are very few fields that completely exclude STEM or humanities. Mathematicians give speeches, lawyers analyze forensic evidence, researchers write grants, teachers create grading policies, etc. A clear example is the entrepreneur: they must be logical in order to market, sell, and make a profit, but they must also be effective at communication, persuasion, and harnessing creative energy. Anyway, you see my point. Don't look at the two fields as if they are in competition with each other when in reality they could benefit from each other. 

2014-03-humanities-student-major_777_AdviceAnimals.txt
I work in IT and as an electrical engineer. I studied them because I love both fields. However, it's things like these that sometimes get me down.

Yes, STEM are very, VERY important, as are other skills. However, ignoring other fields such as English and the Arts and Humanities seems downright criminal. What's even worse, schools are teaching to test, not teaching to learn. I became aware of this midway through my major in college and did something about it, hitting the books, HARD. I ended up better for it. Sadly, I see a lot of kids graduating and thinking they either know a lot or know very little.

But then I see this, as if dancing or writing ain't just as hard as IT, or as if it's some law of nature that it's worth less. I agree that we need folks working in STEM disciplines, but I reckon it's a waste if all they do is "come up with the new iPod" or "add more electronic features to cars". Yes, those things have value and they too have their place, but damn it that's just helping rich folk getting richer in the end.

I think that we should shift the focus a bit. It shouldn't be about just getting a job and paying the bills. It should about, little by little, creating a new society. Not everything should be changed, nor does it need to, but some things do. The day our musicians, our dancers, our plumbers, our teacher and our garbagemen are getting shit pay for very important jobs is the day you know something is very, very wrong with our society. I love IT and EE, and if more people can at least get them on some basic level, that'd be great. If more people can become IT and E engineers, hell, that'll be great too. But I ain't worth more because I chose to study models of reality and other didn't.

2014-03-humanities-student-major_802_TumblrInAction.txt
*Sigh...*

This strikes a nerve because I'm a STEM major student and do believe I stand up for basic human rights.  I understand where this Tmblrite is coming from, STEM majors do poke fun at humanities majors, but the post is absolutely deluded if the assertion is that the reciprocal doesn't happen.  Also, political science majors make fun of history majors, chemists make fun of biologists, physicists make fun of mathematicians, I could go on.  That part of the argument is asinine.

Also, as an aside, I didn't sign on to a STEM major thinking to myself "Oh gee, I can't wait to disregard those irritating SJW's.  Nothing says oppression like a degree in a hard science!"  I did it because it's what I'm best at, it's what I LOVE to do.  I also went into it because there is a sense of objectivity.  For example, in a social justice oriented class, I could make the argument that Kant's teachings marginalized those of a lower social class because they largely appealed to educated western knowledge.  I could come up with proof of my idea, but I couldn't PROVE my idea.  In a math class, even the most fundamental math classes, I couldn't say that the set of natural numbers is elitist, able-ist tripe because it doesn't include pi.  "You don't know how pi identifies!  What if it's a naturalnumber-kin, SHITLORD!"  I couldn't do that because that would be wrong... and dumb... Pi is a real number (don't even get me started on the oppression against "imaginary" numbers).  It is transcendental.  There are easy proofs of this.  It is OBJECTIVE.  And I love it.  And it's beautiful.  And it's perfect.

2014-03-humanities-student-major_826_TumblrInAction.txt
Wow, I sure made a mistake opening up that SRSD thread. 

It's also disturbing that, at least in my experience, the overwhelming majority of them are pretty close to the bottom of the STEM totem pole, like the engineering or computer science undergrads.

Bottom of the STEM totem pole? If anything, most engineering programs are more rigorous and challenging than biology & chemistry programs. The only way that they would be on the "bottom" would be if you were to judge the value/prestige of these fields based on their proximity to core science subjects, which isn't what the "STEM" term is meant for in the first place. And even in the context of this awful metaphor, the humanities would still be firmly embedded into the asthenosphere. 

They also don't know that more of the people who have actually succeeded in science beyond the undergraduate level (the people they look up to) are like me than like them, and that we all think their attitude is extremely immature.

It would be funny if this was true, because if STEM profs, TAs, graduate students, and PhD candidates were actually as receptive to social sciences (and thereby social justice) as he claims, then the blame for the cynicism and disdain towards social science/justice found amongst most undergrad STEM students would fall onto their shoulders. And what of these "people they look up to?" What similarity does someone like Dawkins have with a person who participates in an internet forum where [topics like this generate actual discussion](http://www.reddit.com/r/SRSDiscussion/comments/1k87ga/so_yeah_kyriarchy_is_actually_a_thing/) and not ridicule? 

Of course, they don't know that I am a theoretical physicist specializing in string theory and I've probably forgotten more about science than they've ever known.

...

I mentioned this once but my **girlfriend** is one such student. She is a social science researcher and she is absolutely brilliant.

Aaaaand there it is. Doublethink strikes again, capturing within its jaws the highly prestigious theoretical physicist—god amongst STEMlords. Compartmentalization is truly unavoidable no matter how smart you. [You could have a PhD in geology and still believe that the earth is only 10,000 years old,](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Wise) so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised that there are people who possess the ability to understand string theory, yet completely lose their cognitive faculties and critical thinking skills when they come across a wage gap statistic. If she actually is a good social science researcher doing valid work, there would be all the more reason to openly criticize and reject the increasing presence of dogmatic nonsense in the field, rather than coddle it by appealing to authority with how your STEM field of education is more STEMMY than other STEM fields. 

Completely unrelated but I just saw this in another SRSD thread:
K - 8 needs to be remain a time for learning to read and to use basic thinking skills. I feel like this falls in the same **creepy vein** as the STEM parents who want to teach coding to kindergarteners. 

**Fucking lol.** 

2014-04-humanities-student-major_1800_changemyview.txt
I just think degrees in philosophy, art, English, foreign language, history, and other related subjects should not be offered.


No. 


I'm planning to major in philosophy in college along with computer science as my second major and I'm personally offended. Philosophy is quite useful. I'm using it as my "hobby" major so to speak because it will teach me how to analyze and think critically. Is not the the type of major schools should offer for prospective lawyers? Or are they not important. What about politicians? How about priests? Many priests (my brother is in a school of theology) take extensive philosophy courses and sometimes either major or minor in them depending on their school. Philosophy degrees can be very useful- it depends what you want to use them for. I am considering law school and I think my philosophy degree will help me with that. While I may have a STEM major as my main major, my second "hobby" major (although I dislike that label) will help me with no matter what career choice I take. 



Art- I don't even want to start with this one. Architecture is art. We need buildings. And if someone loves art enough to become one of the next great artists why should they stop? 



English- Who will right the next great novels that students will study in school? Or should we just focus and math and science in school and forget everything else- eliminating skills like analyzing literature/texts 


Foreign Language- Lots of people major in this if they want a career in another country or if they want to study abroad. Why should it be removed? 



History- Another great major for law school. They also become great reporters and Archive managers. Is it not important to preserve history? Why should researchers stop trying to learn about Ancient civilizations? Because a lot of History Majors do that. 




Your view tends to be on the stereotype that many people with humanities degrees end up unemployed working at starbucks. And while its true that some do, lots are successful. Engineering is not for everyone. Lots of people end up dropping out because they can't handle the rigorous curriculum. STEM fields are good sure, but they're not everything. You need a balance. STEM fields are a rising field and have good job security- I'm sure lots of people are going to start looking at those fields. However, no college is going to abolish humanities majors and minors because they hold their own importance. Philosophers, Artists, Historians, Poets, Authors, Foreign Language Teachers all hold their place in society. Who are you to say that Math and Science is more valuable? We can't just get rid of everything else. 

2014-04-humanities-student-major_818_AdviceAnimals.txt
Does that make it bad? A jacuzzi is something that is only available to those that have a lot of money laying around. Is it bad to own a jacuzzi because it isn't practical? You can't ban people from using luxury as they please. But that is a discussion for a different day.

There is certainly a consideration going into university majoring in humanities, or the like. I know that in my lifetime I will earn less than most of my friends. There is no denying that. Unless I get insanely lucky and work harder than I can fathom I will not make as much money as my friends. I made the choice to study philosophy with this in mind. It's something you have to take into account.

I work hard to develop real world skills. Those in the humanities majors can do so. My major has nothing to do with marketing which I have worked in, getting an internship. It might make work harder, but this knowledge for the sake of knowledge is not a bar for success. Someone can be successful (commercially) while still studying whatever they study. The result of that is probably not going to result in commercial success of peers that study engineering or majors that directly lead to reddit's favorite stem jobs, but that does not mean that the person that seeks to further their knowledge is failing. 

2014-04-humanities-student-major_877_circlebroke.txt
This is a touchy subject for me, as I'm the opposite of a STEMlord and love everything about the things I studied, so it rubs me wrong whenever studying history is, completely without reason, shat upon by redditors simply by virtue of not being STEM.


haha yeah I do see you talk about it a lot. I totally understand though even though I guess I am a STEMlord, I minored in Theater and I took as many different general education classes as I could to gain exposure to other fields, and admittedly  minus gender studies I feel like a better person for it. Knowing about everything from how to write a nice letter to European history has helped me out a lot at work! 

TBH the STEM jerk is a real thing even IRL; a lot of my friends (especially the EEs ) say things like "what's the purpose of institutional study of English" and such...

At the same time I don't think redditors realize that outside of MechE, EE , CS and other degrees that are really focused on the applied side of science STEM degrees are almost useless...every person I know with a Bio or Chem degree has had to either go to MS or scrub beakers for $9/hour. And my friend with a Math degree would be on the streets if it wasn't for the fact he is really good at programming . 

Then again I'll admit that if you have a EE,MechE or CS degree as long as you did an internship ,you're willing to or live near a large city  and you had a 3.0 major GPA it isn't as tough for you as someone with a  liberal arts degree with below average to average (people) networking skills... at the end of the day it's not the degree that counts as much as how well you sell your self to employers! 

2014-05-humanities-student-major_1135_TiADiscussion.txt
Reddit is the home to a LOT of STEM-ers, specifically engineers. So a lot of them naturally tell others that they should go into stem because they've enjoyed it/think it's great. 

This conflicts with a lot of the other redditors who have liberal arts-related degrees. So you have this tug of war going on between both fields on reddit (of course, there's a silent majority who just don't give a shit at all, but nonetheless), which causes the results you see below;

 lel a history degree? enjoy making latte's at starbucks

 omg stem? we dont need more neckbeards

So it's this shitty back and forth jerking, meanwhile no points are being made. To reach a good middle ground solutions for a lot of society's problems, we need both "sides of the brain" (heh, remember that illustration of one side being artsy and the other scientific?) to work together. Otherwise, we end up with this back and forth nonsense. 

Anyways;

What is wrong with people in a STEM program?

Nothing. A lot are just annoyed at Reddit's general push to go into STEM over other programs. Still no reason for anyone to get mad at those studying the program. 

Shouldn't we be encouraging more women to enter these programs in the first place?

Well yep. We should be encouraging more people to have the opportunity to join STEM. Just like we should be encouraging more males in fields like nursing and teaching. More diversity in more programs just leads to a healthier society quite frankly. Why SRS is against this notion and just circlejerks back, is stupid and short-sighted. Can't really expect much more from them though. 

Why do people think TiA users are studying STEM?

Same reason why anyone who speaks up against cultural appropriation is automatically white. It fits their stereotype view of the world. 

2014-05-humanities-student-major_783_todayilearned.txt
Okay, so perhaps STEM jobs *are* dying for women to join the industry - I won't argue against that.

But your sexist claim that "women are just more interested in dealing with children and being mothers" doesn't explain why fewer women are studying STEM fields to then work in the STEM job industry.

It would seem, then, that you're arguing that young female students (anywhere from elementary school to graduate school) are more interested in being mothers, and that's why they're statistically more likely to study humanities or social sciences?

There's a lot written about how males are taught to be more confident and aggressive in school, which leads them to like subjects where they can be objectively right. (Math: 2+2 must equal 4, a frog is an amphibian, cells divide by mitosis, etc etc. These are all just facts.) Girls, on the other hand, tend to prefer subjects that allow for more subjective discussions, such as those found in literature, philosophy, anthropology, etc, where they have an opportunity to express themselves and assert their opinions without fear of immediately being wrong. Boys tend to *dislike* these types of subjects for that same reason: there *is* no right answer, so they tend to feel uncomfortable and gravitate towards subjects where they can be sure they can be right. Like I said, there's a lot of literature on this. If you're actually interested I can dig it up and show it to you.

TL;DR The difference between female and male participation in STEM fields can be attributed to the dynamics in a classroom combined with social expectations of each gender, which often lead to boys participating in and enjoying STEM subjects and girls participating in and enjoying humanities and social sciences. Not because women just want babies.

Edit: switched a word (objective/subjective)

2014-06-humanities-student-major_1540_Games.txt
There is absolutely discrimination at all levels for girls and women.

This is careless hyperbole. It's not nearly that one-sided. There are just as many areas in which boys are at a disadvantage. Most teachers from preschool to high school are female, girls are told they're better at language, communication/verbal skills, girls are doing better in school on average, etc. 

Plus, there's just mountains of empirical evidence that contradicts your theory. Why do tons of non-Western countries (China, Japan, Korea, India, Pakistan, Iran, etc) who don't throw ridiculous amounts of money into "get-women-into-STEM" initiatives have much better gender equality in STEM fields? I don't think these non-Western countries owe their relative success to the prevalence of ""science" toys" for their children. Even in the US and Canada, these same ethnic minorities are *overrepresented* in STEM fields.

Why are there so many women in biology compared to physics or electrical engineering? Ie, if the social discouragement you're talking about is still so pervasive to the point where it's actively preventing women from entering STEM, then why isn't the gender disparity in STEM fairly distributed throughout all the fields therein? Why did we arbitrarily let them have biology? It's not like society said, *"Keep those wimmenz out of STEM, but let them play with microscopes."*

And why aren't the art and humanities departments being asked to flagellate themselves for failing to appeal to male students?

2014-06-humanities-student-major_1558_dataisbeautiful.txt
 Considering that many of the female-dominated majors heavily involve interpersonal interactions, my initial thought was that this all made sense: Women are widely believed to be more socially-inclined and nurturing than men, so we would expect to see them dominate fields that heavily involve people.

And it wouldn't even matter whether this is true on any sort of deep biological level; all that has to happen is that women and men *believe* it is true, and self-segregate accordingly.

---

Anyway, I'd be interested to see some actual statistics on this; looks like a pretty good R-squared on the first graph, but it would be entirely accounted for by the relationship in the last graph, so an ANOVA would put a number on what proportion of the effect is explained  (which, intuitively, looks quite high).

How correlated are verbal and quantitative SAT scores? Can't be very much if their individual correlations with the other variable are so different.

---

EDIT: And one other idea. I was sort of disappointed that I can't see what each major is on the graph, though of course you couldn't fit all those labels in there and making an interactive one is a lot more work. But what about color-coding by field (physical sciences, biological sciences, social sciences, humanities, health, education, ...)? This would especially help with the conclusions you're drawing from the last graph.

2014-06-humanities-student-major_1595_MensRights.txt
Okay, then question: If the pay gap derives from STEM and humanities distributions between genders and the pay gap must be resolved, what option is there other than to identify and address whatever apparently leads women to be averse to STEM fields?  

We seem to have only three options:

1. Accept that the portion of the pay gap dependent upon gender distributions in fields can not be changed.   
2. Find a way to equalize the pay between fields in the humanities and those in STEM fields while simultaneously equalizing the jobs available.  
3. Identify and address the underlying cause for the bias in field selection.

A scholarship in any nation with nationally funded financial aide is not an opportunity equalizer.  It's an incentive.  The opportunity was already there all along.  Therefore the increase in new female STEM majors resulting from a scholarship offered to females is a result of rewarding a career change.  That is a counter to cultural forces, not lack of opportunity.

I think of this like immigration versus emigration.  Centripetal and centrifugal forces.  Cultural influences that make choices appealing are weighed against those that decentivize the same choices to produce trends.  Some people immigrate to STEM fields, others emigrate to humanities (so to speak).  The contest of these influences is not the same thing as a balance of supply and demand in labor markets nor a consideration of potentially discriminatory biases in educational institutions.

2014-06-humanities-student-major_1596_OutOfTheLoop.txt
Wow, what a way to generalize. Tons of work on web, print, video, TV, and film is cross-disciplinary, requiring both creative and technical skills. I'm sure it's true in other fields as well, these are just ones that I have personal experience with.

In terms of money, you can make good money doing all kinds of things, however if you look at the *average* pay ranges for careers, the medical field kicks the crap out of almost everything else. Of course, the act of becoming a doctor costs a lot of money in the first place. 

I don't think any math nerds get bent out of shape that George Lucas makes bojillions doing "artsy" stuff. There are outliers in the art field and the top income rates eclipse most STEM professions, but that's far different from average income.

Personally I moved out of a design career and into a more technical focus (I say "more" technical because there is plenty of technical knowledge required in design) because at least locally, on staff designer salaries cap out much lower than tech. You can make extremely good money in design or illustration but you better be damn good at it and you are going to make more if you work for yourself. Working for yourself means doing your own sales and marketing initially and is a real challenge. 

As a tech, I barely have to do any of that to increase my income. In terms of freelance, the expected hourly cost for computer work is simply higher than most design work. 

Your answer would be fine without the need to slander people working for tech

I also have a sample set of four liberal arts majors (my siblings). None of them teach. One sells used cars, one cleans houses, one gave up and went back to school to become a lawyer and one ended up in marketing. Yay, anecdotal and useless information.

I can tell you flat out that work for writers and journalists has taken a huge cut in terms of pay in recent years. I've watched the industry collapse and flounder over the past twenty years. Sure, you can make good money as a journalist but competition in the field is very difficult and entry level jobs pay jack shit.

"i'm so good at maths i no need write gud english" This is probably the most insulting thing in your post. Documentation and communication is a huge part of technical fields. So is dealing with people. Doctors constantly have to deal with people in situations that are often extremely difficult. Many tech people start out in phone/email support which is almost entirely dealing with people.

I don't have any problem with posting to try to correct perceptions about liberal arts fields (they are often misunderstood by STEM majors), but your comments regarding STEM fields are flat out wrong. There's not reason to inject your own incorrect perceptions about fields you don't understand. It doesn't help your point, you just come off as a clueless prick.

EDIT: [Here's the source for income levels. Sort by annual mean wage and you will see that Medical professions take the top 10 spots.](http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#00-0000)


2014-06-humanities-student-major_612_philosophy.txt
I like NDT, but his comments made me rather angry. He disparages the humanities while, at the same time, putting out a show that is heavily indebted to them. Sure, Cosmos is largely hard science, but in its attempt to convey those ideas to a larger audience, it makes use of logic, epistemology, ethics, poetics, history, politics etc. It waxes poetic about humanity's existence, but natural science, by itself, says nothing about Humanity (as opposed to Homo sapiens). The kinds of questions and reflections that the show partakes in are informed by a long tradition of critical thought, but NDT doesn't want to acknowledge those debts.

Science alone is useless (as ALL disciplines are). We cannot live in a world that only approaches knowledge one way. Science does not contain within itself a mechanism to regulate how that knowledge is to be used or how society can relate to it. Every scientist, to a certain extent, dabbles in the humanities (and I am not arguing that they need to be experts to do so). 

As a comparison, English scholars are often ridiculed for an over-emphasis on interdisciplinarity, but I think this kind of ethos recognizes how discourses are not self-enclosed. Allowing for cross-contamination, while simultaneously recognizing that some fields handle certain questions better than others, serves the expansion of knowledge. While many see the world based on productivity (e.g. NDT's comments) and couldn't care less about this, we can perhaps show them that this benefits our individual projects rather than weakening them. 

2014-06-humanities-student-major_658_changemyview.txt
It seems like every argument you've made is a reason why language classes (or at least the ones you've taken) need to be *reformed* or *made better*, not why language classes themselves, intrinsically, are a waste of time. I've had a ton of terrible math class experiences, but I still think its valuable to learn math. I've also had really great language teachers and classes, which inspired me to study other languages on my own. 

/u/elliptibang has already pointed out a number of the benefits of bilingualism. I want to emphasizethis point - the social science literature on the cognitive benefits of learning languages is pretty unidirectional. And that doesn't even speak to the less tangible cultural benefits. You mentioned reading classic books - well, reading *Don Quixote* in Spanish or *Madame Bovary* in French is an entirely different experience. 

Its true that learning another language may not immediately translate into $$$ for you. But that's true of any class you'll take in high school (which is what i'm assuming you're talking about since colleges generally have a wider array of language classes than what you presuppose. Future engineers should still take history, social science and humanities nerds like me should still take math. I think its important that schools provide well-rounded education that's not immediately vocational, because one-dimensional students don't make for great encounters with a multi-dimensional world. 

2014-06-humanities-student-major_841_Drama.txt
So I said this in a SRDD thread the other day but it applies here too.  We need women's studies majors.  We need humanities majors.  We need comm majors and art history majors.  We also need engineers.  The issue is that (at least in the US) we are producing too many humanities majors and not enough engineering majors.  So to say "a humanities degree is useless and doesn't help anyone" is disingenuous.  We just need to shift the amount of people going into various majors.

Because education is just an investment to maximize your hourly wage later in life?
It's pretty sad that so many people share your perspective on education. You may have a point to an extent (regarding who's making the money at colleges), but that doesn't mean a degree in Women's Studies is bullshit. It won't get you an engineering job, but, really, do you think that's what they want for themselves?
Edit: Can we all agree that the issue isn't each other but the price of higher education?

Depending on what their solution is I have a real problem with this.  If it's making higher education truly cheaper and accessible to the point where anyone making a little more than minimum wage can afford it, I'm all for it.  If their solution is to subsidize the current bloated system then screw that, I don't want to pay for everyone else to go on some soul searching journey.  We're already in a mountain of debt from this ill advised War on Terror.

2014-06-humanities-student-major_883_lostgeneration.txt
This is why - and I'm gonna get flamed for this - I get pissed when Le Reddit STEM Master Race™ deride the arts. 

The more and more I think about, the reason, I think, the STEM fields are so handsomely (financially) rewarded in the job market is because they're useful tools for the oligarchs. As /u/reginaldaugustus said, they receive good job training - at university a chemist will learn what chemicals can interact to make a better plastic, an engineer will learn how to build a skyscraper. 

But what the liberal arts/humanities fields teach you is things like critical thinking, how things play out in the *human* sphere, in wider society. 

And this, I think, is something that's sorely, sorely missing. 

There's a T-shirt floating around that says something like "Science teaches you how to build a nuclear-armed T-Rex; Humanities tells you why you shouldn't." That's a succinct, if not-so-serious, way of looking at it. 

What I see a lot in the world is the praising and reward of the STEM-type who builds chemical processing plant three blocks from a school and over a major aquifer. Or the weapons designer (Gerald Bull is a classic case) who is just happy building a better missile and doesn't think about the consequences. Or the computer scientist who works for the NSA...

Liberal arts, yes, is nowhere near as specialised as the STEM fields. That's by design: the STEM fields are specialised, focused areas; the liberal arts are big picture. Micro, macro. Yin, yang.

2014-07-humanities-student-major_44_changemyview.txt
People have different strengths and talents. If someone could grow up to become a brilliant artist or a mediocre scientist, why should I choose them to become a mediocre scientist? Not everyone is suited for the STEMs, and I think it's horribly counterproductive to basically force circle pegs into square holes. In general, people do not pursue fields or careers that they suck horribly at, meaning that society doesn't "force" people to do anything; it is a mostly emergent process where people who are talented at STEMs will eventually pursue STEM careers and people who are talented at the arts will eventually pursue the arts.

You see this all the time in engineering programs. Engineering 101 is filled with a whole variety of people, ranging from people who love engineering to people who think they love engineering to people who are only in it for the money. Come senior year, the majority of those freshmen will be long gone, and of those remaining who have stuck around, the vast majority of them have both the talent and motivation to pursue a career in engineering. You can apply this to every other STEM field like mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc. The implication of your CMV is that the bar, the standards of what it means to be an engineer or a scientist, will be lowered to accommodate people who would've otherwise pursued the arts, but who were "forced" by society to pursue STEM fields. And why would anyone want that?

2014-07-humanities-student-major_48_changemyview.txt
There are a several separate rebuttals I would provide:

1. I'm not entirely sure how you are drawing the line. You only mention dance, art, and music but you are contrasting them with mathematics, science, medicine and technology. If you are claiming the STEM fields ought to be valued, their opposite is collectively called *the Humanities*; which include dance, art, and music, but also literature, philosophy, jurisprudence, history, and linguistics. The humanities represent the study and development of culture and society, and as they are interconnected with one-another, picking out dance, art, and music to criticize against *the sciences* would betray the interdependence of the humanities while also trying to overturn minute areas of study by comparing them to entire schools in science. 

2.  As an American who has studied in [the continental tradition](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/bridging-the-analytic-continental-divide/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0), I defend that every major ideological shift in the history of western society has never risen from the sciences. While the STEM fields have made important shifts in technology, they have never ignited social or cultural change without the aid of the humanities. Strict continental philosophers claim the sciences cannot frame objects of study without the humanities first providing the frameworks, while I, at the very least, believe the STEMs are profoundly dominated by discourses in the humanities. For example, the natural sciences ceased their study of african-americans in the late-18th/early-19th century because we began awarding them moral status as human beings. A more contemporary example was "homosexuality" as a mental disease being removed from the DSM in 1980s because of the LGBT movement.

3. The STEM fields and the humanities are deeply intertwined in analytic tradition, and in America I actually argue there is too much praise given to the sciences and [a systematic diminishing of the humanities.](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/arts/humanities-committee-sounds-an-alarm.html) This is a significant problem because science and technology requires the humanities to give their research sociological weight. Science may discovers things about the world, but humanities builds a culture and society from their discoveries; the scientists of the next generation are products of that culture/society. And honesty, the STEMs cannot build culture or society (they tend to avoid it due to overvaluing anti-normativity in evaluating data). The internet has been a great example of this as it was such a radical change in technology. Silicon valley and internet technicians are great at expanding and improving the internet, but they cannot translate their work into legal theory or even provide any kind of  model for how new media should be utilized and regulated—and they don't see it as their job to do so. So the internet has so far been seen as chaos and noise from the society who did not grow within it. The humanities is now just catching up on these new technologies, and just beginning to offer legitimate moral defenses for legal regulation, as well as normative frameworks for this new media. 

2014-07-humanities-student-major_526_berkeley.txt
First off, I wanted to say, congrats, that's actually quite impressive and awesome that you landed such a job.  70k is nothing to scoff at, and you should definitely be proud of your accomplishments.

I agree with the premise of your argument. I don't think ANYONE should dissuade you from the major you find most interesting, or what you are passionate about.  You have to love what you do, because it honestly won't be worth it 20 years down the line in your career if you really have a strong disliking for what you do, despite the pay, benefits, etc.  As I have heard time and time again, "Where there is a will, there is a way." You CAN, and WILL, find a job with the effort you put in.

However, I would say that you cannot discredit averages.  The facts are facts: It is HARDER to find a job in the Liberal Arts than it is for any STEM field.  It's really simple math: the very reason why certain jobs pay more than others (for the most part) is due to demand and availability of people to fill that demand.  Engineers are in high demand, yet people stray away from the field often due to the high barrier of entry in terms of the necessary math, physics, chemistry (in certain cases), computer science (or knowledge/understanding of the computer software and architecture) etc.  Thus, there will always be availability of jobs for engineers, at a very decent salary.  This is obviously a bit of a generalization, but as a whole, it's what we observe everyday in the job marketplace.

Is there a circle-jerk about STEM  Lib Arts, Computer Science master race, etc.? Probably.

Does that really discredit some of their points about job security and availability as compared to Liberal Arts? Not really.  


2014-08-humanities-student-major_1451_lostgeneration.txt
Sometimes I wonder whether the increasing rift between the humanities and STEM is being encouraged. STEM has an incredible power to benefit humanity, particularly in helping the poorest or least "developed" among us and among the "less-developed" countries. But, as we can see, that isn't exactly what is happening. The best STEM-degreed students don't go into this kind of work; they go into the businesses where the salaries are highest.

One of the important benefits of humanities, is, as you noted, an understanding of the world and the people in it. An understanding of our culture, our economic system, the social forces that shape our lives despite our best efforts, etc., all of this can be learned through the humanities and social sciences. To keep this knowledge from those who are studying STEM and to tell them constantly that they are the elite is taking away their revolutionary power to change the world for the better and instead encourages them to work for the highest bidder...which tends to be the elite. 

The elite benefit from telling people with STEM degrees that the humanities have nothing to offer. They can then take the labor of a scientist or engineer and create more wealth for themselves. By denying the power of a cultural and social understanding, we end up with these scientists and engineers who, as you noted, have contempt for the people, the poor, the immigrants, other cultures, and the oppressed. They are less likely to choose to work towards the benefit of the poor and exploited and instead work for the benefit of the powerful.


2014-08-humanities-student-major_1520_bestof.txt
 The best STEM-degreed students don't go into this kind of work; they go into the businesses where the salaries are highest.

 By denying the power of a cultural and social understanding, we end up with these scientists and engineers who, as you noted, have contempt for the people, the poor, the immigrants, other cultures, and the oppressed. They are less likely to choose to work towards the benefit of the poor and exploited and instead work for the benefit of the powerful.

You seriously don't understand how this is insulting to STEM majors, and you criticize US for not having empathy? In spite of enormous evidence to the contrary, like STEM majors developing vaccines, participating in Doctors and Dentists without Borders, developing alternative energies, building websites for non-profits, donating money, etc.-

The OP and many others are generalizing, with absolutely no evidence, that STEM majors are *somehow* doing less for the world than Humanities majors. That we *somehow* got through college without developing any sense of ethics or morality, despite having that coursework required in both high school and college, and that *somehow*, humanities majors are more selfless than we are. It's not only insulting to us, but it's insulting to anyone without a college degree! Where are all the Humanities majors sacrificing their livelihoods to save the world? Some of the most successful Humanities majors become politicians, propagandists, advertisers, and lawyers- all professions that could easily hurt society.

Textbook, hypocritical, Ivory Tower bullshit. People like OP and so many others in this thread just sit in those towers casting judgment on everyone else for not fixing everything fast enough, and after a few years living off their parents post-graduation they will all move on to work at major corporations, just like the rest of us, because at the end of the day we all just need to get by and pay off our goddamn student loan debt. 

I can only speak for myself, but when people ask why STEMs "hate" humanities majors, I say that I don't. I hate people like OP who judge us for working our ASSES off and going into debt to learn something incredibly useful which we love, and which measurably helps the world every goddamn day.

2014-08-humanities-student-major_467_askscience.txt
"They" are imaginary, as far as your gross generalization goes.

"They" write "pop culture", which is something you seem to equate with the arts. This demonstrates that you're ignorant of what both terms relate to. This is the sort of wishy-washy writing you are ostensibly railing against.

"They...try to use quantum physics" but simultaneously retain "a smug Luddite pride in their ignorance of STEM." I can't think of anyone off the top of my head that does what you're describing other than Deepak Chopra. This is not someone I would be inclined at all to associate with any academic discipline in the arts. In fact, I just checked him on Wikipedia and it turns out his background is Medicine. That would make him STEMs problem. I've also met Biology majors that believe in biblical creationism. I wouldn't let that be a reflection on their field of study though, as that would be a serious breakdown in critical thought (which actually is something under the purview of the arts.)

"They claim dominion over the entire human experience." Immanuel Kant basically did. A few majors entrenched in metaphysics are probably guilty of giving off this impression. That's not remotely a sample of people that could underlie the attitudes of those studying philosophy, let alone all the arts.

History (the study of which apparently you'd do away with as it too falls under the category of the fiendish arts) is littered with people who practised science as well as the arts. The boundaries between studying them in modern times is what comes with hyper-specialisation from the advanced level human knowledge but it doesn't render them mutually exclusive. Many of those who specialise in the arts respect and try to understand matters of science just as many people in STEM fields have an appreciation of the arts in one form or another. 

Therefore your generalization of arts majors is factually inaccurate and unwarranted. 


2014-09-humanities-student-major_480_Economics.txt
You've missed his points that not all liberal arts degrees are the same. Some are high-income, specialized job oriented; some are more academic focused and some are worthless in a job seeking sense. Liberal arts is an education philosophy - that education in multiple, often tangent or non-related subjects has a compounding effect on knowledge. Fwiw, I just graduated a liberal arts degree in economics and earn as much as, if not more than, most STEM majors. My degree (and that fact that liberal arts allowed me to more easily double major) gave me more flexibility in what type of career path I wanted to pursue than, say, a mechanical or chemical engineer. It also gave me the opportunity to study abroad for a year, which I think was an experience worth it's weight in gold in terms of developing me as a person and making me a better job candidate - something most STEM majors could not do nearly as easily.

There's equal merit in the two types of degrees, but people with a less specialized degree need to realize that there is going to be more competition for the positions they are after, and thus need to be more competitive themselves. You need to take a look at what you are studying, both in your major as well as the subjects beyond it, and find a way to form a niche for yourself.

The issue, I think, is that non-competitive students tend to flock to Liberal Arts majors because on the surface it's an easier, more exciting degree and don't realize that the degree itself isn't enough. This is because schools are not marketing these degrees as such, as they have no incentive to do so when all they care about is churning out students for tuition money.

2014-09-humanities-student-major_621_IWantOut.txt
The concept of something being classified as STEM or non-STEM is completely irrelevant.  What matters is if there are jobs within that particular field.  Paleontology and marine biology could even more easily be considered STEM but there's shit-all for jobs.  There's also a huge dearth of jobs even in applied fields in hard sciences such as chemistry, which is a legitimately useful beyond academia.  Really when people say there's a shortage in STEM jobs, what they mean is IT and engineering, and it's debatable whether you could really say there's a shortage because this is usually a talking point for US government lobbyists paid by corporations to raise H1B visa quotas for those corporations to import more foreigners willing to work for lower wages.

The US pumps out so many psychology majors it's not even funny, because this is a popular choice for people who don't know what they want to do otherwise, and it's a rather fun thing to study if you're slightly human.  People graduate and can't find any remotely relevant job and either go into administrative or office-type general jobs (HR etc) that liberal arts majors often end up in (which is fine - hell they often get paid more doing this than someone who devotes 15 years of their life to the hard sciences), or they try to continue in psychology by going to grad school.  As a result, the competition for grad programs is furious, and I tend to doubt that graduate psychologists are also being underproduced - there's just a bottleneck getting into graduate programs because of the availability of (federal) research funding.  I'm willing to bet there's another bottleneck when psychologists with their shiny graduate degrees actually leave school and try to enter the real world as professional psychologists.  That's my take on it anyway.

2014-09-humanities-student-major_672_Economics.txt
There are a lot of factors at play here. Part of it is the "hardness" factor, but I think that's too much of a hand-wave and some self-congratulatory circle-jerking by STEM majors. 

I actually did well in Calculus and took extra Physics courses in high school, which I mostly aced. I took the military ASVAB tests and the Navy kept sending me fliers about working on nuclear reactors. So while I don't think I was a STEM genius or anything, apparently other people thought I had the aptitude for the work. 

Yet I still ended up as an English major with an M.A. in Linguistics.  I did not have a huge amount of economic privilege growing up, nor did I party all day--I worked my way through state schools for both degrees. And I certainly wasn't lazy: my undergrad thesis was probably on par with a lot of Masters-level theses, and I spent thousands of hours doing reading and research.

And yes, I do teach: but without shame or regret. Before that I worked for pennies in the social work field, so education was actually a bigger paycheck than what I was accustomed to.

I'm sure that in economic terms this would be considered a disaster, and it's not like I don't have days where I would appreciate having more money to throw around.

But I think that in the end I've always been more interested in people than things. Even if I had the latent ability to build some new and wonderful widget, I just don't have the inclination. But I'm fascinated by history and socio/psycholinguistics, and I love the process of bringing other humans into new patterns of thinking and watching knowledge and language develop.

I just think that the "STEM is too hard" crowd just fundamentally misunderstand how many people work. Frankly I didn't want to spend my life building crap for other people. At the end of the day, 90% of engineers are just building what someone else tells them to build. The moral aspects of working for resource extraction/defense industries were icing on the cake. 

Honestly if the STEM fields want to attract more people from developed countries, they need to make the careers more attractive beyond the paycheck. If you live in a society where your basic needs are generally already taken care of, many people care more about autonomy and a sense of meaning than having more money you won't have time to enjoy.

This is why STEM departments all over the US are flooded with Chinese and Indian international students: these people are from places where material conditions on the ground and family structures put a huge pressure on individuals with mathematical ability to enter the STEM field. When your family is only three generations from the last famine, material security of the community trumps individual desires.

90% of Americans simply don't live in that world. I think the STEM fields can provide autonomy and meaning, but they don't sell themselves that well. At least not to teenagers. 

My impression during my entire education was that STEM fields mostly said: "Hey, come build shit for us. Maybe you won't agree with what you're building or won't really care about it either way, but we'll give you a pile of money to spend in the 15 hours/week you're not working for us."

And I said, "Nah, bro, I'm good."

tl;dr: Instead of STEM majors insisting that everyone else is too dumb or too lazy, maybe the STEM fields need to work on their image. Perhaps they should hire some humanities people to help with that: it's kind of our thing. 

2014-10-humanities-student-major_1530_infp.txt
I worry this might come off as a STEM circle-jerk kind of comment, so I want to clarify from the very beginning that I admire Liberal Arts majors for having the gusto to do what I could not. If I'd been following my heart, I definitely would not have gone with Computer Science. 

Like you, I loved the humanities classes for their material, and I thrived in any classes with heavy writing-based workloads. However, I had a very negative experience in high school with a teacher whose political ideologies influenced assessments of my writing (we wrote about a contentious topic early on in the year, and I went on to receive my worst marks in English from her). This experience made me lose faith in the objectivity of academia in the liberal arts. 

I chose Computer Science because it seemed to fuse the objectivity of engineering/hard-sciences with the creativity of writing. If you are looking for a good balance of abstract and objective subjects, computer science is a pretty attractive option.

HOWEVER the early phases of learning programming (at the Universities I'm familiar with) will heavily favor the objective side of things. Think about learning programming as learning a language; you need to learn grammar and other conventions before you can write a poem or essay that really expresses your ideas. 

I hope that answered your question adequately! 

2014-11-humanities-student-major_1337_Foodforthought.txt
I can understand why it seems smug, with the *superior scientist* showing the *lowly humanities major* who is boss, but I don't think that is the point the comic is trying to make.  

XKCD is basically a comic for people whose interests aren't or weren't understood by the general population growing up, and while it can come across as masturbatory, Randall Munroe is very good at portraying complex topics in a relatable way. 

I really like this comic because it deals with a situation I encountered a lot as a bio major.  I love art, and film is one of my favorite mediums, but there is a stereotype of STEM majors as being logical to the extreme of Spock or Data.  A lot of the reason why STEM vs Humanities arguments occur, or a lot of other arguments for that matter, is because you get the two extremes on either side shouting at each other, and it makes the people who aren't lunatics feel attacked from the other side as well.  STEM majors can be well rounded people just like anyone else.

The argument that what you are studying limits your ability to appreciate beauty isn't limited to STEM either, I've been told by others that studying film ruined their appreciation for movies.  I've only found that a deeper understanding increases my appreciation for all processes, be in natural, or man-made. 

The existence of the [sfw porn network](http://www.reddit.com/user/kjoneslol/m/sfwpornnetwork) is somewhat evidence of this; lot of times you go in to the comments and you get a detailed breakdown of exactly what you are looking at. This moreso occurs from the man-made side of things than the natural side of things though. Though you do get an intersection of the two in /r/abandonedporn.

2014-11-humanities-student-major_1506_asianamerican.txt
As early as 1988, William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions, said that they were “slightly less strong on extracurricular criteria.”

So yeah, that's from 1988.  A more recent quote, if it exists, would've been better.  I don't quite buy this statement for the present.  I think Asian-American students today are quite "aware" that extracurriculars are important for admissions to colleges.  

However, one thing I *do* think Asian-Americans may be lacking as a group is in the variety or diversity of extracurriculars and interests.  Generalizations forthcoming, but I think AAs as a group tend to live in certain cities, tend to study their own Asian languages/cultures for a foreign language/culture education (obviously), tend to be more STEM, and tend to violin and piano.  We can't really deny this.  The STEM part is *great* for admissions into science-y schools like MIT and Caltech, and the thing is, AAs do have higher enrollments at those schools.  The thing that makes it tricky is that places like Harvard and other big, famous schools that don't have that particular emphasis in subjects (the school tries to be good at everything, not just STEM) seem to want a freshmen class that's not only diverse in race but also diverse in interests.  If you want your freshmen class to be 50% STEM and 50% humanities, that allows for a good number of AA freshmen.  But if you want your freshmen class to be 30% STEM and 70% humanities (simply because humanities itself has a greater diversity of majors and what you want bottom line is that diversity of majors), that's probably going to decrease your AA enrollment.  Some colleges are more STEM-heavy (MIT), some are perhaps in the middle (Harvard), and some are humanities-heavy, like liberal arts colleges (Amherst).  MIT's freshmen class has [30%](http://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/profile) AAs, Harvard's has [20%](https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics) AAs, and Amherst has [13%](https://www.amherst.edu/media/view/523119) AAs.  

Now, might a college like Harvard conspire to tweak and quota its desired freshmen proportions of majors just to make sure it has enough whites?  It's possible, but idk.  One would have to track the proportions of its "intended field of concentration" of freshmen over the years to see if there are any patterns or suspicious sudden changes in certain years.  

The real problem is that, in a meritocratic system, whites would be a minority — and Harvard just isn't comfortable with that.

I'm not trying to defend the status quo or anything, but just wanted to mention that grad school admissions have long since been quite meritocratic.  You want to see the most non-WASPy section of a big university?  Go straight for any grad STEM department.  East Asians, South Asians, and Eastern Europeans as far as the eye can see.  In many cases, the majority are international students.  

My gut feeling is that yes, undergrad admissions is unfair for AAs.  I don't like staunch, hardline belief in the "wholistic" admissions thing - that needs to prove itself and defend itself from doubt and attacks because wholistic admissions is just so subjective (and as described in the article, has a straight up racist and conspiracy-filled origin).  But one thing that I will concede is that as long as the interests of the average elite AA college candidate are more STEM than not, that does give colleges a reason to limit AA enrollment because they *may have a legitimate* goal to maintain a certain proportion of majors in their freshmen class.  I.e., we may have no problem with AA enrollment at MIT and we may think we have a problem with AA enrollment at Harvard, but why don't we seem to have a major problem with AA enrollment at Amherst?  Where are the lawsuits against Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore?  I believe the answer is what I described above, which is that colleges do have their own, unique desire for a certain proportion of majors in their freshmen class, and we accept this.  So what I'm conceding is that it may be valid for places like Harvard to respond, "Our AA enrollment is lower than MIT's because despite our big STEM departments, we're actually more like Williams/Amherst/Swarthmore than you think we are.  We have huge humanities departments, too, and we want students that are interested in those as well."  

I'd be interested in seeing a "Freshmen AA enrollment" per "% of Freshmen intending to major in STEM" statistic for each college.  For example, say we assume that 90% of MIT freshmen intend to major in STEM, so with 30% AAs, that's a 30%/90% = 1/3 for our statistic.  From the page linked above, 60%-70% of Harvard's freshmen class intends to major in STEM.  If it's ok to assume that half of social sciences intends to do economics and it's ok to include economics in STEM, then that's 70%.  So that means Harvard's statistic is 20%/70% = 0.29.  Amherst's majors aren't grouped together conveniently, but I'm going to estimate that 1/3 of the class is STEM.  So our Amherst statistic is 13%/33% = 0.39.  So with these estimated examples, MIT and Harvard are actually kind of close and Amherst is the most "AA-friendly" IF we assume that elite AA college candidates are overwhelmingly STEM.  

If we could get accurate numbers of "what percent of all elite STEM vs. non-STEM college applicants are white vs. AA vs. etc.", we could get better numbers for the above, and can then actually compare with the white STEM candidate's statistic.  An "elite college candidate", both STEM and non-STEM, could be all candidates with an SAT score above some certain threshold (like if 90% of all students accepted to any Ivy have an SAT score above XYZ, let XYZ be the threshold for an "elite" candidate).  Then, say 70% of elite candidates are white, and of that, 50% intend to major in STEM.  Say, 20% of elite candidates are Asian, and of that, 90% intend to major in STEM.  Then, if all of these elite candidates apply to Harvard, out of 100 elite applicants, there are 35 white STEM candidates and 18 AA STEM candidates.  Our Harvard statistic for AAs from above was 0.29 (enrollment per intended STEM major).  If the Harvard statistic for whites is about double, say 0.58 (since there are double the number of elite white STEM candidates), then these numbers show that the admissions decisions for STEM candidates between whites and AAs is fair.  53% of Harvard freshmen are white.  In our example, then, assuming that half of elite white candidates intend to do STEM, then (53%/2)/70% = 0.38 < 0.58, showing that AA STEM candidates are doing better on average than white STEM candidates.  (These numbers are all just for illustration though and not indicative of anything).  I don't know if the logic in my math is all good, but you get the idea.  If you're an elite college faced with 100 elite STEM candidates with X% whites and Y% AAs, assuming they all have the similar extracurriculars, your enrollment of STEM freshmen should be X% whites and Y% AAs.

2014-11-humanities-student-major_1526_AsianParentStories.txt
Here's the thing, so many asian parents push kids towards STEM and violin and piano that it saturates the "market" for the STEM focused violin player.

Colleges are not here to just rank kids 1 through 2,100. They want to build communities in their schools and have active groups/teams/student bodies. Oh and they want people who are super successful in the future.

Now, unless you are truly spectacular and already show promise that you will achieve greatness in something, you're substitutable. I'm talking being nationally ranked at a sport or winning national competitions. Acing some AP classes and scoring a 2300 doesn't count by the way.

As such, because there are soo many substitutable kids, universities are free to form their commmunities. And here's where the "saturation" becomes a problem; a college only need so many violins (24-32ish) for example. Sure they want plenty of STEM majors and future scientists, but they still want to develop future politicians, artists, writers, journalists, etc. Of course, they want athletes for their programs.

I was arguing about this in another post and noted some of the distribution in Harvard activities: (http://www.reddit.com/r/asianamerican/comments/2ndftl/is_harvard_unfair_to_asianamericans/cmdavow)

There are 0 asian players on the football roster. 0 on lacrosse. Jeremy Lin might be a star now, but there aren't any asians on the basketball roster. 2/30 in soccer. 3/14 in tennis (a more "popular" sport among asians). Meanwhile, 17/29 violinists in the Harvard orchestra are asian. 0 brass players are asian. The poor viola section has only 8 violists, 2 of whom were asian.

This isn't definitive, but it shows some trends. That being asians are not going into different activities at a uniform rate; they're almost exclusively not going into and excelling at sports, and trying to excel at violin. I couldn't pull up commencement information from Harvard or at my school, but you can imagine a similar skewed distribution of asians between STEM vs. humanities. Harvard is still a liberal arts school, and they have plenty of other departments to fill out besides STEM.

In the end though, you don't need Harvard. There are so many elite schools and institutions that you can be successful at. But while you're there, be sure to try to pursue what you enjoy. And as you craft your other resumes, keep this sort of thing in mind. Life is all about competitive advantages. The great thing is that this "advantage" should be coming from doing what you enjoy.

2014-11-humanities-student-major_419_dataisbeautiful.txt
Yeah maybe I shoul elaborate on the german university system.

First of all, there are no minors outside of the humanities and there are no Gen.-Ed. classes at all. A physics student studies physics exclusively. These graphs still represent the hours for each complete course of study; so major and minor for humanities students. But since explaining the difference between humanities and STEM majors would have been too long for the headline I simply left it out. My point is that  these graphs do not show how much time each subject but how much time each course of study requires (If all sociology students minored in math the average would probably be higher, but that does not make Sociology any more time consuming) and therefore say more about the (minor free) sciences and engineering than about the humanities. 

Second of all, every degree contains the exact same number of credits which implies equal working hours... officially. 180 credits in 3 years (German Bachelor's degrees take 3 not 4 years, Master's take 2) are 30 credits a semester which equates to a 40 hour week which is equivalent to a full-time job. But then you usually hear from people who study anything STEM related that they have to study approximately 60 hrs. a week, and that Liberal Arts students are slackers.

So I was blown away by the fact that nobody even comes close to 40 hrs. a week.
Except for people who do not study towards a Bachelor's but towards something we call "Staatsexamen" (Lawyers, Doctors, Pharmacists, Dentists, Veterenaries) and are thus not limited to 30 credits per semester. Then again, these subjects are also very learning heavy and reqire more time, since there is nothing really you can "get" like you can get mathematics. A medical student, for example, has to learn all of human/animal anatomy in their first year, and there is no inherent logic to the names of tissues.   
Engineering should be between those "understandable" and "learnable" subjects since it containes elements of both. But I do not know what the fuck happend to mechanical engineering; maybe their sample size was too small.

That you as a science student have more contact hours than (Liberal or Fine ?) arts students, is not too surprising since most of the theory behind Literature/Language/... is less important compared to the theory behind science. But that is mostly because the real work of a humanities student starts after class and only relies on little theory. Trying to get what a certain text is about and approaching it from different angles and justifying your take on each text (or other pieces of art) is what is important about a Liberal Arts education. The taught theory merely enables the student to do those things. But the science equivalent of that would be developing original ideas about nature, which is graduate work. Undergraduate science is pure theory (and a bit of lab work; that is probably the eqivalent of arts students' papers). My problem is not that the humanities have less contact hours, but that they should require at least twice the self study of a science major, which they  clearly do not.

(I'm not even out of school yet, so take everything I say with a grain of salt)  


 

2014-11-humanities-student-major_896_AskMen.txt
So the comment I was going to reply to got deleted, but I wrote so much that I don't want it to go to waste haha. 

I don't think the gender gap in STEM has to do with young girls being discouraged from math/science. 

I think it has to do with our societal structure. When a sample of college students are asked why they chose the major they did, majority of women picked the major they were passionate about whereas majority of men picked the major they thought was going to earn them money in the future. (I do not have the source on this right now. I could look for it but I am currently working on a project so I don't have time right now, sorry)

STEM fields happen to be the fields most often picked because people think they can earn a lot of money from them. Even I picked it because I think I can make money from it. 

Sure I like engineering and all, but there are things I like a lot better than engineering. I really like philosophy and I would have loved to major in it. I didn't though because I know that realistically I'd wouldn't be able to get a high paying job with that major. 

Our society still isn't completely equal because a man that doesn't earn good money is considered worthless while it's not a problem in our society if a woman doesn't earn a lot of money because people think that these women can just marry someone who makes a lot of money. 

This mindset makes men tend to pick STEM fields for money while women pick fields that are in other fields because they are truly passionate about them. 

Why do you think there is such a huge gender gap in liberal arts colleges?

2014-12-humanities-student-major_1109_college.txt
This will sound bad on my part, but I sometimes wonder if we as a society reward mediocre scientists and engineers more than we do the superb artists and writers and so on.

My own parents say that it'll be easier for me to get Cs in my engineering classes and get a good job afterwards than it would for me to become an artist with a 4.0 in an art major. All because "we need more female engineers, but we don't need more artists."

I kinda wish I could do an experiment to test the validity of such statement, if I would have an easy time getting a job in engineering because I am a girl. But for now, I am left to side with the article's perspective.

Sometimes it really does seem like STEM is the bees knees. If you like such subjects, you end up the lucky duck who gets a job that they like because it's in demand, and you get paid a lot.

With liberal arts, at least for me, it's disheartening that one has to compromise either their interests or their pragmatism.

Plus the constant belittling from your parents, your classmates, sometimes even professionals, it makes you feel inadequate. Or worse, they relegate your interest as hobbies that should be done on the side to a "real career."

I never once heard a person with a knack for computers told he should keep it as a hobby. But I myself have been told that in regards to my interests in art and writing and so on.

I don't know if it's easier to be a STEM major. But let me tell you, they don't have deal a lot of the crap liberal art majors do.

2014-12-humanities-student-major_112_personalfinance.txt
I went to a engineering and science only college, so I don't have much experience with history or liberal arts majors. I have quite a few friends who are bio majors and the job prospects are pretty good, though some pay better than others. If you want a research type of job, you will make only 25k with a B.S. and really need and phd to get anywhere. But I do have friends who have started to work in marketing, project management type jobs with a bio degree and then go on to get their mba (paid for by the company). I think they are making in the range of 50-60k but we don't talk much about salary. 

In any case even some STEM majors are useless. I have friends who majored in aerospace and want to design airplanes but couldn't find a job so they continued on with a phd. 

I don't think that everyone else really has so much money. It sounds like you are doing great and I aspire to be like you some day! I often wonder how all my friends are buying 400k houses, well then I found out they put only 3% down. So, when you see people buying things left and right i'm sure they aren't doing as well as you think they are, they just spend more money than you. 

Help your kids find what is interesting to them. Maybe take some personality/career tests online or do some job shadowing? Do you know any friends who are in the biology field that you kids could shadow? Or likewise for other fields?

2015-01-humanities-student-major_1252_TwoXChromosomes.txt
 society doesn't value scientists

Sorry, but I don't follow this? I thought society valued scientists far more than, say, humanities majors. Scientists are pretty highly valued actually.

EDIT: Since so many people keep replying to this, I'mma just leave this here:

http://www.bls.gov/ooh/

http://aquinas.scranton.edu/?p=796

Do you know how many times I have been told that my major is not important? That I will not make any money — that is, if I even get a job after I graduate? “You know how bad the job market is, right?” “What do you even do with an English degree?” “Oh, you want to teach? Good luck with that.” With all of the occupational therapy, physical therapy, nursing, business, pre-med and biology, cell and molecular biology (BCMB) students who attend The University, it is easy to undervalue majors that fall under the humanities track, such as English, history and theater. Of course, those science- and math-based majors are vital to society's needs; however, neglecting the humanities, which foster our souls and open our minds and hearts, dulls society and limits our creativity.

[Liberal Arts Degrees are Undervalued](http://fordhamram.com/2014/10/29/editorial-liberal-arts-degrees-are-undervalued/)

[Philosophy Degrees are Undervalued](https://theunemployedphilosophersblog.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/philosophy-degrees-are-undervalued/)

Too much emphasis on STEM in society:

[STEM Education is Not Enough](http://contraryperspective.com/2013/12/09/stem-education-is-not-enough/)

If the US wants to compete with China, Japan, Europe, India, and other economies, our students must do better in science and math, else our economy will atrophy.

We dismiss those who question all this feverish attention to STEM as anti-science or hopelessly old-fashioned.

[Arts and Humanities research is vital but undervalued in Scotland](http://www.youngacademyofscotland.org.uk/news/arts-and-humanities-research-is-vital-but-undervalued-in-scotland.html)

[In an increasingly industrial world, humanities remain equally important to STEM](http://thedailycougar.com/2014/03/25/humanities-remain-equally-important-to-stem/)

A worrisome trend has emerged in our educational system. The humanities and fine arts are becoming increasingly undervalued, while more emphasis is placed on students who major in science, technology, engineering and math.

2015-01-humanities-student-major_1574_SubredditDrama.txt
I have a few friends (well, "friends") who are like this despite the fact that they're in upper level classes and close to graduating. I don't want to get all psychoanalytic, but I think people boast about their major in part because they have nothing else to be proud of or define themselves by. Literally the only thing they have going for them is that they have a better chance at getting a decently paying job than little me over here with my English major/film minor. They're people who have decided to tack their entire identity onto their (somewhat) arbitrary choice of major.

What *really* sucks though is when engineering majors act like everybody should be a engineering (or at least STEM) major. That's not really an option for me because 1) I have a high school sophomore's understanding of math and 2) because I don't think I'd enjoy it and I'm determined to do something I do enjoy. I had to watch my parents go to jobs they hate every day of my life and I didn't want to turn out like that. On top of that, I really think that seriously learning about the arts make you a smarter, more well rounded and generally more sensitive person. Engineering majors like to act like any sort of intelligence that doesn't earn you 100k a year is worthless, but I would still like to think that an in-depth knowledge of art is valuable and worth having.

2015-01-humanities-student-major_2005_college.txt
I'm not going to dog on humanities. I'm a proponent of the fact that each person is about as useful as they make themselves, and that college just serves as a catalyst. You can be an insanely useful person after majoring in humanities just as much as you can be a useless Physicist. In a dream society, we'd have a rich mixture of people of all disciplines getting deep education rather than the poorly educated 30% of college graduates that we get today. (If you think that a typical person with a bachelors degree is well educated- go try to park at a walmart.) 
            
What a degree is worth is subjective. I could say that an Engineer will take us to mars, you could say that a humanities major will inspire us to get there, I could say that a physicist will find the answer to a physical phenomena, you could say that a humanities orientation preserves us from turning ourselves into robots of productivity, I could say that a Doctor will help people live longer, you could say that art helps people live better, and anyone could point at anything that I just listed and say that its all moot because we're going to be dead and non-existent before we know it.      
Note a critical difference though, the humanities don't directly result in a benefit to society, the results of the humanities snake around. Its hard to argue that the humanities are so valuable when noone can quantify that value. You will rarely get on Reddit and see the headline "humanities major answers the question of what life means to him/her self", or "A recent humanities graduate subtly spreads positive values throughout society"  but you'll always see something about research creating some useful new technology. 
              
Surely STEM majors are worth more economically though (generally speaking and at face-value of course!).  The tuition waiver will get more bang for its buck per Engineer. That is why i'm for this policy. There isn't enough money for everyone to get free tuition. The typical STEM major will come out with more skills than a humanities major to create useful resources for society- regardless of personal ambition. This is indicated by salary differences. Their degree is literally designed to generate valuable resources for society, while humanities degrees aren't about that.
      
A lot of the angst likely comes from the big problems society is facing. If you didn't turn on the news and see how we're all going to die without some sort of miraculous technological improvement, you'd see a higher respect for the arts. In that light, its a supply and demand problem.     
         
Theres also the difficulty gap between the two types of majors. The brain-picking questions that challenge the sanity and intelligence of any person majoring in STEM will leave them wanting to justify their work, especially in regards as to the alternative of majoring in humanities as its the most immediate option. Any kid who has to endure this will be demanding respect and doesn't want to hear about how humanities is good for the human soul, they want approval for all that they've had to endure. You have to give credit where its due and STEM majors don't get much credit beyond "that must be hard but you'll be rich". While the snobbery is immature, you have to respect where it comes from.   
           
So while I sympathize with you, its not as simple as you guys getting bullied.   
            
EDIT x 10: Made more clear, removed some redundancies 

2015-01-humanities-student-major_237_justneckbeardthings.txt
You've just generalised and judged everyone with a STEM degree. You're no better than all of the STEM people who *supposedly* judge anyone who does a liberal arts degree as being "less important".

In other words, you're a hypocrite. 

Are you telling me *every* single person in a STEM field acts like a dick to everyone in liberal arts fields? Have you met every single person in a STEM field? Or are you just making a broad judgement of anyone who took up a STEM degree. Just like the broad judgement among this sub that every atheist is a euphoric neckbeard.

That's just a disgusting attitude to have, not accepting or respecting people's interests and skills because of a few shitheads among them. That's the exact same as saying that "all muslims = terrorists just because a few are". 

You might be a liberal arts student with a bad experienced, but please don't judge everyone with a STEM degree just because a few of them are cunts. What, should *nobody* take STEM degrees anymore? Then we'll run out of engineers, doctors and God knows what else? Is that what you propose? Or is it just that everyone who takes up a STEM field is automatically a bad person? 

Please don't lump everyone who takes a STEM degree with those with a STEM degree that are disrespectful arseholes. That's called generalising and it's, quite simply, unfair.

2015-01-humanities-student-major_712_dataisbeautiful.txt
 Eric could be a total ass hole, but what bearing does that have on this conversation?

Absolutely nothing. I was just trying to be conversational and indicate my personal familiarity with him and his work. Not everything is an argument.

 Additionally, evolutionary psychology is one of the worst examples of a 'science'. The entire field is based on the 'post hoc ergo proctor hoc' logical fallacy, and that's a serious problem.

Causality and effect attribution is an issue in any number of fields, but I definitely agree that psychology is at risk for this sort of thing. Citing the Wikipedia page for a logical fallacy does not exactly lend the nuance to the argument that it deserves. Nonetheless I am somewhat satisfied I guessed correctly :P

 Further, I don't understand your English major over STEM point. Are you implying that a chimp can be trained (by a person trained in a STEM field, most likely) to be fully proficient in STEM fields, so people should follow English degrees? That doesn't make sense with current survey data, STEM fields have lower unemployment rates than 'English' major fields.

I was making a wry remark about what I see as a common thread on Reddit. I see the "soft sciences" denigrated as being trivial and useless alongside remarks that the liberal arts produce unemployable trash. Nothing more there than exaggeration to make the whole thing seem silly, and I certainly acknowledge they are not truths.

My asides aside, what about the actual work done in Gilbert's CSCW paper? Are you really going to double down saying that some kinds of serious science are just worthless jokes from the high view of your ivory tower?

2015-02-humanities-student-major_1318_UIUC.txt
 Wow! Elite much? 

I don't think so. I'm just describing the reality of the situation. College is a four year party for the majority of teenagers out there, even at the elite schools (although a smaller percentage there... maybe). 

While you can approach an arts major with intense intellectual effort if you so choose, it is simply not *required* in most fields. Not so in STEM, where if you don't put in the effort, you don't last (unless you are some sort of prodigy). Even if you do put in the effort, you still might not be able to keep up. 
 
To get back on point, why don't more STEM majors also study the arts?

...imagine how much more innovative students and employees could be if the pool of knowledge from which they draw is wider and deeper. That occurs as the result of a liberal arts education.

I'm pretty sure this is nonsense. STEM attracts students with certain interests, experiences and personalities. You don't change that by picking up a medieval history minor. If you did, the market would have already selected for that. As a previous poster explained, this is not happening.

I also believe the incidence of engineers, in relation to other fields, who can't write clearly is greatly exaggerated. In the world in which I live and work (with all sorts of non-engineers), I can say with great confidence that the majority of adults, period, can't write clearly.

Another problem we all have, engineers in particular, is that most adults also can't *read* with any great skill. When was the last time you read every word of an instruction manual before complaining about how something didn't work?

The main problem people have with engineers is that they communicate with detail and the non-engineers just want the synopsis without losing anything important. As every good engineer knows, it is *all* important, or it wouldn't be there. This is a feature, not a bug.





2015-02-humanities-student-major_1364_BadSocialScience.txt
I moderate a few different serious academic focused subs and the amount of "X field isn't really science why are we funding this instead of STEM studies" comments that I remove is depressing. There is also a general attitude that shows up that the only "real" studies worthy of funding or serious consideration come out of STEM fields. 

Many of my family members are in STEM fields. In anthropology we have to take and teach biological anthropology, which includes labs, stats, basic genetics, etc. Of course biological anthropologists take many more hard science courses than I did. But my point being I have absolutely nothing against my family, friends, and colleagues who are in STEM fields and enjoy reading their research even. 

The complaint here is the frequent attitude from certain groups of redditors that STEM is superior. Search the sub and you'll even find submissions about such claims. Or go to changemyview & askreddit and probably once a week there is a "convince me STEM isn't best" submission. Now of course this doesn't reflect all redditors. It might not surprise you that people who spout bad social science don't respect it very much. So this sub kind of collects those kinds of comments and submissions.

I suspect most of the people saying this don't have PhDs in the hard sciences and only know a little about one field. My friends and family with PhDs in neuroscience, chemistry, engineering, microbiology, evolutionary biology, etc don't disparage other fields like that. My grandfather - a chemistry professor - felt very strongly that you weren't educated unless you were well rounded with a decent college level knowledge of science, art, the humanities, and math. I feel the same way.

2015-02-humanities-student-major_1680_UofT.txt
Warning: rambling post

I think you missed the entire point of this thread. Are you saying that people not in a STEM field do not deserve respect, or that how much respect someone is given is based on how tough their intended program is perceived to be?

 in fact we could consider compscis to be honorary engineers

I can't find the right words, but this is sort like the type of "compliment" OP was referring to. Sounds like you're implying there's something special about engineering

 we engineers respect those who are in life science, math, physics and computer science

Also, I'm not sure you're speaking for all engineers here. I've personally encountered engineers who think CS people are nothing more than ECE rejects. And hell, the sentiment that life science is the "weakest of the sciences" isn't uncommon even amongst those who study the physical/mathematical sciences

EDIT: Just to drive the point home, I'm going to tell a story. There was this kid in my high school who was brilliant at math. Placed in multiple province-wide math contests, self-studied AP calculus in gr 10 and all that jazz. He's currently pursuing a degree in visual arts. He's more interested in the arts than math, that automatically makes him inferior to STEM majors right? I'm in CS, and this guy who draws is better at math than I will ever be

2015-02-humanities-student-major_195_changemyview.txt
Your premise is flawed - you seem to be relying on stereotypes rather than actual data. [Studying liberal arts, social science, and humanities fields do not make you more likely to be unemployed:](http://www.dailycal.org/2014/03/07/employability-myth-humanities/)

Contrary to what clickbait-y listicles using dubious statistics suggest (the Yahoo! home page has never been a great source for thoughtful journalism), wages for the large majority of recent math and science college grads actually flatlined in the 2000s (although they do remain somewhat higher on average). Furthermore, the difference in unemployment rates between STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) college grads and non-STEM college grads is insignificant — according to September 2012 data, the difference was roughly a single percentage point. Even in the long run, STEM majors aren't really wedded to their concentrations, with a 2011 Georgetown study showing that 58 percent of undergraduate science majors end up leaving the field after 10 years.

In short, the idea that STEM majors have a vastly more secure path to steady, long-term post-college employment than other college grads is mostly bullshit. Very convincing bullshit! But bullshit all the same.

If you're looking for the single biggest advantage in the youth job market, the answer is actually pretty simple, and it has nothing to do with which box you check on a major declaration form. To put it bluntly: If you want to get a job, go to college and major in whatever suits you best.

The unemployment rate for *all* college graduates is quite low, and a college degree increases your earning potential by a lot, regardless of what you major in. Given this, choosing to pursue something you care about, even if it makes you a solidly middle-class but slightly less lucrative salary, is not a "bad choice." I would argue that choosing what to study and what career path to follow based purely on how much money it will make you and not how much you enjoy or care about it is a bad choice.

2015-02-humanities-student-major_386_programming.txt
uhh... I don't agree with the cheap/easy programmers thing in this context. All this is gonna potentially result in is more tech students/graduates.  
  
Sure, per the laws of supply/demand more may very well result in cheaper; but I think it's reaching to think the end goal of this is to devalue the art of programming in any way.  
  
re: "well-rounded": American universities have this peculiar obsession with students being exposed to many different subjects. It's believed this some how helps the student's 'character'. Any given student, regardless of whether they are in comp-sci, psychology, engineering, or *whatever* has to take a certain mandated amount of courses in the Humanities, regardless of the whether said material has any bearing on their chosen major or not. The focus tends to be more on exposing non-humanities students to the humanities than it is about exposing humanities students to technical disciplines.  
  
I happen to be someone who has both a British & American degree, from a dual accreditation program. I can tell you for a fact that the American system sacrifices rigor/material in the chosen field for unrelated liberal arts bullshit (bullshit b/c it was not my chosen field of study, and didn't help me advance in that chosen field).  
  
The topic at hand is an *admissions requirement*; it means a potential student cannot enroll in a comp-sci program at all, unless they pass a freaking Spanish test. The proposed change will reward students who started getting interested and learning about computing in High School. This is a *positive* step. An even better one would be to eliminate the "foreign lang" requirement entirely.

2015-02-humanities-student-major_395_SubredditDrama.txt
 How much do you think NDGT knows about Shakespeare? I'd bet he thinks he (and other scientists) "knows a lot about it, though maybe not as much as the literary scholar" because he took high school level English or maybe an intro course. How do you think he would react if someone said that they knew the important part about science because they took high school biology? 

Fucking nailed it. Shakespeare was really his example? Shakespeare is easily the best-known English-language author, read by high schoolers. The science equivalent of having read Romeo and Juliet is something like "knowing that living things are made up of cells". Judging from the post at issue here, I'd be fucking *shocked* if he has a 200-level understanding of the concept of sovereignty or most other fairly basic political theory concepts. This is why it fucking scares me that some people want all politicians to be from STEM fields. It's never as simple as "my side is pro-science, your side is anti-science", and an arrogant prick who thinks he knows a lot about the law because he had to take a 100-level political science class to get his engineering degree can do a lot of harm.

People aren't about the humanities because they think, unlike science, that they don't have to study it to be as good as an expert.

More than that, I think it's because people think that using basic, everyday English (e.g. formulating basic sentences to order at McDonald's) is anything like even an undergraduate-level course. Seriously, he thinks that people respect the humanities because they don't say, "I was terrible at nouns and verbs"? It's astounding that he actually thinks this is a good summary of what an English major studies. 

Jimmy status: moderate rustling.

2015-02-humanities-student-major_408_SubredditDrama.txt
I know I'm going to come off the wrong way even though I don't really mean to. Anyways, most of the larger art-centric subs here (lookin' at you /r/movies and /r/books) are pretty good evidence that while anybody can enjoy a work of art, some amount of training and education is required to really analyze a work of art. People have this idea that anybody can review a book or a movie and that their mostly uneducated opinion is just as valid as the opinion of somebody with a degree and possibly decades of experience in the field. People also have this idea that literally anything is valid in art criticism and that it's impossible to be wrong because of how everything is all about your interpretation. Again, not true. Sure things like feminist and queer criticism have been applied very broadly (hey, whoever knew Henry James was kind of a feminist in his own weird way), but that doesn't mean that everything is correct. I mean, if you *wanted* to write about how John Updike was a feminist you could but you'd get laughed out of almost every university in the country.

People (or maybe just vocal STEM majors on reddit) don't understand that art criticism is difficult too. I don't really think it's as difficult as what most STEM majors do, but that doesn't mean it's easy or has no value. When I'm really putting a lot of effort into writing a paper, it takes a *long* time to cut through the crap and get to something that might be good. I've had more idiotic ideas about books and films in my life than I care to admit. It takes time and it takes work to cut through your own bullshit and get to an idea that's actually worth writing about. NDT's a smart guy, I know he is, but it bothers me how dismissive he is of the humanities. People like to hold him up as the ambassador for all of science which makes it even more problematic when he rejects stuff like philosophy out of hand. Buddy, science wouldn't even exist without philosophy and neither would a lot of other stuff you probably enjoy.

2015-03-humanities-student-major_1610_TrueReddit.txt
 "Maybe women are just different than men" is poorly supported by the evidence and is a cheap way to avoid having to think about this problem seriously.

Almost all primatological research on gendered behavior, specifically regarding all species of ape, including human, show demonstrably different behavioral patterns from males and females of the species.   

It is the reality.  

As to your graph, you're focusing on the outlier; the other three fields show a high degree of progress towards equality.  As for computer science, none of the data on that chart suggests anything at all about the cause of the lower number of female students.   Furthermore, it only looks at four fields; given that the percentage of female college students has continued to rise steadily over that time, and now exceeds the percentage of male college students, we have to conclude that they are going somewhere else;  Off the top of my head, the humanities are on that list; sociology, psychology, and related fields.

Also, we're comparing unlike things.   There is only one STEM (Science, technology, engineering, mathematics) field on that list, and no other sciences (such as biology, geology, anthropology, paleontology).  Furthermore, there is no data given for other related law fields, or healthcare fields, and nothing at all about liberal arts.   

And here's the kicker: The chart doesn't examine the change in male enrollments at all; it simply gives a percentage of female enrollments.   How do the raw numbers look?   As it turns out, [The total number of overall students in CS went down in 1985](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/04/students-majoring-in-computer-science-trends_n_4213769.html).  They surged a little in the 90's, but are again dropping these days.  So there are fewer men *and* women in that field.   And the earning potential of the field is generally exaggerated anyway; recent indicators suggest that there is a job, not labor, shortage for CS.  

As to that relative drop in women in computer science, lets first remember that that is not a neutral source.  The "experts" in that NPR panel came in with their own agenda they want to sell, and built up a case for it; without presenting any really good alternative viewpoints, and ultimately ignored other fields or overall societal trends.  

It is an agenda piece, and mirrors that of the agenda-driven  and as disingenuous statements by politicians that "women make 77 cents on the dollar" statistic...which is just pandering to people to get their support, so that when elected they can continue ignoring the real problems.  



2015-03-humanities-student-major_1906_PurplePillDebate.txt
if you think majoring in anything but STEM is idiotic, and then believing all non stem majors are idiots. You are incapable or realizing that your thought/perspective on this is just one of many, and you might not be right. 

Just had to get that comment in on STEM did ya? ;D STEM isn't the end all be all, but it's much more important than the rest of the academic disciplines, both in terms of impact on our standard of living and in job market demand. 

We could halve our number of humanities professors (start with the relativist degenerates and work your way up to the Kantians) and our society would not suffer one bit. (We might actually improve, with their toxic ideas no longer polluting the children) 

You could not say the same for STEM people, losing 50% of our scientists would result in the loss of the US's global prominence. Fact of the matter is, STEM pays the bills, STEM creates the weapons, STEM creates the new methods of food production that enables worthless A and H academics to run their mouths without end. 

This is not because as you claim, I have trouble separating value systems. It is a mature outlook in life that takes into consideration what benefits society as a whole. Create wealth, power, knowledge and the arts, humanities, women (think once again man-camps/ or the American West) will follow. 

2015-03-humanities-student-major_2123_todayilearned.txt
Thanks for an earnest defense of philosophy (and philo majors!). Most of the supremely arrogant folks with which I shared this major ended up going to law school. If we could weed out the law school bound philo majors from the study the results might have been different. 

As for STEM and engineering majors pissing all over the humanities: When is the last time you heard of a philosophy major or a literature major flying a jet into a building or planting  a bomb in a marketplace? Now what about engineering majors? Just a thought. There is something about humanities students that is, on average, more compassionate and thoughtful than in other fields. We need people to build bridges and tinker with agricultural genetics and so on (STEM and Engineer folks!) but we also need philosophers, historians, poets etc... to see the bigger picture, envision a brighter more peaceful civilization, and to point engineers and scientists in the right direction ;)

Final point about philosophy majors and their presumed doom in the job market: I have a degree in philosophy and several years ago created a successful  company. Being able to think "outside the box" helped in the development of my business. So did the ability to write contracts and simple legal documents (I'm not a lawyer, by the way). So did the formal and informal logic training that I received. So did my ability to sniff out bullshit. A tiny part of this is in thanks to gumption and drive, but mostly it's from my experience as a philosophy major. It's not so much that we are useless, I think that some of us just need a little more time to bloom. At 22 an engineer can apply for a job in his field and be well on his/her way to the promise land. Philosophy majors are often still on a journey of discovery. Perhaps our careers start a little later than that of STEM majors. We're just too busy in our twenties being great lovers and having long conversations about causal determinism and picking flowers and contemplating the stars above than to leap to the immediate worship of money. If that's what you want then go have a look at the misers on /r/personalfinance and ask yourself how much fun they must be at a party. Then consider getting to know a few philosophy majors. We might not help  enrich your stock portfolio (though some of us might!) but we can enrich your soul.

^^^^paid ^^^^for ^^^^by ^^^^the ^^^^council ^^^^of ^^^^^^^seemingly ^^^^^^^disenfranchised ^^^^philosophy ^^^^majors ^^^^copyright ^^^2016

2015-03-humanities-student-major_2300_TrueReddit.txt
Putting aside the point made by /u/muskrat267, that STEM curricula also foster critical-thinking skills, perhaps even better than humanities do, another major problem with this piece is that it shows no awareness of diminishing marginal value.

That is, the fact that we need people with expertise in the humanities does not mean that we need more such people than we're already getting, or even as many as we're already getting. The fact that STEM graduates have higher salaries than humanities graduates tells us that the marginal value of an additional STEM graduate is greater than that of an additional humanities graduate.

Of course, STEM and humanities aren't monolithic categories. Some STEM fields have low demand (I would guess there's not a huge demand for marine biologists, for example), and there's high demand for some humanities fields (e.g. economics).

He's also not accounting for the possibility that many humanities curricula may owe most or all of the wage premium they command to ability bias and signaling. That is, if I study comparative literature, for which I assume there is roughly zero market demand outside of academia, I will still probably earn more than the average high school graduate, not because of any particular skills I learned in college, but because a) I'm smarter and more conscientious than the average high school graduate (ability bias), and b) the fact that I graduated from college certifies to employers that I'm probably smarter and more conscientious than the average high school graduate (signaling).

2015-03-humanities-student-major_581_philosophy.txt
I think this "divide" thing between the arts and sciences is nothing but a pure myth. What you are talking about is kids who are one-dimensional who don't appreciate knowledge as a whole, and then when they enter college and major in stem or humanities, begin to bash the other fields. To put it bluntly, truly intelligent people don't do this. Intelligent people appreciate knowledge for its own sake. I'm an engineering major and I loved my philosophy classes, psychology classes, my anthropology class, my sociology class. Those were highly enjoyable, and I still try to find ways to learn about even though I can't take those classes anymore at the moment because my schedule is filled with upper division engineering courses. This "divide" is manufactured by those who are just plain ignorant and pompous. That's is it. I'm not an "engineering" guy, or a "STEM" guy, I'm just a highly intellectually curious person that just *happen* to choose engineer as his *formal* choice of study. My major doesn't define me, or my intellectual limits of interest. That is why such labels are asinine, and categorizing people by majors like that is just not smart at all. I could've easily been a philosophy major, a sociology major, anthropology major etc, I just happen to choose engineering, that is it. Those labels don't define me. So this manufactured divide should be reworded. Because from my perspective, it is just a phenomena caused by people who choose to be ignorant on other forms of knowledge and who have a superiority complex. Truly intelligent people love knowledge no matter what the subject is; Because *life* itself, is the main topic of interest.

2015-04-humanities-student-major_110_askgaybros.txt
but they aren't as... practical, intellectually demanding, or time intensive as STEM majors.

It's neither here nor there, but I don't agree with you that these fields are less intellectually demanding than STEM majors.  However, my experience (double majored in literature and mathematics for undergrad) is that it's easier to get through a literature degree without doing anything than it is to get through a STEM degree without doing anything.  That being said, I never enjoyed having engineers in my classes because they were far and away the worst math students with the worst discipline and cared the least about learning.


How many of you guys are involved in the STEM fields (engineering particularly)? 

Mathematics phd student here.

I have read studies that while "skill in mathematics" is something you can work on and develop, it is mostly something you are born either able to understand or not

I don't really think this is true, and I'm not sure how you'd measure "skill" in mathematics.  Mathematics is developed through a deductive reasoning process.  Anyone who can reason about the world around them ought to have the mental faculties to reason about mathematics.  In particular, if you can form a convincing argument about Faulkner or Shakespeare, I imagine you can, with enough time, form convincing arguments about epsilons, deltas, topological spaces, groups, modules, etc.  If you understand the underlying foundation of your problems in an engineering math class (e.g., calculus, differential equations/linear algebra for engineers), then solving these problems requires little more than application of a rote process and the patience to stay awake from beginning to end.  In my experience with students, their primary problem - especially engineers - is that they don't understand what they're doing and merely follow a process.


Anyway, all that aside, I'm pretty sure most people can do calculus, if they really cared about learning it.  


Males have also been seen to be better in math/science fields than women

No, they haven't.

 who tend to focus on the humanities and arts.

No, they don't.

 Since bisexual and homosexual male brains have some similar functions as straight female brains,

What?

could this possibly be an explanation for why gay dudes tend to prefer the arts over the sciences?

No.


I was completely in the closet until last week. An alternative idea I have is that the gay/bi guys in my classes are also closeted. This could be because they, like me, have had a hard time accepting their sexuality since they are into "masculine" hobbies... Idk, I'm just finding it very hard to believe (statistically) that none of the other guys in my major are gay/bi.

I assure you, there are other gay men in your major.  

2015-04-humanities-student-major_1416_politics.txt
I would be curious to see the job industry 20-30 years from now.  Everyone is going STEM because STEM is supposed to infer to high paying, well-off jobs.  This might just lead to another overly saturated market where wages go down such as law.  Not all STEM majors are made equally, sure you can be a software engineer and pull in six-figures; you can also be a lab rat and barely break 40k.  

While STEM is important, social sciences/humanities/liberal arts are just as important I feel.  Its not just about research and the next technological breakthrough, humans are social animals as well and have complex infrastructure and societal needs that can't just be solved by computers.  Even with a new break in technology, there would have to be laws to govern them, human interaction for production, and consumer as well as company culture to deal with.

Honestly, it would be hilarious to see if law graduates have an easier time finding a job because the market is slowly becoming less saturated with less enrollment in law school with the opposite happening in many STEM majors.  

Also what needs to be noted is not everyone is programmed to pursue math and hard science, its not even about capability but also just interest.  Why do something you dislike instead of just going on another career path that might not pay as much but makes you happier?

2015-04-humanities-student-major_1517_rutgers.txt
Okay, so, the problems here are twofold. 

* Most STEM courses of study require solid quantitative skills, particularly statistics, calculus, and formal logic. While I wouldn't say that STEM degrees are inherently harder, they certainly require an additional skill set that you may no longer be strong with. 

* Most STEM degrees, in particular anything that isn't an in-demand technical field, like certain engineering disciplines and comp-sci, are nearly as unemployable as liberal arts degrees. This is particularly true of the Life Sciences, as there are plenty of failed pre-meds who will likely have better resumes than you. 

Since you already have all your liberal arts requirements out of the way, what you could look into is obtaining your desired degree part time while you work, so you don't have to worry about crushing debt. You could also try to leverage your communications degree into a scientific field, as scientists are often hilariously bad at proofreading, editing, and communication in general. Look for internships where you could expand your degree into science-related industries, even if the positions are non-technical. 

The important thing to consider is what your game plan is for the future. What is your ultimate career goal, and what obstacle does having a communications degree present over a STEM degree? Are you willing to risk the time and money needed to basically get a second degree for a better chance at your desired career? Can you handle the course work of a STEM degree? These are all questions you need to answer. 

Also, regardless of your degree, if you graduate without any experience in your desired or related industry, you wasted your time and money.  

2015-04-humanities-student-major_2172_WritingPrompts.txt
The liberal arts majors. Who would've thought they would be the ones to survive the longest?

Once it began everyone typically stuck with whomever was in the same class room. A few here and there would run out looking for their friends, colleagues, etc. A few randoms would be spared amongst the groups, just people who were too afraid to go looking for friends. The first ones to go were the Art-Musics. They holed up in the Art Institute, blasting music to try to distract any attackers but it wasn't enough. None of them were really fighters, or even willing to fight. They were the STEM majors' first victims. 

The STEMs got together really quick. They had all the technical smarts and they knew if anyone was going to survive it'd be a combined group with enough firepower to axe the remaining folk. Pre-meds played the medics, the few formally trained EMTs lead them in keeping the Engineers healthy. The Maths worked on the booby traps. They riddled the West Campus with all sorts of contraptions they got from the working Engineers. The Physics made sure the traps would go off without a hitch while the Comps monitored communications, hacking into the University's surveillance system. The fighting Engineers were using robots programmed with help from the Techs to carry the Chems' mixed bag of dangerous materials. After they sent in the robots to blow the Art Institute to smithereens they went after the Social Psychs.

The Social Psychs played the smart game. They were hiding somewhere in the basement of the Student Activities Center, and had access to all the intercoms. They would take turns talking some really dark shit over the loud speakers. The STEMs lost a few Physics and Maths to those nerve wrecking ominous voices. The Engineers wanted to press on but the Pre-Meds warned them not to, the stories would only get darker and closer to home the longer they stayed in the SAC and once the Philosophers got on the mic they'd lose themselves in there. The STEMs agreed to back off once they saw the Theaters Guild moving in.

The Theaters Guild broke off from the Art-Musics. They thought they could win the whole thing. I mean, they thought they could *be* anyone. Who would stop them? Getting past the Social Psychs and Philosophers was easy. They just acted like they were above counseling. Once the Guild found the room they were holed up in they used their props to beat the ever living shit out of them, granted they also stomped the life out of them. The Guild was even more confident after that win, but the second they were finished we arrived at the same spot.

The swimmers gave out ear plugs, so the messages going out were useless. The Guild was so over confident that the second they turned around and tried swinging their foam bats and cardboard trees we just stood there on the front line in our helmets and shoulder pads. Eventually when they tired we speared the fuck outta them. Then the real bats came out.

After we were done in the SAC, we knew we had to deal with the STEMs. They had taken out the Criminal Justice folk while the carnage in the SAC was going on. The CJs didn't stand a chance. They knew all the rules but wouldn't break them. The Business Admins and Gender Studies grouped together to take on the STEMs, but they were doomed from the beginning. They never got along and it didn't take the STEMs long to take advantage of their constant bickering.

We knew we couldn't just roll into the West Campus and handle our business. So we waited in the stadium. The archers, pitchers, and lacrosse folk kept an eye out for any robots or Chems carrying dangerous chemicals. They wouldn't get within 15 feet of any entrance. Eventually the STEMs brought the fight to us. The Engineers were wearing some freaky exoskeletons, while the rest backed them up with random machines. They were in for a fight.

The ballers took out the pre-meds from the back. Enough force behind a thrown basketball and a concussion was imminent. Once the medics were down, the rest was just a brutal beating. The pitchers setup the pitching machines to target from the sides, whoever was hit was knocked out immediately. The linebackers and hockey players took all the Engineers head on. With the helmets and pads the STEMs really couldn't hurt any of us. Once we had them on the ground, anyone with a bat laid into them. The stadium was riddled with dead STEMs before we ever lost a single teammate. Once they were done, the in-fighting began. The Poli-Scis that grouped with us were good man. They had team captains wrapped around their fingers fighting it out on the turf while they hid out in the locker rooms. Unfortunately for them, the Quarterback was one of the few athletes that was also a Poli-Sci and he'd never turn his back on his team. Eventually, he had the division one teams stuffing the Poli-Scis dead bodies into the lockers.

Who would've guessed the liberal arts majors would survive the longest? We did. You don't fuck with the most athletic, coordinated, and determined group of fuckers on campus. We may not be the smartest, but we're smart enough to listen to the team captain. 

2015-04-humanities-student-major_239_todayilearned.txt
 But remember guys, the gender imbalance in STEM fields is meritocratic

The way your comment criticizes the "meritocratic" view presumes that the primary cause of the choice to pursue STEM is *ability* in STEM. In fact, the primary cause to choose to pursue STEM is *interest in pursuing STEM*. This should be common sense to anyone who knows a person that excels at multiple subjects at school, but apparently this common sense isn't that common.

 definitely not heavily influenced by gender-based discrimination and harassment.

Speaking of STEM, scientifically literate people understand that most phenomena can be explained by more than one factor at once with different factors explaining more or less of the phenomena. No sane person would deny that gender-based discrimination and harassment does not exist, however this isn't the whole story for multiple reasons.

The first reason is that there is clear positive "discrimination" to help women in STEM in the form of special programs and initiatives to counteract any effects of sexism. Given that a 1997 NSF study concluded that women were twice as likely as men to be directly encouraged by someone to study STEM, it's likely that this positive discrimination in favor of women in STEM plays a larger role than any negative discrimination against women that surely exists.

The second reason that gender-based discrimination and harassment isn't the whole story is that one would only expect men and women in STEM to be split 50/50 if men and women are exactly identical in their *interests*.

It turns out that the scientific evidence suggests that men and women differ in their interests on average, and that this difference is partly innate. One of these average differences that is relevant to STEM interest is the interest in dealing with people and living things vs. dealing with things and abstract rule systems. The former underlies the humanities and social sciences while the latter underlies the hard sciences and related fields. 

Here is prediction that a scientifically literate person would make based on your discrimination-theory of the gender "imbalance" in STEM: 

* Sex/gender should be a greater predictor of the choice to pursue STEM than the characteristics of individuals due to gender-based discrimination. 

But it turns out that sex/gender is actually *the least* significant predictor of the choice to pursue STEM compared to individual psychological traits such as the tendency to "systemize" vs. "empathize". (People who tend to "systemize" have a stronger drive to construct and analyze rule systems while people who tend to "empathize" have a stronger drive to understand and respond to the thoughts and feelings of other people.) Therefore, whatever is the influence of gender-based discrimination on the representation of women in STEM, it is less influential than the actual psychological traits of men/women/individuals.

Please read this study: 

http://wardakhan.org/notes/Original%20Studies/Developmental%20Psychology/Billington.pdf

 **Abstract**

 It is often questioned as to why fewer women enter science. This study assesses whether a cognitive style characterized by
systemizing being at a higher level than empathizing (SNE) is better than sex in predicating entry into the physical sciences
compared to humanities. 415 students in both types of discipline (203 males, 212 females) were given questionnaire and
performance measures of systemizing and empathy. 59.1% of the science students were male and 70.1% of the humanities students
were female. There were significant sex differences on the Empathy Quotient (EQ) (females on average scoring higher) and on the
Systemizing Quotient (SQ) (males on average scoring higher), confirming earlier studies. Scientists also scored higher on the SQ,
and scored lower on the EQ, compared to those in the humanities. Thus, independent of sex, SQ was a significant predictor of entry
into the physical sciences. Results from questionnaire data and performance data indicate an SNE profile for physical science
students as a group, and an ENS profile for humanities students as a group, regardless of sex. We interpret this as evidence that
whilst on average males show stronger systemizing and females show stronger empathizing, individuals with a strong systemizing
drive are more likely to enter the physical sciences, irrespective of their sex.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing%E2%80%93systemizing_theory#Fetal_testosterone

Finally, the scientific evidence suggests that these psychological differences between men and women also underlie the gender "imbalance" (if you want to call it that) in rates of autism between boys and girls. Autism is characterized by a cognitive profile of systemizing  empathizing.

Would you be willing to suggest that the autism "gender imbalance" is heavily due to socialization and bias? If not, you would also be implying that the STEM gender "imbalance" is not heavily influenced by socialization/bias either, because they have mostly the same cause to begin with.

2015-04-humanities-student-major_281_KotakuInAction.txt
Sorry for the long post. I have a STEM degree and work in a STEM field, but I have a huge appreciation for the role that the humanities play in our society. Most people in STEM do, they appreciate all that those in the humanities create, preserve, document and discuss. There is a perception within the humanities of 'STEM supremacy' (I wont touch the STEM culture of work arguments) because there has been such a push from administrators and governments, specifically in the US, for more STEM funding as it has a more clearly defined impact on a modern economy than say an english major who goes on to work as a research analyst for some company. 

Forgive the tangential rant for a moment, but this topic is an important hot button issue for me, and is far more important in the long run than ethics in gaming journalism and development. We have to remember that this kind of bargain basement humanities education is what has produced all of these 'academics' that claim to study topics of social justice. Back on topic, a **high quality** humanities education is as valuable, and in some cases more valuable than a STEM degree. STEM makes you specialized in to a single topic, I know my topic VERY well and I can learn about other topics to a degree and gain a level of understanding but my knowledge is very specific. I am the definition of a specialist. A humanities education is, when taught correctly, a set of broad set of research and analytical skills that enables the practitioner to have apply their skills to any form of critical analysis. 

What the humanities should be is not what it is now. Right now the humanities as a culture do not self criticize, this may be an outside looking in opinion but it is my perception when I deal with professionals in the humanities. One thing that STEM does is to criticize itself to death. The market of ideas is a cold uncaring facts based gauntlet of analysis that you throw yourself in to and hope to emerge with some small shreds of your ego and your hypothesis intact. The validity of a model or hypothesis is simply measured in applicability and predictive capacity and you must be willing to change your ideas and update your hypothesis/model as new data becomes available. Rigidity in STEM leads to atrophy of your standing withing the community. In the humanities though this exchange is like a pillow fight. Its fun and in the end everyone is a winner because all ideas are equal. This lack of self criticism, on the part of the humanities, leads to an environment where the ideas with the most 'weight' are the ones where people shout the loudest no matter how bad the arguments. It's more like religion than research. Can you gather enough undergraduate disciples and a priesthood of graduates and other academics to your idea and get them to shout down any competing ideas and shut down any criticism? If so then you are influential, not due to the merit of your argument, or it's applications in understanding a topic, but rather because it is loud and you have an army of blind believers shouting down anyone who dares to challenge you. These followers are not trained to advance your theories they are just taught to promulgate it by regurgitation. In this type of environment there is no room for evolution, advancement or nuance, its black and white binary systems of ideas made up entirely of screaming matches between diametrically opposed duck / rabbit god groups that.

Reform in humanities education will come, or the humanities in the US higher education system will wither away and die which would be a tragedy.

TLDR; The humanities are in a bad place because culturally they have lost the ability to criticize themselves and to advance ideas based on validity and the strengths of an argument alone. Rather they have devolved in to bickering tribes that only seek to gather as many blind followers as is possible. STEM is not inherently better, it's just self correcting something the humanities are not anymore.

2015-05-humanities-student-major_1396_CasualConversation.txt
Okay, so I have real world experience with this (general reddit is just crazy, so I usually dismiss them).

Coming from having been a STEM major at one point, the arts seems a bit useless. And here's why. My college was losing funding hand over foot because of budget cuts. Stats clearly show that those in the STEM fields are actually getting jobs and benefiting from their degrees, while most Art majors are struggling (I'm talking for my area; I've got no clue outside of that). Our classes were being cut left and right but somehow they had the ability to build this really large, state of the art Theatre for the Performing Arts, even though everything else was being cut back on. Needless to say, if you weren't an Art major, you probably hated art majors at my college because your tuition was being raised, your classes being cut, while the art students got a new shiny building they didn't even need.

Okay, with my rant over.

A lot of the Art majors are simply put useless for a large chunk of people. It's a lot of money to spend to not really get any further in your career. The opposite can be said of most STEM fields where the graduates are able to find jobs, high paying ones at that and not just McDonalds.

And I'm going to tell you the truth, at least from where I've been. STEM majors on a whole tend to be filled with more assholes than art majors. In all fairness, STEM majors are asses to each other as well. Just look at reddit. It's not really the greatest example, but a large userbase of reddit is STEM (or used to be).

Personally, I think a degree is worth it regardless of what it is in if you actually intend to use it for something. There's nothing wrong with an Art degree, but at least double check that your Philosophy degree will actually be useful.

2015-05-humanities-student-major_1618_Anarchism.txt
I think we need to have a discussion on what education is doing in STEM. It's easy to say that technology is inherently neutral and what we do with it makes it "good" or "evil," but some of these combination of technologies are clearly not (cruise missiles, this software, etc). While they're may be "legitimate" uses someone came up with for the press release (sociologists using it for research), the purpose of this is clearly to crush dissent.

STEM education is almost entirely "how." How do you write this code, how do you calculate this force, how do you build this, etc. The technical requirements have gotten so in depth that there's no time for "why" which means ethics, philosophy classes, etc have been dropped from curriculums. We've got plenty of coders and engineers who have a political and economic education that ends at "democracy is the worst form of government except all others," the tragedy of the commons, and supply and demand. Maybe this is what causes the ancap/socially liberal but staunchly capitalist type of person we see so commonly in silicon valley and the places that aspire to be there.

Worse, there is a culture within STEM students that degrades the liberal arts, that labels philosophy the most useless of majors, that says art majors are only good as baristas. At the same time the decry the fact that society has accepted that someone can be "bad at math" and hate the field.

The loss of literature classes is tragic. Studies have consistently shown that one of the best ways to develop empathy is by reading fiction. Learning how to be a character helps you to insert yourself in the shoes of others in your day to day life. Philosophy teaches you how to question every piece of your day to day existence, your world, and yourself. I'm not going to go on, but you get what I'm saying.

Point is, the typical STEM student gets what amounts to half a class of ethics (I've lost the study that mentioned this figure if anyone could link me up) and essentially 0 philosophy/literature/etc. These are the same people building software like this post, working for the NSA, designing better ways to kill people from around the world. Why don't they say "this is wrong and I shouldn't be building this?" Why are movements like open source being filled with capitalists looking to take the public software for their own profit? Why has "generating value" in the tech world come to mean profit instead of public good? We're seeing the potential of incredible tech being used for the wrong end goals. 

We've failed somewhere along the way.

---

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not a STEM grad, but only by happenchance. I fully intended to be an engineer until I unintentionally ended up on another path. My current work is technically an artist, but is *extremely* technical. I write code on occasion and spend time in the CLI. I spend a lot of time in very techy circles online and off and my observations above reflect the general zeitgeist I see. Most of my friends from high school graduate from top tech institutions and they echo these stereotypes (at least before I ditched my facebook). Anecdotal evidence, but it still shapes at least my worldview.

2015-05-humanities-student-major_2230_books.txt
  To me some of the reaction to The Martian comes off like a liberal arts major going "Ugh, most of this book is about math and science, who would like that?" I mean if random science factoids aren't your thing fair enough,

No, they are my thing. As an Engineering Student, it gives me great pleasure to read books which focus on Maths and Science.

An appropriate analogy would be a person trying to shut conversation down by yelling on top of his lungs, "Sir, do you know how much SCIENCE I know? ONE PLUS ONE EQUALS TWO."

In my *opinion*, The Martian appeals to a person who is casually interested in Science, yet tries to pass it off as his passion. I didn't say this before because it was unnecessary, but since you brought 'liberal arts' into this, I might as well.

As for,
 It's the entire point of the novel, to be an unabashed celebration of near future science and the excitement of traveling to and eventually living on Mars

Really? Please tell me how. Guy gets stuck on Mars, hates it and eventually comes back to Earth.     
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the book is a nice page turner but people keep trying to make it out to be more than it really is. And that's what irks me.



2015-05-humanities-student-major_345_UCDavis.txt
Tl;dr, opposing view points are not necessarily ignorant.

Also, I apologize if you took the fuck you personally. I meant it the conversational and general sense.

Allow me to clarify:
A concentration, such as the history, culture, and traditions of Latin Americans is absolutely a worthwhile academic pursuit. Disciplines such as history and anthropology teach, first, how to view these topics through a more objective lens. There are a great many degrees in the arts, humanities, and social sciences that provide the student with a *disciplined* framework for critical analysis. Comparing micro biology to biology and the issue at hand is a gross oversimplification of our opposing view points. I would suggest you look up something in the HUGE volume of works concerning the unsolved debate around degree bloat in US universities. This is the process by which, over the previous few decades, universities have offered increasingly more overlapping and useless degrees in an attempt to increase the raw count of degrees offered. This practice, ironically, increases the university's rating and brochure appeal, attracting a greater volume of students. See, my opposing view on this matter is born of education, experience, and research. It is possible for an opposing view to come from something other than ignorance.

Now, you raise a very good point that STEM fields are not exempt from over specialization. If you would like to see how STEM fields deal with too highly specialized degree tracks, look at the chemical engineering and materials science major at UCD. This one you can look up yourself.

And finally, the protests. The message is important and needs to be addressed throughout the country. Their choice of forum, however, is completely ineffectual. They really are just wasting everyone's time. During the civil rights movement, people from more liberally mined communities would travel to protest in places that were more oppressive. That took courage and conviction. That is worthy of respect. There is no bravery required to hold these protests in the city of Davis. There are no national guard troops in full riot gear lining the streets here and there isn't going to be. Here is the smallest audience in the country that might disagree with their message. It's a public circle jerk, not a protest.

2015-05-humanities-student-major_746_news.txt
too many kids are quick to dismiss another's higher education if they're not tunneling on some form of engineering or computer science. Like, fuck off, any degree of learning is infinitely more valuable than stopping after high school. People shouldn't be punished because they are interested in different subjects.

It is a fair point that there are many humanities degrees available that are not a good life choice. Some people get degrees in majors that were *clearly* not going to pay off economically, then they want to complain when those degree aren't paying off. I didn't *want* to get a degree in CS, but I did want to have the lifestyle it would bring without going to more school. There is nothing wrong with majoring in Psychology, but you should first understand that a Psychology degree will require more school in order to become a profitable investment. 

I'm not meaning to dampen the war cry of the maligned millennial. I am a maligned millennial, myself. I never even had student debt because i was lucky enough to live in a state that makes in-state college very close to free (in comparison to other colleges, of course), and my state had Georgia Tech in it. I have had good jobs. Still, just experiencing how difficult it is to buy a house has been frustrating. I don't know how other people are getting by while paying down student debt. 

2015-06-humanities-student-major_1762_KotakuInAction.txt
It's not about being 50/50. It's about ensuring that women make up at least 50% of the field. If women make up 100% of the field, then that's fine too.
CHS had actually addressed that issue on a video.
"If a field is male-dominated, it's due to sexism and discrimation.
If a field is female-dominated, it's because women are just better than men."

But I think it also has to do with the prestige of being in science. Scientists tend to be viewed as the pinnacle of human intelligence because their contributions to society are far more tangible than the contributions of, say, a liberal arts major. The "problem" is that men are more likely to be interested in science and women are more likely to be interested in art.

So, in come the feminists with their one-sided view of what constitutes "power" and "achievement". They talk about how "society devalues femininity", but they only consider women successful if they are successful in fields that are typically male-dominated. To them, accepting that women are not all that interested in science (compared to men) is the same thing as accepting that women are objectively inferior to men, and they have actually convinced society that these two things are the same. The idea that a woman can be successful without belonging to a typically male professions does not cross their minds. So, they're left with two options:

1) Accept that women are naturally inferior. (Their logic not mine.)

2) Blame women's "inferiority" on the evil men's attempts to hold them down.

Guess which option they like best...

2015-06-humanities-student-major_1829_explainlikeimfive.txt
I got a degree in English (which was equal parts writing and literature).

I think English is one of the best degrees to foster critical thinking. I'll probably get some hate from the STEM crowd for that, but I mean it. 

In most subjects, there is a right answer. One that everyone needs to reach. Every math problem has a right answer. Science seeks to find the truth of what is (an objective truth). 

English is a little different. English teaches you to form an opinion and have reasons for it. In a healthy English class, debate consists of me presenting my opinion and my reasons and you presenting yours. At the end of the debate, rather than one of us being "right," we can hold different opinions but still be tolerant and understanding of the other's viewpoint. The goal is a respectful dialogue. 

English also teaches you to read people. The study of English is the study of human nature. All of the classics have a message or a statement about human nature. Remember, the written word was the main method of culture transmission for much of history. In studying the scenarios and characters set forth, we can think critically to decide which ideas about humanity we agree with and why, leading us To a deeper understanding of human nature. To this end, I read an article a few years ago about med schools beginning to accept more humanities majors because they had better beside manners than the pure science majors. 

I think if one takes it seriously and seeks to learn all they can about the world, an English degree can help someone succeed in just about any career. 

Please be aware that I'm not denigrating STEM degrees. I love math and science, but I think English has been unfairly demoted in our culture because we want the most efficient answer to every question. Also, many English teachers have sought to impose their worldview on their students instead of leading students to their own opinions. Overall, I think many people have a wrong idea of what English is and is supposed to be. I also think our society could benefit from more useful dialogue, which a proper English class would foster. 

I hope I answered your question. 

2015-06-humanities-student-major_342_college.txt
However, as I grow older, engineering appeals to me less while physics appeals to me more. I think it has something to do with the fact that engineering is more hands on, while physics is more theoretical 

Before you go too far, look at what employers want.  Being smart is good, but being able to do something to provide a concrete good or service is an easier skill set to sell.  See if there's a difference in hiring rates for Physics vs Engineering majors.

I can't answer many specific questions about Physics, but I can answer your questions regarding STEM classes in general.

1) Something just clicks, or you find yourself thinking about classwork outside of class.  There's really no easy answer.  Go into school with an ideal career in mind, and explore similar branches that lead to that career path.

2) Work (full time) and graduate school (part time).  I take online grad classes to ease the schedule and have the option for education reimbursement (although I don't use it for reasons).  I applied for jobs before graduating and had an offer before I finished.  Otherwise, I would have just taken out more loans and jumped into grad school until a job came along. 

3) STEM fields are difficult.  You may breeze through early courses but don't get complacent.  By the time you are a Senior, expect to spend hours in the library or lab studying.  STEM fields are high paying for a reason; they're very difficult as at the higher levels.

4) STEM fields are tough enough that double majors are a rarity compared to the Arts fields.  You can absolutely do it, and some people do.  Just plan accordingly or you'll wind up with a brutal course load and possible extensions to your graduation timeline.

5) College will build you from the bottom up even if you have no physics experience.  Everyone comes in from different backgrounds (including home-schooled students) so most schools just start everyone on the ground level.  If you want to start higher, you have to AP test out of it.


2015-06-humanities-student-major_407_AskReddit.txt
Some googling shows that humanities degrees make up somewhere between 10-15% of degrees granted by American colleges.  Some more googling shows that humanities degrees make up less than 25% of incoming law school students.  The largest portion of would-be lawyers have economics/business degrees.  Combined those majors make up more than half. 


So, your 95% is demonstrably made up and exaggerated for effect.  Taking into account the significant drop in humanities enrollment during the "Great Recession," your number looks even more ridiculous.

Lawyers may make up a massive portion of politicians (which is true in a general sense), but humanities degrees are not indicative of future lawyer- or politician- hood.  Heck, my graduating class in 2008 had close to 500 students in various humanities disciplines; it is absolutely not the case that 475 of them are lawyers and politicians, or headed that way.  How do I know? Well the of the 50+ former classmates I am friends with on facebook only 5 of them went to law school.  So, there's 45 people out of ~500.  Which, if my pathetic humanities based understanding of math is correct is...more than 5% of my class.  

Hilariously small sample sizes aside...you're just wrong.  The majority of humanities majors end up in teaching, research, psych, or literature/writing fields; if they work in the humanities.  I'm currently writing this comment during my shift bartending...great use of my degree, huh?

2015-06-humanities-student-major_586_iamverysmart.txt
Not to generalize, but it astounds me how many philosophy majors seem to have such an inflated ego. 

Maybe an undergrad, or someone new to the discipline. In my experience people with inflated egos are the ones you describe as socially prestigous later on. I don't see how someone receiving flak for their degree would exactly lead to an inflated ego.

A lot of them seem to think that they're an intellectual level beyond everyone else, even though liberal arts degrees aren't really glorified in society and their workloads are usually easier than STEM majors. 

Easier workload? That depends greatly on the "STEM" degree. Regardless, maybe your intro courses are harder, but philosophy is actually pretty difficult. Unfortunately, people associate hardness with practicality. 

In most people's minds, studying math or medicine is impressive, but I've seen philosophy students think that they're the shit even though no one really cares or thinks very highly of them. 

Taking a folk opinion of academic disciplines isn't a very sound way of approaching their difficulty or usefulness. Most people aren't even aware of what philosophy majors do, since the joke itself is repeated more often than actual philosophy engaged. Funny enough, math and medicine majors have to take philosophy courses at some point. Really though, anybody in academia who even pretends that philosophy is useless has undoubtedly never actually engaged it. 

I know most philosophy majors act normally, but there seems to be a large group who think a bachelors in philosophy is on par with getting a phD in theoretical physics. 

Not from what I see. More often than not they're left having to defend their status as a major in the face of a massive, ignorant STEM circlejerk. Philosophy is important and has relevance to anyone interested in more than the simply practical (or a perceived practicality since theoretical physics is arguably not as useful to the average person as ethics). Your last statement is funny, because there *is* a noticeable trend of PhDs in theoretical physics, biology, etc. that think they are capable of doing philosophy (Dawkins, Krauss, etc.) despite being absolutely terrible at it. So more than likely most BAs *don't* actually feel like that, yet there's demonstrably quite a few actual PhDs who apparently can't even handle undergraduate philosophy. Not to set up the dichotomy, since everything is a valuable discipline, but I think it deserves to be commented on. 

2015-06-humanities-student-major_61_relationships.txt
Over the course of the discussion he said I was spoilt and naive to think that my future research could deserve to be funded. He said that people should do it and enjoy it if they can but that you "shouldn't try to justify it to yourself as meaningful". He said that teaching students is meaningful but the research part isn't (including the entire PhD).

I'm in STEM, we need art and the humanities, they give us further meaning. Engineers are the backbone of the architect, before we needed a bridge, now we don't want a building or a bridge unless it is beautiful. I wouldn't be the person I am today without having watched Michael Palin's travel and history videos growing up. Its because of those videos that I appreciate art, culture, and travel. What is the purpose of the things I do in STEM if it is not to perpetuate the other awesome things in life, like the humanities and the arts? What I do in STEM helps us to do what is *truly* meaningful, to live, through the understanding of each other and the expression of humanity in art.

Your research in particular is important for culture and society. How are people supposed to understand each other if there is nothing done to understand each other? The irony is not lost, your SO seems a bit out of touch with a broader sense of the world, and the vast amount of knowledge through things besides STEM that exist in it. He needs to go to more museums and cultural celebrations, to get back in touch with humanity and not the cold keys of his computer.



2015-06-humanities-student-major_722_europe.txt
First things first, you should go study for the exam, or at least take a good rest to clear your mind so that you can face the exam fresh.

Second, I'm not sure whether we can paint the entire Asia with such a broad strokes, China and India was not even South East Asian countries, and among those examples at least China has started to reap the fruit of its investments.

Third, it is not correct that humanities education was neglected in Indonesia, despite of the huge clamor towards STEM fields. If anything, more people are taking humanities than STEM, they are just not as selective as STEM fields in filtering their intakes. After all, even the top 10% is still cream of the crop. The problem is that we have a severe bottleneck in tertiary educational institutions in Indonesia across all fields. (More on that later)

The emphasis that I wanted to outline is that degrees from STEM fields accrue more respect within the Indonesian society, and seen as a guarantor of a better career path compared to others. The downside is that a lot of smart and bright young kids, but with passion somewhere else than in STEM, were entering the field instead of pursuing their own passion. About one-fifth of my bachelor class ended up dropping out and switching to a different major due to this lack of passion.

The "trained elite" part was a bit of a misconception, the desire was not to create an elite cadre of ivory tower intellectuals in order to somewhat maintain a tech hegemony, but the perception arise due to the severe lack of educators and universities across the country that bottlenecked the production of engineers and intellectuals. The government has invested *a lot* in opening new universities across Indonesia, but it is still hard to attract quality educators, especially since usually PhD-level graduates were educated abroad. We probably need another 10-15 years before we can start to produce our own PhDs at a rate that satisfy the domestic demand.

2015-07-humanities-student-major_15_badhistory.txt
In my experience, as an atheists who has had a lot of contact with atheists like these, it's because they see these two as authority figures when it comes to religion, atheism and science, and that trust and authority seems to transfer over to other subjects as well, including ones they have no business discussing, like religion, history, or anything else (imo). One of my friends is a New Atheist, and is part of a New Atheist group of students in our area, and they think that because Sam Harris and Dawkins are respected authority figures in both atheism and as scientists* they trust what they have to say on other subjects as well. For example, One of the members of this new atheist group was convinced that Harris absolutely trounced Noam Chomsky in the email debate thing, even though it was pretty clear Harris was completely out of depth. 

There's also a lot of unfortunate ideas about history, social sciences, and religion and other humanity/arts being easy or simple compared to more science-y fields, so people get this idea that if you are intelligent enough to be a scientist, then you can understand the humanities, liberal arts, and social sciences easily. It's like those obnoxious engineering/physics/premed students who are taking several rigorous classes their field, but have only taken history 101, and they decide that that entry level class is a representation of all history classes, so they decide that their major is much more difficult and rigorous than a history major.  


*This is highly, highly debatable depending on who you ask.

2015-07-humanities-student-major_1903_AskReddit.txt
Because right now STEM does have less competition and more jobs, and they pay better in part because of that. You're right, if everyone went into STEM that would change. People generally do want to help others so its partly genuine good intentions and partly ego stroking.

I think the main argument people make about art majors is that succeeding in the education part of those fields is generally considered easier and more fun than STEM, which is why so many people go into it. The flip side is that its much harder to truly excel in the arts, and add onto that the high competition, its really hard to separate yourself from the mediocre and make yourself successful. 

Think about how easy it is to get a 70 in an arts class and how hard it is to get a 90 in that same class. The subjectiveness of the arts means that its easy to do okay, and damned difficult to be great.

STEM on the other hand is more linear, in that getting a 90 generally means you were able to objectively get 90 percent of a test right for example. It means that working harder to learn more generally has consistent returns. 

The arts not so much. You put in the work to get that 70 percent, which puts you with everyone else. Maybe you work a lot harder and get an 80, above the pack, but not enough to really make a huge difference. After that, either you get lucky and someone helps you out (prof likes your essay, someone influential likes your work), or you have something truly unique (that still may take a lot of work) and separates you obviously from the rest.

So is it that crazy that STEM people are encouraging others to go that route? I don't want everyone in STEM either, but maybe they're just trying to help.

2015-07-humanities-student-major_885_todayilearned.txt
Here's the thing about STEM/if-you-get-a-usefull-degree-it's-doable mentality:

Is that the world you want to live in? Where only those jobs that pay for ~$200k educations are worthwhile? I'm guessing that no, of course not. I have two degrees in Theatre/Acting and was fortunate enough to find work at the top of my field (Broadway) immediately after graduating with my MFA. Although I hustled steady work for three years, it just didn't pay enough to service my loans and live in a major metropolis (where you must).

Are you going to blame me for taking on debt, for getting those degrees, which cultivated my talent to work in the 99.9%ile of my field? It would be cold-hearted and short-sighted to do so.

We should advocate for lower higher-ed costs all around, or higher pay in the liberal arts/humanities fields. The only reason that the performing arts, or teaching at all levels, or curating, or whatever you devalue as non-STEM...the only reason these fields don't provide enough income to service debt while avoiding poverty is because the free market assigns them very little value.

That phenomenon is not a failing of these fields, but a failing of the free market. We will soon need to answer, as a society, whether these fields are important to us, and how we must pay for them collectively, or whether we would rather live based on 100% utility of input.

2015-07-humanities-student-major_991_FeMRADebates.txt
I've heard that in many all-girls schools or colleges actually quite many girls take physics or IT at advanced levels or choose these courses and the explanation is usually something along the lines of "there are no men to make them feel uncomfortable". So, yeah, maybe segregation would actually help (even though many feminists and non-feminist women too would be outraged at this).

But other than that, I don't think there's any instant solution. The only way is to change people's attitudes and get rid of stereotypes, and it's going to take time. Just look at how many previously male-dominated fields are now either gender-equal or female-dominated - medicine, lw, humanities, etc. All these fields were once thought of as unsuitable for women, but now they're considered completely acceptable for women. I see no reason why the same couldn't happen to STEM fields - many of them are already pretty gender-equal like maths, chemistry or biology-related fields. 30 years ago there were fewer women in computer science or engineering. Maybe 30 years later there would be more women, or maybe not, it's hard to tell. But there are countries that have a lot more women in science than Western countries, like Iran, Oman, India, etc. And, from what I've heard, what these countries have in common is that there's no stereotype of women being bad at sciences. I guess it can really make a huge difference.

On the other hand, the current situation of women in STEM in some Western countries is pitiful - not the number of women so much as the attitude towards it and all the babying and victimization. I feel that in many places it's gotten way past simply trying to eliminate sexism and discrimination (which, I believe, are still present to some degree and a serious and legitimate issue) to trying to treat women in STEM like some special, super-fragile snowflakes that need a lot of extra coddling and allowances. I'm a woman and I'd much rather work in a "neutral" environmnt where my gender didn't matter at all than somewhere where I'd have an advantage and special treatment just because I'm a woman. I'd probably refuse a female-only scholarship or grant too if I knew that there was a male student who was better than me and deserved it more, and I'd have no interest in joining all these female-only STEM societies or clubs if the main activities were talking about women in STEM rather than the actual STEM. And then I'd probably get called a bitch for "not being supportive of women in sciences", and some guys might call me attention-whore for choosing to hang out in the usual mostly-male STEM societies/clubs. The whole extra pressure of being "a woman in STEM" would be a disadvantage - people tend to see women in traditionally masculine fields as representative of the whole gender and if you fail, many would go "See? I told you women aren't suited for STEM" or if you succeed, many would say "See, I told you women receive special treatment and favour in STEM". I don't think all these would be enough to turn away women who are genuinely interested in STEM, but they're still disadvantages.



2015-08-humanities-student-major_1319_AskReddit.txt
Don't buy into the "STEM masterrace" hivemind on reddit if you're not interested in the STEM field. Yes you're more likely to get a job in the field you studied if you have a STEM degree. But if you aren't interested in it, don't do it just because reddit snubs its nose at other majors. Get a liberal arts degree if that's what you're interested in. Just understand going in that you very likely will not end up working in the field that you studied. Your liberal arts degree will teach you skills that are valuable for your future career, but it likely will not give you knowledge that can be applied to that career. YMMV of course.

On that note, try out a wide variety of courses if you can. Try science courses, social science courses, humanities courses, art courses--you never know what you might find an unexpected passion for. Don't be afraid to be open-minded. 

Work hard and try. Don't just coast and be happy to get C's. If nothing else, you will develop a good work ethic which will make you very valuable to future employers.

Get to know your professors. They can help you a ton in the future with references and recommendations. Don't be a weirdo about it, just show that you're interested in their subject and what they are teaching you. Office hours are great for this. 

2015-08-humanities-student-major_253_Purdue.txt
If you are asking about how they are generally regarded amongst other Purdue students then yes, sort of. There are many students who like to de-value the intelligence of liberal arts students, make fun of how easy their homework is and talk about how they will never get jobs. Is any of this actually true? No, at least not from my experience with my liberal arts friends. Sure their homework and majors are certainly different than anything a STEM major will deal with, but they are not necessarily any easier. Are some of the Liberal arts students dumb, yes, but so are many of the students in Krannert, Engineering and everywhere else. Most of my liberal arts friends have found work after graduation, granted its not going to be $70,000 starting unless you are a real special talent, but research shows by middle age liberal arts and stem majors end up making around the same amount anyways. If its what you love and you are prepared to live with whatever lifestyle you think your major will bring you then go for it.

As far as the University and its allocation of funding, then yes Liberal Arts is certainly second tier. Even then, being considered 2nd class is quite generous. Not saying this is the way it should be at all, but Purdue is renowned for engineering and ag schools not its liberal arts so that is where the money goes. CLA's real claim to fame is Brian Lamb and the school of Communication, aside from that it is not really well known nationally. 

Just a fun fact from Purdue's CCO website about average starting salaries:

Engineering - $61,000, Technology - $50,000, Liberal Arts - $37,000, Education $34,000, Agriculture - $44,000, Management - $50,000, Health and Human Sciences - $38,000, Science - $51,000

2015-09-humanities-student-major_1006_AskReddit.txt
I'm going to go less of a STEM circle jerk direction and more of an anti liberal arts direction. It isn't so much that LA majors are idiots, but it's much easier to get away with being an idiot in LA. If someone has a degree in aerospace engineering there's no way they bullshat their way into that degree, same with most other STEM degrees. The sheer amount of work you would have to do in order to pass those classes without understanding is staggering, so most with those degrees have grasped a ton of difficult concepts.

On the other hand, look at English professors. Plenty are really intelligent people, but some are just astoundingly stupid. Like "doesn't understand how to calculate her own grading setup do I have to go behind and check her" stupid. Not even just in math, I've noticed many need a lot of help to get across a very basic logical step from A to B that most people wouldn't have trouble with. This leads me to think that you can get a degree in English while being generally incompetent. Anecdotally, I see the same thing with sociology, history professors, etc. Always great in their field but often incompetent anywhere else. The biggest deficit I see regularly with STEM professors is poor memory and absentmindedness.

It isn't that I think you're an idiot if you're an English major, but you won't be relegated to a higher eschelon automatically, which is what we're talking about with degrees on a resume.

2015-09-humanities-student-major_1013_news.txt
Ignoring the explosion below; I have a theory about Colleges. I think that humanities should be compulsory for any field; but not it's own field within the confines of a university. When I went to College (three times now, mind you.) I had to take Humanities, Stats and Sociology.

I was to take a point to address why a lot of Business Field (Me now) and "STEMlords" (me then) dislike the Humanities/Sociology.

Because they fundamentally attract a type of logic that puts them down and encourages people to dislike them. I think they are fundamentally taught in a way that doesn't challenge STEM fields, but insults them.

For example; during my Humanities/Sociology class, we had to do a case study on Jamaica. I failed this case study. I chose to focus my argument on the fact that Jamaica had a high level of borrowed debt, similar to Greece, that I couldn't pay back, no powerfully endorsed labor laws and little way they could even pay the interest on their debt. I summed my argument up that the events that take place in Jamaica (high poverty levels, sweatshops and pleas for support) are typical of countries who gained independence without an ability to stand for themselves. I was told that my argument was heartless, incorrect in conclusions and "not sociological in nature." because it doesn't fit the paradigm of that course.

Humanities, as a subject, does not require a high level of critical thinking. It's just a head nodding experiment to believe in other peoples gripes, understandings and endorses (what we call here) circle jerking. 

I mean, what can I hire a humanities major to do at my company? What staff position should they have? What should a Arts/Humanities/Women's Studies major do for a living?

2015-09-humanities-student-major_1081_japan.txt
It's worth noting that while the government's initiative *has* been misinterpreted in some ways (there's definitely an element of shutting down underperforming or meaningless courses), in other ways it's just as bad as it seems - there really is pressure on all national universities (even the big ones) to push more and more students into STEM.

Reasons? Firstly, the government is deeply concerned that Japan's universities don't perform well in international league tables, and has decided that the easiest way to boost their rankings is by focusing more heavily on STEM subjects, where they already do reasonably well, and closing down humanities and social science subjects, where they do pretty badly. Obviously, this is a terrible way to go about educational policy, but nobody ever accused the Japanese government of thinking too hard about its educational policies.

Secondly, the LDP is apparently under the impression that more STEM graduates is what industry wants, and have bought into the idea that humanities / social sciences do not produce the kind of person businesses want to hire. Again, this is not good policy; the reality is that the critical thinking, research, presentation and topic engagement skills taught through non-STEM degrees are incredibly valuable in business, something which business leaders (even those running businesses in strongly STEM-related fields) emphasise again and again, apparently to little avail. The Keidanren, Japan's largest coalition of businesses (representing a pretty large proportion of the country's big employers) has actually come out really strongly against this latest move, saying it's absolutely not what they want - they want universities producing a mix of STEM grads and humanities / social science grads, and they want Japanese universities to *improve* their humanities / social science courses, not *abolish* the damned things: http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201509100050

2015-09-humanities-student-major_1346_iamverysmart.txt
Liberal Arts wanker (specifically, Writing) here. 

Oh, lord, these guys were the worst drop-ins. Absolutely, a wide variety of people from various courses would take our subjects as an elective.

Few were as insufferable as the STEM Lords (and, no, I didn't see any STEM Ladies). 

First, one must understand of the STEM Lord: he is much, much more intelligent than you. That is obvious, because he is studying STEM. QED, bitches. Never mind that knowledge or skill in one field doesn't translate into another; apparently if you're excellent at one thing, then by extension you must also be great at another.

Second: you must understand your pathetic non-STEM area of study is inferior, and shameful, and deserving of this neckbearded genius's laughter.

The STEM Lord is only here for the easy marks, and to prove that a STEM student is indeed a Universal Man, so inherently skilled and talented he can turn his hand to anything and excel in it.

But you should be grateful for his scorn, that the STEMi-god has chosen to grace you with his presence. He mocks you, but also pities you: he knows you're merely here because you weren't good enough to get into the course he's in, even though everyone on the planet must desperately wish they could be like him.

Third, speculative fiction is the highest form of non-factual writing ever. And the best forms of writing are, of course, based on the language of scientific writing, and engineering reports, none of this active-voiced, differently-tensed, artsy hippie prose you poor, deluded artists languish in. No, the more words, the better. And the bigger those words, better still. 

These kids got reamed in our classes.

2015-09-humanities-student-major_538_GradSchool.txt
I'm a graduate student in physics, and the writing skills of some of my peers is atrocious. I sent a departmental wide email for our graduate club, and I got compliments from roughly a dozen students complimenting me on my writing. All I did was use a few colons, use commas properly, and use a few nifty and technical words (as well as abusing the [rule of three](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_%28writing%29)). I also used Latin abbreviations correctly (e.g. vs. i.e.). 

I focus a lot of time to studying Linguistics (my minor), to studying grammar (I have [this beautiful page](https://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html) bookmarked and peruse it frequently), and reading up about psychology. Psychology helps me read people, communicate more efficiently, and mostly teach efficiently as well. 

I've gotten a lot of flak from one of my former advisors for "wasting" time reading up on psychology and not reading physics papers for 10 hours a day. I'm not working with him anymore because I have interests other than physics. 

Though to be fair, there is a healthy (unhealthy?) competition between humanities and STEM fields dating back pretty far. Your comment lampoons STEM fields in the classical way that most humanities do (we're poor at writing, communicating, and are so far distanced from anything meaningful in life that we're a bunch of circlerjking intellectuals much like physicists in *The Big Bang Theory*). Contrast this with how STEM personnel launch logical fire toward your field for being unproductive, inconsistent, and less strict than STEM fields. There's no reason there can't be a bit of truth to both of these attacks, much like there is often some truth to stereotypes, as painful as it is to admit. 

2015-09-humanities-student-major_957_news.txt
As a person who has a STEM degree, and has worked with quite a few folks with philosophy degrees, I'd say that's because philosophy is supposedly about how to think and what limits our understanding of the world around us. As such, I believe philosophy majors are better equipped to recognize the advantages they have in the marketplace, and understand that their education isn't a means to an end in and of itself. This ability to reason may be more valuable in the marketplace than the ability to recite facts and dates. 

Conversely, there are folks who think that their humanities degrees make them better than STEM holders, because a STEM degree is just an advanced technician. Which honestly seems silly to me when you consider that a modern liberal arts college may require 120 credit hours for a bachelor's degree, and most majors programs only require 40 hours of specialized course work. Less than half, and as much as 2/3 of the course work is core curriculum. 

Business and (computer science/information technology/software engineering/computer engineering) are probably the two most versatile degrees which permit a person to succeed in an egalitarian marketplace like we see today. The former teaches the student how to exploit the marketplace, the latter teaches a very valuable skill set in the marketplace which also had a low barrier to entry, and potential rewards that would make a gold rush prospector pick up a book. 

2015-10-humanities-student-major_1437_personalfinance.txt
Okay, this anti-liberal arts circlejerk bothers me. 

One, liberal arts majors (English and Communication with a specialization in public relations here) are not useless. They give you a specific set of broad skills that you can use to market yourself. I've seen a lot of people limit themselves to their dream career and fail at that ("I want to be a writer" won't get you very far). HOWEVER, if you approach the job market with the idea that you have a specific set of skills that can be used in many jobs (I can do digital media, public relations, marketing, technical writing, potentially teaching  English or Comm with some grad school, teaching ESL...the list goes on) it won't be hard to find something that pays acceptably (or--gasp--even well). 

Two, not everyone will be GOOD at a STEM major. No matter how bad I want to be (which isn't very badly, I like what I do) I will never be good at engineering. That's just not how my brain works. The closest I could have come would have been a Biology or a Psychology (I know, soft science) major and...I don't like the job prospects for either of those majors.

That being said. I'm a straight-A student who's got an extensive resume. Liberal arts doesn't weed out its students like engineering or math-- if you want to be lazy, you can still graduate. But you'll be competing with people like me, who are working hard to become accomplished (and probably a little neurotic--sorry).

TLDR; You can suck at a liberal arts major and stay in it (unlike STEM), but if you try hard enough and are just generally good at whatever you study, you're qualified for a shitload of jobs.

2015-10-humanities-student-major_217_technology.txt
I always see all these 'women in stem' groups, but what do they actually *do*? If you're targeting someone in, or after, high school, they've already made up their mind. You have to make the courses interesting in elementary school. Make it relevant and interesting.

Tech, AFAIK, wasn't ever taught growing up. meaning it's only for people who stayed home all day and had access to a computer.

Science wasn't ever made interesting. Just all book learning.

Engineering, like tech, wasn't ever touched upon.

Math was the one with the most access, but mostly boiled down to rote memorization of algorithms. Again, not something that'd be interesting to anyone in particular, besides those who love algorithms and methodology.

Compare this to the arts (creative), or history (stories from the past), or english (literally reading novels).

What's more interesting is that the distinction between many guys int STEM and few girls doing so happens damn early in K-12. Why that might be is anyone's guess at the moment. But I *do* know that STEM isn't really ever the class favorite while growing up. And this attitude simply develops as time goes on.

Trying to make sexist single gender benefits for entering a field few of them have interest in due to other factors isn't helping anyone.

It's kind of like video games. It started as the exact same demographic: nerds who didn't have anything better to do, and enjoyed the algorithmic and methodology of them, and that further developed. Once it became engaging and inviting to the average person, the gender balance fixed itself almost immediately.

So either: fix the gender balance of nerdy/geeky people (no clue how to do this, but it sounds difficult), or fix  the engagement and entertainment of STEM fields early on in the education system (much easier to do).

But perhaps the better solution is to make non-stem fields be put into a better light? Make them more valuable, and more worthy of being chosen.

---

As a side note, where's all the "guys in performing arts" groups? Certainly that whole side of things is heavily female-dominated?

2015-11-humanities-student-major_1180_stanford.txt
I ruled out MIT before I decided between Stanford and Princeton, for the following reasons:

* At MIT, you're pretty much certainly going to do STEM. Granted, I think you can major in some liberal arts, but very few people do. I was interested in doing some form of engineering beforehand, and that held true after I enrolled in university. However, that wasn't the case for other people. Being more of less locked into STEM is making a bet that your interests won't change substantially.

* As an extension of the above, you'll cultivate a more homogeneous circle of friends at schools are are more or less exclusively technical. I think it's important to have friends that are in a variety of interests. I don't just mean different flavors of STEM, but humanities, arts, pre-professionals, etc. You want friends who, when you're 40, are a mix of academics, artists, business people, and social leaders.

* The two acquaintances I knew who were studying at MIT while I was deciding on universities fit the stereotype - and not in a good way.

* There is a lot more structure in MIT's general education requirements (or whatever MIT's equivalent is). Essentially, a very large chunk of your first two years worth of classes are predetermined. There are absolutely zero required classes at Stanford. The general requirements are that you take certain categories of classes, but you almost always get to choose from at least ten classes that meet those requirements. 

It goes without saying that MIT is a great university, and some of the criticisms leveled at it can be applied to Stanford (*cough*STEM-centric*cough*), but those were the key differences that prompted me to decide against that school.

2015-11-humanities-student-major_1367_changemyview.txt
This isn't an absolute explanation, but I think part of the reason some people may end up focusing on the humanities as a way to solve complex social issues could be because they feel the solutions that STEM fields provide are too limited. For instance, sure, civil engineers can help communities access clean water, doctors can work overseas with impoverished communities, and structural engineers can help rebuild physical infrastructure after an earthquake. But some people are more interested in the "why"; why do some areas have access to cleaner water whereas others don't? Why are many healthcare facilities not adequate in a certain country? Why are some cities able to afford/build more earthquake-resistant structures than others? These questions more often than not involve understanding geopolitical realities, the historical circumstances of an area, the collective memories a group of people may share--things that, in the US, tend to fall under the umbrella of humanities subjects rather than STEM subjects. This is not to say that STEM students cannot be interested in depth of issues, or that there aren't humanities students that only care about the surface of issues, but in general it seems that STEM professionals focus on *how* to relieve the symptoms of social problems, seeing things from a "little picture" perspective, whereas humanities professionals are more concerned with *why* the social problems exist in the first place and ponder what can be done to overcome those initial conditions, seeing it from a "big picture" perspective.

2015-11-humanities-student-major_1954_canada.txt
Something STEMlords always seem to miss is that, if you can make it through four years of university without being constantly bombarded by helpful advice to the effect that STEM is the way to go, you are a very special snowflake indeed and should probably be put in a museum somewhere.

Yes, we get it, industry says it wants more STEM graduates. Yes, we get it, STEM fields pay higher salaries and have better job prospects. This has been a fact of life for several decades now, and people choosing to attend university are well aware of the fact.

Despite this information, and with eyes wide open, most students aren't *choosing* to study STEM fields. And nobody ever wants to talk about that. There's something about ~*useless stupid indulgent MAs in Sociology*~ that draws people in and makes them want to throw years of their life into them, and none of the arguments advanced from the pro-STEM crowd have succeeded at reversing this trend in a large-scale (or even medium-scale) manner.

Could it be that these fields offer something which STEM doesn't, and that this "something" is totally divorced from careers and earnings and revenue potential and employability? Could it be that a lot of people *are*, in fact, happier working as baristas who read Proust or childcare workers with drama degrees than they would be as barely-competent engineers who only got into the field for the work prospects?

And if that's the case, what is "fixing" the system by adjusting admissions rates or "institutional emphasis" supposed to do? Do you really think that students are fungible, that we can take someone in a Humanities program and plonk them into Biology and nothing will change?

This sounds to me like a great way to generate lots and lots of disinterested engineering students who are only here because of lack of other options. (Which sounds to me like a great way to generate lots of failed engineering students.) Are these really the Thinkers Of The Future who are going to Synergize Leveraged Entrepreneurial Paradigms? Is this how we find these people? Would a shift of this character really be what industry is looking for?

2015-11-humanities-student-major_689_Negareddit.txt
I say this as a humanities student. I don't think that very many people at all in the total users of reddit have a positive view of /r/thredpill and probably there is at least a plurality of people who have a negative view of the various pick up artist subs. 

I would also say that though it is a 'soft science', psychology (and other areas like anthropology) seems to fall into the broad category of 'hard sciences'  in that it involves some consideration for the scientific method, p values, hypotheses, complex study construction and correction for various things and technical stuff that social sciences don't pretend to for the most part. There has been an effort in the US to make social sciences seem more 'sciency' (calling it 'political science' etc) but I think this is at least somewhat different in scope from the kinds of stuff involved in psychology. 

Though I agree that the STEM v humanities jerk on reddit is somewhat tiresome, esspecially because iirc after a few years there is close to no earnings gap overall between the fields as a whole, and I  do think that similar things to psychology are often involved different fields of History, Politics and in sociology particularly and it is often considered the most trivial of subjects in that kind of circlejerk. There is also the fact that many of the ideas from /r/theredpill come from interpretations of various less credible aspects of evolutionary psychology, which is generally a speculative and very 'humanities like' field of psychology.

2015-11-humanities-student-major_949_todayilearned.txt
This is why redditors act like boys lagging behind girls in education isnt taken seriously by experts and certainly not by feminists.    When boys face a problem its because they arent "taught to control their behavior".  It cant for any reason at all be because the institution has become hostile to them and they disengage from it... that would be fucking ludicrous.  Misandry dont real and all that crap.

Unless youre talking about girls and instead of all of education youre just talking about STEM. Then suddenly its an enormous problem isnt it?  We didnt have enough women in STEM so we looked at the entire institution of education emphasizing the way we taught math and science and we completely turned it on its head, didnt we?  We've been at it for like what...four decades now?  Everything was misogynistic and creating toxic environments and we rooted (and still are) all that out.  Google and Intel and other tech giants all throwing money and resources at programs to foster interest in STEM amongst girls.  Even wikipedia is having little gangbangs to get women and feminists to just please god edit some pages because too many guys were doing it for free and not giving it that kickass pc bias that we love so much.  We even started rebranding toys just in case girls would be put off from a toy that came from the wrong aisle or had to the wrong coloring or something I dont know, legos are sexist and all that...and so be doomed to a life studying the humanities or some god aweful gender studies kookery.  The point is, the entire institution was upended like it was the end of the freaking world.

Boys are dropping out of education like flies and according to you the feminist response is "well boys arent enough like girls and they underperform."  Girls are the majority at college but not in STEM and its a national fucking crisis.

So when you say that boys lagging behind all of education is treated as a legitimate problem by feminists and experts, how would you scale that to the legitimate problem of women in STEM?  half as serious?  quarter?  or is it pretty much so infinitesimally insignificant that its not really on anybody's radar because few people really give a shit and the ones that do could never get funding to do anything about it anyway...is that in the ballpark?

2015-12-humanities-student-major_1444_ShitPoliticsSays.txt
I knew a lot of humanities majors in grad school that constantly bitched that I had money through grants to go to conferences and got (slightly) more money than them.  They were your typical redditors that would argue their skills of "free thinking" were better than my "just following formulae" with STEM.

Don't forget a lot of reddit humanities majors think that scientists and engingeers are just following a bunch of formulae.  Which I guess explains why they didn't do well in intro physics.

I'm sorry I'm not sorry that certain skill sets are more valued in our society than others.  Why are they valued more? A few reasons.

1) Writers and "free thinking atheists" are a dime a dozen.  So there's a supply and demand thing there

2) Short of becoming a best seller (rare) you're not going to make anyone good money being a good "thinker".

3) STEM majors, particularly US citizen ones (needed in some fields) are fewer and there is TONS of money to be made in anywhere from working for a DC to Wall Street.  If you have math and science skills, especially if you have coding skills to go with it, you're able to find companies fighting over you because they will make money OFF of you.

this is the whole reason why "marketable skills" is important.  If a company can't make money off you, they have ZERO reason to hire you.  End of fucking story.

2015-12-humanities-student-major_1892_TumblrInAction.txt
You need actual living humans who dedicate their lives to knowing about this thing, to talk about it and to tell other people

That's fine, but who's going to pay these humans? There's no tangible benefit.

If you have no experts on Welsh poetry, it means Welsh poetry can't appear anywhere in the products of any industry. 

Why would it? Welsh poetry is just a random example I use to mock people who study useless things and bitch about being unemployed, but I can't think of how humanities benefit the products of any non-educational industry sufficiently to mean we need more humanities experts than STEM experts. There are no history majors working at Intel.

then you throw away a portion of your society's RAM and lose access to all that obscure stuff -- and reloading any of it from the "hard drive", all the libraries, would take a long time.

It takes all of 10 seconds. Given the speed on the metaphorical HDD (the Internet), it seems like keeping a humanities expert in every company is unnecessary. Knowledge is freely available, and easily accessible by anyone who would possibly need it. In this way, we can have people specializing in applicable knowledge like math and physics, while still being able to [access Welsh poetry](http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/sechard/492welsh.htm) in an instant if the need arises. Unless you plan on teaching it, which is important, there's simply no benefit to society for people to learn just humanities.

 if society doesn't have people constantly talking about things like Welsh poetry, it loses access to these things, making its culture simpler and poorer, which I can't call a sign of a healthy society

Things nobody cares about, such as neglected humanities, get shelved in exchange for space travel and fusion power. Not lost to the sands of time, but archived for all eternity in a resource that can be quickly tapped by anyone who happens to want or need the knowledge.

**TL;DR:** Humanities have no practical application and are easily accessed when desired, while STEM drives advancement of humanity. The world would be better off if the majority of people specialized in STEM, and studied humanities on the side. Which, frankly, is exactly what STEM majors typically do.

Consider me.

I'm an embedded systems designer working in aerospace. I got my MS in computer engineering and taught microprocessors in grad school. Meanwhile, I am also very fond of classic mythology and medieval fantasy, as well as drawing. Of course, I didn't major in European Folklore and then bitch about not getting a job with it.

2015-12-humanities-student-major_2500_TiADiscussion.txt
Engineering Major here. Holy shit you're a dick.

 Would it perhaps have something to do with liberal arts requiring a lesser degree of intelligence (in general) to succeed in than a STEM degree?

No. I make fun of liberal arts a decent bit on this sub, but honestly I feel sad because they're legitimate subjects that have been corrupted by SJWs.

Anyway, I think there are three factors. 

First, there's a vicious cycle where SJWs are pretty much by definition intolerant of opposing beliefs, so they will avoid majors which they perceive as "oppressive" or "dominated by white males," and be attracted to majors where they're among people with similar views. And what's more, because some of the SJWs who major in liberal arts get a job *teaching* liberal arts, after a few decades even a slight imbalance can turn a large section of academic culture into an SJW echo chamber.

Second, SJWs don't tend to have any separation between the personal, professional, and political. Their lives revolve around their identities and their activism, so their primary interest will be in subjects which are *about people and societies*. If the focus of my existence is dismantling White Privilege, why would I take a class on astrophysics over a history or ethnic studies class?

Third, while liberal arts are not inherently stupid (although I'd argue that the political climate in academia may well have made them so), they are inherently more subjective than "hard sciences," with social sciences falling somewhere in between. This gives SJWs an opportunity to force their views through in a way they'd never get away with in STEM subjects. For example, if I wrote a history or theology paper describing how the primary motivation of the Abrahamic Religions, or towers and spires in architecture are phallic symbols, I could make a convincing argument by throwing some shitty sources together. On the other hand, if I tried to claim that carbon fiber is an extension of hegemonic masculinity in a materials science class, or that rockets are tall and pointy because they represent men's penises in my aerodynamics class, I'd be laughed out of the building.

2015-12-humanities-student-major_270_KotakuInAction.txt
I don't think he/she's implying someone from the humanties is incapable of being intelligent or level headed enough to support the motion in this letter, but instead that people from STEM are far more likely to, as a result of the fundamental differences between STEM fields and other fields. 

A starting point in this discussion could be that the twisted forms of 'social justice' that we see nowadays, particularly in academia, is largely perpetuated and enabled by a specific kind of belief system. Censorship, victim-identity, collectivism, relativism, and the belief in sociological power structures dominating every aspect of life are all extensions of, or categories of, postmodern thought. Each  of these ideas is strongly related by a number of threads. And it's important to note that this kind of thinking is incompatible with reality itself. Since it's incompatible with reality, by extension it is incompatible with the subjects taught in STEM fields. STEM professors and students, unlike those in the humanities, have no use for fashionable nonsense. That's why it always comes as such a shock and surprise to rational people when we hear about censorship on campuses, speakers being prevented from speaking, or activists shutting down other people instead of engaging with them in a logical discussion. That behavior/response stems from flawed reasoning. 

The reason it's no surprise to see people in STEM spearheading a motion against this kind of thinking is simple: bad thinking cannot exist for long in STEM, so those who are successful enough in STEM to have degrees in it, or especially to be professors in those fields, have to possess a firm understanding of reason and rationality that is not required for those who get degrees in, or teach, the humanities.  

A  prime example of this is the [Group of 88](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_88), in which members of the Duke lacrosse team were wrongfully accused of rape, and despite the lack of objective and factual information available at the time, but in light of the strong ties to ideological and political issues that the controversy entailed, 88 professors at Duke signed a politically correct but devoid-of-substance ad that capitalized off the "incident", and emphasized the victim-complex that was implied in the case. The professors who signed this ad were from the humanities departments: African American Studies, Women's Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Romance Studies, Literature, English, Art & Art History, and History.

You don't typically see STEM professors or STEM graduates advocating these sorts of things, because it's unusual for people to get behind something that they can tell is so objectively baseless and unreasonable. 

2015-12-humanities-student-major_84_Anarcho_Capitalism.txt
My advice concerning college right now at credit-inflated prices: only go if your field near-absolutely requires it (traditional engineering fields, like mechanical, electrical, and chemical; and then science fields with steep PhD credential requirements, like biomedicine).

For these fields, even at credit-inflated tuition prices, they still pay _big_ dividends for going, especially if your exposure is something like only a four-year BSc in ChemE, and then you go on to work in oil and gas.

This would be the most extreme return, with the less extreme returns being the PhD scientist route, but even here, you just have to make it through the $10k-$40k debt to acquire the BSc, then you get paid to finish the PhD a sum which you can so easily support yourself with that you can pay off any existing student debt before graduation, if that's what you'd want to do.

If you are not studying something STEM, but are absolutely positive you can get into a graduate program that will pay a large enough stipend, then it's not necessarily financially dumb to get a BA in something non-STEM.  If you will not be going to graduate school, getting a BA in something non-STEM will probably be a large money sink with zero or minimal employment return.

That time would be better spent networking, teaching yourself about your desired field through heavy reading in your free time, and forcing your way into your desired field via painstakingly built contacts and demonstrated deep knowledge and original thought.

Another non-BSc route is where one doesn't study something liberal arts, but doesn't want to complete an engineering degree.  You can get hired with just a high school diploma as just a lab tech right now today and gradually work your way into a given field to be a decently paid tech, but the by far more common route will be to complete either a two year associates program in a vocational field or some kind of IT/medical technology certification.

If you're willing to do this, you can quite quickly find yourself decent employment ($35k-40k/yr) and at minimal/zero cost.

2016-01-humanities-student-major_1413_literature.txt
I don't see how you can argue that women's access to education wasn't considerably worse than men's access during this time period. 

There were almost no educational institutions for women which meant that only upper class women (which would be an infinitesimally small portion of the female population) would have had any access to what is traditionally considered to be a solid education. Even then, they were discouraged and often actively prevented from studying science and math. I don't know where you came up with this idea that women actively chose not to study those fields but the idea that any student of any gender in these time periods was able to select which fields they would receive their primary education in is laughably ignorant. Teachers and parents dictated to students what they would be taught until they were old enough to choose for themselves, at which point female education would regularly be terminated by the parents or, if she married, the husband.

Also, you can't be serious with that cooking, sewing, and cleaning example. That's not an education, those are outdated expectations of a housewife. You would have to be incredibly disingenuous to argue that those are at all comparable to instruction in math, science, the humanities, and any other traditional pillar of primary education.

In short, I stand by my assertion. Education was basically nonexistent for women. Upperclass women being damn near the only exception and even then their education was much shallower than men's.

2016-01-humanities-student-major_2089_philosophy.txt
Made me chuckle.   (thanks!)   Especially the 'lick a window.'  (priceless) 

But I swear I didn't mean it that way... 

It's just that Humanities experts don't get anywhere near the respect that Science experts get.  Even though they go through the same grueling 10-year training (with 70-hour workweeks) (for 10 years), have to learn the same sort of intensely-specialized language, and have if anything far *more* intense competition for positions.  (there were almost 400 applicants for the position I currently have.  This is 380+ people with PhDs from Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, UCLA, Oxford, etc.)  I've probably read or skimmed over 10,000 books, and can spell out all the major historiographical debates in 3 different fields, 5 different subfields, that span 5 centuries.   And yet, someone who's read a couple best-sellers on the Third Reich is absolutely convinced that they are "right", and I am "wrong."

And if you want to immediately see what I mean by the differential of respect, imagine this were r/Science.  And I was a professor of Astrophysics at a major research institution.  How many Redditors would be surprised by my comment "It's pretty much impossible for an interested amateur to comprehend the cutting-edge math of Astrophysics these days"
... let alone be offended by it? 

As an aside, it's different in Europe.  They have a long history of respect for the humanities that the pragmatic, suspicious of high-falutin' education, frontier-culture of the USA does not.  But that's a different topic. 

TL/DR:   no offense intended. 

2016-01-humanities-student-major_494_TumblrInAction.txt
In college, between undergrad and grad school, I studied Math, CS, and Physics, and I attended a few different universities. Most of the STEM students I've known respected the humanities as disciplines. Our general beef was that humanities programs were watered down, such that those majoring in them often graduated without actually developing a solid foundation within their chosen field of specialization. This perception has held over the decade since graduating, when speaking with people from many other colleges.

I've encountered philosophy graduates who were entirely unfamiliar with Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, or nearly any other major philosopher. I've even seen some who were entirely unfamiliar with the entire school of analytic philosophy. Similarly, I've known literature graduates who had never read Beowulf, Chaucer, or nearly any other "cannon" writer. I could go on, but I believe the gist is clear. Thus, the core criticism is that far too many humanities (and social science) programs are far too watered down. While many, probably most, students in those programs are intelligent, passionate, and will fill the gaps on their own, there are enough that make it through without grasping the basics that it provides a negative impression of the whole field. 

Meanwhile, STEM programs tend to force people to be aware of the basics of the field in a far more thorough fashion. You still get the bad apple here and the, but it is few and far between. Typically, the bigger problem with STEM graduates is that they only know their field, and lack non-technical skills. Like the complaint against humanities students, this is probably not true of the majority but is of a sufficiently large minority.

To fix these dual problems, I would like to see undergraduate humanities programs become more rigorous and focus a lot more on a core cannon. Meanwhile, I think STEM students should be encouraged to pursue non-STEM minors.

2016-01-humanities-student-major_973_college.txt
That belief might exist in STEM majors who think they're hot shit. Honestly I guarantee you that most STEM majors don't do that well in liberal arts classes, that's why they're STEM majors. I know countless people that suck at writing and analyzing things, and if put in a few liberal arts classes, would severely struggle. 

I know personally that the amount of work liberal arts majors do is crazy. It's just different work, for instance, as a STEM major, most of my homework are about problems and learning how to solve specific problems a certain way, whereas liberal arts majors have lots of homework involving tons of reading, annotating, and writing. 

Tests are different too. STEM majors are tested on concepts, and liberal arts majors are usually tested on facts. If anybody says that STEM majors are superior, they're full of shit. Some of the smartest people I know are liberal arts majors, they think differently. STEM's are taught to think in problem solving and through using data, however liberal arts majors are taught to analyze events, make connections and to see the big picture. 

So never EVER think that a liberal arts major is "inferior" because they don't do math until 3 am. I sure as shit couldn't write papers everyday until 3 am, and most other STEM majors feel the same way too, they just like to act like they're smarter.

2016-02-humanities-student-major_1129_SBU.txt
First pick between suite style and corridor style. Suite style is three rooms with a common room. You'll interact a lot with your suitemates and little with everyone else in the building, whether you like your suitemates or not. In corridor, you interact a little with everyone. If you're social, you'll have a ton of friends. If you're not, you'll have like none.

Suite style:

* Kelly (HDV)
 - In a wooded area and you have balconies.
 - Don't know much about the atmosphere
 - Close to West Dining

* Roth (SSO)
 - Most convenient location and has AC. Small rooms though.
 - Lot of science majors especially pre-meds, or so I've heard
 - Close to Roth Dining (obviously)

* Tabler
 - Don't know much about other than it's up some steps. 
 - Closest to Roth dining.

Corridor:

* Roosevelt (GLS)
 - Lived here for a year. Lot of weed smokers.
 - Skews towards humanities majors. Half the people here major in psych.
 - Buildings are kinda run down, but they're warm in the winter.
 - One bathroom per couple of rooms and they're cleaned daily. Probably has the cleanest bathrooms.
 - Closest to West Dining

* Mendy (ITS)
 - Relatively new and nicer buildings.
 - Skews towards STEM majors. Half the people here major in compsci.
 - Somewhat nerdier atmosphere. Also a lot of people from specialized high schools congregate here

* H-Quad (ACH) 
 - Knock-off Mendy quad. Look similar but further from everything
 - Mix of majors.
 - A lot of international students
 - The acronym is ACH, and always makes me think of ACh, the abbreviation for acetylcholine 

2016-02-humanities-student-major_1384_entp.txt
 It might be tempting for sceptics to put this down to a lack of intelligence or education on the part of the believers, but in fact past research has failed to support this interpretation.

This is where one flaw at least comes in.   

 matched for years in education or academic performance

4 years in a STEM major is not the same as 4 years in Humanities, regarding analytical thinking.   
Similarly a 3.0 student in STEM (good) is not the same as a 3.0 in the Humanities (borderline failure).  

So when comparing people's analytic skills based merely on years of education or GPA it's not really surprising that they don't find a strong correlation.  

It could be that certain majors promote analytical thinking -- majors where there is one way to be correct, and many ways to be wrong, like physics.  This promotes skeptical thinking, because you're always looking for how things can be wrong.  And wrong is not explanatory. 

Similarly other majors may promote rationalization -- majors where there is an opinion to be supported by argument, which if done poorly, amounts to cherry picking to support your bias.  Four years of practiced cherry picking can lead to a bizarre balance of credulity in one's own biases, but overly harsh skepticism regarding other's beliefs. 

Or of course it can simply be that analytical thinkers go into physics and rationalizers go into women's studies. 




2016-02-humanities-student-major_2168_news.txt
Oh, for fucking *fuck's sake*.

I'm a mathematician.  I love mathematics: I find it beautiful, I find it exciting, I enjoy both the endless frustration and frighteningly powerful rushes of realization it offers.  The fact that I get *paid* to do math research and share it with others makes me feel like I'm pulling the biggest "long con" in history.

But *come the fuck on*.  Cutting funding for non-STEM fields and relentlessly *pushing* kids to study STEM topics just screams "bad idea" to me, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, it pushes a lot of students who have little interest (and find little reward) in STEM fields to study something they dislike.  Others have pointed out that a lot of STEM people leave the field after a short period, because they *fucking hate it*.  And, shit, who can blame them?  If you get force-fed sauerkraut every day until you're 26 and a half years old, you probably won't want to eat much of it once you get free.  Pushing people toward careers they *hate* is generally not a productive activity.

I also think that cutting back on "liberal arts" deprives students of a *very* vital part of their education, even for STEM students.  My BS is in math, but I got it at a liberal arts school.  A lot of people think "liberal arts" means that I spent a lot of time writing about "how math makes me feel" or doing macrame or something.  But traditional liberal arts schools actually insist on students taking a *variety* of courses-- including science and math courses for the theater majors, and writing and philosophy courses for the math majors.

The standard argument my old classmates and professors would make is that I'm a "more rounded person" as a result ofa more diverse array of classes.  I tend to agree.  At the same time, I don't think that a lot of folks in the pro-STEM crowd really give a shit about people being "well-rounded", so I'll take a different approach.

I am a better *mathematician* for my liberal arts education.  My mathematical skills were *improved* by taking classes in history, basic analysis of literature (I sucked at it as much as I enjoyed it, which was a lot), creative writing, education, and sociology.  The ideas I was exposed to in those classes  influence my mathematics work, just like science and mathematics can influence the work of artists, musicians, linguists, philosophers, politicians, lawyers-- you name it.  If the pro-STEM folks actually care about the *quality* of the STEM graduates, then they'd be idiots to gut the liberal arts programs in favor of hiring a few more adjuncts to teach differential equations.

Finally-- and, I believe, most importantly-- the "divert funds to STEM" approach *completely ignores the biggest problem*.  Maybe we have a shortage of STEM folks, maybe we don't.  But look at how science and mathematics are *taught*.  Jesus Tittyfucking Christ, what a shit-show.

Science, from a young age, is presented as a collection of facts that apparently just magicked their way into existence-- there is no discussion of Bacon, or Hooke, or Aquinas, or the gradual development of "natural philosophy" into modern-day science, or of any specific subject's development.  Even when kids *do* get an introduction to "the scientific method", it's a god-awful, bastardized, follow-the-steps-and-let-the-teacher-nurse-his-hangover version.

Mathematics is presented as a rigid set of symbol-manipulation rules that you are *required to follow every time*, or you *did it wrong*-- with no discussion of the (remarkably simple) *intuition* behind ideas like calculus (or algebra, or statistics, or even place-value arithmetic), or of the context in which those ideas developed.

Engineering is presented some sort of really cool thing you'll get to do someday-- maybe-- if you can just slog your way through all these *horrible* classes in mathematics and science and manage to get good grades.  Which no *sane* child will likely ever want to do.

Science and math education should *benefit from* and seek to *learn from* the much-derided "liberal arts".  Good scientists and mathematicians *have* to have the skills that liberal arts classes encourage and develop-- creativity, playfulness, a sense of style, and even a little bit of rebellious spirit.  We should infuse our math and science programs with the sort of independence and risk-taking spirit of a creative writing class.  Instead, our current STEM programs seem fucking *designed* with the explicit goal of stamping out *those exact traits*.

It's like our country decided to teach classes on nature appreciation by forcing six-year-olds to watch somebody dress and butcher a fresh deer.  The deer lived in the forest, so the students are learning about nature, right?  The meat that deer provide is crucial for a lot of families that try to make ends meet, so they're learning about the practical value of deer.  Why are so many of the kids crying?  Goddammit, Johnny, will you *shut the fuck up* about the butterflies you saw in the woods behind your house?  We're trying to appreciate *nature*, here...

Can't we just take the kids to the woods for a few minutes and show them some nifty bugs and birds-- or even a deer, if we're lucky?!

2016-02-humanities-student-major_2258_actuallesbians.txt
I just resent the assumption that I had an obligation to go into STEM and that by not doing so, I was in effect "letting down the team." Either that or they figure that the only reason I didn't go into it was thanks to sexism. No. That's bullshit. Sure, I'm all for advocating for more women in STEM fields, but some of us really just aren't passionate enough to personally pursue it as a career, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's just so paternalistic and condescending when people assume that I didn't go into STEM because I'm a victim of sexist discouragement, or that I had an obligation to go into it regardless of my own interests and passions. By imposing those assumptions on me, you (general you, not directed at you personally) are discounting my own agency.

I also run into a lot of STEM people who look down on me because I majored in English (and linguistics, which is a soft science that they don't take seriously) which they think of as useless. I think both the humanities and STEM have equally important but different functions in society and I wish things wouldn't so often devolve into a pissing contest between the two. Science and math are obviously important but (for me at least) life wouldn't be worth living if I didn't have art and music and literature. 

2016-02-humanities-student-major_65_learnprogramming.txt
I started just over a year ago, when I was 24. I had just started college the previous semester with four courses from different disciplines that were really interesting to me, in the hopes of getting general education requirements out of the way while searching for something I'd like to major in. They were all liberal arts subjects, and one of them was a women's studies course. One of the major topics in the course was about how women aren't encouraged/expected to go into STEM fields and how that happens. While I intellectually already knew this, seeing it in that context while I had "which major should I pick" in the back of my mind really had a huge effect on me. I've always loved computers but I never thought I was "good at math" or that I would enjoy a career in science. But why wouldn't I? How did I know I wouldn't like it if I'd never even tried it? So I went home that day and took a look at which courses I would need to take to major in computer science, and that week I met with a counselor and planned out my next semester with math and my first programming course. "I'll just try it out, and if I hate it I'll switch to something else." I was really expecting it to be difficult and intimidating, but my first course in algorithm design in C++ was so fantastic. I had an AMAZING professor and everything just made so much sense. I couldn't wait for class every day and I couldn't believe how good it felt to do my lab assignments. It's like I would go into a trance and then wake up to a rush of endorphins and my code would be finished. 

I'm taking my third course now and the work is more difficult, but that feeling is still there!


2016-03-humanities-student-major_1142_AskAnAmerican.txt
Yes, all undergraduate degrees include a liberal arts component (if not *all* then at least the vast majority.  Anytime you speak in superlatives, someone WILL be waiting in the wings with the infrequent exception!)

When people talk about "Liberal Arts" degrees, they are referring to Liberal Arts majors:  Philosophy, History, Art, etc.  This is an ongoing point of disagreement in higher education:  is the purpose of higher education to broaden one's perspectives and become a well rounded person, or is it merely higher level vocational training?  Graduates of STEM programs often resent having to spend time learning about Matisse and Machiavelli.  For students coming from a lower socioeconomic background, liberal arts are often attractive because they seem easier than STEM careers, but these are the students who can least afford student debt and low-paying entry-level employment.  Liberal arts majors are typically NOT degrees that one can earn and quickly parlay into a lucrative first job - they generally require developing relationships and establishing oneself in that discipline's field... and they require passion for the subject.  It's eas

We need both - we need engineers and historians, statisticians and statesmen, architects and artists.  A promising scientist or engineer taking the "easy" road and becoming a passionless liberal arts graduate is just as unfortunate as a passionate philosophy or history major wasting away bored in an engineering firm.  

(I mention engineers because it's currently the go-to technical "get a great job quickly!" field.  It may not always be so... that's what law school was to my age group, and there's currently a glut of lawyers, up to their necks in debt but fighting for paralegal jobs).

2016-03-humanities-student-major_143_uwaterloo.txt
For me the negative attitude toward arts is probably 1 part banter and 1 part actual disdain:

Banter: As people have noted, arts course tend to be easier than STEM courses, and on average have less job prospects, so as a joke I like to make fun of them for that. It's the same logic as the arts and Laurier students who mock our programs for leading to no social life or creativity. Both stereotypes are true to some extent, but of course the joke lies in exaggerating the truth.

Disdain: I have nothing against most arts subjects in theory, and I'm personally interested in many of them. However, the academic study of these subjects has two major flaws that make me disdainful:

a) Low rigour: Ever heard of the Sokal Affair? By the nature of these arts subjects, it is extremely difficult to actually prove something or get to an objective viewpoint. The problem isn't this nature, but the obnoxiousness of arts academics to claim that their subjects are just as rigourous and yield as many useful results as research in STEM subjects. 

b) Academic circlejerk: A consequence of the first flaw, most of these subjects (in my experience) are heavily biased towards one particular theory or view and often have a cult of personality centred around a few academics and their opinions (looking at you, linguistics). The problem is that this "consensus" is not brought about by something having been proven rigourously or empirically, but is just an academic bias which excludes all other viewpoints. It's the reason why arts academia tends to be so strongly leftist - the hivemind has been radically left-wing for quite a while and most right-wing perspectives are considered "fringe" for no actual empirical reasons.

2016-03-humanities-student-major_1482_pics.txt
The other thing that gets me is the remark about how he never took a single math class in his "liberal arts" education.

When did "liberal arts" start meaning "a well-rounded education, except for math and science and stuff"? My understanding of the liberal arts ideal is that a liberal arts student has a solid foundation in many areas, and seeks to develop general skills through the study of particular subjects: political science teaches you to analyze complex human institutions, computer science teaches you to approach tasks systematically and design modular processes, mathematics teaches you to reason logically, and so on. There is value, the liberal arts theory holds, in learning (e.g.) how to do calculus, even if you never actually "need it in the real world", in the sense that you might rarely or never be called upon to do an integral. Because learning calculus taught you how to visualize rates of change and relationships between factors, and how to express ideas in a highly formal and precise notation, and so on. These are all meta-skills that you might use even if you never do another integral again.

 A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.  
 —Robert Heinlein

To me, a person who takes only humanities courses is no more getting a "liberal arts education" than a person who takes only physics or engineering courses. That's not to say that this is a bad thing—liberal arts is not the One True Way—but I think there's real value in the liberal arts ideal, and it dismays me to see the term repurposed to mean "humanities".

Likewise, whatever value "math for poets" and "poetry for math majors" courses may have, I do not think it lies in supporting a liberal arts education. A genuine student of the liberal arts should be taking a serious poetry class, and a serious math class. Perhaps a lower-level, starting course, in each case, but not something trivial or shallow. I think it's an embarrassment to a liberal arts college to have such "X for Y" courses. Are you saying your students can't hack it outside their narrow area? Where did all this talk about "learning to learn" go?

I sympathize with the idea expressed by OP: a bit of pushback against all the "STEM or you're a waste of space" talk. But "I took a fuckton of English classes and not stuff I wasn't as good at" doesn't mean "liberal arts", to me.

2016-03-humanities-student-major_1684_AskReddit.txt
That's interesting as a hypothetical question, but if you're asking about what's going on in the job market, I don't think it's accurate to make sweeping statements about "humanities majors" vs. "STEM majors". Any possible consequences of a drop in humanities majors while STEM majors grow are incidental to if not opposite what we'll actually see if current trends continue. Because in reality, majors in engineering, mathematics, English, and history [ALL went down from 1970 to 2011](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/05/09/310114739/whats-your-major-four-decades-of-college-degrees-in-1-graph). 

I'm tempted to say that the real growth is in "social science," because the business major grew, but then I think education is usually filed as a social science and that shrunk. "Health professions" grew a lot but still is only about 10 percent of the total. How does that fit? It's technically, mostly a technical field, but it's not what most people think about when they hear "STEM majors." 

What all this means varies. Personally? As an English major, I used to make peanuts as a reporter, because there isn't much money in it - not that there ever was, of course. But it turns out that highly educated people with years of experience in a STEM field who are used to working 12-hour days have trouble finding the subjects of their sentences, or keeping in mind the difference between jargon and plain English. So now I'm more of an editor than an actual writer, and I'm doing OK. On the flip side, all these would-be programmers or whatever the stereotypical STEM career is, have to deal with the fact that their job can easily be outsourced to a billion even-more-driven people in India and China. 

**TL;DR:** It's a very complicated issue.

2016-03-humanities-student-major_2274_navyseals.txt
It doesn't matter what you study for your OCS package. I know 1 guy who went to BUD/s as an O, and he studied Criminology. What matters is having a good GPA, and taking serious classes (not classes that are *all* labeled "Tuesday night at the movies"). I grew up with a Naval Aviator who went to a different university, studied Criminal Justice. Once again, unless the OCS package stipulates a STEM degree (and is unwaiverable), then it doesn't matter.

I do know that its a hell of a lot tougher to get a spot at BUD/s as an O, and they're a lot harder on the O's for the obvious reasons. There's a few policy things to be in-the-know about. 

Edit: Also, to answer your question on how someone like Babin or any E went to officer, here is how it works. It can be through Direct Commission (which is very rare). Or, if he already earned his college degree while enlisted (as many do), then he already has the BA taken care of, and its just a matter of submitting the OCS package. Also, the Command can have a lot of to do with it. Someone mentioned the Seaman to Adm. program, and that is another avenue. 

Edit 2: I was going to comment how this younger generation is STEM obsessed.  Are there advantages to being naturally inclined in Science? Sure. Let me state this, however, and do yourself a favor to remember it. When you get to college, if you don't genuinely love the STEM subject you're studying, you will  *most likely* do lackluster in it, if you can even pass it. College will look nothing like HS. College is like rugby, whereas HS is like soccer. You lose all the grade-padding in college that once inflated your grades in HS. You will most likely be far more respected in your work life (be it military or elsewhere) if you have the balls to pursue a degree in something you actually give a shit about. You *will* do better GPA wise as well. If I had a nickel for every time that I knew someone who was book smart in science, but morons when it came to street-smarts, I'd be a rich man at a young age. Yes, it happens. You can major in the humanities, then earn a MBA if you take abou 6 required undergrad courses, and be the motherfucker *paying* the STEM majors salaries. The take away from this: **Do what the fuck *you* want**, and don't be a sheep to the STEM flock. 

2016-03-humanities-student-major_2291_australia.txt
I want to know why others think these degrees are useless

Because there is a huge STEM circlejerk in society while bashing on humanities has been an academic past-time for 100 years. STEM students often have a huge superiority complex as well.

The ironic thing is that personally I found humanities FAR more brutal than Engineering. 

"Here, write 10,000 words on the cultural implications of Stalinistic bureaucracy on the Kuomintang organizational structure within Chongqing province. You have a week" and then you find out there are only like 2 books in existence that even cover this topic and one is in Russian and the other is in Chinese.

From my own anecdotal experience as well, Humanities students tend too have a far better grasp on argument, thinking out side the box and thinking "socially" than STEM students (many of which, sorry some of my best friends, are basically borderline autistic). Humanities and Art degrees don't only relate too academica, they are useful in all sorts of government and corporate structures since the degrees themselves build many different skill sets that say an engineer, scientist probably won't have. Many in STEM don't even have a basic grasp on actually conveying information that actually sounds like it comes from a human. If I have too read another Textbook with shit like:

The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missile from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't.
In the event that the position that it is in is not the position that it wasn't, the system has acquired a variation, the variation being the difference between where the missile is, and where it wasn't. If variation is considered to be a significant factor, it too may be corrected by the GEA. However, the missile must also know where it was.

The missile guidance computer scenario works as follows. Because a variation has modified some of the information the missile has obtained, it is not sure just where it is. However, it is sure where it isn't, within reason, and it knows where it was. It now subtracts where it should be from where it wasn't, or vice-versa, and by differentiating this from the algebraic sum of where it shouldn't be, and where it was, it is able to obtain the deviation and its variation, which is called error.

I'm going too kill myself (and since I have a linux machine that will probably be very soon kek)


2016-03-humanities-student-major_2335_AskMen.txt
My results on this were really interesting; I (young 20s F) took both the career vs. family and the STEM vs Liberal Arts. I had a preference **towards women and STEM** (!).

For *career vs family* I (along with 25%) of the testers had a **strong** correlation for men with career and women with family. My personal observation was that I was equally able to put career words with men and women, but was SLOW to put women with family and VERY SLOW to put men with family. Essentially, I'm very career-minded but will still default towards women with family if I have to.

For *STEM vs Liberal Arts* I was an **outlier**. Along with only 3% of testers, I had a moderate preference for women and STEM and men with Liberal Arts. My personal take is that even though I'm an (electrical) engineering student, in research labs that are mostly male and classes where I'm often the sole domestic woman, I still (by virtue of being a woman in engineering), know a number of women engineers (I room with three). Being at a strongly STEM school and hardly having taken any liberal arts classes, I don't have many regular friends in liberal arts. So when I think liberal arts, I go back to k-12 education and I think of the the famous (male) great thinkers. But when I'm asked to think of STEM, I relate to taking about homework with my female roommates. When I'm asked to classify, I bias towards women in STEM simply because a lot of my social interactions in STEM are about 50-50 (or even 60:40, F:M)


In a few years however, I could see my test results changing. At an internship last summer, in a department of 65 engineers, there were 2 women. An abysmal percentage. Once out of school and in the workforce for a while, I could see myself associating men with STEM more strongly.

Anyway, \u\yogurtmeh , I don't really think the "bias" test reflects biases in thinking (for or against women) as much as biases in experience.

2016-03-humanities-student-major_2387_TrueReddit.txt
Oh yeah, I was absolutely in "rant mode" when I wrote that, lol.

Yeah, I think there's something "valuable" or "correct" in conceptually separating "life education" (humanities) and "job education" (stereotypically, STEM).  It's unrealistic to completely separate them and I'm probably not in the minority to say that the ideal educational institution would be a place that is able to masterfully combine the two and provide that for their students.  And in fact, most of the top colleges are able to do this, when you look at the faculties and resources they have for students.  Which is why, I should clarify, that my exasperation is directed towards the admissions officers in this game and their idealistic talk, not towards the actual faculties, resources, and riches of the universities that are provided to students once they get in.  

A simplistic solution though would be to change admissions standards for academic departments.  Humanities departments are free to look for the candidates they want to (e.g. well-rounded, quirky, etc.), and STEM departments are free to look for the candidates they want to (e.g. test scores, grades, science project prizes).  The obvious side effect to a system like that is it makes it harder for students to change majors between humanities and STEM once they're in since the admissions standards are so different, and it also probably forces students to make a major academic life choice when they're still in 9th grade or so and (at least for the precocious ones and their parents) start to think about college applications.  (On the first point though, perhaps it's fine to make it hard for students to change between humanities and STEM majors once they're in college, because in this system, the humanities and STEM departments are explicitly stating that they want a certain kind of student and not the other.  So unless you, say a sophomore STEM in college, can demonstrate that your 4 years in high school + 1 year in college shows the qualities that your college's humanities department wants, then you ought not be able to switch to humanities.  Switching within STEM can still be harmless as it is today in some colleges for that student.)

2016-03-humanities-student-major_2525_ontario.txt
I'm not sure why this is posted in r/ontario. It's a article about a humanities professor in PEI.

While the comments the articles makes about staffing and the relationship between the administration and the professor are probably universal, much of the article is overshadowed by the author's position as a humanities professor. Much of the problems the author complains about are the result of the massive and ultimately unsustainable growth in non-technical fields at the university level and the lower standards and lack of accountability in the teaching of programs that are unaccredited by profession organization or dependent of non-subjective facts. Not to pick on the humanities majors, but there is a difference in the level of teaching when the material in the course is objectively verifiable instead of the nebulous subjective material that many humanities course provide.

I also think it is important to note that other the a small minority of dedicated students who actually care about their program, the lower entry requirements for humanities programs would tend attract the kind of student the author is decrying. A student who just wants to get a bit of alphabet soup behind their name isn't going to work their butt off to get their math and science marks up enough to get into an engineering or science program at a university. If the author had asked his two questions in a technical field, I very much doubt that half the students wouldn't want to be there.

TL;DR: It's not a problem with the University systems, it's a problem with the humanities.

2016-03-humanities-student-major_757_EngineeringStudents.txt
I have the same experience.

Engineering professors are the WORST teachers in the world. And I have a double major in economics, so I've experienced a lot of liberal arts as well as economics teachers. 

But engineering professors tend to be the worst.

They start class immediately, look at the whiteboard or the power-point and drone on...and on...and fucking on.


Sorry I'm ranting right now. Just had a test where 5 people started crying after it, not a single person finished the test.

Why? Professor doesn't teach, so much as drone.


Lets say you are in a car design class. He teaches you about how the tires are made, how the windshield is made, how the steering system works, and maybe what a suspension does.

But what is in the test? Design the drive-train, design an AWD system optimized for off-road usage, etc.


Dances around the topic at hand and never actually goes into it.

People were studying for hours to self study for this exam, and it just didn't work.

Doesn't help that he thinks he is teaching fine. Doesn't help that his English is borderline decent. 

Yea, I hope this guy gets fired, literally by next year.




* I've had 2 great engineering professors, and that's it.

My best STEM professors tend to be for the Gen. Core classes. Physics, Chemistry, Calculus, mechanics, fluids, thermo, etc.

These are not research professors, and neither are they engineers. Engineers are the dunces of STEM teaching I swear.

2016-04-humanities-student-major_1135_NewOrleans.txt
Oh wow, you have no idea what liberal arts actually means. 

Ok, take this someone who went to a Liberal Arts school, the point of "Liberal Arts" is that you take a variety of classes Humanities AND Stem. That what makes you a Liberal Arts. A Humanities school is a school where you can do those majors without STEM components. 

Now, I am speaking from bias of course, one would argue STEM w/o Humanities is also quite deficient, and it shows when it comes to the ability of STEM majors to convey their work to a larger audience. 

So you want to say "getting a useless humanities degree". There truly is no such thing as a liberal arts degree w/o STEM components. 

To go on, some schools are lazier than most and will create specific STEM course for Humanities students so they can claim to be a Liberal Arts schools. Don't be fooled. This is one of the major things to look at when evaluating a school. A TRUE Liberal Arts education is well-versed, well-rounded and challenges their students to learn from a variety of fields. For example, I tested quite high on my AP and ACT. So when I, a Poli Sci, major came time to do my math classes and wanted to do just basic algebra my advisor refused. Instead I had to do calculus, which I am wagering you know, is more difficult and honestly not something I would use as a Poli Sci major. But doing well in Calculus lead me to taking Comp Sci electives which was INSANELY beneficial come LSAT/Logic game time. 

One of the things you truly learn and benefit from a Liberal Arts education is the realization of the thousands of false dichotomies that exist in this world. Humanites v. STEM. Dems v. Republicans. Sanders v. Trump. From what makes us the same lies the solutions, that which makes us different causes noise. 

2016-04-humanities-student-major_1292_TumblrInAction.txt
 engineering men tend to be ignorant of their male privilege and they're the types who laugh at feminism because they grew up in math and science

Or, here's an alternative: because engineers are taught how math and science *actually work,* including statistics, we are more likely than English majors to see through people who try to manipulate numbers to prove an agenda, and tend to get sick of movements which do it ALL THE DAMN TIME.

 Men in English majors are better at doing literary analysis

Look, I'm probably more sympathetic towards liberal arts in general than most engineers, in that I don't think it's automatically shitty, I just think SJWs have fucked it up... but from my experience in English classes, "Literary Analysis" basically means projecting your own biases onto a story, coming up with a whole bunch of bullshit to justify it, and trying to convince others to pick your bullshit over the other guy's bullshit.

 and generally understand rhetorical appeals and logic fallacies.

I dunno, I tend to have a pretty good eye for that, although it's possible I wade through more shitty science writing than the average STEM major.

 They're better at understanding social constructs

"Social Construct" means pretty much whatever you want it to at this point, e.g. "Hegemonic Whiteness As a Social Construct." Saying you understand that crap (aka you've learned to regurgitate what the cult leaders tell you) isn't something to be proud of.

 From my experience, they're more socially mature.

...okay, you've got us there. Engineering does have a lot of socially inept people.

2016-04-humanities-student-major_1537_UofT.txt
I don't think it happens that much on here outside of troll posts (like those "Computer Engineering Master Race" posts we got for a while). 

In real life though, I know a couple of people in my department/year that are really hostile towards the humanities. There are a few fair criticisms in there, for example:

* Some subjects needlessly invent their own vocabulary, to seemingly seem as much of an ivory tower as the hard sciences. Part of the strength (in my opinion) of the humanities is that it should be easy to communicate your ideas to the general public in simple English. Some things related to STEM are guilty of this too though, most notably Finance, who love to jerk off to their own useless vocabulary.
* It is easier to get the course credits. This is something that when read by a humanities student might cause anger, but hear me out. You can bullshit an essay and PASS, but you can't bullshit something that is much more objective and PASS. On the flipside of this, I think it is harder to get a 4.0 in humanities subjects.
* In my particular discipline (Math), we tend to be elitist when we see references to the lower level stats or philosophy logic course being hard. Many of us take the Philosophy symbolic logic course for breadth as a free 4.0, and the complaints about it sound to us like "that course is CRAZY, I had 20 pages of reading a week!" would to a humanities major. It's a matter of perspective. Stats is also pretty sad, although there is terrible understanding of stats IN STEM as well, so I wouldn't level criticism of that against humanities students as a whole.

Now, outside of those things, there is a disdain that is unfair. There are a few mild things like jokes about wiping down tables with a Classics degree, or how lucky we are to have so many people in the english teacher hiring pool... but I have seen some outright hostility. One guy in particular is known for outright refusing to talk to people after they tell him they are studying something outside of STEM, one time even writing on an exam for a breadth course that it was a "waste of his money and brain to take this garbage".

However, I don't see that seriously here that much, outside of joking. I think humanities students should just develop and say their own jokes about STEM folks more often, I know I make fun of my department all the time with my friends.

2016-04-humanities-student-major_1784_AskWomen.txt
 I guess a narrow definition would be anything investigating or manipulating the natural world. Not the best definition since but political science or sociology aren't typically lumped in with STEM, despite using empiricism and describing the world.

I don't understand. STEM has a specific legal definition: it is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics. What are you trying to clarify? Are you saying that sociology and polisci should be a part of STEM?

 Basically, looking for perspectives not from women who went into STEM and left (I've read about the leaky pipeline), but rather women who didn't go into STEM at all.

Shouldn't that perspective be fairly obvious? Like, because many people aren't interested in STEM, so they don't go into STEM? It feels like you're assuming that STEM is the natural and obvious first choice for any homo sapiens ever, which it may be for you, but didn't they teach you about reasoning from N=1 in that calc class?

I've always had a leading interest in the humanities and social sciences and I've always been a top student at top institutions in those areas. I got good grades in STEM, but I slept through all the classes because I was bored. I enjoy math and I sometimes regret not giving CS a try, but ultimately I would have felt incomplete had I studied something other than what I studied. 

See, one can love one's field even if it isn't STEM. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills just having to say that.

2016-04-humanities-student-major_2213_Negareddit.txt
I started university majoring in Computer Science and full-on STEMLordery. I openly questioned why I was being forced to take humanities classes alongside my comp. sci. courses, when they seemed to utterly useless to me. I even laughed at those stupid jokes about how the only career awaiting liberal arts majors was selling coffee at Starbucks.

But after my first year, I began to notice something - that while I was *good* at my first-year comp. sci. courses, I didn't actually *enjoy* them. On the contrary, I found them extremely stressful, and many of the students in those classes, some of whom I considered "friends," were very cold and arrogant. When I reached my second year, everything changed. The computer science classes became so stressful that I was suffering full-blown anxiety attacks, and it was patently obvious that I was out of my depth. Those humanities courses that I had onced sneered at were now oceans of tranquility.

Eventually, I changed majors to English, and the difference was like night and day. The people in the department, both students and faculty, were warm, friendly, and possessing of far more self-awareness than than the comp. sci. and engineering students I had interacted with up to the point. And most of all, they lacked the arrogance of STEM types, who thought they had it all figured out, that their knowledge was the only useful knowledge, and that they were going to have some rock-star career waiting for them when they graduated.

Yet oddly enough, despite their abundance of confidence, a lot of computer science majors were terrified about the possibility of outsourcing. Usually this manifested itself as this odd sort of nervous joking ("I'm going to be making *so* much money once I get my degree...that is unless my job gets sent to China LOLOLOLOL1!!!")

2016-04-humanities-student-major_611_TumblrInAction.txt
Let me defend humanities for a second, simply because I am really hoping to go deeper into the humanities field and hopefully major in humanities.

Okay- I get this is TumblrInAction and bashing SJWs is real fun, but also understand that Gender Studies is an interdisciplinary subject that people devote their entire lives to studying. Alfred Kinsey and Audre Lorde are great examples of advocates for gender studies.

If a woman takes a class in Gender Studies, then subsequently recognizes that women don't receive enough attention in STEM related fields, it's unfair to say that that woman is stupid or unintelligent for speaking out against people who believe that women are completely and 100% at fault for not entering and excelling at STEM.

Think of it like this: protest is important to this world, be it issues such as increasing female engagement in STEM or recognizing that pay inequality actually exists (not the 0.76 cents to the dollar bullshit). The women's soccer team recently sued because despite winning the World Cup for America three times in the last couple of years, America has paid them a shit ton lower than America's male soccer team. And get this- despite America profiting nearly $5 million from the national female soccer team, the national male soccer team actually netted a $1 million *deficit*.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/data-how-does-the-u-s-womens-soccer-team-pay-compare-to-the-men/

So obviously I can't write a dissertation here or prove my point with endless case studies as much as I'd like to. And obviously, this girl definitely didn't articulate her point well, as she ended the convo with a pretty curt "fuck you." 

There is a reason why 4 girls at my school enrolled in Computer Science last year in a class of nearly 35 people. It's definitely not because women just aren't interested in Computer Science- there's definitely a deeper dynamic that goes on. Now, Gender Studies does sit on a lot of hypothesis, but it's important to acknowledge that women aren't stupid or that feminists are illogical SJWs that sit around with cat-eye glasses and complain about the patriarchy.

Thanks. I still enjoy you, TumblrInAction, and the wonderful attacking that armchair critics enact against feminists who believe in some hostile patriarchy that is out to eat them or something.

I just wanted to make it clear that moderate feminists exist out there, and a couple of comments that made it to the top of the comment list in this thread just (A) didn't make too much sense to me and (B) lowkey attacked a girl who was making a point (albeit crudely) about a situation that actually should be clearly looked at, which is the underrepresentation of women in STEM.

Lowkey worried how this comment will fare here, but yolo :P

2016-04-humanities-student-major_653_reactiongifs.txt
[Oh, well, allow me to retort](http://img.pandawhale.com/98929-oh-well-allow-me-to-retort-gif-jLE0.gif) 

My undergraduate degree: Soft Science: Sociology with a specialization in Human Sexuality (although, there were some components that included hard sciences)

Current job: Global marketing director for a software company.

Salary: Higher than the average petroleum engineer at the same mid-career point

Now, I realize my experience is anecdotal, buy it's clear that you have no idea what you are talking about. You know who makes even more than me? Our top sales people. You know how many of them have a hard science degree? Zero. Our top performing sales rep made more money than the CEO, who also does not have a hard science degree.

Liberal art degrees are incredibly useful. The teach you to think critically in non-linear formats. You know who I love to hire? Philosophy majors. If I may paint with a broad brush, they are intelligent, articulate, and can think in ways that more technically minded people do not. More to that point, they have social skills. Are there social STEM folks? Absolutely. Is that the norm? Not in my experience. They tend to hold themselves on a different plane and look down at people who (in my line of work) can't code or debug software. Yet, most couldn't sell the software they created if a gun was stuck to their head. 

To be fair, I couldn't create the software either, but my point is that non-STEM is complimentary to STEM in the real world. Most of us liberal arts folks don't end up being baristas at Starbucks. We end up having nice long lucrative careers. Again, anecdotally, I find that STEM folks, while starting out with a better salary, end up plateauing faster than non-STEM folks because they end up in a technical box and don't end up going the management route. Even the CIO and CTO positions are moving away from technology people and hiring business folks as these functions are becoming considered assets instead of cost centers.

TL;DR You have no idea what you are talking about. STEM starts with a nice salary but without the business acumen that comes with Business and Liberal Arts degrees, they plateau mid-career and are out-earned by non-STEM people.

2016-05-humanities-student-major_2339_CringeAnarchy.txt
Sure. I'm headed to Wesleyan University this fall as a non-traditional student. I've done plenty of looking in to this. The admissions rate for the class of 2020 is 17.5%

That's in line with Georgetown University (16.4%), UC Berkeley (16%), Notre Dame (21.1%), University of Virginia (29%), UMich (26.2%), and Johns Hopkins (15%). These are all nation renowned schools.

The median SAT score for Wesleyan 2020 is a 2230. 

As far as career outcomes go, 25% of graduates go in to either consulting or finance. Two very lucrative career paths. They're extremely competitive to get in to.

From 2011-2015, Wesleyan's pre-med program has an acceptance rate of 65-76% into a med school. For comparison the national average is 43%.

-------
It's easy to blow off LACs as purely activist schools when all that you read about them comes from these blowhards in articles from reddit. The truth of the matter is that great LACs still attract some of the best and brightest students across our country. I've only shown you 1 school that is ranked #14 by US News. 

Just because a person isn't studying engineering (which by the way, Wesleyan has a decent engineering exchange program), doesn't mean they're not studying worthwhile pursuits or that they're not studying hard. 

Liberal arts isn't just "gender studies" and other majors that reddit has collectively deemed worthless. I wish more people would understand that. 

2016-05-humanities-student-major_2547_history.txt
Because every major requires you to think critically, especially the hard sciences. Do you think Business majors or Biology majors are not trained to think critically about the subjects they study? Maybe biologists spends some time in a lab or in the field, but they are still consuming scientific literature and research.

It's a matter of focus, I think. And I'm certainly not trying to cut down anyone's major. But humanities students are trained to research, analyze, and argue persuasively. We live or die based on our ability to do those three things. I obviously don't know what every other major is like on a firsthand basis; all I can draw from are what others have told me about them. From what I've heard business majors, for instance, are much less focused on these things.

I think that has more to do with History majors being unable to find lucrative careers in their chosen field than anything.

95% of people who major in the humanities know they're never going to work in them. That's been the case for a very, very long time, since before college was an option for most people. You study it because you like it and because you have an aptitude for it - and yes, I am speaking from a position of privilege. Yet, history majors have disproportionately gone into law for decades, and most lawyers I know (legal family) think highly of it as a preparation for law school. The skills cross over well.

2016-05-humanities-student-major_419_canada.txt
The reality of the matter is for every 1 job available for a humanities student they accept 1,000 students into that program. With science it might be 1 job for every 10 students. For teaching it might be 1 job for every 3 students. For engineering it's likely 1 student for every 2 jobs.

Where do those statistics come from? I'm guessing from somewhere in the vicinity of your rectum?

I'm just a dumb humanities graduate, so I'm not so good with math, but golly, I do have research skills. And it only takes a little bit of googling to come up with some hard numbers:

- The unemployment rate of humanities graduates in the US [is marginally higher than that of graduate students from other disciplines (5.4% to 4.6%)](http://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatordoc.aspx?i=10919) (and even more narrow when they go on to get an advanced degree), but is markedly lower than that of people without a university degree

- The median salary for humanities graduates in 2013 [was $50,000, compared to $57,000 for all graduates, but much higher than the $35,000 median salary of those with only a high school diploma](http://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatordoc.aspx?i=64)

- In surveys related to prospective graduates, [employers consistently](https://www.aacu.org/publications-research/periodicals/it-takes-more-major-employer-priorities-college-learning-and)

recognize capacities that cut across majors as critical to a candidate's potential for career success, and they view these skills as more important than a student's choice of undergraduate major. Nearly all those surveyed (93 percent) agree that “a candidate's demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than their undergraduate major.” More than nine in ten of those surveyed say it is important that those they hire demonstrate ethical judgment and integrity, intercultural skills, and the capacity for continued new learning. More than three in four employers say they want colleges to place more emphasis on helping students develop five key learning outcomes, including critical thinking, complex problem solving, written and oral communication, and applied knowledge in real-world settings.

- You'll find [similar patterns in Canada](http://www.ideas-idees.ca/blog/humanities-and-social-science-grads-have-more-stable-careers-over-time); humanities undergraduates tend to earn slightly less after graduation, but have more stable earnings over a lifetime

But like I said, I'm just a dumb humanities graduate, so what do I know?

2016-06-humanities-student-major_1211_AskWomen.txt
Well here's the thing.  It's harder to FAIL at humanities, social sciences, etc.  So it's easier to coast, and the students who don't want to do much work are going to gravitate to those fields.  But that doesn't mean there aren't students who are hard workers, brilliant, and legitimately interested in those things either.  However, it is at least as hard (sometimes harder!) to really excel at those fields.  There were something like 2,000 psych students at my university of 16,000.  And I was one of maybe 4 to receive an award for my thesis, one of only a handful to get highest honors, one of maybe a couple per year that impressed a professor enough to take a grad seminar from them.  Distinguishing yourself from the pack is extremely, extremely difficult when there are over 2,000 students vying for the positions you're applying for, the scholarships and awards you want, the graduate schools you're applying for, etc.  So sure, maybe a bunch of those psych students didn't give much of a fuck and just wanted to coast by getting Cs.  But for those of us who cared, who wanted to excel, we worked at least as hard as the hard science majors.  Like I said, I had friends in hard science majors who never put as much work into their degrees as I did and did just enough to coast.  I had others who worked really, really hard, just like me.  The point is, every degree has both of those kinds of people.  It's just *harder* to be a coaster with some.

2016-06-humanities-student-major_1220_AskWomen.txt
Hello, I have a stem degree and liberal arts minors. I work in stem education with a lot of really bright and nerdy high school students. 

Especially when people are considering majors without a defined job path after college like arts. 

When discussing possible subjects to study in college and their value I zero in on this idea when it comes to stem vs. liberal arts or other subjects. 

Yes, if you study outside of stem and a few other majors your career will most likely be much less defined. Does that mean that you cannot make a living, be a professional/have a career, and be happy? Of coarse not. I think it's more that your career will not look like a *traditional* career (working at a company, mon-fri 9-5, benefits, Christmas parties, etc) and you should not expect it to do so. You will most likely have multiple different ventures, collaborations, and projects, going at once and will really have to have some kickass networking skills. 

Honestly, many people prefer that type of a career to to a traditional looking one. I kind of fall in the middle as a teacher but I can tell you I would NOT do well in a traditional office or company environment. 

Also I went to a very stem oriented university and I know a ton of unemployed comp sci and engineering majors in a tech hub city with low unemployment. 

2016-06-humanities-student-major_1226_AskWomen.txt
I think that on a undergraduate level it is apparent that some majors are more difficult to obtain than others. That difficulty depends on the individual pursing the degree and their abilities as well as the rigor and merit of the major they pursued. On one hand it would be unrealistic to assume that all majors are equally as rigorous. My school had an American studies degree which was basically a joke. Even the people I knew who got that degree agree. Could a similarly themed degree at another school be extremely rigorous? I definitely believe it. Now it goes without saying that some skills come easier to some people than others. My sister is incredibly talented artistically. I am not as talented. Now I think that people who work very hard to excel at whatever they are passionate about deserve respect. I also believe that you should feel pride in knowing that you chose to push yourself and challenge yourself to accomplish difficult things. I don't blame those who stayed inside the library all weekend while their peers were out at parties for feeling like they worked harder than some people in college. All the math and science classes I took were quite challenging for me and all the liberal arts classes I took tended to be easier for me so long as I was interested in them. I can see where a similar experience might lead some people coupled with seeing their peers not studying as much lead people to believe that liberal arts degrees are easier to obtain. Yet I chose to get a science degree because I was passionate about biology. College should be about following your passion. But I think if there is any inequality it lies in the education system creating majors in their universities that are fluffy. 

2016-06-humanities-student-major_1233_AskWomen.txt
My high school was like this. All of the advanced level electives were STEM. They actually had five different engineering options. My options were essentially take something I have no interest in at a high level or take something I'm interested in but kill my gpa because the course isn't weighted as much. 
STEM is important and should be offered in schools, don't get me wrong, but there are so many careers outside of the STEM field. If we pigeonhole everyone into STEM, eventually things are going to be messed up. 

My sociology degree is currently doing me pretty well. I'm in a top ten MSW program and almost guaranteed a job out of school because the field is becoming more and more in demand. I'm proud of my sociology degree even though many (ignorant) people told me I would accomplish nothing and didn't think I was smart.

The idea that if you don't major in business or STEM you won't get a job is ridiculous. Just because there isn't one corresponding job with a liberal arts degree doesn't mean that there aren't jobs. The world can't run off of just business and STEM and kill off all other sectors. If people go into fields that they aren't passionate about just because they think that it will get them a job, the world is going to become really unhappy. 

2016-06-humanities-student-major_65_findapath.txt
I hear you - if you're not into STEM, then you're not into STEM. A lot of people like to talk crap about how there's no career option for anyone in the non-sciences. IMO, it's largely BS. You just need to realize this is not the 50's, and there won't be a "clear path" for you to take after graduation. But if you are creative and resourceful you can make a living doing almost anything that you're dedicated to. 

I don't think it's a bad idea to try to live off the grid - I think it's a bad idea to do it now. It sounds like you need to switch majors to something you care more about. And I know you don't like math, but the number one thing that can take a humanities graduate from "low employment prospects" to "hired right out of college" are quantitative, programming, and technology skills. You're gonna need to pick at least one mathy skill and get good at it - regardless of what career you have. Saying "no" to both math and computers is career suicide these days, you need to pick at least one to incorporate into your skill set. 

Don't give up - this part of your 20's is challenging for everyone. Finding a path in life is not easy but if you're dedicated and smart, you WILL find a way!

2016-06-humanities-student-major_872_lostgeneration.txt
Not true at all in my case. Maybe in software development that works but try any engineering field and that does not apply. 

I've heard tons of comments on the job in my own experience of how "worthless" liberals arts is and we should just make more room for the STEM people. 


You're right there are some history and english majors that happen to get into a dev role, but that is not the norm even remotely with the abundance of CS majors now, especially if the job is making regular use of rigorous computer science concepts.


Even at my job there is tons of liberal arts majors that got into a role, but that was 30 or 40 some years ago. They're boomers that "just happened to" get into their job. It's like they didn't even have to try to get it. Nowadays it's a whole different game. 



I am more talking about the implicit bias against liberal arts in most STEM fields now, both inside and outside academia. It's pretty hard to ignore where I am--it's very prevalent. People are always focused on money, not personal wellbeing and happiness. It'd ridiculous.


Mention english as a reasonable career choice/major, and you can hear the scoffs, snivels, hems and haws from over a mile away. The superiority complex among engineers in this scenario is fucking palpable.

2016-07-humanities-student-major_1004_SandersForPresident.txt
The mentality that education only had a purpose to help land a job is the scariest. People rag on liberal arts majors because they aren't as employable as STEM majors.  First and foremost, not only is everyone not cut out to be an engineer or scientist and that is okay. As a society we should want to have  historians, artists, poets and philosophers around as well. But not everyone is cut out to be one of those either. Overall we should have an educational environment where people to be able to test the waters and take classes in anything that interests them without it costing an arm and a leg. Where did the element of satisfying personal curiosity go? That is what education about! We should want to get people to think creatively and expose themselves to new ideas. The more educated a populace, the better society is off as a whole. The cost of educating society should be evenly dsitributed among all of us,  as we do for any major infrastructure. We share the cost of highways, bridges and government buildings because we need them. A strong education system should be see as a piece of infrastructure. Just because I may never use a highway in Alaska doesn't mean my federal tax money shouldn't help them have decent roads to drive on. I didn't choose for those people to live in state with harsh winters but I can wrap my head around they idea that they can't do everything themselves, that the whop country has to pitch in from time to time. Similarly, I won't ever see all of the national parks but I am happy to have my money help keep them open. An educated society creates a strong backbone for our country and we should foster it. Since when did getting an education have to be practical? I'm betting it was a fairly recent development. Maybe we should ask a historian...hmm, I can't seem to find any /s. It's the mark of a strong civilization when it is at a point that it can promote the arts and humanities without restraint.  I'd be incredibly happy if the money earned by our county through STEM related industries (tech, finance, military, etc) could help fund a new "golden age". Wiki is telling me I'm wrong to use the term when I say golden age, but hopefully you catch my drift. Maybe if education were free then I'd know the proper term to describe the era of cultural enlightenment that I dream about.


*Sorry for the mobile induced formatting and spelling errors.* :|
**Thanks for the gold!**

2016-07-humanities-student-major_108_FeMRADebates.txt
I don't think it's only about money. There are other high-paying fields besides STEM - like medicine and law, and there's no shortage of women in those fields. Women are already the majority in medical schools in the US, in my country they currently make up more than 70% of students. Law is slightly female-domianted as well.

Also, I wish people stopped treating STEM like a monolith. It's not - it's composed of many different fields, not all of them male-dominated. To my knowledge, the only STEM fields that are clearly male-dominated in Western countries are computer science and engineering. Everything else has enough women, some fields are even female-dominated. Women are increasingly choosing well-paying fields as well. I'd argue many women who choose social sciences and humanities aren't choosing those fields specifically because they don't care about money - maybe they care about money but simply don't believe they can pull off studying STEM. The stereotype that women suck at spatial skills still prevails and it could definitely be one of the main reasons why there aren't enough women in engineering. While spatial skills really does seem an innate difference because it's also noticed in other mammals, even those where females roam as far as males (so it appears to be simply a side effect of higher testosterone levels, not an evolutionary biological reason), this difference is quite small and can easily be eliminated with some extra training - but many women don't know that, or don't believe they could improve because they've been told their whole lives that they're innately inferior to men in this regard and there's nothing they can do about it. Even if they received a more encouraging influence of feminism telling them those differences aren't innate or can be overcome, what they've seen themselves in real life when comparing the men and women they know was probably the opposite of that, so it was hard to believe it.

As for computer science, what I believe to be a very underrated but significant key factor is its reputation for attracting nerdy, socially awkward, sexist guys, plus the influence of feminism. It's very possible that computer science in Western countries tends to attract a disproportionate amount of "nerdy" men, or socially awkward, but the sexism part could be exaggerated by feminism, turning many women off. When you get told that if you go to comp sci, you have to be extremely brave and prepared to ward off constant harassment and you're definitely going to be discriminated against, it can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most women get too intimidated to get into those fields, and those who do are overly-conscious of their sex and it affects everything they do - from the way they speak, to how confident they feel, etc. Which can cause them to be much worse at it and drop out at higher numbers than their male peers, despite being equally capable; and, above all, it causes those women to be treated differently than men, not because of misogyny but because they do act differently from men. And the cases of real sexism (which do exist, I have no doubt) get blown into huge scandals and carried wide, many women hearing about them and getting even more intimidated.
And you can't ignore the masculine association with STEM factor.

2016-07-humanities-student-major_1188_DarkEnlightenment.txt
When I worked in academia, post 1995, many of the conservative types would ground out the lessons they taught with real world experience. As an example, one of the Law School profs I was good friends with was describing how much of an ass he felt like after a guy he was convinced was innocent turned out to be unequivocally guilty. Or a guy teaching an engineering class who described some of the process he went through in helping design the engine on a Corvette while he worked at Chevrolet. 

The libs based everything on ideology, but they tended to be relegated to the humanities related departments. Many of them were just trying to differentiate themselves via ideology. So we had them organizing protests which were mostly peaceful, and all manner of campaigns on campus. They rallied several times for various obscure political prisoners.

The problem wasn't so much the differences in ideology, though. The problem was that tenured profs acting like tin plated Hitlers. A lot of the conflict between the two philosophies was actually just smoke for a few people that had personal grudges for slights, both real and imagined. These people started political in-fights that were pretty epic in scale.

So the infighting gets started and inevitably these profs are using their students as pawns. Lets be honest, about 90% of the college students are there because mom and dad told them to go to college to get a good job, but they usually pick an easy degree, and spend the extra time partying, while rushing assignments at the last minute. 5% are there strictly to party, and usually flunk out quickly. Maybe another 5% are there to actually learn something. The catch is the kids looking for easy degrees.

I've literally had kids signing up ask me which degree had the least amount of math involved, because math is hard. Want to know why there is almost always a glut of humanities degrees, and a dearth of qualified STEM fields? There you go. So the kids that have a degree in English get out and look for a job, and discover that practically the only thing they are qualified to do is ... teach other people a nearly useless skill. So they get recycled into the college sphere. Meanwhile the STEM degree earners have the opportunity to go make money in the real world, thus they are recycled into higher education at a lower rate.

There is a lot of re-circulation of liberal idealism back into the education system, mostly because they liberal types have created a bubble universe there. The STEM fields have been somewhat un-affected, as they still require some rigor. Think of civil engineering, where if you make en error building a highway bridge and it collapses, there will be consequences most of the time. Write a particularly bad poem, and nobody cares. 

That's pretty much the catch. The lib's have turned almost all of higher education into processed cheese: There is no exceptional performance, or failure. They can exist in without having to interact with differing ideological points of view, and due to tenure and political positioning many of them are as hard to remove as cancer. The difference is that now they want to spread this erosion to everyone else.

2016-07-humanities-student-major_1864_changemyview.txt
I think you're view is based on misconceptions.

1. That the only purpose of a college education is to train you for a specific career path.

This is not the case. A college education *can* be used this way, but it's greater value is in providing a broad spectrum education.

2. That the most important thing you will learn in college is skills and facts.

The most important thing you will learn in college is how to *think*. The most important things professors will teach you is when you are wrong and why, not just stuffing facts and skills into your skull. You don't study history by learning the names and dates of battles. You study history by learning how to synthesis that information and process it.

3. That any degree must or should or does directly translate into a specific career path.

Most people, regardless of their degree, will not enter into a career path that directly involves their field of study, or at least the hard skills that they learn in their degree. Most IT personnel are not doing coding for their servers, they are administrators for user passwords and network access. Most engineers are not drafting out designs for products and building, they are managers overseeing production and rubber stamping plans. Certainly by the the end of the first decade of your career you won't be doing any of the nitty gritty work, you'll be delegating it to your team. It's very similar with humanities degrees. English majors become technical writers, editors, copywriters, etc. Film majors become news producers, or corporate videographers.

4. What falls under the umbrella of "humanities"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanities

5. that your ability to get a job and maintain a career is primarily skills and knowledge based as opposed to softer skills.

Your first few jobs *might* rely on your direct ability to to preform specific tasks. After that, it will very quickly lean further towards interpersonal skills, creative problem solving, motivation, etc. 

6. That the humanities don't "deserve" the rigorous study, classification, and understanding that other fields of study do.

There is a level study that isn't exactly *impossible* outside of college or university environment, but it is incredibly difficult to achieve. I'm not speaking about individual efforts of study, I'm talking about the entire body of human knowledge kind of stuff. Without students in a university environment, it would be difficult to continue exploring theses subjects.

7. That a person getting a humanities degree would even succeed in a STEM or business program.

The likelihood of me having successfully completing any STEM or business program is basically zero. Expecting me to sink my teeth into something I have absolutely no passion for is setting me up for failure. I went to school for technical theater, focusing on lighting. My hobby on the side was electrical engineering. Sure, I could have gotten the EE degree and done theater on the side but *that* would have been a waste of my time and the $60K. I have no desire to design circuits all day, I want to create events, and I do.

2016-07-humanities-student-major_609_TrollXChromosomes.txt
I have an educational background that sits somewhere at the intersection of arts and STEM. I've an undergrad in Industrial design. About a quarter of that was STEM (materials science, materials engineering, maths, physics, manufacturing engineering, statistics, etc.). My postgrad was in digital media (half of that was coding and the associated maths). I'm now a PhD researcher (researching makerspaces. My grant is specifically about furthering STEM education), which has involved modules in quantitative research methods (stats), as well as more "liberal arts" modules.

Overall, I've found that the STEM and liberal arts sides of my education have been equally challenging. The most difficult parts have been the year I spent in fine art before I changed course to industrial design (art is incredibly hard work) and the advanced stats in the PhD course (less the maths, and more the figuring out the appropriate methods to use for particular data).

From a teaching perspective, the liberal arts side of things is generally more challenging for students. When there isn't a "right" answer, just increasingly "better" answers, some of them really struggle. Students from computer science backgrounds in particular are surprisingly bad at creative problem solving and divergent thinking. 

STEM helps people to solve defined problems. Liberal arts helps people to *define* the problems, to pull a clear thread out of a mish mash of complexity. Both involve critical thinking, just in different ways.

2016-07-humanities-student-major_614_TrollXChromosomes.txt
STEM fields tend to be more competitive, as most people think that they're "serious" or the most likely to get you a job (and that is true depending on the field). STEM fields have incentive to weed people out. For instance, the nursing field in my school is more competitive and harder than the pre-med field, because more people are trying to be nurses, so there's incentive to knock them out.

Many liberal arts fields don't have that issue because they aren't competitive. Sociology doesn't need to weed anyone out - they're just trying to make sure everyone there learns the basics as well as possible, and maybe even catch the interest of someone who is undecided or looking for a minor.

That doesn't mean one field is harder over all. It means one is more competitive. It also depends on the person. For instance, I'm an English major because I love English. I dropped my science major because I wasn't happy with it, and knew I'd be miserable spending my life in it. I could have chosen any major (except math or engineering, I'll be honest) and graduated just fine at my school.

My friend, on the other hand, is in the medical field. She does well enough, but she would fail hard in anything liberal arts based. She's a terrible writer, and even worse when it comes to interpreting media. She never sees the twists coming in movies, couldn't describe a character to you, and never picks up on any hidden messages in the films or books she watches and reads.

Still, most people perceive her major as "harder", despite the fact that she could have never gotten through mine.

2016-07-humanities-student-major_662_SubredditDrama.txt
Okay I get it, I really do, the STEM jerking that goes on in the defaults is really annoying. Well I presume it is anyway since I don't actually go on the defaults, but c'mon. I'm a libarts double major (econ and history) and I had to take a few high level CSE/CLA crossover stats classes. Easily by far and away the hardest classes I ever took.

Now I'm not disparaging the importance of writing well, being able to convey thoughts clearly, that kind of thing, that matters quite a lot. And I'm not calling liberal arts degrees useless, and certainly not a business degree.  However, I feel like a lot (not all, but certainly most) of people counterjerking about STEM haven't actually taken a STEM class. At the end of my time in school I could write my history essays in a day and reliably pull As. STEM sucks because it requires constant effort. Everything you learn in those classes builds on what you've learned earlier in a way that doesn't really let you disengage and reengage at will. You won't have the foundation necessary.

I dunno, I knew a lot of engineering students at school and I've got a lot of respect for the work they had to put in just to stay abreast of what they were learning. I mean, I hardly think they'd be all that broken up over meanie internet comments since they're all making bank right out of college,  but I don't like it when people disrespect the work they put in to get there just because the reddit hivemind is kinda obnoxious.

2016-08-humanities-student-major_1133_academiceconomics.txt
Thanks. I hope I'm helping in some way instead of just ranting at air. I've been a mentor to far too many kids in STEM+ (including economics) related fields that have this exact mentality, and it's always a struggle to correct.

For some reason, after recognising that no one on the world stage appears to be solely using science and empiricism to tackle complex issues of morality and governance, the most common conclusion drawn is that everyone is an idiot for not doing so, not that there must be a reason why everyone is not doing so.

The level of derision I often feel from my colleagues (I work in financial economics now, mostly surrounded by STEM PhDs) toward philosophy and the humanities as a whole is palpable, and I find it extremely sad that Western education now seems to be piling on STEM as the answer to absolutely everything, creating a rift even at liberal arts schools that are supposed to grant a comprehensive education across a broad range of subjects.

It doesn't help that money seems to have all flowed into STEM fields, leaving behind little but Starbucks cashier jokes for the humanities majors. Speaking melodramatically, I think this over-reliance on science and empiricism to solve life's problems will potentially kill us all -- as it already almost did in the 20th century. And I say this as a STEM major (Math/CS).

2016-08-humanities-student-major_1586_LateStageCapitalism.txt
That thread pissed me off when I saw it. Guess what classes these people always want to replace : Arts and Humanities. Every fucking time, it's : "Yeah fuck history and French and English and psychology, every child should be forced to be a STEMlord! Who cares if they suck at sciences and math, force them to take coding too!" I've even see people argue for taking shop classes out of schools in favor of computer classes. If you are not good at, or don't like coding, why should you be forced into it? That's what secondary education is for. School should be a general education and include a broad amount of subjects. Not forcing hardore math and sciences on unwilling students.

I always take shit like this personally, because at my high school the only electives were advanced maths and sciences. There was 1 history class available, and shop classes were underfunded as fuck. I barely passed maths and physics because I had no other choice. I did an Arts degree and got amazing grades, and I loved every second of it. That's what I'm good at and I love it, why should people like me be prevented from having this in school? I may never get a job, but at least I didn't go into STEM and fail out after a year. I fucking despise STEM because of their fucking arrogance. Fuck off and leave the few Humanities classes left alone. Just because you hated French class in high school does not mean all liberal arts are worthless.

2016-08-humanities-student-major_519_KotakuInAction.txt
All you have to do is say something about how you were discouraged because misogyny when you were young from taking an interest in the early developmental things that make STEM easier when you are older(thinking math is cool at 10 and reading calculus books for fun will make pretty much all STEM fields easier when you're in college). Since you didn't feel you had the opportunity to gain competence in the field starting this late in life you want to prevent that from happening to anyone else.

This has actually been shown to generally be the case (except for the "misogyny" part, at least to some extent). To get STEM degrees requires a STEM focus in high school education, and most female students take arts/humanities/social sciences. 

And let us face it; our society generally does encourage women to go for that kind of study (or at the very least, does not discourage women away from those fields). For one, due to the whole "socially acceptable to be a dependent partner" thing, they don't *need* to study a massively profitable field. For two, our society generally does see STEM as unfeminine, which pushes at least some women away from the field. 

That said, women play a part in this too. A recent study showed that when surrounded by 'nerd' paraphernalia (Star Trek posters etc), women are likely to demonstrate less of an interest in STEM than when they are placed in a more neutral classroom environment. A plausible interpretation of this is that nerdiness repels most women away from things associated with it. 

In addition, there are parts of STEM (particularly in the biological fields) that are female-dominated. 

Basically, if you want more women in STEM you need to start by promoting STEM to high school girls. By the time they're in college and studying English Lit or (even worse) Communications/Oppression Studies/etc, its generally too late.

2016-09-humanities-student-major_1372_AskWomen.txt
Oh my god, girl, stop hanging out with the STEMlords.

"paying the bills" is a really low expectation for success, and it speaks to how fucked up our academic culture is that you got the impression that someone with a non-STEM degree can't even do that. Taxi drivers pay the bills. Illegal immigrants that clean houses for a living pay the bills. The person who asks you if you want fries with that also pays the bills. 

Also, if it's a career, and there are living human beings working in it, then those jobs aren't impossible to come by. To pick some stereotypically "impossible" example, maybe it's unlikely that you'll write for the New York Times, but it's exponentially more likely that you'll be able to write for some regional publications, and you can pay the bills doing that. 

The whole STEM vs liberal arts circle jerk doesn't reflect any tangible reality, of the labor market, of the divisions in academic science, anything. STEM careers that reliably make a high salary are the mathematical sciences, some types of engineering, and medicine. Biology? Not so much. Same goes for BAs in chem or physics. Ditto for academia. There's a lot of engineers out there making 60k. 

I got my degree in economics and I do pretty okay, and I'm not even an investment banker. By the time you graduate, seriously no one cares about what you got your degree in, and most jobs - even prestigious ones - will consider you depending on your accomplishments such as work experience and GPA, not your major. In the end it comes down to luck and hard work. 

2016-09-humanities-student-major_1643_ukpolitics.txt
It really isn't, the majority of the UK's economy is built on professional services which require onsite training not prep-work built at Uni it matters very little to most good employers what your background is unless you are going to be pigeon-holed into a certain technical area.

Most of the big-four recipients I know came from all backgrounds and its difficult to pin down a generally popular area for example. Either way I know three guys from Imperial stuck under 30k after a few years.

The big numbers speak for themselves though, having a degree  not having one, having postgrad qualificationsnot having one. Strictly in the sense of employment and salary numbers. 

I often feel like most of the people talking about "you can't get a job outside of STEM subjects" haven't actually graduated or looked for a job in their life.


Either way the MEDIAN salaries for 16-64 olds is a 7k range from 35k-28k from STEM down to Humanities/Arts (though if you ask me a degree in English is going to take you further than one in dance so meh)

The MEDIAN salaries for new graduates is only a 3k range from STEMHumanities/arts

The % in High Skilled Employment is 72.8% in STEM and 60.9% in Humanities in arts (16-64)

The % High Skilled in STEM is 63% to 51.3% in Humanities/Arts (new graduates)


In my honest opinion you might as well look at skin colour/class background/ if they got a 2:1 / If they went to a top 20 University.




2016-09-humanities-student-major_176_literature.txt
I'm sorry if I implied that STEM majors have no value or worth, I absolutely understand that they are crucial in our society, it's just that their input can easily be figured quantitatively, and it's much harder to express the worth of the humanities. 

Guys like Erich Fromm thought that the under appreciation of the humanities was one of the leading reasons that we struggle with depression and poor mental health when we are practically living in the Jetsons, but he also understood the need for STEM majors. That's apparent. 

What's sad is that kids have to abandon their passions and desires to pursue a career where they will (maybe) be half-satisfied with their life and station. 

Some of the blame falls on the person, you have to take risks and work your ass off to get where you want to be, but I think the lions share of the blame falls on us as a society and people. Everyman isn't greedy. But the ones in power are, and as such, the humanities take a back seat because STEMs make money. Maybe one day we can change that, but in the meantime, I'm going to spend my tuition and future debt on something that I'm confident can get me a well paying job that won't make me hate my existence when I know full well I would be much more satisfied taking English courses. A sad reality, but it's the one we have to deal with. 

2016-09-humanities-student-major_2012_business.txt
I took a few years off between high school and college, and even that smallish gap in time made me much more serious about the education I was getting when I went back. 

I really think we need to stop this "everyone go to college at all costs!" thing we push.

listening to our generation of parents telling us to just study what we loved and the money will come.

I think this has been shifting hugely, but also too far the other way. The advice now seems to be STEM or don't bother! But since we're still saying everyone go to college, we're now saying everyone go to college for a STEM degree. That's not better.

Especially for those people (like me) who aren't strong in STEM and excel in my humanities field. (Writing. I majored in English despite more than one "what are you going to do with THAT" comment/useless degree comments.)

The advice needs to be more nuanced than what my generation was given, and what this generation is getting. It's not "everyone go to college!" or "everyone do STEM for a good job!" It needs to look more at individuals - if they have the drive and interest in and intelligence for college* (and if not, other options that we need to stop stigmatizing. Trade schools are great, too) and then what sort of things they're good at and can hone, which will then make them much stronger in their field, which often translates well career-wise.

I've survived company layoffs, gotten freelance gigs, etc. from being the strong writer in a marketing department. (Turns out, a lot of people in business can't write for shit.)

* Some people are smart but aren't interested in college. They may have drive that works well elsewhere, like starting a business.

But yeah. Just ranting. :)

2016-09-humanities-student-major_296_college.txt
All students, regardless of major, should be looking at potential careers and seeking internships and career guidance every step of the way. Simply doing the bare minimum for a STEM major without a thought as to what one's future career entails is a surefire recipe for unemployment, or employment in a field one hates because they didn't do the research first to see if they'd actually like it. It took me several tries for me to realize that the medical and biomedical research fields just weren't for me. It also convinced me to switch majors to something more flexible. That's an opportunity a lot of these students won't have, just because their parents have terrified them into obedience with threats of financial ruin. If I were a parent of a child in college, I would rather have them give me a good justification for picking a humanities or social science major than a shoddy justification for a STEM major. 

It makes sense to pick majors consistent with the career you'd like to see yourself in. However, when you have parents texting their children to get out of a guest history lecture *right now* so that their squishy developing brains aren't corrupted by the liberal arts, that's when you have a huge problem. 

What we're looking at is the end result of the fetishization of capitalism in the academy. Fields are valued by how much money they make and how "productive" they are to industry, not how much they actually enrich the mind or teach "indirect" skills. Parents don't even see the value of non-STEM courses because they care more about guarding their own "investment" and prestige (as if their child is a commodity, yuck) than whether or not their child gets to be an adult who is allowed to make mistakes and be something other than Mommy's and Daddy's shining star of perfect excellence once in a while. 

/soapbox

2016-09-humanities-student-major_306_funny.txt
Bitter English major rant here:

I'm sick and tired of the STEM obsession in the U.S. (or is it a global thing?) Ever since elementary school, we're basically brainwashed into believing that STEM is the *only* way to be a success in life. We have science camps, "science is cool!" themed toys, lists of "when I grow up" jobs (doctor, scientist, engineer, etc.) Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with introducing kids to science, and I have nothing against those in the STEM fields. Science *is* cool -- but it's not for everyone. When we're cutting art and music from our schools, and praising math and science whizzes for their "genius" while ignoring the bright artists and writers, I think it detracts from society.  

I've always been a very literary, writing-oriented person. Math, not so much. Still, urged on by a childhood of "girls should be scientists!" propaganda, I tried majoring in biology for my first two years of college. It was a topic I was interested in, but my brain just wasn't wired to understand the high-level math required. My GPA started going down the toilet, so I grudgingly switched majors to English, which is my element. I immediately started getting straight A's, but I still felt like a failure, because society pushes, intentionally or not, the idea that science, engineering, and business majors are set for "careers" and that liberal arts students are pursuing a worthless degree with no real job prospects. Heck, my university doesn't even know how to *promote* their English department, so it's basically ignored in favor of promoting their science programs. 

It took me a long time to realize that there are plenty of English majors making very good (or at least decent) money, that there are *different types of intelligences* -- in other words, a person who is good at math isn't necessarily "smarter" than a person who can read and write fluently -- and that businesses need people who can communicate effectively just as much as they need a good accountant or engineer. I'm a lot more confident about myself and my abilities now, but I think it's sad that I spent so much time thinking that I was stupid and worthless just because I'm not naturally good with STEM. 

Sometimes I wonder, how many other brilliant young artists, writers, and musicians are we smothering with the constant push for science and math at all costs? Or what about the kids who *could* be excellent in music or art, but never reach their potential because they're never exposed to it in favor of math tests and science fairs? I think we should expose young people to a variety of different intelligences and pursuits, and encourage them to do their best at whatever it is they're good at, instead of trying to shove everyone into a box before they're even aware of other options. 

2016-09-humanities-student-major_354_CorporateFacepalm.txt
As someone with a liberal arts degree (English Literature) from a very small, private liberal-arts school I do sometimes wish that I had been more interested or driven to pursue something in the STEM field. I really loved Physics, Biology and Geology...Forensic Anthropology almost made me change majors. But for whatever reason I am drawn more towards the arts & literature than to science. My parents were supportive of my choices to study literature and be involved in theater and art instead of professions that would have a more ready financial return, but my mother on a few occasions has half-jokingly sighed "If only you wanted to be a doctor." 

That said, it takes all kinds. There has been a huge surge of emphasis on the liberal arts in my generation, which now seems to be shifting back to a focus on STEM - likely because fewer students are pursuing degrees in those fields due to the "follow your dreams and be an artist" or whatever trend that influenced my generation (I'm 27). 

The truth is, some kids should be artists and dancers, some should be botanists and doctors, some should be lawyers and politicians, some should be carpenters and electricians, some should be bus drivers or custodians, police officers or soldiers, some should be athletes, some should be computer engineers, some should be home-makers. None of these professions is better or worse than the other and the fact that they are portrayed as such - as in these ads - I think is a detriment to our society by means of discouraging young people to pursue what they love. 

2016-10-humanities-student-major_1383_AskReddit.txt
Once, there was an Arts Major and a STEM Major. The Arts Major knew his career prospects were low, but he chose to follow his passion anyway. The STEM Major, being a responsible adult, chose his path knowing it probably ended in middle management but, oh, that paycheck!

The Arts Major toiled day and night, learning the skills of his trade. He didn't make as much as he wanted, but over time he had a respectable body of work. He said to the STEM Major, "hey, look at this thing I made!" But the STEM Major scoffed, "hrmph! That qualitative stuff can't make you the REAL money you need! Why don't you get a REAL job in something quantitative like me?"

But the Arts Major didn't listen, he was passionate. Making art was very hard, and sometimes he didn't get the praise or pay he wanted, but he liked doing it and was always striving to get better. Meanwhile, the STEM Major relaxed in his comfy office chair with his comfy spreadsheets, living a comfy life.

Then, one day, automatons started to show up everywhere! Robots taking work from real people because they were more efficient, cost less and didn't need middle managers like the STEM Major. Pretty soon, The STEM Major lost his comfy job with his comfy chair and comfy spreadsheets.

So the STEM Major goes to the Arts Major to warn him about the robots, but to The STEM Major's surprise in the Arts there were hardly any robots at all! The STEM Major said, "hey, where are all the robots?" To which the Arts Major replied, "hmmm, there aren't any robots here. Just real folks, being creative."

The STEM Major had an epiphany: creativity is difficult to automate, precisely because it's qualitative. So he said, "Hey! Can I make art like you? I sure could use the money..." to which the Arts Major said, "sure, but art is pretty hard and doesn't always pay well. Are you sure?"

And the STEM Major said, "I'm sure! At least it's something REAL!" Then, they both starved to death because no one could afford to buy their art since the Robots replaced the world's labor market causing capital to be meaningless.

And the (tldr) moral of the story is: STEM Major or Arts Major, it doesn't really matter when the robot uprising begins.

2016-11-humanities-student-major_1590_berkeley.txt
This editorial didn't seem particularly coherent. It started off by talking about the gender gap in EECS, but finished talking about elitism, and it didn't do a particularly good job bridging that gap. It also didn't really provide any solutions or things to build on, it just kind of stated there is a problem.

With that said, I mostly agree with what is said. There is very large gender gap in EECS, and including L&S CS doesn't decrease that gap by much, if at all. To me, this has less to do with the elitism of EECS, and more to do with Society, and the lack of CS education being available for many in HS.

But I think a bigger problem is the emphasis that society puts on college, and how it has become a place to go in order to get a good paying job, as opposed to a place where you go to study a topic you are interested in. IMO, this is why there is such elitism in EECS, and why most STEM majors kind of bag on Socials Sciences and other humanities. Now, I am just as guilty for feeling this elitism, more because of comparative workloads than salary, but I am trying to change my perspective. Everyone who goes to Cal worked hard to get here, and most everyone tries as hard as they can to be successful in their major. Everyone has their own set of struggles, and just because one major may lead to a job right out of college, or another is more rigorous doesn't mean those challenges are any less credible. 

2016-11-humanities-student-major_1821_college.txt
Do other LA undergrads feel the same?

No, they do not. Or at least, not anything like a majority of them. There are endless examples of liberal arts majors in excellent careers, and little evidence that STEM majors are "smarter" or in some other way superior to other students. People have different areas of interest, aptitude, and talents; the resulting skillsets fill different niches in the marketplace and in life. For example, the current White House Chief of Staff was an undergraduate History major. If you look at mid-career median salaries Philosophy majors ranked in the top ten in a recent study (per Business Insider IIRC), far above many STEM majors. Humanities majors of all kinds go on to a variety of interesting, impactful, and fulfilling careers.

That said, if you are personally feeling you "lack knowledge" the simple thing to do about that is to take courses in some other fields or self-educate on areas of interest. Don't knock the ability to write either; many students I've worked with as humanities majors are working for companies or government agencies where they were quickly promoted over STEM majors as project supervisors or mid-level managers *because* they were able to communicate and see the big picture better than the technicians who work under them. Be good at whatever you chose to pursue and opportunities will present themselves, but if you simply take the path of least resistance and get by you'll find it a hard road no matter what subject you decide to pursue.

2016-11-humanities-student-major_489_stanford.txt
Several points I wanted to address.

1. "Humanities are severely outnumbered by STEM". If you ignore the social science this is true, but social sciences + humanities aren't "severely outnumbered". In 2015-2016, 60% of declared majors were in humanities and sciences. This includes bio,humbio,physics,math and chem of course. Arguably Symbolic Systems but I would be hesitant to include SymSys as solely stem since it includes Linguistics, Philosophy and Psych. But physics,math and chem are all small majors, and if you look at the specific major breakdown the school you see that STEM majors come up with about 55% of the population, hardly severely outnumbering as you said.
http://facts.stanford.edu/academics/undergraduate-profile
https://registrar.stanford.edu/everyone/enrollment-statistics/enrollment-statistics-2015-16/school-humanities-and-sciences

2. "Humanities tends to form the heart and soul of a university...". Yes the humanities are extremely important, but seriously saying humanities are the only people who bring interesting and lively conversation to dining hall tables is a huge stretch. I've had plenty of extremely stimulating conversations about politics and ethics and art and music with plenty of people here, including Physics, CS, EE, Math and other majors (and English and History and other humanities majors as well). Most people I know are diverse in their interests even if they major in STEM. You talk about some CS majors having a dismissive attitude towards the humanities but you seem to have an equally dismissive attitude towards STEM students. Humanities and STEM are both important, and in my opinion should be on equal footing, you seem to consider the humanities to be superior and then turn around and complain about STEM students having the same attitude. And let us be real, who actually uses the term fuzzy? Almost everyone I hear use it is a humanities major being self-deprecating, almost everyone I know respects the humanities (with a couple exceptions, but in my personal experience these people are the minority)

I will not dispute your point about media attention, but that is not the fault of Stanford or the departments involved. As to your point about institutional resources, if you substract money spent on expensive lab equipment (not on students on EQUIPMENT), the per student expenditures are similar. Let's be frank, the sciences are expensive, lab equipment costs a lot money, doing humanities research does not (and Stanford makes plenty of money available for undergrads who might want to travel/have other expenses associated with doing projects in the humanities). Stanford has almost equal amounts of faculty in STEM as in humanities and social science combined where the difference is in the single digits comparing groups of hundreds. It makes no sense to expect both areas to receive the same amount of money beyond having similar amounts of faculty and paying the faculty the same.
https://web.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/budget/plans/BudgetBookFY16.pdf

I think you have a biased view of CS majors (I am not a CS major for the record). I may have been lucky to be able to find lots of friends and intellectually stimulating conversation here, but I assure you it exists, you just need to cast a wider net to find it. Try living in the Humanities House or get involved with clubs associated to the humanities.


2016-11-humanities-student-major_608_changemyview.txt
 I just can't wrap my head around the idea that you can avoid taking humanities classes for much of your college years (and even high school) and emerge as a well-rounded, empathetic, creative, imaginative person.

1. Being empathetic doesn't require humanities classes.  It just requires being a caring human.  

2. I also have a problem with saying humanities classes make your well-rounded.  I could attend humanities classes and do nothing else but this doesn't make me well-rounded.

3. STEM students are pretty creative and imaginative in their own field of study.  Its not creative as in "paint a picture" but it is creative in "create a solution to this technical or theoretical problem".

 The STEM programs at the school that I go to (and the one that my boyfriend is enrolled in, which causes him and me much stress) are competitive to the point of what I would call cruelty, and suck the enjoyment out of whatever you're studying even if you enjoyed it to begin with.

1. Life is competitive.  Its ok to say "I don't want to lead a competitive life" but you can't make that decision for everyone.  

2. Just because it is stressful and painful, doesn't mean that its not worth the end-result.  You can't run away from everything that causes you any stress or pain.  Its a bit of upfront stress and pain to make it easier on yourself later on in life.



2016-11-humanities-student-major_613_changemyview.txt
You seem to have crammed in at least three distinct, independent points reasons for your view in the OP: (1) "a lot" of STEM majors do STEM for the money or parental pressure, (2) avoiding taking humanities classes for much of your college years prevents you from emerging as a well-rounded, empathetic, creative/imaginative person, and (3) some STEM programs are overly competitive. 

Point (3) can be discarded because it is a criticism of particular STEM programs and not STEM programs generally. 

Regarding (1): let us grant that some people major in STEM primarily because of financial benefits and/or parental endorsement. So what? When deciding a major, income and parental endorsement are considerations that must be weighed against other considerations such as enjoyment, talent, etc. This weighing is for the most part a subjective endeavor; there is no objective right or wrong way to weigh these considerations that is independent of the desires or ends of the subject in question. For some people, financial benefits are the most important considerations; for others, enjoyment is most important. It is not immediately obvious that there is anything bad about prioritizing financial considerations. 

Regarding (2): let us assume that there is something valuable about being "well-rounded" (which is a dubious assumption). Even so, you could counter that a person who majors in the humanities is not "well-rounded" because they would avoid taking STEM classes (Now, of course, many humanities majors may take STEM courses. This is true, but it is also true many STEM majors may take humanities courses). So your claim that pursuing STEM prevents well-roundedness applies equally well to pursuing humanities. As for creativity and imagination: there are often mathematical or technical problems whose solutions can only be discovered via creativity or imagination. Now, you might say that this "STEM creativity" is distinct from the sort of creativity used in the humanities. You might be right. But it is not clear why a student should value the type of creativity found in the humanities any more than the type of creativity needed for STEM.

I will not reply to the implication that one cannot be an empathetic person unless they (a) attend college and (b) take humanities courses while there. I find it too obviously false to be interesting. I'll leave others to respond to it.

2016-12-humanities-student-major_1455_mit.txt
Got rejected from MIT as undergrad, doing PhD here now. In retrospect I'm so glad I didn't go here, or any other tech school for undergrad. I was pretty set on wanting to go to MIT for college at the time, but being rejected was probably the best thing that happened to me. 

I went to a decent public university on scholarship, so I don't have any student loans to pay off. The biggest thing though, was the diversity of the people I met going to a big public school. MIT just cannot compare. The entirety of humanities and social sciences at MIT is one department, and a small one at that, whereas they'd be entire colleges within a large university. As a result, I know people who are doing amazing things in so many different fields outside of STEM fields. I have friends who ended up being published authors, stage directors and actors, Olympic athletes, lawyers, artists, founders of non-profits, international aid workers, teachers, politicians, and musicians, on top of the scientists, engineers, doctors, researchers, and businesspeople that most people at MIT tend to end up as. It's not to say that MIT doesn't have those kinds of people, it just requires much more active effort to find them.

MIT is a good technical school, but it's not the only place you can get a good technical education. There's nothing that's being taught at MIT at the undergraduate level that doesn't exist elsewhere. Math is still the same regardless of where you learn it. So stay motivated, focus on learning about things you love, and find other people who are passionate about what they do, and you'll do fine. 

2016-12-humanities-student-major_1561_changemyview.txt
A few quick thoughts:

1. You haven't offered anything establishing we *need* more STEM majors. As of this precise moment, STEM majors are more likely to get a job. They can certainly contribute in terms of certain facets of driving our country forward (none of which you've specifically listed.) However, providing loans to STEM majors to the exclusion of liberal arts majors is likely to create the very dilemma you're lamenting with liberal arts majors: saturated markets. We've already seen accusations at Google and other tech companies of encouraging young people to go into STEM majors in order to increase the surplus of people for them to employee, thus creating an employer's market that drives wages down. Further, there's no reason why any increased demand for STEM majors (for, in your words, progress) need come from America. We could also increase immigration and ease paths to citizenship for STEM talent abroad.

2. This is a very narrow lens. I work at a tech company and, while being a STEM major might get your foot in the door, it doesn't spell success. A lot of the programs driving companies forward require "softer" skills emphasized in liberal arts. You might be a very talented programmer, for example, but if you can't communicate that to the various other stakeholders in a project, you're not nearly as useful as you'd imagine. People who are good at writing and communicating their thoughts, as well as thinking outside-the-box to resolve new, non-programming problems, are (in my experience) way more useful in the long-term and *on a large scale* than those who merely isolate their talents to the purview provided by a STEM major.

3. This is the least convincing argument, which is perhaps why you've listed it last. Who is to suggest that no one (or few people) are passionate about STEM topics? Moreover, there are a myriad of practical ambitions tethered to liberal arts studies. This false division is no basis for distinguishing between STEM and liberal arts major funding.

A better resolution would be a way to align the skills offered with liberal arts majors to the needs of employers, who are frequently relegated to more mechanical ways of sifting through entry level talent. I'm sure there's a lot of deadweight loss in recruitment and I'd be interest in seeing if there's a better, scalable way to align the necessary skills of both STEM and liberal arts majors for those with heightened potential in technical application (such as actually programming or engineering) and can contribute those skills to a broader, profit-oriented goal.

2016-12-humanities-student-major_1574_changemyview.txt
Consider a few things:

1. A graduate of harvard in a liberal arts is going to make a shit-ton more money than most STEM students from an 'average' university.

2. the value of certain degrees ebs and flows.  As stem is more lucrative it will be flooded with students and its value will decrease.  STEM folk (i'm one of them) like to think their value is somehow "real", but...any well studied historian will remind you that this value is temporary, and the economist will point to the impacts of over-supply. An actuarial pricing degrees would be foolish to base payback rates over 30 years on a moment of value of a specific degree.

3. I have a similar background to you.  I've started and sold a couple of companies, run another into the shitter, and have made more money than is reasonable expected.  I've got a degree is a STEM subject, and a degree in philosophy and another in political economy.  The later are the majority parts of what has enabled me to achieve economic success.  

3. It's naive to think that STEM degrees "drive our economy and society ahead of the world".  There is more to "success" for a country than is measured in pure economic terms.  Heck, essentially none of our political leaders studied STEM, and should we dismiss the role that social workers, lawyers, artists, etc. play in society?  

If you want to minimize loans then kill the program, but if you want to _support education_ then lets educate people for the broad set of skills and abilities that drive a successful society.  Thinking that these skill are stem, stem, stem is a patently false, and....frightening were it to take hold!

2016-12-humanities-student-major_1825_ABCDesis.txt
I agree and disagree with things this author wrote. Firstly -- why should a people have to worry about 'brand management' of their ancestor's nations? Arguments can be made about perception, but ultimately I don't think it plays a role in the grand scheme of things of a person daily life. Most Americans I've talked to know as much about Indian culture as they do about Chinese culture, which isnt much, but they have some exposure to it. Japanese culture on the other hand is amplified due to a history of cultural exchanges and Japanese cultural exports. 

He mentions Pakistan's 'success' with their 'brand', but Pakistani perception in the US is terrible, and there is a major lack of cultural and societal knowledge. And as for China, they are notorious as well for the lack of free speech. 

 Everything good about India is assumed to have been imported

Is this a common conception? I've never heard or read anyone say there was no flourishing culture pre Mughals or that the Greeks brought Math and Science to the region. At least not from any reputable sources, I'm sure there are fringe groups on there that promote this. 

I do agree with him that South Asian historical studies are greatly lacking and there should be investment in that. But I don't like the 'culture capital' outlook on it. All cultures should be studied, they don't need a 'cultural capital' to be studied. 

But where it stands now, humanities arent seen as the go to study for anyone like they used to. Probably due to economic reasons. And the stereotype is for South Asian families to push their kids toward a STEM field rather than a humanities field. 

2016-12-humanities-student-major_385_politics.txt
Agreed. Humanities is overflowing too. Science is too hard. When I was a wee college kid I tried to go for a major in the hard sciences. My American high school public education did not prepare me for that bloodbath and I ended up switching majors to the humanities, at Cal Berkeley (double majoring, in two areas; so it's not like I was slacking off in college). 

One interesting thing to note is that foreign students usually went for the hard sciences while they were pretty non existent in majors like English, which were filled to the brim with well-read white people. There were a bit more foreign PhD students in the Psych department though, but usually in the Psych department that focused on Culture.

And guess which majors have the toughest time finding jobs? The humanities. Because these subjects are just overflowing in part because they're the easier subjects to pass in college. what do English majors do with their degrees vs a Chem major? (Joke) They become baristas vs finding a stable well-paying job. Stable well-paying jobs are in abundance, if only American college students went to college to major in the sciences, rather than the humanities. 

There are plenty of job openings...for Engineers. One of my clients even asked me if I knew anyone to fill a (starting at) 75k position once he heard I graduated from Cal. He said a lot of Engineering students were looking for lab/research jobs but he was looking for someone with an Engineering background to go into sales. I told him to look for their department email and ask about posting the job in an email. He did, and still didn't get any bites. Engineers can be picky...because there are so many job openings available to them. People are looking for builders, not poets. But many American students would rather drop out than go into a hard sciences major.

2017-01-humanities-student-major_1490_cscareerquestions.txt
I'm gonna go against the grain here, I don't think CS is a difficult major compared to others. I think CS is equally as difficult compared to other STEM majors and even liberal arts majors.

I think we like to circlejerk ourselves and claim what we learned/are doing is difficult even as we watch 10s of thousands of other people do exactly what we are doing and graduate each year. 

I think CS has a wall and unfortunately for it it is right up at the front of the major. Unlike other majors which have an analogue to courses someone has been introduced to in earlier education (history, english, physics, chemistry, etc...), CS really doesn't. Most HS do not offer some form of CS and if they do it is an elective and most likely barely touches the subject matter in a way that is even helpful to a college level programming course. 

Compare this to Mathematics. I'd say the wall is around Sophmore/Junior year. That wall is Discrete Mathematics and the dramatic shift to proof oriented mathematics. Beginning courses are typically some form of Calculus or Linear Algebra that is 80% computation, something we have all done in high school. But then the wall comes. Suddenly you are in Abstract Algebra 1 and you have no idea what the fuck a group or ring is and all concept of the natural numbers disappears because you don't really need them at the moment. You didn't hear about this shit in high school.

Other majors have their walls too. 

2017-01-humanities-student-major_1857_college.txt
'Elite' schools aren't actually all that useful for technical disciplines such as engineering (and, to some extent, physics) because the follow-on market for your undergraduate education isn't particularly competitive. Unlike fields such as the humanities, where you'll be competing against massive numbers of other students for a very small number of opportunities, both employers and graduate schools tend to be eager to snatch up whomever they can find. So the primary discriminating criteria for technical fields tend to revolve around what you did with your education - such as research and internship - with where you went not being particularly important.

This isn't entirely true. The difference isn't as big as with a business related field, but the difference is still there. You said it yourself - grad schools care about research and internships and on average you get the best of both at Elite schools. Employers also still care a lot - for example many of the big tech/energy employers came to my school for on campus recruiting which makes it a lot easier to get an offer than through applying on online portals or trying to network. 

Your financial situation is not amenable to the kinds of schools you're aiming at. Places like the Ivy Leagues and MIT are overwhelmingly populated by children with well-to-do parents. If you're from a lower middle class background, you're unlikely to be able to pay for such schools without massive loans.

This is incorrect. Yes, many of your classmates are upper class but Ivy league schools have massive endowments and tend to give the best financial aid to those who need it. 

2017-01-humanities-student-major_2084_indonesia.txt
I'm getting **really fucking pissed** at my boyfriend who goes to a different university than me and all he does is shit-talk MY university (which btw I am perfectly happy with). All he does is talk about 'rankings' (I don't care about rankings, and besides my university is ranked 50+ spots ahead of his anyways save for a few specific major rankings). He boasts about his university's football team being better than mine (I came to university to study, not to watch a team of boys run around a field with a football). He complains about MY university's imperfections but gloats about HIS university and pretends that his own university doesn't have its own imperfections. And you know what the funny thing is? He's trying to TRANSFER to my university. 

Also we're both engineers. All he does is SHIT TALK my engineering major and liberal arts major (or basically any non-engineering major). Like okay, we get it, you're some super smart god-like grade-A asshole just because you're an engineer. Without liberal arts majors the TV shows and movies that he likes to watch all the time would be nonexistent. We need both liberal arts majors and engineering majors - both are different majors specializing in completely different fields.

Grow the fuck up man. It's not a god damn competition. I don't care about your university and I honestly give absolute zero shit about who's better than who. Just shut the fuck up and let me study and read my textbook.

2017-01-humanities-student-major_2159_college.txt
HAH. oh boy. English majors...they are the ones who get that information across. Half the engineering majors can't read, write, or spell or communicate their findings. If you can't communicate, then no one will know what you've discovered however important it may be. There is so much technical jargon in every technical field and putting that into layman's terms is much more challenging than you may think. If you can't write a grant, you're not going to get any money for what you need. 

Elon Musk is very intelligent, but he also reads and writes and he knows how to talk to the average everyday person to get his ideas, inspirations and visions across. That's why everyone loves him, because he's smart and he can speak well. He knows what to say and how to say it in a way that fully envelops and inspires people.

Don't think that getting a STEM degree automatically means you'll be contributing to anything enormous. You probably won't be. 

I advise you try to find english/history/etc classes in subjects you enjoy so you appreciate what a liberal arts educaiton can actually do for you. It IS actually a skill, but you have to keep an open mind. If you just automatically hate something before trying it you're a lost cause. College humanities != high school humanities. They can be so much more fun and engaging because there are so many more courses to experience and enjoy. Find what you like 

2017-01-humanities-student-major_2381_worldnews.txt
STEM is disproportionately filled with socially inept neckbeards who both enjoy shit-talking on the internet (their preferred safe space) and really don't have much else to brag about... "Haha my field gets paid more, LITERALLY everything but STEM is a waste of time." It of course ignores the plethora of shitty jobs with really unimpressive pay available in STEM (eg, a majority of them tend to hover around $50k a year starting salary; very few start at the mythical 6 figures unless you're working in big tech in SF or Seattle or something, but then your $100k salary is more like $60k anywhere else in the country due to absurd cost of living) Not to mention that how much you can earn at a job is a reflection of nothing more than that job's value to the economy, not its intrinsic importance or some guarantee of fulfillment. Football coaches and random administrative positions at colleges earn millions a year for really doing fuck all. On the contrary these jobs are often very demanding and disrupt work/life balance more than in most industries. Most of the STEM circlejerk you see is, at least based on my experience, from high school and college students, and there's a reason it's mostly 18 year olds who think they've finally found a way to be better than their peers. 

Not to even get into the fact that the person you replied to didn't even say "arts" or "liberal arts," but all BA degrees. You can have a BA in almost any science field. Maths, physics, astronomy, computer science, biology, chemistry, environmental science, food, geology, marine sciences, neurobiology, biochemistry, ecology. In many fields there's almost no preferential difference for a BS vs a BA (certainly in *some* but not science as a whole)

Basically, it's just neckbeards

Source: being in a CS program at a major university 

2017-01-humanities-student-major_2956_justicedemocrats.txt
The thing that concerns me about the gender wage gap is that it has lead to people arguing for the wrong thing. Now we have basically everyone interested in the issue blaming males controlling business and that either getting more women into controlling positions or promoting feminism in these business leaders will result in equal pay.

But the big problem isn't men not hiring women at equal pay wages (small discrepancy, but it's not the reason women do on average get paid way less) -- making these men feminists literally can not solve the issue. The problem comes from men and women -- often times feminists themselves -- failing to socialize male and female children equally. *Women are not taking educational paths that lead to high paying positions*. Women are becoming nurses, HR, they major in predominately liberal arts. Meanwhile STEM is dominated by males, and STEM majors are the people becoming CEOs and other well-paid positions.

If we could somehow socialize women to take up STEM majors at similar rates as men (and to engage in their careers equally -- a lot of women drop their careers for childbirth, or they get a STEM major but end up in HR anyway) I'm confident the wage gap would be pretty much gone, or at least significantly reduced (then it would also probably be easier to narrow down other factors).

And when I try to argue this? I usually get accused of being sexist by SJW....

2017-01-humanities-student-major_564_videos.txt
I think that's an incredible misunderstanding of "liberal arts" degrees. If you're going to a shitty state university, of course you're going to find people opting for "easy" communications degrees, because the culture of the times dictates that one needs a degree of some kind. I was fortunate enough to go to a good public school, and as a result I have many friends attending top tier university (UChicago, Columbia, UVA, USC, UCLA, Brown, etc.) and guess what? Most of them are doing "liberal arts" degrees, including economics, social policy, international relations, philosophy, and more. Though I don't go to school with them, it's obvious that they don't have an easy time at school. The friends I have that are going into engineering would be absolutely crushed by the amount of reading, analysis, writing, dissertation, etc. that my humanities friends do. And it's not that these engineering friends are dumb; they attend great universities as well (Cornell, GTech, VTech, Carnegie Mellon) but it's simply not their skill set. I'd wager most people that call "liberal arts" degrees as easy do so after having taken one or two 200 level courses in history or sociology as part of their degree requirements and then never do anything humanities related again. 

The difference is that those who excel in STEM are *constantly* bombarded with ideas of being better or "smarter" which results in young, STEM majors that don't seek to familiarize themselves with other areas of study. Whereas humanities majors, my friends and I (an English major) are more familiar with mathematics and science due to the fact that we aren't put on a pedestal simply because of what we're good at. I say this as having two years worth of coursework in computer science, which was my original degree. 

Sorry if this is a bit long winded, but the idea that liberal arts degrees are inherently easier is so false, yet prevalent on this website. There's a lot more to say about the situation, but I don't want to make this comment longer than it already is. 

2017-01-humanities-student-major_752_AskReddit.txt
Engineer here.  I'll give you my opinion.  We engineers are generally geared towards hard and fast rules.  We like facts, and we like order, which is why we like math and physical science.  For most engineers, the less that is left open to interpretation, the better.  The world is black and white.


Then, you have liberal arts, where often times there are shades of gray.  This sends a lot of us engineers into WHARRRGARBL mode.  Hell, you should have seen the folks in my major when they found out we had to take a technical writing class.  "OMG!  THEY WANT US TO BE ABLE TO WRITE COHERENTLY!!!1"


On top of that, you also get stuck in this perpetual feedback loop of all of your fellow engineering students talking about how hard engineering is.  Pretty soon, difficult = superior.  Ironically, this is a horrible fallacy in logic.  I knew plenty of lib arts majors at my school who had a metric shitload of difficult coursework, but if I had stuck to my small circle of fellow engineers, I might not have realized that lots of degrees are difficult.

caveat:  I am a metallurgist, which is like the artsy-fartsy branch of engineering.  In fact, I probably wasn't supposed to be an engineer, but hey...whatever.

tl;dr - your ex is a dick, but a lot of engineers think like that, unfortunately.


2017-02-humanities-student-major_168_news.txt
 There's a systemic bias within american society implicitly telling females STEM are for men.

I'm in STEM. Society been pushing STEM on women hard. They get offer more scholarship mone and they highly desire by employers. 

STEM in general struggles with getting students compare to liberal arts.

 Like okay...the data says...

You are miss my point. 

Data and facts are not arguments. 

It's up to a person's interruption of the data and facts to make an argument. By selecting what facts you include and exclude. The order you present them. They can be manipulated to represent any position. That's why the saying, "lies, damn lies, and statistics" is common phrase, we've all experience manipulated arguments using data to misrepresent the situation. 

 The data regarding women and STEM will change significantly in coming years as more females grow up in a society where they're encouraged to pursue math and science from an early age.

I doubt it. They been throwing money, PR, and pushing women hard into STEM field for decades now. The reality is STEM is a subject that only a small portion of people enjoy/go into. Only 1% of the working men in the United States are in the STEM fields. 

Woman are already the majority of college grads. No campus are discriminating against women and stopping them from going into STEM. Women are simple not choosing STEM fields. Similar to 99% of the male workforce are not choosing STEM fields. 

2017-02-humanities-student-major_2603_lawschooladmissions.txt
 Wouldn't law schools realize there is an easy way of getting into elite schools by taking simplistic undergraduate degrees? 

1. Most law schools place a significantly greater emphasis on LSAT than GPA, in part for this reason.

2. There is no truly easy way of getting into an elite school.

3. It's at least a bit rude and unfair to deride non-STEM majors as "simplistic"--this coming from a STEM major.

 Doesn't that just saturate the market with lawyers who know nothing but the law?

Assuming we're talking about people who made it into top law schools, then almost certainly no. Because they presumably did quite well as undergraduates and learned at least a thing or two along the way--yes, even if they majored in the humanities. Most (read: nearly all of) lawyering does not depend on intricate STEM knowledge. And, lastly, engineering majors actually do graduate from top law schools all the time. While hard IP may be one of the more in-demand fields of law, it's not as if there's some terribly severe shortage.

 Heck even medical schools love a music major. They love the diversity it offers.

Law schools are interested in diversity as well. And you're bound to find a wide array of majors at every law school, spanning the humanities and STEM fields. Again, you'll find STEM majors at most law schools. There actually are STEM majors with good GPAs. Bummer if you're not one of them.

 I'm just having a hard time wrapping my head around that.

US News rankings factor into whether law school administrators get to keep their jobs. Undergraduate GPAs factor into US News rankings. Undergraduate majors do not factor into US News rankings.

Like it or not, law school admissions is by and large a numbers game. Only two numbers really matter: LSAT and GPA.

2017-02-humanities-student-major_733_AskReddit.txt
 STEM is what drives the world forward

Thats if you're looking at how the world has advanced technologically. But there are other ways to advance, such as man advancing politically by moving to allow the common folk like you and me to have a say in our government. Man advances religiously by having newer philosophies on what God is, and what happens to us after death.

Studying literary theory does nothing for anyone besides the person who studies it. 

It isn't about the actual texts themselves, its about the skills you develop analyzing them. You learn to think critically and connect the dots, see the bigger picture in life. These are valuable skills in any industry because they allow you to be a leader and think for yourself.

Studying mechanical engineering has a great potential to help the whole world. Villagers in remote Africa would much rather have a reliable way to get clean water

And how do you get the clean water to these remote villages in Africa? Giving them free water and other free things could cause a problem with a local economy, which you need someone who studied economics to come and solve. Or how about local businesses? Thats where business majors come in and create sustainable business practices for the local communities. You are only thinking about the building of the well itself, but there are thousands of other factors in place aside from just building it.

Business degrees are helpful, yes, but the amount of people in jobs that require those degrees is rather small, and business could fit into a math group through statistics and even more advanced math. 

What the hell are you talking about? Business majors every year are right up there with engineering on highest job placement, and depending on what field they go into make more money as well.  I don't even know what you mean by the math groups.

There is a much greater need in this world for STEM than LibArts

I'm not denying there is a great need for STEM. It's an important part of our society, but you are retarded to think that its the only part that matters or to disregard/speak so lowly of the liberal arts. Most of the liberal arts aren't even as abstract as you think, they are grounded in hard fact and evidence.

Finally, I'm jaded because I'm tired of STEM assholes like you coming in and proclaiming that STEM is the end all be all of society and that we would be sooooo much better off if everyone conformed to your worldview. Its stupid. I'm on reddit, so you should automatically assume I'm a white man regardless of what the topic is. I'm a white guy who studied marketing analytics, so fuck off.



2017-03-humanities-student-major_1181_Negareddit.txt
Funnily enough getting rid of the liberal arts is precisely what happens under fascism and dictatorships. To be entirely honest, I don't see most stems as anything special either. Software engineering, computing and ict are all pretty vocational and they don't really tie everything in together. Let's take history for example, with history you're getting a wide variety of knowledge from language to religion, in English you're getting knowledge on culture, history, poetry, entertainment and so on. If anything it's the liberal arts which are intellectually stimulating rather than stem but I don't necessarily follow this way of thinking. Everything has its use and need for society and we shouldn't prioritise based on the subject and nor should we dismiss people who don't have stem. Some of the best inventions and discoveries have come from people who weren't specialists. The idea that certain degrees are useless is juvenile and silly. Even the arguments used are just full of shit.

 "stem is progressing humanity" no, you working as a system administrator is not progressing humanity. Stem can progress humanity but stem is so broad and not everyone who is doing a degree in stem will change the world and they don't need to change the world. Changing the world for someone by being a teacher or an author is just as important. 


"liberal arts students will work at Starbucks" that's nowhere near true and especially in the future, liberal arts degrees will be needed. 


2017-03-humanities-student-major_1316_AskReddit.txt
I also majored in a STEM field, but this is exactly right.

I went into college assuming that a STEM major just wasn't right for me, and planned on majoring in a social science (I ended up double-majoring in the end). 

In hindsight, it's sort of silly, because for a lot of my childhood, I very obviously had a strong interest in my field! I (temporarily) stole textbooks in my subject from my sixth grade classroom so I could read them at home. I adored my seventh grade class so much that I remember being home sick from school one day and getting out old lab assignments just so I could have fun redoing certain parts. I was, and still am, a giant fucking nerd about it. 

There's no obvious point in time or reason where I decided I couldn't pursue STEM. There were a number of little discouraging incidents, which didn't have a big effect on their own, but probably contributed.  

I'm not sure I would have ended up in STEM if I hadn't gone to a women's liberal arts college, tbh (some of the benefits are discussed [here](https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-05-09/womens-colleges-can-close-the-stem-gender-gap)). I also benefited a lot from being mentored by a couple of female professors and having a lot of female faculty members I could look up to – over 75% of my STEM courses were taught by women. 

In a statistics course during my first year of college, one of my professors handed back one of my tests, and on the back, she had written "You're good at this! Take more stats classes!" And I'm pretty sure that's the first time in my entire life that anyone actually encouraged me to pursue STEM. 

2017-03-humanities-student-major_1734_fatlogic.txt
 I'm sorry but can you point me to the part where I said everyone should be in a STEM field even if they hate it?

I didn't say or mean to imply that you did; I was kind of trying to clarify my opinion and why I made the comment that I did in the first place. So, my apologies as well, I guess.

 You mention that you're a teacher, so unless you're at a private school or you did something like teach for America chances are you have an education degree which means you studied at least one thing besides English for the purpose of finding work.

Wrong, but I'm a special case. I live in Germany, and I have an American-earned degree in English and psychology. Conducting therapy has been a lifelong dream of mine; it's something I know I would enjoy and I am willing to put in the extra work to make it happen, which is why I went into the field. I actually don't have a degree in education. I'm planning to start grad school in the fall to eventually become a therapist, but in the meantime, there's a high demand for English lessons from a native speaker here, I have bills to pay, and I do really enjoy teaching. I will add that while I did have a brief training course through the first language school I worked with, I don't feel that my lack of extensive formal training in education has made an impact on my ability to teach.

 Needing a PhD to find work sucks, but it's hardly limited to non-STEM professions.

You're right that this issue is not limited to non-STEM professions, but I think when most people encourage others to "go into STEM" and/or mock them for complaining about not being able to afford food when they majored in English, they're not generally encouraging people to go get a BA in astrophysics instead. Rather, they usually mean the "marketable" STEM majors (e.g. software engineering, programming, etc). To clarify, that is what I am generally referring to here. 

 I think too a lot of STEM snobbery comes from the perception that it's more difficult and therefore more deserving of respect. This shouldn't be true, but in my school at least in my experience it kind of was.

See, this is where I don't necessarily agree. I think that yes, in some cases at some universities, a STEM degree is objectively "harder" and more work than something in the soft sciences or liberal arts. That been said, I think a lot of the time the different degrees just involve entirely different sets of skills that can't be accurately compared. There's this idea that people whose strengths lie in math or science are somehow "smarter" or "better" than people whose strengths lie in other things, like verbal skills or interpersonal intelligence. I don't agree with that. I think different skills are just different and not necessarily better or worse than others. Lots of people, for example, are brilliant writers who couldn't pass an eighth-grade algebra class. It also goes vice-versa; I know plenty of engineers who breezed through graduate-level math classes but can barely form a coherent paragraph. I think it's very likely that a lot of these STEM snobs would find themselves gasping for air if asked to write an in-depth literary analysis or learn a foreign language. It takes all kinds.

2017-03-humanities-student-major_1804_politics.txt
The problem here is that federal loans are the reason tuition is so ludicrously expensive. Just like with healthcare, there's a total disconnect between the consumer and the supplier. 18 year olds starting school, taking out federal loans don't think *they* will have trouble getting work. Kids that age all think they'll be successful one day. They don't think about the debt because it won't be real for years for them. If you have heath coverage, you don't think about how overpriced all your treatments are because you only think about the copay. All of this changes when you pay out of pocket. 

I couldn't afford to pay out pocket for a bachelors degree or a masters, just how I wouldn't afford to pay out of pocket for surgery.

The answer to both is to either abolish health insurance for all, abolish student loans for all. Or to embrace government single payer for both. 

Either way I don't want to see LGBT studies or Aramaic studies go away. I'm proud to live in a society where people are researching and teaching things that have no economic utility. The humanities enrich the republic. If we let the humanities die and only teach STEM (which is a subset of the humanities), we'll just have more mediocre engineers. People should study what they're good at and not what is profitable. Otherwise the complaint won't be unemployed humanities grads, it'll be unemployed STEM grads, and depressed STEM wages because of the glut. 

2017-03-humanities-student-major_190_AskReddit.txt
 but it seems like majoring in them is a real waste of time for most people.

why?


If it's for personal growth, you'd do better to get a job and learn it on your free time - $100k will buy you a lot of art supplies and Kirkegaard. 

Personal growth is really vague, going to the gym is personal growth, studying a nonSTEM major is not something comparable with art supplies and school yard doodle... 

 if you don't have the fortitude to actually learn it on your own instead of merely saying you will and playing Skyrim.

this is **PRECISELY** the reason why non-STEM is not a waste of time, you will never have another opportunity in your life, where you get to sit there as a 20-23 year old and listen to this really accomplished individual (professor) talk for a couple hours every week. Why is this important? at that age, you are just coming out of your shell, and in to the real world, everything is interesting, your mind is a blank paper ready to absorb everything. I tried to major in 3 majors Philosophy Engineering and Physics because i was **that** interested in everything. at the age of 30 i look back, sitting at a decent job, yep the train has passed, if you go back and try to learn these things (non-STEM) subjects now, you are not getting the same crucial type of interface that you'd get as a College student. i can go forever about this.

The crucial difference is Engineering has more to do with technical material, the irony in your comment is that you are suggesting people to learn these non-STEMs after they studied STEM/something crucial, but the reality is that it is much easier to study STEM at any age because at the end of the day, the conceptual basis of these subjects do not depart much from their technical details, meaning that as long as you can grasp the math, which anyone can given the right amount of time/effort, you can easily grasp the concepts. You can't say the same for philosophy, I have a coworker that teaches philosophy and complains about how these middle age people can't grasp the concept of a premise and a conclusion like high school kids could.

Econ is more or less useless because like Engineering, you don't have to really to go college to learn it, you can just learn it by buying the textbook and reading it by yourself. You can't do that in humanities or other social sciences, because it requires you to interact with the professor


2017-03-humanities-student-major_2476_AskFeminists.txt
You know I actually sort of disagree with you. I know that in some fields of STEM this happens and particularly in medicine but STEM subjects seem to have a different mindset that those in the humanities. For example, if some scientist discovered something and we learn about it in class, we critique the idea, not the person or their background as is sometimes done in humanities subjects. In STEM if you have a good idea, it is possible that academics in the field will respect you for your idea/discovery irregardless of your gender. In STEM it is usually the idea or research that is more important than the person who carried it out. As a female undergrad in STEM I have never once been belittled and seen any other female be treated this way. My lecturers and demonstrators have been fairly 50/50 in terms of men and women. I'm not saying that sexism never happens in STEM but I would argue that it is less widespread as you are making it out to be, at least from within. I have definitely had comments from people about my choice of study but none of those people were from my courses, they were all from different fields to mine. Historically, women have been and are still under-represented in STEM and it is important for this to change to prove that actually women are perfectly capable of doing STEM. 

2017-03-humanities-student-major_3274_AskWomen.txt
And the other side of the coin - over-glamorisation of STEM. Ok, I get it, computer science and engineering are very prospective these days, but ffs not everybody has to be come an engineer or software developer. Not everybody *can*, even if they wanted to. Not everybody wants or needs to learn to code, and that's absolutely fine. Those are not objectively the coolest and worthiest jobs on earth, there are many other highly fulfilling, interesting and well-paid jobs with good employment opportunities.

Still remember my last year in high-school and all those career advice lectures we had. Tl, dl: "STEM and medicine are the only things worth majoring in, if you choose social sciences and humanities, you're  just condemning yourself for unemployment, seriously, don't be dumb, don't choose this!!!".

The funny thing is that in my country there's now increasing unemployment of doctors in major urban areas, because virtually everybody with decent grades and ambition is majoring in it. Same thing happened with business and management a couple of decades ago, it used to be all the rage and everybody went there, now it's considered virtually useless. And then with pharmacology not that long ago. Yeah, it's almost like if one individual field becomes a fad, the market gets oversaturated... Pretty sure at one point it's going to happen with computer science and engineering as well.

2017-03-humanities-student-major_331_fulbright.txt
It would be nice to have some info on which countries are STEM friendly, if that's even a thing.

It's not a thing unless you spend time going through the country descriptions individually. 

I did a random sample:

**India**: All disciplines will be considered.

**Togo**: No specified. Need intermediate French skills. 

**Ethiopia**: Ph.D. candidates who plan to conduct dissertation research are preferred. Master's- and Bachelor's-level candidates with extensive professional study and/or experience in the fields they wish to pursue and who present serious projects matching the U.S. Embassy's priority areas – peace and security, economic growth and human rights and democracy -- will also be considered.

**Ghana**: Not specified.

**Tajikistan**: Not specified. Knowledge of Russian or Tajik language is recommended and may be required.

**Brunei**: While the program is open to all Fields of Study, Brunei presents an exceptional opportunity for students of rainforest ecology and associated disciplines. 

**Singapore**: Applicants are required to indicate in their Statements of Grant Purpose how they expect their projects to enhance their understanding of Singapore or the bilateral relationship between Singapore and the United States. 

**New Zealand**: Not specified. "...carry out an independent study/research project while being affiliated with a New Zealand higher education or research institution."

**Mexico**: ...interested in supporting fieldwork and research in areas of relevance to U.S.-Mexican relations, including: culture, economic integration, trade policies, society and politics, science and technology, ecological and environmental issues, public health, human rights and law, education, and migration and border issues. COMEXUS is particularly interested in proposals pursuing STEM fields and Public Administration or policy. Spanish language skills required. 

**Israel**: Applicants with little or no previous experience in Israel receive preference. Applications will be considered from well-qualified candidates in all fields.

**UAE**: Not specified. Arabic language required. 

**Portugal**: Applications are welcome from candidates at all degree levels who have completed a Bachelor's degree before the start date of the grant. All fields of study are considered.

**Czech Republic**: Advanced graduate students capable of working independently are preferred. Applicants should have some experience in the proposed field of study.

**Romania**: Proposals are welcome from well-qualified candidates at all degree levels with established relations with the host institution. The Commission expects proposals in all disciplines - arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as in the fields of science and technology.

**Germany**: Proposed projects should be innovative, feasible in Germany, and based on the candidate's overall academic background and profile.

**Poland**: Proposals are welcome from candidates in all disciplines with established relations with the host institution. The Commission strongly encourages candidates in the fields of science and technology to apply.

Of all of them, only Poland actively encourages science and technology. The rest seem to not care or have their own requirements and needs. Also, I am not sure why you are convinced that some countries are against STEM majors. They  clearly state what they want in the country description and if they don't state a preference, think about who is reading it, where they live, what their country is trying to promote and is known for (i.e. Germany and engineering). STEM is all the rage right now and people who apply to Fulbrights tend to not be STEM majors so you have a novelty factor there.

Yes, I get where you're coming from with data science. I do work in health data in resource-poor countries; it's a nightmare sometimes but ultimately a powerful tool. I am just saying some countries don't even have the measurable data (the World Bank or WHO has to go in and collect *estimates* most of the time, which is the data we see). Columbia isn't a developing country (it's comparatively rich in SA), which is why they can invest in data science and why that data is even available to work with. 

**Edit**: I think all this thinking and gaming about which countries would be best will just drive you crazy. Have a good proposal, a compelling personal statement and remember what the Fulbright is all about. You have to get past the IIE beforehand (who whittle down the 50 - 100+ applicants to the top 20% to send on to the Fulbright Commission in you country of choice) and they need to feel you are a good candidate to promote the Fulbright message. I have a friend with a 3.0 GPA who is a semi-finalist right now because her application was solid and she kept in mind what her country wanted and what the IIE would be looking for in a Fulbrighter. 

2017-03-humanities-student-major_389_politics.txt
As an Art History major, I just have to reply.

We have to tell these universities that a art history masters degree is not worth the money they are charging.

I totally agree with this statement. While I have done my undergrad in the US, I intend to do my MA and PhD at much more affordable Canadian schools. I also think students need backup plans. I'm a licensed EMT and I am building experience in liqour sales/distribution as well because I was fully aware going into my degree that I chose a riskier career path.

*That being said...*

I hate that Art History is the default example of a "useless major." I hate it for two reasons. First, it assumes that Art History is a field that lies 100% within the humanities. Not true. There is plenty of science in Art History, especially where preservation and authentication are involved. I actually minored in chemistry for that reason. Art History isnt limited to teaching and curatorship. There's lab work, art sales, etc.

Second, there are many college majors that are utterly *useless* without an advanced degree. Ive seen people get their BS in Biology, and fail to get into med school only to find barely anyone in the entire midwest hires people like them. Those that do get jobs arent paid enough. I know a guy with a BS who gets payed more as a Paramedic (no degree required) than he does as a researcher. Art History is largely useless without an advanced degree, *but so are plenty of Humanities & STEM majors*.

Again, I largely agree. I just hate that my major is always the punching bag used to highlight a problem that involves many other majors.

2017-03-humanities-student-major_523_college.txt
 Yeah my comment definitely has a /r/iamverysmart tone to it. I get that, people can down vote if they want, it's just annoying when people act like they're bad at math because of they're somehow wired to write essays instead. No, you're just too lazy to sit down and think until you get it.

It's equally as annoying when stem majors act like they are as educated on the topics in someone's liberal arts major and understand the often complex nuances that underlie the topics in those majors. 

 It just trivializes all the hard work that goes into a stem education when talentless chads assume we're just naturally good at it without trying. And then they act like their communications degree is somehow just as hard, but in different ways.

You just got mad at liberal arts majors trivializing your degree, and then you trivialized theirs. You implied that hard work doesn't go into their degrees and that they are talentless. 


The sword cuts both ways. 

I don't think I've ever met a humanities/social sciences major at my school who does not respect the work that STEM studies put into their majors. I have however met an endless supply of arrogant STEM majors who think liberal arts majors do no work just because their work involves reading hundreds of pages instead of solving math problems. They often have this mindset, "because anyone can read!" 


2017-03-humanities-student-major_578_personalfinance.txt
Another consideration, though, is how many jobs are available, as well as how many other people have the same degree as you.

Medical doctors can get work anywhere, and they don't have a lot of competition because there aren't that many medical students.  They have relatively safe careers.

People with STEM PhDs make a lot of money, they can find work in most big cities, and they don't have a lot of competition because most people can't hack it in grad school.  Easy career.

There are plenty of engineering grads, and there are plenty of engineering jobs.  They have an easy time finding work.

Tech writers make good money, but how many jobs are there for them?  Not a trivial number, I guess, but I see a lot more openings for engineers.  Great work if you can get it, but you probably have to fight for it.

Liberal arts majors have plenty of job openings, but at least when they're first starting out, they face a ton of competition trying to get that first job.  After that, they cease to be *liberal arts majors* and become *account managers* and *sales executives* and *HR whosmawhatsits* and whatever else they do.

Then they have less competition going for a second job but also probably have fewer places to apply.

But that's true of most careers.  I did the STEM PhD route, and as a result, I applied to a ton of openings for my first job, and after that, I was more narrowly defined by my experience, as opposed to my slightly broader education (that is, instead of applying for *everything I saw* from finance to data to algorithm development, I only bothered applying for data science jobs because by the time I started looking for my second job, I was an experienced data scientist).

2017-03-humanities-student-major_659_KotakuInAction.txt
 Also why does it matter if its "valuable" or not? if they want to study it why should they not get the same benifits as STEM students?

Just want to note that as as STEM graduate myself, I agree with you completely. I don't think it's very smart to immediately assume the "practicality" of subject matter, since STEM itself would not be what it is if purely academic interest in electricity, computers, quantum mechanics (a requirement to understand current storage technology), general relativity (needed for GPS positioning), or number theory/combinatorics (eventually became very useful in encryption/security) were all unsupported because they were rightly considered "impractical" at the time of their discovery.

I see art, philosophy, and the general humanities as being knowledge in exactly the same manner, and important in the same way as all knowledge is. Even papers on the social impact of *Twilight* have value, although I think (as a real world example of such) sending researchers to a Twilight convention should require major justification considering the potential misuse of such funding for entirely personal benefit.

In the end I think what many people here react negatively to (and rightfully so!) is the indoctrination (lack of critical thinking) and greed/wastefulness that is obvious in the humanities at many academic institutions, and they angrily conflate this with the idea that the entire discipline is "useless" or "impractical". However, these are not the same things. I agree wholeheartedly with the former, but it is a case of "cutting off your nose to spite your face" in the latter.

2017-04-humanities-student-major_1929_changemyview.txt
I agree with you that the system of determining financial aid based on parent income is flawed. Many students from middle class families end up having to pay for their schooling on their own. In fact it is people in your position who have the most to gain from free post secondary education being free. We already have a system for getting poor students into school and really wealthy students usually don't have a problem. Middle class kids are the ones who usually get straddled with debt. 

Also, I hope that you think about the anger and prejudice you described in yourself in this post. It seems like your anger is pointed towards the student who got a better deal than you did, as if they created this messed up system that left you paying for your college, as opposed to pointing your anger at your government that is leaving you out of much needed financial support for your education.

You used an example of a theatre arts major, as if people with financial aid don't go into hard sciences. Also, it shows a prejudice that you believe humanities is not as hard as hard sciences and that somehow an engineering degree holder somehow contributes more to the world and society than a theatre arts major. While some people do coast through a humanities degree i have seen similar things from "genius" kids who are stoned all day and do no studying but ace through their hard science degree. These people don't represent all people in that program. If it really were that easy everyone would do it. The other barrier to finishing a degree is that it is hard no matter what major you go for.

The fact that there exists a theatre arts program at your school means it is a more valuable school than if it only taught engineering. The fact that you can take a theatre arts class adds value to your education. And while you may not be in a position to pay to take a non major course, if the government was helping you pay for school you would get that chance. The fact that you get to interact and meet humanities majors adds value to your college experience that you would miss out on if you went to an all engineering school. And if you really thought about, none of us would want to live in a country where everyone had only ever studied the hard sciences.

The humanities are a crucial part of education for every student and I think it is the fault of a bad financial aid system that you and many other students will never get the opportunity to take advantage of those resources in college. That is what I am angry about and see as what you and other students are being denied by not having a free college system where instead of having to worry about how much debt you will be for each course you take you can instead just concentrate on the value of what is being taught to you.

2017-04-humanities-student-major_2482_AskHistorians.txt
I don't know enough about the decline of the classical humanities educational curriculum to know whether it was really changed by Sputnik. But the other side of the question, the push for STEM, is definitely true post-Sputnik. Sputnik was seen as a major "referendum" on American education, because the American scientists and policymaker were afraid of a gap in "scientific manpower" with the USSR, who supposedly had better ways of identifying promising students and tracking them into careers in science and engineering. There were major attempts at educational reforms meant to streamline STEM paths, like the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). NDEA tried to funnel a lot of federal funding to every level of education in the US, specifically to promote STEM and modern (e.g. not "dead") languages. At the elementary school level, scientists attempted to develop more standardized science curriculum that could be taught in rural or poor districts, to increase the base interest in STEM fields. 

Now I don't know if that really meant that there were cutbacks in Classics and Latin. It could be. One would want to actually establish that, though. There were definitely strong pushes to steer people towards science and math, though.

On the educational reforms post-Sputnik, John L. Rudolph, _Science in the Classroom: The Cold War Reconstruction of American Science Education_ (Palgrave McMillan, 2002) is the standard source. I am also partial to David Kaiser's "[Cold War requisitions, scientific manpower, and the production of American physicists after World War II](http://web.mit.edu/dikaiser/www/Kaiser.ColdWarReq.pdf)" (2004), which is all about the field of physics in particular pre- and post-Sputnik. 

Kaiser's work (on physics and other disciplines) notes that there are non-obvious trends in educational history that take a lot of work to make sense of. Humanities degrees, as a share of the total degrees inside the university, [actually went _up_ in the 1960s](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DBrJMHffgrI/UbH6bN24UTI/AAAAAAAAEG8/-ItCJtFxZFc/s1600/Temporary+Boom+in+Humanities.png). It then collapsed in the 1970s. Is this a Sputnik, pro-science issue, or is it an issue relating to other factors in the US economy and education system? [Here are some raw numbers from the Department of Education on BA degrees in the USA](http://imgur.com/PyhZrhY) — I've only grabbed a few fields, but you can see that the trends are not exactly straightforward, you have local boom/bust cycles, you also have different demographics over this time. 

It would be interesting to do a more in-depth study of this question. Latin and Classics are fields that prospered primarily under a very exclusive, privileged, elite, and very much "white" educational system. The trends in US education have skewed away from that over the years, towards more middle class, even lower class, and many non-whites. These sorts of factors are likely at play as well. 

In short, I don't think you can blame Sputnik for all of these trends. Did the post-Eisenhower reforms play a part? Sure. But there's probably a lot more going on there. 

2017-04-humanities-student-major_2690_LateStageCapitalism.txt
Yes, 10s of millions of people going to college and spending $200k on liberal arts degrees is absolutely going to prepare us for our automation driven future.

It doesn't need to cost $200k. That's an effect of greed.

 I've got zero interest in fully subsidizing degrees that aren't in STEM fields.

Free education in STEM fields alone would at least be a start. However, I think you're underestimating what other educational fields bring to society. Technology is good, but technology without ethics or historical perspective brings disaster. 

I think many overestimate the actual cost of a college education. We can educate our students far more effectively for much less than what we spend on it. The Internet is already educating people just by existing. If we harness the technology we have now to create a better education system, we could churn out armies of highly skilled scientists, programmers, and medical professionals as fast as we used to churn out soldiers and factory workers. There's no reason for millions of people to be languishing in poverty, working two or three jobs that don't actually contribute anything to the advancement of the human species, just for their survival, when they could be getting advanced degrees in game-changing fields instead. It's not that people don't want to get those degrees and do the work to make the world a better place, the current system just makes it incredibly difficult to do so, especially if one is not financially well-off. We need a better system. 

2017-04-humanities-student-major_599_SRSsucks.txt
 Well I doubt the "smarter" part but that depends a lot on how you define being "smart". You may be smart in maths or science but that doesn't mean you're intelligent.

No, it really means you are. The average IQ difference of a  computer science major compared to a psychology major is a full standard deviation. Again, 'not necessarily' true for any one individual, but I don't want to pepper this post anymore with pointless banalites like this.

Just look on Reddit, a lot of people who aren't children are allegedly in stem and yet they're unaware of most things

What, pray-tell, are they unaware of? This comes across as a dogwhistle. 

They aren't inherently smarter than people choosing liberal arts and to believe such a thing is quite problematic.

No, but they typically are more practical. 

Not everyone can be good at something, I know many stem grads who would not be able to do law or English and similarly I know law grads who won't be able to do maths so it's not a question about who is smarter and who isn't because you can't measure intelligence like that so you aren't smarter for choosing stem over a liberal arts degree.

Given what modern "English" degrees are, it more-often-than-not is a matter of drive or not blowing your brains out. 

I know law grads who won't be able to do maths so it's not a question about who is smarter and who isn't because you can't measure intelligence like that

IQ is a damn good measure, far better than the standards of practically all of popular sociology--especially social sociology--and as I said above, what majors one picks is a pretty apt proxy to determine it. 

Let's say we have a group of people who can either choose English or Engineering, it doesn't meant that going into engineering would mean they're more intelligent, it just means they chose a different path.

Rather relativistic. It doesn't 'just' mean they chose a different path, the difficulty curve required Engineering is far more steep. An English degree in the modern day is just an alias for a Communication degree with some Derrida thrown in. 

2017-05-humanities-student-major_1730_changemyview.txt

the computer may not look as appealing visually but will still have the same capabilities and utility as a well designed one
Sure but it doesn't matter how amazing the machine is, it will still have to compete with other machines. To get people to buy your laptop, not only will your laptop need to be technologically sound, but it needs to look good as well. 



I guess what I'm trying to say is that STEM relies on the arts as much as the arts relies on STEM. We are also talking about two different types of areas that doesn't allows align with one another as well. I need my laptop and all it's engineering components but I also need the music that plays in my radio. 



You can make the argument that society relies on STEM degrees but when you look back in history what do you remember most about society? Most of the time you think of art, you think of Michelangelo, Da Vinci (okay that's a bad example), you think of artistic monuments, paintings, composers. What I'm trying to say is technology is important but so is art. You can't fault people who want to go into that field. The fact is, most people are having trouble finding jobs, can you fault somebody for going for their own goals? 



I know I've went everywhere but there is one more point I would like to make. What about those who aren't good at math of science? I'm dyslexic. I've never been able to do math as I flip numbers around and cannot think in a "mechanical" way. There would be no way I can take classes in STEM fields. So knowing this would you fault me in trying to find other careers that I excel in?



Edit: yes fridges are designed with function in mind but I am saying that there are art students who are specifically hired to design everyday objects. They are called [industrial designers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_design). Things don't look the way they do simply because of the function. 

2017-05-humanities-student-major_2622_AskFeminists.txt
It is to some degree anecdotal, but did you miss the part where I said I am a college professor? "Anecdotal" among average Joes and Janes who aren't in the field is quite different from "anecdotal" among those who actually deal with this shit every semester year after year after year. This is talked about endlessly in our circles. So you don't get to hand-wave it away, or pretend that legacy favoritism is the same thing ... unless you too are a professor and know whereof you speak? It is also false that " almost every single school offers athletic scholarships." Do your research. Your statistic about success rate also needs a citation, and even so, in the case of some athletes, a passing mark on a transcript (or even a mark that's better than just passing, because some schools require a minimum of a B average to keep scholarships of various natures) does not indicate that they actually know the material, only that they were passed through at the level required to continue participation on the team. Sure, this isn't as common at smaller schools in lower-visibility athletic tiers -- you're more likely to get students there who are actually there to learn -- but at Big Ten or similar schools? Happens ALL THE TIME. 

Again, I work in the field, and have for over 15 years now. Do you? I've been at three different kinds of institutions -- a community college, a small liberal arts college, and a giant state school with a big sports program. Treatment of student athletes varied greatly from one to another. I don't think I need to tell you which of the three schools was the worst offender. 

As for the Greeks, yes, woohoo, the Olympics! If you can name as many famous ancient Greek Olympians as you can philosophers, scientists, political thinkers, mathematicians, writers, civil engineers, etc., I'll give you a pass. No? Okay then. 

2017-05-humanities-student-major_2698_askphilosophy.txt
 it really makes the subject more like a humanities or a literature course

Well, philosophy courses *are* humanities courses, no?

I have two thoughts about your thoughts here.

First, as with any discipline, the more you know about fields outside of your discipline, the more likely you are to be successful inside of your discipline. If you're a computer scientist trying to create artificial intelligence, and you know nothing about psychology, you're probably going to suck at your job. If you're a novelist, the more you know about disparate fields, the better your stories are likely to be, as you can draw on a great deal of material. Likewise, if you're a philosopher, you're likely to be a better one if you know something about other disciplines. This is made all the more important by the realization that...

Second, philosophy isn't just philosophy, it's philosophy *of* X, where X ranges over other disciplines. So, obviously, if you do philosophy of science, you had better damn well know some science. And I have found that many philosophers are genuinely knowledgeable about the disciplines about which they study. I've know some philosophers of physics who could be considered good physicists; I know some philosophers of math who are genuinely expert at math; there are many philosophers of language who are very well educated about linguistics and language development; many philosophers of mind are very well-studied in neuroscience and psychology. 

That said, to get through undergraduate training in philosophy, one obviously needn't be an expert in any other field. There's enough material out there that doesn't require expertise in order to wrestle with it. The basics of philosophy are more about learning how to think than about learning how to think *about* something particular.

2017-05-humanities-student-major_822_college.txt
I think for either path the determining factor is the work you put in to it. Some of the STEM degrees are pretty linear and will land you a job easily (majors like engineering, computer science, geology...), but many biology and chemistry majors who did nothing to gain experience in undergrad are not finding jobs. A lot of the core sciences also require more schooling to even begin to make as much money as some of the more lucrative, industry-based STEM fields. 

This subreddit seems to shit on the humanities, but you can be plenty successful with them. If your main goal is to make a lot of money you should probably pursue something straightforward in achieving that goal. If you want to end up doing something you find fulfilling (for some people those two things overlap, and that's awesome), stick with what you're doing and try to get the most relevant work experience that you can. If whatever STEM field you would choose is not something you are genuinely interested in, you will most likely fail. Hard.

I believe a lot of people go into the humanities and have no idea what they want to do with it. Having an idea about the careers you would like to have one day is the right direction in finding success. The humanities are also more broad, so while it may seem like people in these fields aren't finding relevant work post-college, they usually are but the paths are so varied it can seem that they're not. 

As a science person who loves STEM... I would fear for a world where no one practices the humanities. 

2017-05-humanities-student-major_94_NoStupidQuestions.txt
They are but they don't pursue careers in math and science as much as men because they've been socialized to not be into math and science. In elementary school, when a lot of really important socialization happens, girls more likely to be praised for their creative and nurturing abilities and boys for math and science abilities. The reverse only tends to happen if they're exceptionally good at math/writing respectively. Since people tend to like and put more effort into things they're told they're good at, girls focus their attention on writing and creative things because they get good grades in it. Boys focus on math and science because they get good grades in that. By the time they get to university, girls are more likely to go into liberal arts and boys into STEM.

Women may also not go into STEM because of the culture around it. For example, my sister's in high school and has to pick her classes based on what she wants to do as a job. She's really good at math and science and shit at English and social studies. However, she's not sure if she wants to go into STEM because she doesn't want to spend her entire career being the only woman at her work, worrying that every achievement she'll make will be attributed to her gender rather than her work. Instead, she's considering going into economics or psychology. Some women don't want STEM careers because (if they live in the US), they might get shit health care and bad or no maternity leave. 

There's a movement to push girls and women into math and science but it only really picked up when current university students were in junior high or high school so we probably won't see the effects for another five or six years.

2017-06-humanities-student-major_1479_MensRights.txt
In my male-dominated STEM degree, we were required to get a certain number of credits in a selection of approved humanities subjects, apparently with the goal of giving us a more "rounded" education than STEM-only would have provided.

Of course we saw this as pointless hoop-jumping and tackled the task as an optimisation problem: which humanities subjects should we choose to get the highest grades with the least effort? This would allow us to take the minimum amount of time away from study in our far-more-difficult STEM course.

We figured out that certain philosophy subjects offered the best available credits:effort-required ratio and so we all piled into them. They were easy subjects and we all got good grades with minimal effort, in fact we found we only needed to attend one lecture in three, or even less, and that was enough to learn the subject and get a top grade.

The humanities students absolutely *hated* us for coming into these classes. Nearly all the top scoring students in these classes were "visitors" from STEM, with hardly any humanities students. In fact we crowded them out of the top ranks and pushed them down the grading curve, so they got much worse grades in this class than they would have without us there.

We dominated those classes with ease and with minimal effort, simply because they were a walk in the park compared to what we were used to. The poor humanities students just couldn't compete, and there's no question in my mind that humanities courses are far easier than what we did in STEM.

2017-06-humanities-student-major_1624_ApplyingToCollege.txt
There's nothing new there. As an asian american myself, I can confirm many of us really do play violin, focus on STEM, did math team, etc. I can count on one hand how many asian americans I know who went to top schools who are doing something humanities or art related, and I know a lot of asian americans.

If you look at the orchestras of top schools, the violin sections are predominantly asian, typically 2/3 or more. Hell you can even see how the Brown orchestra [is very asian and very STEM heavy](http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Music/sites/orchestra/musicians).

If you look at tech, STEM PhD programs and research positions, finance, etc., you'll see we're also very overrepresented. 

None of this is an accident. Our parents are huge influences and push us into certain activities and academic focuses.

The result? Artificially inflated competition. When so many of us pursue STEM at top schools in a disproportionate manner, it makes the competition seem much more severe. Harvard is only 50% STEM, compare that to MIT's 97%+, and think about which will have easier competition. Which is why advice like this "works":

We work with our Asian students to identify and help foster their humanities interests, rather than solely focusing on math and science where it's impossible to stand out amongst the competition

It's not just about stereotypes but also about supply and demand.

2017-06-humanities-student-major_1922_todayilearned.txt
Ok so here is a very logical explanation and example of the dilemma when people like you say tests are useless. Are you an engineer? If so, how do you think an engineer is supposed to "engineer...." if he never was able to learned how to take a derivative and nobody examined him. If you're not an engineer than here is a real world experience you should think about before you promote "stop giving students exams" again...

Would you drive across a bridge that said engineer built if you knew that he was never examined?  Nobody tested him to see whether or not he knew what his degree said he should know. Would you use a phone that could possibly light your hair on fire and explode next to your face? Would you walk into a building that an unexamined engineer built knowing that it may collapse any second? Would you plug in a lightbulb knowing that the electrical engineer that planned the circuit that runs through your home could short circuit any time and light your home on fire because nobody examined to see whether or not he knows his math... Would you turn on the stove knowing that the engineers that made it weren't examined and it could blow up? Would you let that doctor who was never examined perform surgery on you? Would you let your kids go to a school where the teacher was never examined and may not know the material themselves? 


Sorry, I got carried away and I could go on and on about this...

If you didn't get the point... Pass the freaking exam to show that you have an aptitude for the profession to a certain extent.... Show potential employers you can back up your degree in an interview... Get the godamn job and do your best at it or get fired/ never get the job b/c you aren't prepared to handle the job. 

Exams are meant to do examine whether you can do the freaking work... 

As for liberal arts and many other non-STEM fields.... Yeah your tests are pretty much just for literacy and exactly why your financial situation is extremely volatile unless your parent's/family member/friend can hook you up....


Anyone who wishes to further debate whether exams are worth it should consider which field the exams are for.... If your a liberal arts major and in  non stem fields such as business....you are basically just doing busy work and learning jargon associated with your field which probably won't ever be useful....



P.S.Forgive my rants and  typos....I'm on mobile. Don't blow up my inbox either 🙏 please and ty...

2017-06-humanities-student-major_2284_GradSchool.txt
 I know I was a math PhD student and happened to see someone else's paystub who was a history student and was making somewhere between $1k and $1.2k/month.

So you use anecdotal evidence to back your claim when you harped on my for stating that your belief might not be as true as you thought?

You might be interested in [this](http://www.phdstipends.com/results). I will warn you and say these figures are from self-reported individuals and thus there is no way to verify what they say is true. From a quick glance myself, it seems like the stipend amount is more linked to university that whether the major be in the Humanities, social sciences or STEM. 

For example, if you look at the biology degrees, there is a range from $10,600 at Northern Illinois University to $41,900 at Stanford. Similarly, a quick glance at History gives a range of $2,222 at Southern Methodist to $33,744 at Northwestern. 

 I've also heard many many stories about humanities/SS students getting "accepted" without funding, but rarely hear about that in STEM. 

This is true, but is not as common as one would think. Many humanities PhD programs will not admit students if there is no funding. A quick look at English PhD programs does demonstrate that a few universities does admit unfunded programs, but more prestigious universities/programs are providing 25k/year +/- a few thousand. 

  If you have statistics to support the idea that humanities and/or social sciences have better funding than STEM, let me know.

My main hangup wasn't the claim that humanities were better funded, but rather that you gave a very low number that misrepresents the stipends of many Humanities students. 

2017-06-humanities-student-major_2467_changemyview.txt
Just an FYI, but you know that Bernie Sanders is Jewish, and "Schmuck" is seen by a lot of Jews as a slur?

Anyway.

I think the country should have free STEM and trade school. But there are too many universities that are fucking up. Honestly, I'm fine with the social justice weirdos as long as they pay for their own education. But it's not fair to ask tax payers to fund brainwashing teenagers into an ironic cult.

The line between STEM and liberal arts isn't as clear as you think.  Just to give a few examples:

Most if not all doctors will need at least some working knowledge of sociology, depending on their field.  If you treat drug addicts, then you need to understand the social and economic influences that can lead to addiction.  If you're in reproductive healthcare, then understanding gender issues is a fundamental prerequisite.  If you're in public health, you're going to need to be have a pretty solid understanding of government policy.  

The same is true of engineers.  Engineers need to understand policy and regulations.  Engineers also need basic ethics, and since engineering often entails working in interdisciplinary teams, they need strong writing and communication skills.  In fact, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has made teaching of humanities to engineering students a priority: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7940112/

Even the purest of the scientific fields, physics and mathematics, depend heavily on the critical thinking skills that are honed by the liberal arts.  You will meet very, very few mathematicians who recommend against taking a course in sociology or philosophy.

And that means that even the most pure STEM school is going to need faculty who can teach writing, communication, ethics, gender studies, philosophy, and what have you.  And those faculty themselves need to be taught by someone.  And so on.\

 There are plenty of people who are in technical education who want to use their education for humanistic or artistic purposes.  There are plenty of medical students and nursing students who will want to do humanitarian work.  There are plenty of engineering students who want to go on to make video games.  And since the unjust power structures of the world frequently use pseudoscience to try to justify themselves, scientists are in a unique position to oppose those unjust power structures because they're the ones whose job requires being ready at any time to unapologetically call bullshit.

And as a final note, where does this assumption come from that people in STEM should consider themselves above any sort of humanistic or artistic engagement?  If we want doctors, scientists, and engineers to be a guiding force in society, then they need to understand society and the world they live in, and that's the purpose of a humanities education.

2017-06-humanities-student-major_842_AskReddit.txt
I think that has to do with how the US structures the educational system. When it comes to most STEM fields, even two years of rigorous study is not enough to get more than a sampler of one larger field. As a result, the development of critical-synthetic expertise and refinement of a specific field is relegated to graduate study. In light of that, it's more realistic to assume that one will need a graduate degree (MS or PhD) if they want to hold a research position, it's unlikely an undergrad will be hired for that role in anything but an assistant capacity regardless of major.

I worked in a quantitative field right out of school where both my own company and many I worked with hired for research positions. It was strictly private sector, all research positions at the senior level had a PhD, it was rare even to hire an MS/MA unless they had a highly specific skillset or a field-specific thesis. I can't speak for others, but I have never seen a single liberal arts degree in the bunch. Many of my friends from college went into graduate study and reported much the same treatment. That's why I take issue with touting research skills for an undergrad degree, even though admissions offices and brochures love to put it as a bullet point. It's unlikely you'll be hired to perform research with an undergrad so if that's an expectation you have, it would be better to know that significantly more developed technical AND writing skills would be required for such a role.

As for the world needing all kinds, I agree. I never really understood the zero-sum competition between liberal arts and STEM. At least in part because it was often framed as STEM being able to earn more, knowledge has value beyond just a paycheck, regardless of kind.

2017-07-humanities-student-major_1499_relationships.txt
I studied engineering and was always taught that engineering is art more than it is science. 

Science often points to one answer--there is often a right answer and a wrong answer, or a right way and a wrong way. Science more readily deals in absolutes and certainty. 

Engineering is an art because there is no right answer. It's a mix of herding cats and trying to balance all the competing interests (technical requirements, economics, accessibility, health and safety, environmental concerns, ease of fabrication, etc.) without sacrificing too much in one area.

We need artists in engineering. They will flourish if they're given the right opportunities and support. I personally was going to study creative writing but ended up in engineering. I've been very successful at finding niches for myself simply because I can do things most STEM types can't, or that they struggle with. I'm very comfortable writing and I can explain complex ideas in simple language. I can step outside the box because my education prior to engineering was never inside the box to begin with. I grew up on a steady diet of literature and history and trips to the museum and while I enjoyed science, it was never my sole focus. So while I never quite fell in love with the really technical day-to-day side of operations (I love math and systems and programming but sizing valves and drawing scale diagrammes are special circles of hell), I can do those things just as well as my coworkers. But I have strengths they lack. At the end of the day, I love what I do and I do it well. What I do is both science and art and I wouldn't have it any other way.

We need creative thinkers from other streams of the humanities as well--we need designers who understand form as well as function and we need engineers who understand accessibility concerns. An otherwise innovative piece of useful tech can be rendered useless simply because no one stopped to think about how the hell the average person is going to use it. We need engineers who understand humanities and the arts because those subjects are what breathe life into our lives. Sure, it's cool that we have all sorts of fun tech in our lives these days but most of us use tech to access art, stories, culture, films, information--things that we value and find to be meaningful.

STEM needs the arts because creation needs humanity. STEM majors who think the humanities are ~dumb~ need to take a long walk off a short dock. I'll fight them any day of the week. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2017-07-humanities-student-major_2086_AskReddit.txt
Yeah, sorry for being curt. I've had a number of conversations with people who were really condescending on this issue and I assumed that's where this was going. That's my bad.

One of my things is that it's not just that STEM is hard. It's that there's high demand for STEM skills right now, partially because there was a flood of humanities majors in the past 20-30 years that overwhelmed the market for those jobs. If a lot of people enter STEM majors, the same thing will happen. 

There's also a lot of investment in STEM right now, which may not always be the case. The US and the world economy are in states of tremendous flux, and while it's likely that STEM will stay valuable for quite some time, we don't know what the future holds, and various forces could cause the job market to shift back over the coming decades. And college majors are, after all, supposed to be investments in the next several decades.

I just don't like it when I'm scolded for getting a history degree. I have to hustle for my work, because I freelance, which is fine -- at least I'm putting my degree to use. But when I state that it's hard financially, sometimes, or that I've made some bad financial decisions in the past that are unrelated to my field of study and could use some advice on how to handle it, on Reddit especially I'm likely to get deluged with comments saying "You should've gone into STEM." It's the least helpful thing anyone can say, both because I don't have a time machine and because even if I did, it wouldn't change my aptitude.

2017-07-humanities-student-major_2103_changemyview.txt
Difficulty is entirely subjective, so I'm not quite sure how things can be "objectively more difficult".

Certain individuals are more adept at certain things and certain activities. That's why someone can be a brilliant sculptor but may find it impossible to create meaningful works on canvas(while the opposite also may be true).

This doesn't apply to art, but virtually everything. There's a reason some people absolutely can not figure out computers while others manage it with ease. There's a reason people have no problems working on their cars while others dutifully bring them to the dealership for service. 

The average STEM student could take a liberal arts course like political science (just an example) and make it out with a decent grade, but if flipped around the average political science student would fail miserably if put into a thermodynamics course or something like a biomedical systems course.

This totally varies as well, however you need to compare comparable things. Thermodynamics has prerequisites while base level political science courses do not. It would be more appropriate to compare thermodynamics to something like "Federalism in the Holy Roman Empire".

The other thing you need to consider is the fact that many STEM students would fail miserably in heavily social courses(E.G. Advanced Speech).

At the same time, if you actually took these individuals through the prerequisites of the different programs, you would likely see a similar number of them fail. 

2017-07-humanities-student-major_2323_college.txt
Every school has different standards regarding what they accept.

You'll also have different general education requirements for a "Liberal Arts & Science" degree and a "School of Engineering" degree for Computer Science.  The latter normally has far fewer general education requirements and generally doesn't involve foreign language requirements.

i'd definitely recommended AP Calculus BC - it's the most widely accepted, useful AP exam out there.  It completely covers non-STEM math requirements and it prevents you from getting stalled by math pre-requisites in STEM programs.

AP Bio or Chem are good choices, since they eliminate lab science courses.  Lab science courses aren't hard so much as they're tedious and labor intensive.

History and English AP exams will generally satisfy general education requirements.  However, I personally think a better way to get these requirements is to take online courses at your local Community College (presuming this is an option at your school).  Instead of having to memorize piles of information and take an all-or-nothing test, you'll generally end up writing a couple of papers and taking a number of (effectively open book) trivia quizzes.  This method also has a better chance of satisfying vague 'writing requirements' that many colleges have.

AP Physics comes in four variants - 1, 2, C(Mechanics) and C(Electromag).  The first two are useless for STEM majors (and not particularly worthwhile for non-STEM since you can get the same credits covered with Bio or Chem).  The latter two aren't offered at many high schools, but can potentially be useful for STEM majors.

The various Social Sciences (Econ, Psych, etc.) are a bit of a minefield, since different schools accept different ones for different programs.

Statistics and Environmental Science are generally useless for a STEM major.

Foreign Languages are nice, *if* you have a foreign language requirement.  Otherwise, don't bother.

Anything Art or Music related is probably worthless.

Lastly, Computer Science (two different exams) is... sketchy.  They're not as widely accepted as other AP exams.  More importantly, the courses they replace are the ones that introduce you to the specific IT infrastructure of the college.  So while taking them might allow you to jump right into higher level courses, those higher level courses will presume a knowledge of specific applications, languages, O/S's, etc. that you may not know since you haven't taken the basic coursework at that particular university.



2017-07-humanities-student-major_2729_AskReddit.txt
It's kind of silly. I know a lot of successful people (I'm not among them), some of them got STEM degrees and some got Liberal Arts degrees.

I think there's a big advantage to LA degrees in that they open you up to a wider range of fields than a STEM degree does. If you get a degree in engineering, the things you learn won't be applicable to much outside the field of engineering. If you get a degree in Philosophy, you got an education that didn't teach you to do anything in particular, but that you can apply to anything from social work to writing or teaching or business or IT.

One of the downsides to an LA degree is that it doesn't always prepare you for a specific job, so you have to put in time and effort to learn something else when you want to move to a new industry. You can be a SysAdmin with an English degree but you'll need to be self-taught.

STEM fields are by definition very rigid in thought, STEM students seem to see things as more binary than LA students and so when they see the LA degree not teaching any job skills they immediately label it as useless. Most LA degrees have a heavy lean on creativity or expression which, while they have their places in STEM fields, are not particularly useful for the vast majority of STEM graduates.

STEM fields generally get you in to higher paying, more specialized jobs and to some people salary is a measure of a person's worth - those people tend to end up in STEM fields making more money which can lead to a superiority complex. Part of it is likely some kind of envy that LA programs are much "easier" and don't require the kind of rigid memorization STEM does, so STEM students see it as a "lazy" option.

In reality, the only time it matters is if you're absolutely dedicated to working in a specific STEM industry. Everyone else, or everyone who is less ambitious or not clear about what they want to do with their life, can study whatever they want, get a degree in anything to show that they're capable of learning and conforming to the environment, and then find ways to apply it to different careers afterward.

Also I can't speak for every university, but many schools treat LA students poorly because they're not bringing in big research dollars like STEM programs do. Part of that bleeds over into student culture.

2017-07-humanities-student-major_27_college.txt
I personally don't believe that majors like those are useless at all, despite being seen as such. Society is developing at exponential speeds what with technology and development at a high. The employment market is going to change a lot. There's going to be an influx of employers looking for creativity, communication, adaptability, critical thinking, all sorts of skills that might come with majors such as sociology, English, philosophy. 

Someone with a soci degree might not become a sociologist, or a philosopher from a philosophy major, because majors in the arts/humanities have more of an advantage in being adaptable and generalizable with the skills they teach rather than as specific degrees feeding into a pinpointed field (like med students -- doctors). It's not to say that it's going to be a breeze to find a steady career with a philosophy degree for example, but the usefulness in arts/social science degrees can't be solely measured by specification alone. 

Plus, it's arguably not useless to major in something you're very interested in and good at, even if it's what a lot of people deem to not be worthwhile. If you're invested in it, you'll be far more likely to go far with it, despite it being a less """marketable""" major. 
It might be better than doing something deemed more competitive and employable but which you have 0 interest and motivation in. (There's a balance to all that that needs to be struck of course.) 

Different types of majors are useful and applicable in their own ways. I really respect fields like law, med, engineering, etc, but the prestigiousness of such professional majors doesn't automatically cancel out the usefulness of having English/sociology/philosophy majors in the skills they teach their students. With a grain of salt of course, do what you love (but what will also hopefully put food on the table and a roof over your head). And as a last afterthought, what you major in really doesn't necessarily end up matching your future job. Nothing is so set in stone these days. 

Plus, all usefulness/employment debates aside, I just really _enjoy_ studying things like English and psych and philosophy and whatnot. The arts/social sciences are important to society as well. 

2017-07-humanities-student-major_494_BikiniBottomTwitter.txt
You seem to be missing the point entirely, and also are egregiously misunderstood on the necessity of so called asinine armchair philosophy and (I'm  assuming from your points) the humanities in general. It's clear you didn't read the entire thread, which is understandable because it's long. I'll try and break down for you what is happening. 

Your friend Gandalfs ballsack or whatever originally said studying art as a primary subject is outright useless. No purpose to it at all. That is unforgivably absurd, but unfortunately a pervasive concept in this tech age.  It seems that, at least in my years of experience as a philosophy major, my colleagues in STEM fields scoffed at the idea that studying anything in the humanities was a fluffy, idiotically romantic pursuit by starry eyed dreamers and lazy potheads. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to second that sentiment judging by your tone.    I challenge you to ask any respectable professor in the humanities why they chose to pursue what they did; most likely you will come to understand that it's not as asinine as you believe. I'm not a professor, I'm a law student now (not drawing pretty pictures, I was never good at drawing), but for me I chose to study philosophy with a focus in ethics, justice, and values because I knew I wanted to study law and philosophy provided an outlet not only to learn about the fundamental principles of law (the practical side) but also to develop skills in logic, critical thinking, and yes, some of the more mind tickling existentialism or, as you so ignorantly put it, "armchair philosophy".  

 Some would argue that once you learn enough about subjects such as physics (im not a physics major btw), you essentially have more of an understanding of how the world works than most people and by proxy would be significantly more enlightened.

If you would have read the full thread, you would know that I completely agree with this. Actually, I'm not sure how you could have misinterpreted me when I said "I respect all pursuits of knowledge" in the comment you're referring to. Therein lies the point I have been trying to make: all pursuits of knowledge are to be respected and considered sacred.  However on the whole, STEM students think humanities studies are more of a hobby, something to do in your free time. The reason you get such acerbic responses when you perpetuate that idea is because we in the humanities hold our fields very close to our hearts - they are beautiful beyond words to us and you trivialize them without ANY knowledge of them whatsoever. All my roommates in school were engineering majors. They looked at me like I had 10 heads when I told them I studied philosophy. Luckily they were open minded, and after listening to what I had to say, saw things from a new perspective and questioned their preconceived notions.  I ask you and anyone reading this to do the same.  Don't go trivializing art or philosophy or English or fucking medieval studies without understanding what you're criticizing first. 


That's all. I'd like to apologize to Stephen Hillenburg and all my fellow spongebob fans for hijacking an otherwise innocent sub. 





2017-07-humanities-student-major_748_NoStupidQuestions.txt
Not really. I think a lot of it comes from people not understanding what what those disciplines are and give them flak for problems that sometimes doesn't even exist. For example, gender studies majors get shit for pointing out the lack of women in STEM but aren't in STEM themselves. Gender studies majors aren't pissed they can't get jobs as programmers or biologists; they're complaining that women who have the qualifications to become programmers or biologists can't get those jobs or that women who are capable of becoming programmers or biologists are being discouraged to do so. Gender studies majors can explain why there's a lack of women in STEM, which is essential for getting more women in STEM. Genders studies is not just a bunch of butthurt feminists pay a couple thousand dollars a semester to shout about women's issues in a safe space.

Jobs in liberal arts aren't always that obvious. You don't go into sociology to become a sociologist. You go into sociology because you want a job working with demographic information, or work in the criminal justice system, or go to law school, or become a social worker. Sometimes the connection between the jobs liberal arts majors are qualified for don't seem like they're connected to the degree or aren't paid well and thus the degree is seen as a huge waste of money. Meanwhile, you go into engineering to become an engineer. That's pretty obvious. 

2017-08-humanities-student-major_1152_politics.txt
At least in my experience, the vitriol has always been directed at liberal arts majors, not the classes. The former is an easy way to get through college but the latter were often the favorite classes of my STEM peers. Ethics, logic, philosophy of science, art history, political science, behavioral economics, etc. were often the best classes with professors who challenged students the most in their ways of thinking and the vast majority of STEM majors I knew greatly appreciated that - especially since the classes were far more peer oriented than the math and science courses, most of which were significantly more rigorous (by which I mean the density of content was far higher leaving far less room for actual exploration of the topic).

I graduated from Caltech, which is a top 1-3 STEM school that doesn't even have more than a handful of liberal arts majors, but most of the humanities courses were fantastic and my group of friends loved them. Likewise, teaching at Pasadena City College nearby, I saw lots of STEM nerds who excelled in their philosophy classes because their professors, even when they were mediocre, challenged the way their thought process. Even at Caltech, though, the people who went only for the liberal arts major, as opposed to STEM major and humanities minor, were the ones that were made fun of (except for the Philosophy of Science people, for some odd reason).

2017-08-humanities-student-major_1896_UIUC.txt
Please, please, please do not fall down that hole. So many people out there will tell you that you can't do anything but teach with a history degree; **these people do not know what they're talking about.** They're perpetuating a pernicious myth about the humanities that has little basis in reality. 

I spent this past year developing an annotated bibliography of perspectives on the state/purpose of post-secondary humanities education from the past five years for the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. Naturally, much of that work involved digging through various arguments about and data sets related to employment. Let me give you some brief insights from that work.

Here's the thing: today, many people conceive of higher education as vocational training. They try to associate a specific major with a specific career: engineering majors become engineers, pre-med majors go on to be doctors, etc. A lot of those people have trouble connecting a history major to a specific career; the only job they know of that specifically requires a history degree is history teacher. In reality though, a specific major doesn't have to be tied to a specific job. [The data show](https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/april-2017/history-is-not-a-useless-major-fighting-myths-with-data) that history majors are actually employed in an impressive range of fields; this is largely because a humanities degree trains you to be a critical, analytical thinker with an adaptable skillset and the ability to communicate effectively across cultural boundaries (in fact, many data sets have shown that the majority of employers say that they care more about employees having many of the broad skills conferred by humanities degrees than having a specific major. This is in part because many jobs require these fundamental skills for employees to be successful while many job-specific skills can be learned on-the-job. Plus, a ton of people change entire careers throughout their lives; having a broad, transferable skillset is more useful in that scenario than a narrow, job-specific one). Sure, you've got fields that are more obviously connected to history degrees: education (K-12 and college), librarians, museum workers, curators, preservationists, archivists, public historians, digital humanists, researchers, historical society employees, etc. But you'll also find history majors in positions like: doctors, attorneys, managers, administrators, admission counselors, analysts, journalists, college advisors, non-profit staff, social service staff, entertainers, web design, economists, business owners, a whole slew of government jobs, and the list goes on and on and on. (For those interested in medical school: many medical schools, like Duke, have recently been investing in what's called "medical humanities" -- there's actually an IPRH Research Cluster centered on that very subject here on campus. That's because humanities majors who attend medical school tend to perform just as well in their medical courses as STEM majors, while often outperforming their counterparts in areas like patient empathy and care. Oh, and for you business-oriented people: recent data show that history majors tend to score 9% higher on the GMAT than business majors). Yes, there are certain jobs that require a very specific degree -- but most don't. And if you're worried about finding those jobs, humanities majors - especially history majors - are actually employed at rates on par with most other majors. 

In short, you can do *almost* anything with a history degree. And you're at a great university for it: we have one of the best, top-ranked history departments in the country. You'll find very accessible and dedicated faculty doing exciting work, as well as an advisor who is such a compassionate, student-centered person determined to help in any way she can. (Fun fact: this past April I sat across from a UIUC History alum at my table at the Department Awards Reception. That alum turned out to be one of the founding team members at YouTube; she was presenting a scholarship to one of our students. Oh and I should also mention that an external review of our department this past year called it a "jewel" of the university). Besides, if you're still worried, you can always double major or minor in something else to further diversify your resume; the dept itself has a minor called Science and Technology in Society. I also think that history is a great complement to English, classics, political science, economics, geography, linguistics, Af Am studies, Asian/Asian Am studies, gender and women's studies, Latin American studies, Latinx studies, anthropology/archaeology, psychology, or any language. Of course, it can be paired with just about anything from biology to math and beyond. A second major or a minor in geography or CS would be great if you're interested in the computational side of digital humanities.

Now, to all you STEM majors out there: please know that I'm not disparaging you. STEM is important and fascinating too! But a truly great university is an interdisciplinary one; it's when STEM blends with the humanities and social sciences that true innovation occurs. 

OP, please feel free to contact me if you have any follow up questions. I'd also be delighted to put you in touch with our fantastic history advisor and/or our Director of Undergraduate Studies if you'd like to get to know more about transferring into the history major.

2017-08-humanities-student-major_2332_ucf.txt
 You went on a diatribe trying to score some brownie points to an argument I never presented. Why were you giving examples about the contribution to society by non-STEM majors when I was pointing out the problem with student loan debt?

if your intent is to be intellectually dishonest, then this is by all means an appropriate response to make. if your comment intended to communicate nothing more than, "it's a shame non-STEM majors have so much college debt," you wouldn't have received as many downvotes as you did.

 non-STEM majors are expected to take on huge amounts of debt for a job that now requires a college degree, which in the past only required a high school diploma

since when did fields in anthropology, political science, psychology, and international affairs require nothing more than a high school diploma? what universe do you live in? i'm probably 10 to 15 years older than you, and i can assure you these disciplines requiring college degrees is nothing new.

 Who are the majority of students in higher education? Non-STEM majors but pointing that out is a big no no.

it's not a "big no no." it just indicates that (a) STEM education in the US is broken and (b) the vast majority of jobs are designed for lower level workers, not scientists and engineers.

 You'll find more baristas with liberal arts degrees struggling to get by compared to physics majors. Studies and statistics are on my side.

because, as you stated, there are fewer STEM majors, and thus, fewer physics students as compared to liberal arts students. as a mathematician, you should be able to understand the logic that if every student in liberal arts switches to physics, there won't be enough jobs in physics to accommodate them, and thus physics majors will be forced to work in the service industry.

unless, of course, your argument is that liberal arts majors are not capable of majoring in physics and get jobs in the service industry because those are the only jobs they are mentally capable of doing, which is both disparaging and elitist.

the reason, as i stated, that non-STEMs struggle to find work isn't because of a lack of jobs. it is a lack of hand-holding. many non-STEM majors fresh out of college are not aware of how widely applicable their skill sets are. take, for example, anthropologists. companies, most specifically marketing firms, are desperate for anthropologists. why? because anthropologists are excellent statisticians. sociologists are valuable to companies for a similar reason -- their training enables them to bridge the gap between big data, cultural trends, and customer relationships. you're insane if you think these jobs can be performed by the average person with only a high school degree as their highest level of training and education.

 the employers who don't value liberal arts degrees

then they're stupid, because the top companies in the entire world find them highly valuable and are creating new job titles specifically to hire talent in the liberal arts.

 It's all about supply and demand.

more than half of STEM graduates do not get jobs in STEM. there are not enough STEM-related jobs in the job market to accommodate STEM graduates. they are, in part, being replaced by foreign workers. if you think that STEM graduates have a bright future in this country, think again. EE are already facing a depressed job market.

your talking points sound exactly like what baby boomer republicans have been parroting for the last 10 to 15 years. it's not the 1970s anymore. you can't look back on what the word was like 40+ years ago and try to use that as a baseline for education today. society is different, technology is different, business culture is different, etc. you're a young person, so get with the times and stop holding onto antiquated ideals because it inflates your ego. because that's really what this all is about -- you're a math major, and you think that makes you hot shit.

2017-08-humanities-student-major_2419_The_Donald.txt
I do not study social science (unless it's some forced propaganda multicult shit I have to take in order to graduate). My major is in speech, language, and hearing *sciences*. It's more science-heavy than most people probably realize. Out of necessity my field does cross over into some liberal arts subjects, such as linguistics or foreign languages. That's simply the nature of it. 

I have to study linguistics because I need to have a thorough understanding of things like syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics. In order to put notes into the medical records of my patients, I also have to know how to very precisely transcribe their speech into IPA. This area of study simply happens to be highly relevant to what I will be doing. It has extremely little to do with social science; furthermore, my minor happens to be in Linguistics, so I have to take more courses in that subject than most others in my program. 

Anyway, I have no particular attachment to calling it "STEM". Whether or not "real" STEM degree holders consider my degree to be a "real" STEM degree is just not something on my radar. If it's not STEM, so be it. It's a blend of language stuff and medical science stuff, which are two of my favorite things. I don't give a flying, hot buttered fuck what it's called, I care that it's perfect for my interests and talents. I don't begrudge STEM people their STEM pride. I'm married to one of those (programmer), close enough lol.

2017-08-humanities-student-major_4_TrueReddit.txt
most of those ideas will not necessarily see traction.

Pushing people into STEM is a *bad* idea - I speak after living in a nation which has been doing that since inependence.

It creates a monoculture of thought - coming on reddit, especially during the early days, you would find a multitude of opinions, fields of study and expertise in the comments.

Thats a wealth of perspective you *lose* once its only STEM grads.

The way it works is by influencing the number of variable opinions you have in your friends circle/network.

I'll argue now, and I am sure after its obvious it will be a common position, but America's strength wasn't its STEM education. It was its ladder which allowed people to master whatever they wanted to master.

Expanding on the point: A glut of STEM graduates, means just that - lots of people who got the degree.

Not necessarily people who wanted to get the degree.

Again, I'll refer to India to describe how it plays out - Indian families and employers put inordinate value on STEM grads. If you are a humanities major- God be with you. 

All students therefore, fight to get into STEM degrees. They may HATE the subject, they may never want to build something with their own two hands - but they will do calc, circuit boards or whatever class you demand of them.

When they graduate? Well you can guess how inclined they are to do actual innovative work.

Having a STEM degree acts as a base filter to decide whether you get considered for having your resume considered.


So the hope of tech savvy laborers is misplaced. Theres just going to be a rote learning and exam taking culture which you will import.

The thing you are losing is that American common sense. 

Education in STEM is a symptom. What America really has is a jobs problem, and an unwillingness to recognize that many bright people may not necessarily want or succeed in STEM jobs.

This point alone, casts a huge shadow on your projections. I assure you its true, and its implications would force may other assumptions in your model to shift.

2017-08-humanities-student-major_727_BinghamtonUniversity.txt
It definitely is subjective and ranking the majors offered at Bing by difficulty is pure speculation. I would 100% feel out of my element in a philosophy or natural science class, just as I would expect someone with no prior experience in an engineering class to have a hard time in EE, BME, etc. 

However, the reason I selected the majors above was because because OP asked for the hardest majors here, and I took that more as "How difficult is it to declare a major in this subject, complete all the requirements for it, and receive an undergraduate degree in this?" instead of "How difficult are the concepts, ideas, and subjects explored in this major?" 

For the latter, I wholeheartedly agree with you. But for the former, I still choose to stick to my guns. I apologize for sounding like a STEMbro douchebag right now, but I'm willing to bet that the average engineering or science student has to do more work to successfully complete their given curriculum compared to the average humanities, "soft" science, or business student. 

Does this mean that rockstars in the philosophy and comp lit majors who are absolutely at the top of their game aren't putting in as much work as the students excelling in a STEM field? Hell no! All it takes is a couple questions on an exam in an engineering class to turn an A- into an A, but doing the same on an essay isn't so clear-cut and it's a process that could take hours of your time, with no guarantee if your hard work will even be noticed by your professor. Due to the numerical and structured nature of a STEM class, though, I do believe that a student taking one would have to work harder to attain a grade of a C+ or B- compared to a student striving for the same grade in a non-STEM class, which are usually more forgiving towards the lower end of the scale. 

My argument is just that your typical, run-of-the-mill student who happens to be a little skilled in a broad range of fields and could approach any subject with the same work ethic (hypothetically) would face a more challenging road by trying to finish one of the majors I listed above compared to a different major.  


2017-09-humanities-student-major_1360_hapas.txt
~~You've written that paying for college is one of your biggest problems. As long as you're making a trip, might be someplace better than San FranWMAFco~~

~~Travel to New York State, where they have "socialist" free public college, that all the Alt-Right WMAFs vote against.~~ 

http://www.timesunion.com/7day-breaking/article/Do-you-qualify-for-New-York-s-free-tuition-11176914.php

(Although now I'm reminded that you have an AS not a BS, so you might actually qualify) 

Sorry, I really thought this could be a solution for you, but I remembered your looking for graduate school, and it looks like it doesn't apply. 

Maybe try student loans? At this point you have nothing to lose, so even if the price is burying yourself in debt, its better than what you're worth now. Sorry I wish I could help more. 

IDK much about this topic, but just googling I found this post claiming that most majors in hard sciences end up getting by grad school for free. With your background in physics, you might find some place willing to invest in you, theres actually hope for a return on investment unlike the liberal arts. So there is hope. I say it begrudgingly as a non-STEM but STEM people are valuable, and I'm sure if you search long enough you will find someway to get them to pay for your talents. 

http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2010/01/04/grad-school-is-free/

Or if your back is really to the wall, maybe try something like Teach For America for now? I think they'd grab someone with a physics background.

https://www.teachforamerica.org/join-tfa/how-to-apply#determining-your-eligibility



2017-09-humanities-student-major_1892_AskReddit.txt
You know, I'm really happy that you're such an amazing and successful person, but your experiences are not universal.

[Here is a well-known report on unemployment by college major from a few years ago](https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/HardTimes.2013.2.pdf)

* Anthropology/Archeology (yes that is STEM): 12.6%??

* Architecture: 12.8%??

* Biology: 7.8%

* Computer science and math: 9.1%

* Economics (yes that is STEM): 10.4%??

* Engineering: 7.4% (mechanical engineering 8.1%)

* Information systems: 14.7%??

* Life/physical science: 7.3%

* Psychology (yes that is STEM): 9.2%

Some points:

* Yes, these are all STEM fields. [Here is an official US government list of what is considered STEM](https://www.ice.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Document/2014/stem-list.pdf)

* For anyone who wants to argue "but that's not *real* STEM", I direct you [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman).

* These data are for recent college graduates and it's true that unemployment rates go down for experienced graduates, but that's true for pretty much all fields including liberal arts, even stereotypically useless ones like theology. This does not refute the thesis that a STEM degree is an instant guarantee to a job. Clearly it's not and experience is also important.

* Even STEM fields that Reddit stereotypically loves to circlejerk about, like computer science and engineering, have relatively high unemployment rates here, and no one would deny they are "real STEM"

* The fields with the lowest unemployment overall seem to be mostly healthcare-related, not in STEM itself

In summary: no, people with STEM degrees are not all pissing rainbows, maybe you're just lucky, or maybe just extraordinarily privileged and don't know it. I don't know, but your experience is not true of everyone in STEM, unless conditions on the ground have changed quite drastically in the last 3 or 4 years.

2017-10-humanities-student-major_2005_BlackPeopleTwitter.txt
Agree in part. I studied humanities based degrees for various reasons and would not change it. Yet somehow still I ended up in the business world with a solid middle class job and room to grow. I plan on going back for an MBA next year. 

Here's what I'll say about studying humanities: it is worthwhile, but you need to be realistic. Like you say, I would steer clear of newish social sciences unless you're dead set on devoting your life to those fields. Probably the same with fine arts. 

If you're just a nerd like me who wasn't ready to study business, and not interested in STEM, look at Philosophy, English, History, Classics, or even things like Anthropology, Linguistics, etc. Things that will enrich your intellect and enlarge it. I truly believe these subjects are valuable to society and will help you wherever you end up.

But also you need to be prepared for certain realities. 

1.  There's a strong chance you will not end up in your field of study if you want to make money. Most people I know who studied more liberal arts/humanities degrees ended up in business, the military, nursing school, or law school (Also be careful about law school. Not a golden ticket to a 6 figure salary like you think). I don't know anyone who became a successful writer, philosopher, historian, linguist, etc. The only people I know who work in their fields are school teachers or academics

2. You're going to have to prove yourself. You're probably not going to be able to walk into jobs that pay the same as your friends with Finance or Engineering degrees. Be prepared to start at the bottom and work your way up. I did, and so did everyone else I know who got non-Business, non-STEM/Med degrees. Took me a little longer to get a solid income, but it was worth it. 

3. That said, do NOT get sucked into service jobs like bartending, waiting tables, barista, etc. They may pay a little more than some entry level jobs, but over the long term they hinder your professional growth. Being a bank teller, secretary, or other semi-mundane professional worker may be less fun and pay less, but it gets you in the door. Tellers often end up becoming bankers. Secretaries end up getting better jobs in their office. And on and on. 

So, long rant, but basically, the world still needs people studying history, philosophy, literature etc. Not everyone can be a STEM major. Not everyone wants to be a STEM major. Those who don't shouldn't be (and usually aren't) thrown onto the garbage heap. 

2017-11-humanities-student-major_1856_AskAnAmerican.txt
I majored in history.  I remember some STEM kids in some European history class who always sat in front during lectures, were always raising hands and asking questions during lectures (which was annoying, since you could do that during office hours), and once in a while tried to correct the professor.  The latter never turned out well.  I remember one kid had to clarify during lecture wether France was catholic in the 18th century yet (which he called the 17th century).  Again, this was an upper division history class.  I dont know how he got there. 

Later on I was in a study group with that kid.  He wasn't an asshole, but he really over-estimated just how much of a grip he had on the class while trying to run the group.  Because he was in STEM.  It felt like the group turned into his tutoring session instead of a study group.  

I personally know a lot of really intelligent and high achieving STEM grads who tend to overestimate how well they understand any other difficult ideas outside of their field.  They tend to wave off experts in the feild they're crashing because the subject isn't as "rigorous" as theirs, or something.  As a result, they tend to fall into really really dumb ideas.  You start to get Doctors who think anyone slightly to the right or left of them is a communist or a fascist, or electrical engineers who keep sharing the dumbest Obama-Muslim facebook memes on your timeline.  You get You get intelligent programers who get all their politics from conspiracy videos on youtube. You get smart people who confuse their prejudiced hunches about other people's ideas as reasoned conclusions because, you know, they're really smart and history isnt that hard.  People who have no idea how their social institutions developed or work, who never really understand who they're arguing against, and who still vote.  **You just get terrible citizens**  

That doesnt mean liberal arts grads dont forward their own dumb anti-vax facebook memes.  Ideally there should be a better way to work both of them into general ed, but I have no idea what that would look like.  I imagined it would involve a lot more self-directed study with heavey guidance from teachers, sort of like the Montessori method, but maybe that's just my dumb facebook meme idea.  

2017-11-humanities-student-major_1934_Philippines.txt
This discrimination is somehow directed towards HUMSS (humanities and social sciences) students. While other strands study everything objective and quantitative most especially sa STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and ABM (accountancy, business and management) the bunch of us who belong in the humanities  are shunned mainly because our subjects are 'easier' compared to theirs. Ika nga nila, mas madali ang HUMSS dahil puro basa-basa lang ginagawa namin kaysa kanila na mas mahirap: na puro computations, formulas, theoretical work and whatnot, hence the elitism.

What they don't understand is that the likes of us in the humanities deal with everything abstract: of critical thinking (that is most especially needed as of present), of reason and logic, and of understanding the phenomenons and theories that drive humanity as it is today - and this is no easy feat. We're given a shit ton of readings as addendums to help us understand the world even more. 

It's just sad that those in the humanities are undermined not only in school but also in the workplace. Yung top 10 jobs ng CHED are mostly stem-oriented, and the number of potential social scientists dwindle in numbers as the years go by.

Those in the HUMSS strand are probably your future lawyers, teachers, journalists, artists, and social scientists. As what Robin Williams said in Dead Poets Society, non-verbatim: the sciences are noble pursuits necessary in sustaining life, but it is the arts and humanities that keep us alive.

2017-11-humanities-student-major_1968_politics.txt
I try to resist making generalities based on purely someone's formal education, but my personal experience both online and in real life tend to bare out similar observations about CS and Engineering types. A lot of them only take the bare minimum GE required humanities classes, and often assume their success in CS or an Engineering field translates into a high general intelligence and an understanding of fields outside the scope of their education. In reality, if you look into the sociology of higher education, of the STEM majors, the CS folks tend to score the worst on graduate level testing. Better than your average English major, but worse than any pretty much any other hard science field. Invariably when I meet political ideologues online (Libertarians, Objectivists, etc) they often tend to be people in tech. or engineering. Political ideologies, just as a guess, I think appeal to the sort of black and white thinking that goes into engineering. A lot of the Silicon Valley-types are also fairly libertarian, not merely because they don't like to pay taxes, but because it appeals to their sense of DIY, rugged individualism, and it offers a fairly easy to understand set of rules while supposedly maximizing personal liberty. Sadly, such philosophies tend to ignore history, human nature, and practicality. However, I've met a number of Engineers who don't fit this mold at all and are very thoughtful people. CS types though, I've hardly met anyone that isn't pretty neckbeardy, but I'm sure that is just a bad anecdotal sample I have. 



2017-11-humanities-student-major_569_college.txt
It's because of the stigma in society, because the way such subjects are advertised in society -- they make it seem like math and science are difficult subjects that take real skill to do, and anything else can be done by everyone.

All of my friends are science students, and I often feel stupid in comparison to them. It doesn't matter that they're *all* undergrads and I've got an MA under my belt, and am doing a PhD, I feel stupid in comparison because they all seem so smart, so scientific, and I just...I'm lost whenever they talk. I know my degrees are in my passion, and they *did* feel easy to me because so, and subconsciously I feel that I buy into this societal view that history is simply *easy*. I always feel as though I've only gotten this far because I did something easy.

But my friends provide me with the smack back to reality that I need, constantly reminding me that they are useless in history, useless in social sciences and humanities in general, and that I'm much smarter than I think I am because I can actually do these things, write a damn MA thesis with ease. One of my undergrad profs did somewhat of the same for me, when I did my science elective he told us that he understood if we had trouble because he could never do a social science without almost failing.

So...don't listen to people who act like your major is useless or easy, because many of those people A) would struggle if they were to try doing what you do, or B) also find it easy because they enjoy the subject and therefore assume that it must be easy for everyone.

A lot of the reason why people believe liberal arts subjects to be easy is because they don't require much more than reading and writing, and those are considered to be skills that everyone has, when in fact there are people who *do* struggle with reading and writing. Not everyone can write a 70+ page essay with ease, some people find math and equations to be the easy thing, but many people assume that the opposite is true for everyone.

2017-11-humanities-student-major_841_Catholicism.txt
Those inclined to enter a trade in the future should take remedial levels of those classes and have his free time spent as an apprentice. Those inclined to literature and the humanities should not be taking anything past remedial levels in maths and science. Those inclined to STEM fields need not be taking biology and human anatomy.

I disagree. People need exposure to different subjects in order to decide which one they like best, and this may change at a high school level. I, for one, never liked biology until it was taught to me in detail how DNA replicates. I never would have learned the nitty-gritty of that if I had not taken high school biology as a required course.

Also, I think it's a big misunderstanding to say people in STEM fields don't need to learn high school biology. Medicine *is* a STEM field: it's the application of biology, which is a science. Also, there are fields in engineering that specialize in developing biological or biomedical technologies. Additionally, even if we're talking about people in STEM fields that have absolutely nothing to do with biology and/or medicine, we still need to take into consideration that technology must be designed to be used by humans, and even, in some cases, to be in an environment surrounded by living beings. To not know even the most basic thing about biology is a hindrance there.

On the subject of people inclined to the humanities: sure, they probably don't need calculus. I'm not sure how advanced the math you think should be in the content of remedial classes would need to be, but if I had to make that choice, I'd go as far as pre-calculus level. There's plenty things useful there for daily life, even if people don't realize. Besides, I think more mathematical literacy is better because it means people can understand the language of science even if they don't study science in-depth, and that's **very** important.

So... I disagree. Even more so, I think schools should teach more and should teach a wider variety of things. Why settle for the bare minimum when you can have more knowledge? But I would make a point of requesting that the teaching include explaining why a particular course or formula or tidbit of knowledge is useful and important, rather than teaching for the sake of having students pass exams. Bring back the Renaissance-era love for knowledge.

2017-12-humanities-student-major_1018_Purdue.txt
It's a different challenge.

When I took Dr. Janney's Civil War & Reconstruction class (highly recommend, Janney rules), it was full of STEM majors and just four of us history majors. Of them, three of us were in history honors and the other was a freshman. 

About halfway through the semester, a senior in engineering said that one class assigned more reading and writing than he had experienced in his entire major. For myself and the other history majors, the reading and writing workload was typical of every one of our classes. Now, are reading and writing "hard?" Like everything else, it depends on the student. Reading books is one of those things everyone certainly thinks they can do, but following a text's argument and integrating it into one's understanding of the subject or theme is a skill that requires practice; especially at a good pace, which you need when you have to read almost 20 books a semester. And as far as writing goes, I've peer reviewed enough papers to know some students are outright awful at it; as awful as I would be trying to do any serious project in STEM. I've seen many struggle to coherently structure the sort of short 5-page papers I can bang out in an afternoon.

I will say this though, there isn't a process by which--at least in history or philosophy--CLA weeds out the weak early on, as there is in some of the engineering fields at Purdue. If you make it through that, from what I understand, there's a (probably correct) assumption you have the potential to work professionally in that field. For me, I don't anticipate truly having to pass through a great culling until graduate school. But I certainly already have skills (research, interpretation, communication, etc) that CLA have trained me in with just my BA. These skills are important because in CLA we learn that there are no objectively correct answers in our field, so we have to be able to evaluate, explain, and argue for what we think--originally and independently--are the best ones, and why. STEM students can struggle with this, because they're trained to have a different understanding of critical thinking which is more about problem solving. 

A final thing to consider is the rising demand for STEM classes and the declining demand for the humanities and social sciences. This means that STEM can not only afford to make its classes more rigorous, it almost has to. Whereas CLA has to encourage students to enroll and may in some cases drop the difficulty to encourage it; witness how many threads show up on /r/Purdue asking about "easy electives" in the latter. The reverse certainly happens, hence "rocks for jocks," but it's hardly as common. Personally I found the classes that dumbed the material down to History channel levels, in order that STEM majors could keep up with us, boring; just as I expect a STEM major would if their classes were turned into episodes of How It Works so that I could get a C in them.

In conclusion: https://twitter.com/tatummoleski/status/938820346639212544

2017-12-humanities-student-major_1324_MurderedByWords.txt
Except that the guy you originally  applied to never said to defund the military, he just said that college funding was important. So there is another misrepresentation, nice job. Now let's say that he did say that college was more important than funding the military. You immediately replied with a comparison of how useless liberal art majors are compared to stem majors. You have continued to stick with this argument throughout the thread. 

However your entire premise is that STEM majors are more useful than liberal art majors which has nothing to do with the military funding vs college funding argument that you seem to believe you are in. So to sum it up your argument for why college should not be free and military funding should not be cut is because some college degrees are more important than others. I'm sorry but I just don't see the correlation there. 

Also you seem to think that LA majors are so useless but surveys done show that many employers value the skills associated with a LA degree. 93% of employers agree that a job candidate's  aptitude in critical thinking, communications, and problem solving is more important than their undergraduate degree. 80% believed that students needed to cultivate "broad knowledge in liberal arts and sciences." (This is from a TIME magazine article. I'm on mobile so posting the link might be hard but if you want me to I can.)

2017-12-humanities-student-major_1383_UCSantaBarbara.txt
Generally, humanities majors students on average have higher GPAs than STEM majors students. This is due to the fact that STEM courses are more rigorous in terms of the professor's expectations for the students, the material of the class, and the amount of time invested into the course. I have personally taken a good mixture of STEM and humanities classes, and I can say with certainty that I probably spend around five times as much time studying for my STEM classes through practicing book problems, going to CLAS, writing lab reports, and practicing concepts than I did for any of my humanities classes. This is generally the pattern for other students -- STEM classes simply require more time, demand more critical thinking skills, and have higher standards/expectations, from my personal experience.

STEM major courses, such as biology, chemistry, physics, and math all have specialized CLAS tutoring in which students not only go to the lecture for the classes, but also go to tutoring sections to review what they learned in the lecture. No humanities course has any tutoring service like this because they are a lot easier to self-study for than trying to grasp a more difficult/complicated STEM concept.

This isn't to say that humanities majors are "brain dead", BUT, STEM majors/STEM courses definitely require much more time/effort/studying than humanities courses do. Humanities majors also tend to be the majors that students fall back on when STEM majors prove to be more difficult.

Also just disclaimer but I'm not trying to hurt anyone's feelings/make anyone feel bad -- this has just been my personal experience with my academics, and a lot of other friends/classmates have also shared this experience as well.

2017-12-humanities-student-major_1435_indieheads.txt
 We need people in humanities too.

Exactly, you get all the STEM-jerk people bent out of shape when they have incompetent coworkers and they never take for a minute to realize that not everyone should be going into those sorts of jobs. There's plenty of stuff that are vital to society that are safe from automation and not requiring of that field of study, like social work, therapy, counseling, advertising and various other industries that need physical humans for max effectiveness. 


Also I feel like with the new mantra for the younger generations on the subject of college being "do STEM or die", I wouldn't be the most shocked if it becomes a lot more over saturated and not have as many well paying openings, sort of like the situation with there being more law students than lawyers.

You can already see this with a lot more tech companies being a lot more picky with going with those who have a degree as opposed to just as, if not more competent people who didn't go to college or dropped out because they weren't learning anything new.




Yes we'll always need people with those skills but I feel like over the years it won't be the most ironclad thing and will really be a situation of who had amazing foresight to major in the right particular field of study at the right time, I know that's been the recent case with certain types of engineering. People are always going to want things for a lot cheaper and will slowly be lowering the bar.



2017-12-humanities-student-major_1460_changemyview.txt
Some of us live for literature, history, politics, etc. How are we supposed to get through life if all that is pushed is STEM?

So, I've been playing guitar for over a decade and a half now, and my other hobbies include high fantasy RPGs and occasionally writing... whatever it seems like a fun time to write, really... So I say this with full knowledge of how much love someone can have for the arts and humanities.

I work a job in IT, which is right in that T of STEM.

I can have a fulfilling life (that is: I can use my skills that allow me to succeed in the STEM field I'm knowledgeable about) in lots of different ways. Pretty much every STEM major or professional I know has an interest in the humanities, from my friend the former marine turned civil engineer who can tell you the entire history of the world in more detail than most people would care to know, to my co-worker who paints in her spare time.

The difference is: the push for STEM is coming from the current job market. Right now, what corporations need are people who can find solutions to problems in a highly technical and scientific way.

In a way, my STEM job has enabled me to live a fulfilling life. My degree program included classes in history, the humanities, art, and literature, but I didn't get as deep as a major would in any of those, and I can independently study more as my interests allow.

I know that you probably have a lot of people who will say "money isn't everything" and that "money can't buy happiness" and while this is technically true, and the advice is not given in bad faith, they don't add the very important asterisk that a *lack* of money can make your life really miserable really quickly.

If you're looking at going to college now, you are looking at leaving several hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt if you're like 90% of people (if you are from a privileged enough background to pursue an art degree and pay the whole thing with no debt, then by all means do what you want with your money)... The expected return on investment of a STEM degree is much higher than that of a humanities degree. If your goal when you go to college is to get a better job, then STEM is basically the only option that offers that.

Why don't people see the value in the skill-set that humanities develop?

We do see it. It's just that art is subjective, and so it's much harder for any individual artist to become economically successful: they have to connect with people on a level that makes them want to buy that art, and that is a lot harder than people think.

2017-12-humanities-student-major_1475_UCSantaBarbara.txt
I'm just sitting here kind of giggling.  You undergrads think the humanities are easy.

And I'm in STEM.

I mean, I dunno about undergrad because I undergrad'd in STEM, yeah, it's probably easier at the undergrad level, but lemme tell you, the humanities grad students I know do *important* and *complex* work which I have to sit and ponder for a while sometimes.

Sure, we in STEM discover things about the universe.  We invent, we cure, we drive society forward with technology.  We talk about what is.  This is important, as you know.

The humanities talk some about what is, yes, when it comes to human society, but the humanities also talk about what ought to be, and what could be, and how we think about what is and how all of this relates to our lives as thinking beings.  This is also important, but gets far less attention than STEM because it's less monetizable.  You can't turn philosophy into medicine or bombs (well, I mean, you can in the abstract, but).

To be honest, I don't think either STEM or the humanities could really exist without each other.  They're complementary.

You go do whatever the hell you want as long as you have a plan to feed your face.  Don't spend 5 years on a degree that you're not passionate about; it'll be a miserable 5 years if you're not and you'll get a shit GPA.

2017-12-humanities-student-major_1490_changemyview.txt
Howdy, engineer here! I started out college (U.S.) as a music performance major (I sang in the choir), so I've kind of played both sides of the field. I'd like to make a couple of observations that will hopefully help you on your journey (and maybe change your view!).

First, it seems like STEM is really being focused on right now, because it is! However, one must keep in mind that society's focus shifts over time. For example, when I graduated high school, it seemed to me that STEM subjects were kind of portrayed as really tough and perhaps unrewarding; things you did only if you got straight A's and lived and breathed math and science. Nowadays, they are being focused on as fun and rewarding. I'm sure that in a few years the focus will shift to another career type that there is a dearth of (my money is on vocational careers like draftspeople, pipe fitters and welders).

Second, one of the reasons that STEM is being focused on is a transferrable skill set. STEM degrees definitely provide knowledge for a particular field (e.g. electrical engineering or chemistry) but they also develop a way of thinking that is beneficial to many different fields. In my current position as an engineer I use both the skills and knowledge that I gained at school but, when looking at all of the people that I know with engineering degrees, I would say that 3/4 of them aren't actually engineers. Many of them moved into sales or academia or education but to get those positions, they leveraged their skills attained from their STEM degrees. What I noticed when I was pursuing my music performance major was that the career choices I had upon graduating we're very slim. I can say that the years I spent as a music major and in the choir we're some of the most memorable and significant of my life, however the actual education that I was paying through the nose for contributed very little to where I am now. I would argue therefore, that the returned value for your education dollar is higher with STEM fields rather than a humanities field, thus pushing STEM degrees out in front in these days of increasingly high college costs. Once upon a time, you could get through college on a dishwasher's wage (and some still do, but they are fewer and work harder) and come out debt free. But I digress...

Anyway, I hope that that kind of influences your perspective and helps you sort things out, please forgive me if I missed the mark somehow; either way you've got exciting times ahead, try to enjoy it!

Tldr: 1). STEM is really popular now, but the pendulum of society's attention swings over time. 2). STEM degrees can provide transferrable skills and thus may provide more bang for your buck.

Cheers! 

2017-12-humanities-student-major_1920_DarkFuturology.txt
 Certainly other fields have very intelligent and very capable people. It was not meant as philosophers are the only 'thinkers', what I was alluding to was the differences between the two.

 There is a huge difference between say an engineer thinking about the stress factors in a bridge and a philosopher thinking about what direction society is going to take if say X law is passed (just examples).

 One of the examples of how useful philosophy is, was what happened during the Cambodian Khmer Rouge War. Philosophers, artists, poets and other people in the humanities field were killed first and foremost. The Khmer Rouge wanted them gone as quickly as possible as they were ones who could make the most problems for the regime. To this day Cambodia is a very hollowed out country, been there and seen it myself.

 Philosophy deals with the big questions and the big answers and can move a society backwards or forwards quite quickly. Marx, Engels, Socrates, Kant, Epicurus etc... changed the fundamentals of thinking, political movements and made vast changes to the world. 

 My theory is that there has been a planned 'humanities suck' movement for a while as we are all too busy now at work and cannot think like we should, nor do we have anyone doing it more than corporations with a 'buy now' agenda. To be honest other posters have answered the question as to why philosophy is useful better than me. 

2017-12-humanities-student-major_2130_college.txt
It's all a matter of perspective. It's not that the humanities are necessarily easier, it's just that there's less application and the primary aspects are reading and writing, which are skills that people believe that *every person* has, when in actuality some people are very bad at reading and writing. STEM students often have to do application work - whether it be something simple (to them, not to me) like mathematics, or something more like physical experiments - and they expect that is more difficult than simply reading and writing.

As a history graduate (BA and MA level), and a human studies student (interdisciplinary humanities/social science doctoral program), I obviously think highly of the humanities, but that's because my major skills are *reading and writing*, the major components of humanities study. I do think the humanities are easy for me, but it also depends on the subject, because I'm going to do poorly in a philosophy class as opposed to a history class -- I can write well, but I can write primarily *as an historian*, not as a philosopher.

Many STEM students don't realize that there's a difference in the writing between fields, and just associate the term 'writing' with any sort of writing at all. They often have to write reports for their work, but not necessarily essays, and the essays they do write will *vastly* differ from those in humanities subjects. So with that in mind, remember that when they think what you do is easy, it's because they don't really understand the extent to what you do -- they have an idea in their head based on their experiences in their STEM classes.

Personally, my experience is the opposite of yours. Most of my friends are science students, and I always feel inadequate in comparison to them -- I may be a PhD student and them undergrads, but I would still fail grade ten science if I had to take it a third time, so I feel that they are in much more difficult programs than I am. They often respond to me that they could never do what I do, that even as an undergrad I was doing things they cannot, and they made me feel more...well, like I was more than just some other person in an "easy" program.

2017-12-humanities-student-major_2144_college.txt
I agree that its an argument based on money, but its not an unjustified argument. 


I think there are good non-stem fields to go into, and I personally enjoy some of the humanities subjects (I'm a huge fan of philosophy). 


The reason some people say things like this is because unfortunately the job market is not the best right now and lots of people are stuck paying off student loans for the rest of their lives because they majored in an over-saturated field, or field with high unemployment, and cannot find a good, relevant job. 



Take my brother for instance. He majored in philosophy. Do you know what he does now? He works in a bakery. And while some may not regret majoring in liberal arts or humanities subjects: he definitely regrets it and constantly complains to me about how he wished he majored in something more practical. Living paycheck to paycheck like he is isn't fun and not everyone likes that. 


It's important to be realistic with your goals. Paying 40k a year to attend a private liberal arts college for a philosophy degree just is not a smart decision if you don't have the money to fully finance that. The stem circlejerk can be ridiculous but not everyone can afford to go to college to study whatever they want. Jobs and money are important, unfortunately. And with student loan averages rising: surviving in the real-world post graduation can be tough. I know lots of liberal arts grad students who were at one point homeless. Is it worth studying humanities if it would put you in that position? 



2017-12-humanities-student-major_2203_college.txt
I would add that to achieve the same level of success in their careers, humanities majors must work as hard as stem majors. Maybe we spend less time studying, but I spend a lot of time outside of class reading other works that are related to my research interests and working in internships.

Sometimes I actually think stem is easier in the sense that it involves a lot of memorization, which is something I find easy in comparison to writing a huge paper. There's almost always a correct answer in stem while in humanities there is almost never a correct answer. So this makes things both easier and harder in both majors, depending on what your strengths are. But at the end of the day I am a humanities person and I prefer writing and reading heavily instead of studying formulas, and I honestly haven't taken any upper level stem classes so I can't really know how hard it is. 

My friends in stem seem to study a lot, and sometimes they say I have an easy/useless major too, but I honestly don't give a fuck because I'm studying what I love and I already have a paid internship related to my major (and as a freshman) so anyone who wants to belittle my career path can fuck off. You chose to study the humanities, and your boyfriend and his friends chose to study stem, and they should just leave it at that and stop dissing your major.

2017-12-humanities-student-major_2209_college.txt
I'm a humanities major. My roommates made me so bitter toward STEM majors for a bit because they were just mean about it. I'd never claim STEM majors don't do a lot of hard work that's really far outside my level of expertise. What I deeply resent is them being jerks and implying that I do nothing, that I don't work hard or that they're smarter than me when it takes them upwards of three days to write a 2-page paper that I could easily write in a a few hours even without knowing the topic ahead of time. Yes Leslie, I can write your paper on marine science. Writing about a wide variety of topics is literally what I go to school for, you're not special. 

My studies give me hours of reading and writing. I took a stab at a linguistics course and it was very challenging. I have my skills and while they are very different, yes I did study just as long as my roommates did. Longer even since they typically had plenty of time to sleep at night while I just didn't save for a two hour nap the next day.

So STEM majors please just... be nice? There's no need for the snide comments asking why I'm doing something so pointless, or telling me to my face that I'm useless and have no skills. Just say, "Oh that's cool" when you hear my major and drop it if you have such negative feelings toward us. I'm too stressed out to deal with it. 

2017-12-humanities-student-major_3102_politics.txt
Which is hilarious, because college absolutely makes you smarter.

They don't make you take arts, humanities, and all the other GE courses to make you suffer. They do it to make you generally smarter.

Could you have learned all of that without those classes? Yeah probably, but you really have to ask yourself...would you have?

A college degree. Especially in a STEM field is **NOT** a training course. It gives you ways to ask questions and approach things the proper way. While giving some underlying knowledge.

When I went into college as a CS major. I expected ~95% of my time to be focused on programming in my major classes... I could not have been more wrong. I learned about different programming languages, the types of programming languages and how they differ on a lower level. 

I learned how computers work physically. I learned how a computer program works on a fundamental level and how it is structured.

I learned logic. I learned math. I learned physics and how to create circuits. I learned how to work as a team.

Did I get better at programming? Yes of course, but it wasn't what the vast majority of my time was spent on. If you are thinking of going into computer science. Be advised that only your first 2 semesters will be focused on actually learning how to program. The rest is 95% theory.

2017-12-humanities-student-major_668_iamverysmart.txt
This. 

I also think it has to do with a student's strengths and weaknesses. I majored in English and minored in Biology. As a result, I spent a good amount of time in both the Humanities and Science departments. 

Many of the Humanities students were excellent in their area of study, but struggled with math and science. Similarly, many of the STEM students excelled in the Sciences, but had a lot of trouble writing and communicating their ideas. “Challenge” can be very subjective. 


While there are great arguments supporting a strong STEM education, if a student can't write a basic paper on what they're studying and they're unable to communicate their ideas concisely and effectively, they're going to have trouble continuing their education or working after college. 


I now work for a large engineering company in a Support position and handle training and weekly / monthly reports. Some engineers can write up status reports on their projects an hour before the due date with no issues. Some engineers struggle with syntax and diction so much that their reports are unintelligible, and I have to spend a lot of time working with them to fine tune their submissions before they're presented to our VPs and stakeholders. 
The engineers who can write are the ones who become project managers and program directors. The engineers who can't sometimes struggle to advance their careers. 


TL;DR
Difficulty can be very subjective; everyone should have a healthy balance of STEM and Humanities

2018-01-humanities-student-major_1311_ApplyingToCollege.txt
It's a very traditional experience. Semester schedule (unlike Dartmouth), mix of gen. ed and elective choices (unlike Columbia, MIT, and Brown). Out of HYPSM, it is probably the most balanced - Princeton has more humanities+maths focus while MIT and Stanford are very STEM oriented. 

I do not think any major feels underserved at Harvard. I have heard about humanities majors at Stanford feeling alienated among STEM folks, as well as the folks at MIT pursuing studies that aren't hard science, math, CS or engineering. 

Harvard has a very traditional campus, which some schools, especially those outside the Ivy League, have started to lack.

You gain the advantage of being in Boston. Boston is there if you want it, being 15 minutes away, or gone if you don't want it, as Cambridge has everything you need. This way, you get to be a big fish in a big pond, unlike if you attended Dartmouth, Yale, Brown, or Princeton. The airport is nearby and a lot of other airports have direct flights to Boston.

There are a lot of fun traditions, namely the Harvard-Yale Game, the primal scream, and peeing on John Harvard's foot. 

Harvard kids have good senses of humor - check out On Harvard Time on youtube. 

The social life is perhaps the most diverse of all the Ivies. You can choose whether or not you want to drink, whether or not you want to party, and where you meet your friends. Greek life is small but not a major factor unlike Dartmouth, UPenn, and less so Cornell (which all, in turn, have massive party cultures). There is no residential college system like at some schools, e.g Yale, but you are still randomly sorted into dorms so that you meet new people. 

2018-01-humanities-student-major_1832_politics.txt
/s?

The idea that any one major or career path guarantees income or job security is a myth. 

The fact is that almost all jobs created since '05 have been temp or limited contract positions with no benefits. Having a wife in the sciences, I know more unemployed or out-of-field STEM grads than I can count on all my fingers and toes. 

The other half of your implication is that a degree in Liberal Arts or Humanities is a wasted piece of paper and a path to a job at a fast-food chain. This could not be further from the truth. There are strengths and advantages that a degree in fields such as History, Linguistics, and Political Science hold that STEM degrees do not. Humanities majors encourage analysis, critical-thinking, and a vast knowledge of various topics. These majors look deeper into varied texts that affect media, culture, society, literature, and politics. It is not the major specification that is applied in the workforce, but it is the work ethic and skills that are gained in earning the degree. English majors work well with close reading and analysis, as well as grammar and writing, which can be applied to media professions, law, business, creative professions, and politics. 

If our country focuses only on the drive to be a technologically advanced nation, our culture and society will follow in suit. We need the Humanities majors to run our schools, social services, and political centers. Who will write future great films and literature? Where does art come into play in a STEM filled world? Engineers do not fit at the UN table.

I'm being a bit dramatic, but you see my point. Blaming someone for not getting their dream job (or any job) based on their major is simply moving the goalposts when we were told from birth that as long as we did well in school and went to college, we would be in a career with a family and a house immediately thereafter. *Any* college degree used to be enough to get you the income for a comfortable life. Now PhDs are unqualified for the real jobs in their field without 10 years of experience, so they, like everyone else, end up cobbling together rent and bills out of three part time jobs, and still don't have healthcare. 

2018-01-humanities-student-major_2019_slatestarcodex.txt
This was very emotionally satisfying to read, but I think the argument he's making is weak. Some scattered thoughts:

* I have an engineering degree. A *lot* of my old classmates are now management consultants, in finance, pointy-haired bosses, or maybe they have a startup where they've gotten lots of money just based on flashy ideas and talking a big game. These are not meritocratic jobs and they are not doing "honest" work in the sense of ditch-diggers.

* Conversely, most "thinkfluencers" might come from the humanities, but only a small fraction of humanities students become "thinkfluencers". Your average history major is far more likely to be, say, a schoolteacher. 

* The stereotype of the STEM student with no interest in art is ... well, it's not literally true, but there is a nugget of truth in it. There are just these people you run into in STEM circles: they guy who seems to have no interest in music but inexplicably knows the lyrics to every "Weird" Al song, the guy who somehow only consumes entertainment produced for children, the guy who'll tell you at length why all art made in the past 100 years is terrible but couldn't name a single artist whose work they actually enjoy. Now all of them might love Lord of the Rings but this doesn't make them patrons of the arts. The average humanities student is just far more likely to go to the museum, a concert, the theater, slam poetry, an arthouse movie theater, whatever.

2018-01-humanities-student-major_2155_AskAcademia.txt
 Student debt is so suffocating and will effect everything you do

*affect

  before you incrue more debt.

*accrue or incur. incrue isn't a word.

There are a lot of incredible writers and generally erudite people in STEM, but for those of us who aren't quite at that level, a humanities degree may be a good idea, since they focus on developing those skills.

I think the idea that STEM job prospects are a priori better than humanities job prospects is a red herring, because there are few undergraduate degrees nowadays that will guarantee you a good job. Sure, if you study engineering or computer science, you're probably set - but if you're majoring in the S or M sections of STEM, you're in roughly the same post-graduation boat as the humanities majors. Most STEM majors need a graduate degree to lead to a professional career in that discipline. The vast majority of jobs that look for people with a BA select based on skills - not on what the BA is in. And a lot of people graduate college without any skills, either hard or soft, irrespective of their major. And sure, maybe the career you want requires a certain major - but that seems to me more like your personal preference rather than all the other majors being stupid. In the end, whether you'd like to make $12/hr as a lab tech or an accounts specialist is a question of taste.

2018-01-humanities-student-major_2242_technology.txt
 So it's a catch-all term for all academic study?

It's often used informally (and pejoratively) to refer to the humanities. I think of liberal arts instead as a style of education meant to acquaint the student with the fundamentals of every major field, to create a well-rounded individual who can parse a problem arising in any of those fields, communicate intelligibly with experts in that field, and given enough time acquire specialized proficiency in that field. Sure, you have a major, and you might well go on to advanced study in that field after you get your undergraduate degree, but you're acquainted with other fields beyond some trivial "math for English majors" level.

It irks me when people talk about "liberal arts" as meaning "just the humanities". A graduate of a liberal arts college should be acquainted with the humanities, sure. But they should also have some familiarity with other major fields of human inquiry, including the sciences. My own view is that a liberal arts grad should, for many or most other fields of study, have taken the first class or two that a student majoring in that field would take.

The very idea of a course called "math for liberal arts majors" is repugnant to me. A real liberal arts student should be taking legitimate (if basic) math courses alongside math majors. That's my idealistic stance, anyway.

Obligatory:

 A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.  
 —Robert Heinlein

2018-01-humanities-student-major_2403_college.txt
In my experience, as someone pursuing a liberal arts degree: 

In certain STEM fields, there are a lot of jobs, opportunities, great internships, awesome pay, etc. I would also say a lot of these degrees are aimed towards a specific career goal. 

In liberal arts, the opposite is true. There are not a lot of jobs. The ones that exist are very competitive and low-paying. Internships are more likely to be unpaid or not paid very well. In general, someone is likely not to earn that much money out of school with a liberal arts degree compared to STEM, as someone else said. A liberal arts student may also need to pursue more and more education (in other words, spend more and more money) to get the job they're qualified for. Compare this to the STEM students who can get a well-paying job right after their bachelor's. 

Liberal arts majors are often very broad with no clear career direction, so it can attract a lot of people who have no plans. They may just pick something that they like or that is interesting to them, without thinking seriously about what they are going to do after graduation (which means they might not be researching the actual job prospects of their degree, trying to get internships, research opportunities, specializing in something, building a network, etc.). In fields where there is no one career path, having those relevant experiences, connections, etc. is essential. 

You can do a search on subs like r/jobs or r/careerguidance and see a lot of people who graduated with a degree in X and never knew what they wanted to do with it, so they just have this general degree and nothing else to show for what they learned or did, and they're applying for jobs but can't find any employer willing to take them. 

Also, I think people generally perceive liberal arts degrees to be easy to obtain (for someone just looking to get a degree), while STEM degrees are a lot harder. Liberal arts degrees can appeal to the people who don't know what they want to do but know "they just don't like math." 

2018-01-humanities-student-major_3348_UIUC.txt
Like the other commenter said, it's really an issue of publicity. The university puts considerable effort into marketing our STEM programs, which are indeed excellent. By contrast though, it puts relatively little effort into marketing our humanities programs. This is despite the fact that we've trained field-leading historians like David Herbert Donald (now deceased, but formerly Warren Professor of American Civilization at Harvard and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of what's still considered by many to be the best Lincoln biography ever written), Edna Greene Medford (huge name in the 19th century African American field and professor at Howard), and Kenneth Noe (the Draughon Professor of Southern History at Auburn); we have an interdisciplinary humanities center that leads a major national humanities consortium and is endowed by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (the major private humanities benefactor in the country) to offer cutting edge internships and certificates in fields like bio-humanities and environmental humanities; we have an undergraduate digital humanities initiative that recently won a major Humanities Without Walls grant to head a  new DH study and consortium with Michigan State and Nebraska-Lincoln (arguably two of the very best institutions in the country for digital humanities); our history program is ranked in the top 25 of all colleges - public and private - in the nation, and in the top 10 for public universities; English is the most employed LAS major; we have one of the best programs anywhere for Russian and Eastern European studies (we actually got a visit from the Ambassador of Estonia last term); we count among our faculty people like Antoinette Burton who last Spring was called over to Oxford to sit on the committee for one of their PhD students; and we benefit from North America's second largest academic library. 

So long story short, we have fantastic programs in STEM *and* the humanities, even if only one gets all the publicity and hype.

2018-01-humanities-student-major_462_jobs.txt
Firstly, if you got through one college degree your likely not too stupid to get another degree. I'm not saying you'd be a 4.0, it would be dependent on what you put in or what your physically able to learn.

Secondly, it sounds like you don't understand what computer science really is. It's less about programing and IT work and more about math, science and analysis.


Your probably also looking into this because of Reddit. No offense but I would not base decisions on this website. The internet is full of liars, braggarts and jackasses. Liberal arts majors can make big money outside the field. STEM majors can end up not working in the field. Reddit will argue statistics but if you don't try you'll never know your story. You already made your decision so why not own it for a bit and try to see if you can succeed without more school?


Try to work at LEAST 1 year in any field before committing to any major. When I got out of my degree and started working full time I wish I had done that BEFORE college. You need to spend some time in the real world and not living in the comfort of thinking your degree can get you out of anything. 


Life is hard work. STEM is not a magic button that improves lives.

2018-01-humanities-student-major_726_im14andthisisdeep.txt
Why do you people love making up fake over-the-top majors that don't exist? 

But you're wrong...these wacky majors *do* exist! At UC Berkeley, for example, you can major in..wait for it...["Dance and Performance Studies"](http://guide.berkeley.edu/undergraduate/degree-programs/dance-performance-studies/). That's not education - that's a crude pantomime of education. 

I credit my 25 page paper requirements in helping me have the decent diction and nuance I needed in my first customer facing entry role and the writing skills needed to create literate proposals and presentations. No, I'll likely never use my knowledge of the classic philosophies behind liberalism and conservatism ever in my career but the skills needed to earn my degree will always be useful to me. I work in an industry full of STEM majors and the ones who didn't take their liberal arts requirements are obvious. They have much difficulty writing and speaking about the product in terms that can be understood by our non-technical customers. They cannot do presentations to save their life. Lastly, they have much difficulty in communicating which is needed especially in a situation which we are providing support for a customer's product and need input from various teams around the office. 

Sorry, you don't need a liberal arts major to be able to communicate effectively or to have "diction and nuance". You need to just not be autistic and have some life experience dealing with people. The fact that STEM types can be awkward and unable to relate to non-STEM people isn't because they didn't have enough education in "Early 20th Century Dance". It's because they're naturally introverted and cerebral, which is why they went into STEM in the first place. 

2018-01-humanities-student-major_744_philosophy.txt
Philosophy majors actually do pretty well. They are overrepresented in law schools and medical schools. Also, there are quite a few of us in technical fields. I think my study of philosophy had helped me profoundly.

Edit to respond to /u/OFGhost:

I would disagree that law school has nothing to do with philosophy, and although not as obvious, medical ethics is absolutely philosophy. These students aren't electing to go to medical school and law school, but many people who intend to become lawyers and medical doctors purposely choose philosophy. They aren't applying in droves, but they are far more likely to be admitted.

Philosophy majors tend to do very well on the LSAT, GRE, GMAT, and the MCAT. They score the highest on the LSAT, fourth highest on the GMAT, they have the highest analytical and verbal scores on the GRE, and finish right below the sciences and engineering fields on the quantitative section of the GRE. I can't find figures for the MCAT by major, but humanities majors make up 3% of the applicants for medical school, yet philosophy majors have the highest acceptance rate of any major. I'm out of the house now, or I would include some sources (I'll add them later if you want them and can't find them on your own).

A smart student that wanted to go to medical school or law school would consider majoring in philosophy with its proven track record. What should they major in? Which major is the most like law? Do medical doctors _do_ biology or chemistry? Not really.


2018-02-humanities-student-major_1168_ApplyingToCollege.txt
 went to MIT to study english

Uhh just wanna say that while it's true that MIT doesn't have an English program, it does have a Writing program and a literature program and both are top notch. 

Also, MIT might have a reputation as the "engineering" or "stem" school, but that kinda ignores the fact that MIT actually has amazing programmes everywhere. One of the best Linguistics programmes in the country, one of the best economics programmes, one of the best poli sci programmes, an amazing philosophy programme, etc. There's nothing wrong with applying to MIT for a discipline in the Liberal Arts (which includes stuff like mathematics) or even more specifically, humanities because they excel at pretty much everything and really, the only schools that could compete with most of their programmes even in the humanities section would be other top and high prestige schools. 

I don't like to use ranking systems but [here you go](http://news.mit.edu/2015/mit-named-among-three-top-universities-humanities-and-arts-1022)


 You wanna study the humanities? Check out a liberal arts school.

Why? Plenty of national universities have excellent humanities programmes. Just like how plenty of liberal arts colleges excel at STEM disciplines (Harvey Mudd???) 

  someone who went to Yale to do engineering... Save thousands of dollars and go to a state school with an infinitely better program.

Also, for undergrad, Yale is still good for engineering. When people describe Yale as bad, they're talking about it in comparison. Obviously, if you're deadset on engineering, yeah probably go to Purdue or GA Tech instead and it will be a better programme, but there are only still a few schools that would truly have a "better programme," and certainly nowhere near "infinitely better programme." Regardless, it's engineering so the school doesn't matter that much for that. 

And if that phrase applies to MIT humanities programme, I hopefully clarified that that's a pretty inaccurate image and description of MIT's frankly excellent programmes. If I thought I had a snowball's chance in hell to get into MIT for linguistics, definitely would have applied lol. 

 only true wise students apply to schools that may not be the most prestigious, but fit their academic needs the best.

there are a thousand factors that go into a decision and I don't see why there needs to be so much alienation against students who do factor in prestige more than you probably do. Agreed that it is overrated, but it is true that the layperson does find it to be astonishing, impressive, an achievement, etc. and while we do tend to not care about the social aspect and what degree of respect that it will confer upon you in a social setting, I don't think you can deny that saying you are a graduate from Yale will instantly afford you a great deal of respect from the majority of people and people will treat you differently as a result. I don't think there's anything wrong with considering that factor. If I were to go to China and tell somebody I was graduating from Yale, or that I was a Yale graduate, they would instantly know where I'm talking about and be very impressed. Anywhere you go in the First and Second Worlds, a degree from Yale will probably carry some serious weight. In comparison, Purdue won't even carry weight in some parts of the country. Again, we're discussing this in a social setting, not a field specific setting. If I'm interested in moving and going out of the country permanently, a degree from a very prestigious institution will most definitely carry great weight. It's not immature or stupid at all to consider the social impacts of your degree.

Also, unless you're wealthy, schools like Yale and MIT probably won't cost as much as you think. In a lot of cases, you might actually save money if you were to get into a top school like that. They're the most generous schools with financial aid. In comparison, these state schools you're discussing, often don't have such generous financial aid which means that unless you live in a state like Georgia, California, Indiana, Michigan, etc. which has an engineering undergraduate that you could classify as significantly better than Yale's, you're probably going to pay similar if not less amounts of money to go to Yale. 



2018-02-humanities-student-major_2219_skeptic.txt
 If you remove environment's influence, all that's left is internal nature.

No. There's no such thing as "true, unadulterated" nature. No organism has evolved in a vacuum or lives in one. It's in our nature to constantly adapt to our environment, both geographical and social environment.

You know what's funny to me when it comes to this "STEM gender debate"? People state their different theories, including this one, yet no one actually asks what women themselves think. In this case there's an assumption that women in "less gender-equal" countries are forced into those "masculine" fields, poor victims, doing a job they hate just because they need the money... Has anybody actually asked those women whether or not they like their job? What if they actually went there because they loved it? What if they initially went there for the money, but ended up loving it, instead of remaining repulsed by it that, according to those theorists, their inherent biology required them to? Why is nobody considering other potential explanations? There's a post on AskWomen on this topic right now, and a few Iranian women have chimed in, stating that unlike the West, their country has no concept of science being "masculine", or that women inherently suck at math. And a few more interesting observations.

Anecdotally, I'm studying in the UK and can confirm, women in engineering and computer science are usually from East Asia and Middle East. But they didn't go there because they were forced to, they went there because they wanted to. Poor people can't afford international student fees we have in the UK. Those women, just like other international students, are well-off, none I know have part-time jobs or anything of the sort. Those women could have easily stayed home and lived comfortable lifestyle getting taken care of by their own families, or married some well-off man. Or, even if they did come there, they could have gone into dentistry, nursing, medicine, law, economics or finance - all quite secure and good options that have a lot more women in them.

Another thing - if there's a speculation that women in those developing countries go to STEM because of the money... then where do the men go? One would assume men in those countries need money no less. It's not like those countries have completely opposite gender roles where women support men, right? If men have an inherent interest in STEM while women don't, and STEM pays well, then you should still see a lot more men in those fields, while women go to fields that are still well-paid but more traditionally feminine, like nursing or medicine. And if it's all about money, we all know men in the West prefer higher-paid fields, so why is there no assumption that men in the West go to STEM for the money as well? The gender ratio in various fields has changed quite a lot during history. In 19th century, arts and humanities were the shit in regard to social status, and they were utterly male-dominated. Cue 20th century, the prestige of arts and humanities drop, and so does the number of men in them... Coincidence? Math and physics were actually seen as more suitable for women in 19th century, and weren't thought of as particularly prestigious. In fact, computer science was almost 40% women in 1980s. But then the whole "nerd culture" thing became mainstream, and computer science became a lot more promising and prestigious, so what happened? Men flooded in, women flooded out. You can see the same thing everywhere in all fields. In my country, medicine has always been relatively low paid, and it's mostly women. In some countries, teaching is very well paid and considered very prestigious, and in those countries most teachers are men.

2018-02-humanities-student-major_3154_iamverysmart.txt
Ah, yes my favourite.

Because it's not like art majors can turn in something and get a bad grade not because their work is objectively bad or flawed, but just because their teacher didn't like the concept/the work itself.

Because it's not like education majors have to study student psychology, prepare to deal with things they'll never be fully prepared for until they experience (i.e. having a student with severe mental/physical disabilities, having a student who doesn't speak/is still learning the classroom language, etc.).

Because it's not like art majors have to work on projects just to warm up for the real work they do, which is time consuming and exhausting in and of itself

Because it's not like education majors often have to double major in the subject they teach (i.e. education/history, education/math) and are often pressured to attend graduate school so they appear more hireable/more deserving of a good wage, even if they're doing the same job the same way.

Because it's not like art majors might spend hours, days, or weeks on a project, only to scrap it because they don't like it/it's not what they planned/their instructor doesn't like it/the assignment changes/they lose inspiration/etc.

Because it's not like education majors have to balance school with required student teaching/shadowing and possibly a paid job (to pay for THEIR education) on top of their own personal lives.

Because it's not like art majors, education majors, or anyone else outside of STEM has to face dumbasses like you who think that because they're busy that they are a Uniquely Suffering Being that deserves to shit on other people for no reason at all.

Of course not. It's not as if art and education are real majors that require real work which leads to real careers. That's mental. They're a bunch of lazy kids and YOU'RE the mature one. Clearly.

EDIT: sorry for the rant, it's just that a lot of my friends/family are in humanities and arts, but they're also incredibly hard-working people, so I hate to see them and their peers ridiculed like this.

2018-02-humanities-student-major_557_AskReddit.txt
STEM is shoved down our throats to an unholy degree. I went to a great, small high school with a holistic approach to educating the whole child. Loved the place more than I ever imagined loving a school. I graduated valedictorian and had a full ride to any school I wanted to go to in the state, as well as like 70+ hours of transfer credit from dual credit courses and taking classes at community college while I was in high school. 

I loved English, I was great at English, and I had a talent for languages and writing. I still got pushed toward STEM subjects. I started freshman year as an engineering major and I spent sophomore and junior year as a double major in English and Math. I wasn't able to admit to myself I had no aspirations to pursue a STEM career until I was 21 years old. I'm really glad I have the math and science skills that I do, and I'm a big believer that those skills keep my mind sharp, but not enough is done to help students explore the opportunities that humanities opens to them. We just try to tell everyone with half decent grades in math they should study STEM subjects. 

The social pressure to “succeed” and the way counselors always talked up the money in engineering and finally the narrative that humanities is “easy” kept me from really recognizing who I was and what I wanted out of life. I'm just glad I was brave enough to make English one of my majors sophomore year. 

2018-02-humanities-student-major_768_pics.txt
You laugh, but it got me thinking. Lets say no one majors in Art History because of, well, how useless it is perceived. Which means where current art evolved from is not studied for future artists. Which means art focused museums would be a thing of the past. Maybe we get lucky with one or two that might remain popular, but with no one really knowing WHY they are popular (similar to paintings of the Mona Lisa or The Last Supper. My art teacher was the one who taught me how The Last Supper has hidden mathematical aspects.) They just nod and accept that it is worth some value but no idea why.



When you think about it, its kind of sad to have a culture with no artistic identity. Every nation has it, its part of the thing that defines cultures. Same with literature, same with music. How do you think science progressed so far without the help of literature and reading? Why did so many STEM workers get inspired by the 'liberal arts' (which I include media; shows like Star Trek being a major influencer as well as books by Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov) rather than other dry technical manuals? Things like teleportation, hover boards,  helicopters, submarines, and so on evolved from the mind of writers before scientists got to them.



Really we should be helping each other than disparaging each other's field. Maybe your kid will be influenced by Renaissance Art History, find inspiration from a Leonardo Da Vinci sketch of a war cannon and goes on to build massive weapons for the military.

2018-02-humanities-student-major_928_fatlogic.txt
If you don't mind, I'd also like to add:

1) Women are far more likely to experience sexual violence, harassment, or domestic abuse than men. This is one of those instances where the patriarchy also harms men, however, as men are often mocked for being "effeminate"* if they admit to being victims of rape.

* Also, notice that words associated with femininity are often considered insults.

2) Women being underrepresented in high paying fields (notably STEM). I know a lot of people like to brush this off as women just being fundamentally different from men, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that subconscious bias against women is actually discouraging us from pursuing these careers. For example, did you know more elementary school girls actually express interest in STEM careers than boys do? However, math exams taken by those same female students are, on average, scored lower than the exams taken by their male peers, *even when they actually perform the same.* This suggests girls are receiving subtle cues that they aren't "good enough" for STEM from a young age.

There's also other evidence to support the idea that men aren't inherently more interested in STEM fields than women - for example, the arts and humanities have, historically, been considered an exclusively masculine field. The Ancient Greeks thought women were too emotionally stunted to appreciate art. But now our stereotypes have changed, suggesting that they were never rooted in reality at all. 

2018-03-humanities-student-major_1344_samharris.txt
You can't blame me for not being blown away by expected outcomes that don't in any way dis-confirm my worries.

Of course not, but I do blame those who paint a false picture of trends at schools that contradicts the stats.

I am wondering about the humanities in regards to the main issues people are worried when it comes to PC, gender race and Islam

To paint a more accurate picture . . . there is so much more to the humanities than just critical theory.  I'm not even sure how many people even across the study of Islam.  

My wife is an English major.  She hasn't mentioned any sort of indoctrination from her experiences.  Though she is a huge Jane Austin fan.

I do believe the humanities get a bad rap.  People make it seem like humanities majors are worthless degrees when in fact humanities majors have pretty low rates of unemployment and catch up to STEM majors in salary later in their careers.  If you listen to Christina Sommers you would think that every third female college grad is a Women's Studies major and every other black student was an African Studies major.  In actuality about 2500 and 1000 of those degrees are conferred every year, and I would guess that in today's competitive landscape the majority of those might even be double majors.  There is evidence to indicate that its social media and social groups that foster extremist attitudes, not academics.  So let's at least be *honest* about whatever we are trying to shit on.

2018-03-humanities-student-major_196_technology.txt
Also, for the record, (even though Damore was not who was referenced by your parent comment), Damore was ***NOT*** saying that women are less capable in any way, but that they are different from men, in that they value different things in a career, which is true. He attempted to explain the disparity in the number of women in the software engineering field and many other STEM fields through statistics such as the tendency for women to choose liberal arts and the humanities, and roles that have more social interaction. He backed that up with various studies which collected statistics. But most importantly, he made it clear that these are simply trends which have been observed in our society, and he is ***NOT*** generalising these points to *all* women, but rather, is pointing out these trends which have been observed in our society. He also suggested ways which could potentially make software engineering more appealing to women, such as pair programming, which would increase social interaction, which the statistics seem to suggest that women tend to value. 

He also suggests that the true way to increase gender diversity in STEM fields is to make STEM more appealing to women and girls in schools, so that they are more likely to choose STEM as their field of choice, rather than taking a candidate's gender into account in the hiring process. At my university, UNC, there are far fewer female students in the computer science department than male students. Naturally, as a result of this, there are going to be fewer women in the labour market for software development/engineering roles as opposed to the number of men. The real solution is to aim to increase the number of women who are interested in, and choose to become computer science or other STEM majors. Solving the problem, 'at the source' so to speak, will increase the number of women in the applicant pool, and eventually, the applicant pool for STEM fields will be naturally more equal, eliminating the need for recruitment to take a candidate's gender into account. 

2018-03-humanities-student-major_2149_askphilosophy.txt
Yea, I went to a university with a lot of STEM majors and was routinely judged by STEM majors for my Philosophy major. I even had some of them, almost angrily, ask what I was going to do with my major. While nobody ever said this directly to my face, I'd often hear people say that Liberal Arts majors are easy/worthless. 

I think it's more of a stigma against Liberal Arts in general than a stigma against Philosophy specifically, although I've heard of Philosophy in particular being the epitome of people's conception of the Liberal Arts being useless. 

I think it just comes from people thinking the major is useless, thinking it's easy, and in Philosophy's case also just having a basic misunderstanding of what philosophy actually is. I once had someone laugh at me when I told them I was doing research in philosophy for an independent research course I was taking--they had just assumed philosophy was just about making random and subjective nonsense up. 

At my university, I will admit that the Philosophy major was rather easy. I think the courses were dumbed down for non-Philosophy majors who would take the courses as general education requirements. Also, at my school the Philosophy major was incredibly small, so I think the department didn't want to scare people away from doing a double major by making the Philosophy major too hard or a lot of work. It was rather disappointing. So at my school at least I think the hatred for Philosophy majors (and maybe Liberal Arts majors more generally if other Liberal Arts majors were also easier) came more-so out of jealousy of Liberal Arts majors actually enjoying their courses and having some free time. 

2018-03-humanities-student-major_2413_philosophy.txt
I've got to say, I'm a bit surprised about the amount of people saying this is a good thing within the philosophy subreddit.  Must have to do with being a default sub.

The idea that social sciences have a much higher rate of unemployment than other majors is exaggerated to say the least.

https://cew.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Unemployment.Final_.update1.pdf

If you scroll to page 7, you'll notice that outside of the arts, health, architecture, and education, there isn't much difference between the unemployment rate of college majors for recent graduates.

On the next page, the earnings from most majors upon graduation is also relatively close together.  After graduate school, social science earnings just barely inch out business, and aren't lagging far behind STEM fields.  The humanities admittedly lag behind.

Starting at page 10 they break it down more specifically.  Within the humanities, History does well at the graduate level.  Except for sociology, the social sciences do exceptionally well.  At the graduate level, they outperform all business majors other than finance majors, where economics majors still outperform them.

With the social sciences, it's not as obvious as something like Aerospace Engineering or Computer Science as to where to look to find a job, yet the data does show that there aren't large discrepancies in the unemployment rate.  Skills you learn from these majors do translate into the job market.

Also, why should college only be for learning a trade?  There used to be a difference between trade school and college, but that line has been blurred.  If for no other reason, should be not cling on to the ability to become recognized experts (to varying degrees) in these subjects just on the basis that they are part of what makes us human?  These subjects enrich our lives.

Finland has the best public school system in the world.  While it is difficult to point out exactly why that is, one of the things it does different than the U.S. is put a larger focus on the social sciences and humanities rather than pushing them away (http://nordic.businessinsider.com/finland-has-one-of-the-best-education-systems-in-the-world--here-are-4-things-it-does-better-than-the-us-2016-11/).  Maybe this has nothing to do with it, but I would argue that the skills and ways of thinking learning through the social sciences cause one to become a better thinker and a better writer.  I think it would be hard to argue that the ability to be a good thinker is not a useful skill to have in society.  When it comes to writing, completely anecdotal here, but I have heard that people coming out of STEM fields do exceptionally well in the technical parts of their jobs, but perform rather poorly when they have to sit down and write about it.  A philosophy major who teaches themselves coding wouldn't have this problem.  This is not to say that a computer science major couldn't teach themselves philosophy, but I would argue that self-teaching philosophy is more difficult than self-teaching coding.  This is also not to say that learning coding isn't difficult, but rather that the very nature of how these things are learned makes one more difficult to self-teach than the other.

2018-03-humanities-student-major_2584_literature.txt
If the implication is that humanities majors don't get jobs, it's not a true implication. The idea that English, history, and/or humanities majors don't score jobs is a bit of a myth. English majors, in particular, are in high demand as technical writers and typically earn more than communications majors. This idea that humanities majors will work in coffeeshops forever (or something like that) is something I heard a lot as an undergraduate, and it's something my humanities majors students hear a lot. But tracking my students longer term, I have very few who can't find work in their field or can't find decent paying jobs, and I'm not even including the many students who go into English and history because they want to be teachers. Humanities majors remain the best represented in law schools, and are even fairly well represented in MBAs and other professional programs. I've had several students double major in English and biology because it makes them infinitely more attractive to medical schools. My departments (I work at three institutions) all track students post-graduation, and those who graduate tend to find work in their fields anywhere between 70-80%, which is comparable to STEMS fields at the same institutions. Empirical stuff matters here, so I'm including a link to a digest of several post-graduation studies of earnings and job prospects by major: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/education/edlife/choosing-a-college-major.html. While there are some minor differences in earning potential favoring STEMS majors over humanities majors, they certainly don't amount to students having no job opportunities or an inability to pay down student debt in a reasonable time frame. Ultimately, you also have to factor in the competition of the job market, and the declining number of humanities majors may well end up being beneficial for humanities majors because they are rare, and in some cases quite distinguished.

Full disclosure: I'm a humanities professor (History, some interdisciplinary classes in gender/sexuality studies), and I majored in English as an undergraduate.


2018-03-humanities-student-major_3124_unpopularopinion.txt
I absolutely love this post because it speaks out everything I have in mind about this topic. I have chosen the highest educational path in my country, which means that you have to attend a special school to get a diploma to first be allowed to study at university. That school is dedicated to impart general knowledge to its students. Sadly, (with a change of principals) my school started focusing a lot on STEM subjects. While I was never particularly good in all of them I really admire our scientists and wholeheartedly support scientific development in these subjects. I am also very interested in them as far as I can understand them. Now due to my school focusing more on STEM there were some changes in our curriculum, first of all we were forced to take a STEM subject as "optional subject", as if forcing someone to study a certain thing makes them more interested in it. We had some special events to help us with our choice of university and subject. These special events were always about STEM subjects. Somebody who was interested in humanities wouldn't get a chance to inform themselves about them. I am fine with supporting STEM but that doesn't mean neglecting everything else. "Optional subjects" should remain optional, if you're going to make info days make them about every subject not just STEM.
Sadly, this isn't going to change. I have read articles calling for more STEM in these types of school. Their reasoning: "Boys struggle with languages so replace them with STEM so they have more incentive to attend these schools." Well, I struggled with STEM as well and made it. Nobody would lend me a helping hand.

The humanities are incredibly important for our society. They are important for a healthy democracy and a good political climate. I live in a (half-)direct democracy. I want the people voting for their and my rights to have basic knowledge in history, politics, philosophy etc. Having a direct democracy with uneducated people isn't much better than having no democracy at all, since the people will just blindly vote for what's recommended to them by the state. I am not saying that STEM people aren't educated in these matters of course, I am just referring to what should get taught at schools alongside STEM.

2018-03-humanities-student-major_3216_EngineeringStudents.txt
Are they though? Are they actually more intelligent? Or do they simply have more knowledge in a technical field? 


I think what is trying to be said is "education = more intelligence." There is some extremely brilliant liberal arts majors, and people outside of engineering (even STEM for that matter). An English major is exposed to so many ideas, cultures, and thoughts by reading tons of books by so many authors. Even writing in itself is so important in being introrespective and being aware of your own thoughts and ideas. Now compared to what? Being good at math, physics, and problem solving like an engineering student? I guess which one is better is considered "intelligence" and "smartness" is subjective to the reader, but anywho, that's not to say you can't be both. 

Also, it's not so much about whether or not that point is true, it's more so about 1) the lack of self-awareness by the dude above, and 2) the pretty evident ego this guy has. Humility is a very important, underrated, and useful trait in life. There are plenty of people in this world who are absolutely brilliant, and, because of their humility, may not feel like they are smarter than "most other people." You know what humility has to offer them? More knowledge, friendships, and reputation (this is not exhaustive). Even if you do feel like you are smarter than other people (you should probably check your ego if this is the case), just saying it is an automatic lose situation. Really, what does it gain you? Are you wanting people to think you're smarter than other people? If yes, then show them by your actions and interests (this does not mean speak like /r/iamverysmart and always let your friends know what book you're reading). 

Again, the cringe comes more from the lack of self-awareness and absolute douchery of an ego it implies by just saying "I'm smarter than other people" 

2018-03-humanities-student-major_3251_6thForm.txt
As I said in my other comment, for social sciences and humanities it's much easier as:

You have significantly less contact hours. In my first year I had 10 a week, now I have 6. Flexible working is therefore the rule, rather than the exception.

It's extremely easy to get a 2:1, much easier than in a STEM subject. In my first year, where I never started an essay anytime other than the night before it was due, I averaged like a 67. However, it's harder than a STEM subject to get a first - you can't peak as high as no paper will get above an 80. 

For STEM it doesn't apply as much as  you still have lots of contact hours, so  feels more like school. Much less flexibility in what you do. 

However, if you are good at your STEM (or any quantitative degree i.e. economics) subject then you can breeze past it - acing exams with scores of 90-100 will bring your average way above a 70 overall (the mark required for a 1st class), so you can afford to balls up multiple modules as long as you're good. At A Level this simply isn't the case as you need to be consistently excellent across each exam for top quality grades. This is why it's easier to get a 1st in a STEM subject. 

Taking a subject like Maths you could conceivably barely pass in your 2nd year with a grade of 50, then if you sweated out third year and got an average of 83 that would still get you a 1st class degree. At school you can't do that at all. And nor can social science students - getting above a 78-80 is very, very rare and keeping an average that high even rarer. 

2018-03-humanities-student-major_3540_RussiaLago.txt
3) "education" on the show that is mocked is the liberal arts nonsense that actually adds no qualitative value to the intellect of the student. Its "filler", designed to fleece the unsuspecting (paying) public as they are told they are "learning". In that sense, it IS a conspiracy foisted upon the people..Poor fools.

Oh jesus christ, you forgot to tip your fedora, m'good'sir. 

1. I said it was made for over 50's, not that only 50's watched it. Just because you enjoy geriatric conservative culture as a under-50 doesn't change what that show is. You probably jerk yourself raw to Tim Allen's televised dumps as well, congratulations. 

2. I bet you do believe you are smart, but the fact is is that broader conservative culture demeans _all higher education_ and not merely some STEM-lord obsession with liberal arts. In fact, much of Christian Conservatism strongly derides hard STEM science like Biology and Physics because of the religious implications of scientific facts.

3. Save me the STEMlord drivel, as someone who holds a STEM degree, you embarrass everyone who studied science or engineering and quite frankly I would bet $$ that you do not hold a B.S. or above in a STEM field, based on how you act and how you speak.

4. Numbered lists are fucking lame, and what's more, there is no need to number this list as the correct format would be to quote and respond. However "Technical Communication" was a required part of all  STEM degrees where I graduated, so I forgive you for your poor grammar and unsophisticated communication. 



2018-03-humanities-student-major_3621_ukpolitics.txt
I didn't say it was about forcing people to do anything.

I made it very clear that my points are geared towards societal pressure or bias which lead/encourage/tend people to choose a particular career path based on their sex.

This isn't 'solved'. The most obvious example being women in STEM. I'm not saying it should be a 50/50 split, but it shouldn't be as low as it is now (generally speaking, around 70-80% m:f).

Here's an [interesting article ](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/women-gender-equal-countries-less-likely-gain-stem-degrees) on the topic.

Professor Geary said that a lot of previous research has “focused on absolute differences”, such as mean scores in science and reading, but what a student's best subject is is probably more important.

“You may be very good at math or science, but if you're even better in reading comprehension and literature, then the latter would be your best subject,” he said.

Nevertheless, Professor Geary added, there are still significant numbers of girls and women whose best subject at school is maths or science, and in every country the researchers looked at, this number was higher than the percentage of women getting degrees in these fields.

“If the interventions [to improve female participation] focused on the girls who have the academic profile and the interests that are common in people who go into these fields they might be more successful,” he said.

The question is, why are girls; whose best subject is science or maths and its an objective fact that they will likely earn more money by doing so, not going into a STEM field?

There's a similar argument to be made with boys not going into humanities or social science subjects. 

There's a strong element of social pressure involved here that any manner of skills, experience or education will not remedy, because this factor comes into play before all of that.

*The general article is positive and showing that things are changing but its still important to see problems exist.

2018-03-humanities-student-major_819_MensRights.txt
STEM fields arent like the liberal arts. In a LA degree you're going to encounter modern University sociological material. So like English has a dose of feminism, history does too. Hell I even got hit with some in the one econ class I had to take. But in STEM... You only deal with numbers. And when you learn history you learn who contributed to a great discovery, man or woman. You don't necessarily care about the social circumstances of a scientific discovery though I will say it is often interesting to look up the social impact of inventions or keystone discoveries, I digress. The point is, in these classes you aren't shamed for being a man and now it's actually a very positive environment because we know it's a boys club. We do. At my school we make it very clear we are open to anyone who wants to be an engineer and means it. You won't be harassed, the professors no longer tell antiquated jokes, if anyone needs help all they need to do is ask and no one gets ridiculed. It's just. A mature environment. A glimpse at a real proffesional one. My issue is that there are certain groups that still complain about the lack of gender diversity, but we also share alot of resources with interior design majors and they're mostly ladies. 80% my CAD class consisted of women. Hell, even my machine tools class had a slight majority of women. So at this point I truly don't know what the fuck anyone is talking about.

Sorry that was pretty rant like. 

2018-04-humanities-student-major_1306_Showerthoughts.txt
All which pay shit in centers with high cost of living.

That's the dumbest assumption I've ever heard. EVERY career field has different levels of pay, from entry-level to top. 

How much do you think you'll earn as an engineer when 90% of people are suddenly in your field? How many do you think would end up as baristas? You really want to convince everyone to join you? Or are you just that elitist? 

STEM is already getting oversaturated. So entry level wages are going down and people with those degrees are finding it just as hard to get the career they want as the arts students are.

Maybe you'd be able to understand stuff like this if you had, say, a sociology degree. Maybe you'd understand how essential these roles are in a community if you knew anthropology. Maybe you'd be able to pass on that knowledge if you knew how to teach. Maybe you'd be able to sell whatever it is you're developing if you could advertise. But because you don't, someone else needs to. If everyone was an engineer the world would be fucked. All of those fields I mentioned are necessary, and all of them have positions that pay just as well as STEM.

You stick to writing code and soldering irons. Let the other, equally intelligent, people be happy whilst they earn the same amount of money and do what they love and maintain society.

2018-04-humanities-student-major_1355_ucla.txt
For me it was worth it. I've worked in industry, and with a PhD I can also teach at a university, and I like teaching.

In certain very broad majors, a Masters degree can help you specialize. For CS, it helps specialize to a particular part of CS (machine learning, database systems, biomedical etc.). Plenty of people with a BS in CS do great, but it takes time to move up in the ranks at a job from a generalist to a specialist. For majors like math, it can be necessary, unless you learn other skills or get creative with your field of study. Some people can get a BS in Math and then become an actuary, teacher or data analyst, but it's one of those majors that gives a strong foundation for other more applied fields.

Because Masters programs are so short, I recommend at least getting a Masters. It's the best of both worlds. You get a research degree (which can be important in the sciences), and it's a short program. A Ph.D., while usually funded, is a different beast, and is longer. The Ph.D. is basically a license to do research and adds additional credibility that the recipient is competent in scientific method (or in scholarly contributions to social sciences and humanities), since not all schools confer the degree, and *relatively* few people get the degree.

Of course, some people just want to be done with school and go to work. There's nothing wrong with that, but I encourage anyone that is sort-of-interested and questions it, to go to grad school.

2018-04-humanities-student-major_1400_aww.txt
Huh. Kind of outside my specialty. I feel like if you have that kind of skill set already, there are fields that would be really good for you. There are some other subreddits you might look at. The first one that comes to mind is /r/AskAcademia. Something that I have found interesting is that there are computer science programs that have begun to offer hacking as a specialty, cyber security, digital forensics, and stuff like that. Take a foreign language while you are at it too if you are good at that. I have found some students who are in the computer science field excel at languages. Or if you are into the programming side, head in that direction. If you have other interests, double major in something. I had a student double major in pre-law and computer science. He then went to law school and now works for the CIA. Pretty cool. Again, I am in the social sciences so this is not expert knowledge, just my opinion. In my experience, I do encourage students who are in the STEM fields to supplement their studies with some humanities. They seem to excel in those fields as well. One of the fields I have seen computer science students excel in is philosophy and history. Computer science will make you employable! Again, I feel like you should get some specialized advice from some people in the field. Hopefully some people will chime in. There are also some computer science reddits out there that could help. I'm definitely not familiar with them. 


Also, if you have a particular school or schools in mind, they might have reddits. Additionally, see if there are some reddits that talk about specific majors. 

Edit: the reason I suggest the humanities to students is because I feel like it helps them see the subject they are studying from different perspectives. Not because I think they need a lesson in Descartes or something. 

2018-04-humanities-student-major_1680_changemyview.txt
Hi! STEM major here. Looking at your argument, you haven't taken a higher level LIT class, and therefore I don't think you really have grounds to make the comparative without engaging in dialogue with a lit/liberal arts major.

The degree of correctness that exists differs between majors. In STEM, correctness is pretty much set. Unless you are dealing with the most cutting-edge information, there really isn't a ton of debate about whether this triggers that or X cyclizes in the presence of Y. However, the understanding of literature changes from professor to professor. The only real agreed upon point is that a particular piece of writing existed.

I go to a heavily STEM/CS school. Preparing for examinations are half test strategy and half actual learning of content. For an essay or a literature critique, you can't apply the same idea of testing strategy. Because even with all the world's resources available at your fingertips, you have to synthesize the contents in a coherent, persuasive way. I don't have to persuade anyone that my reaction set up is right; it's either correct or incorrect. 

That being said, many STEM majors don't know how to write at all. For all the understanding of jargon and equations, there's a lack of ability to communicate it. In my Biochemistry lab course, we have to synthesize the contents of the previous labs to create a lab report. The professors have to walk the students holding their hands through what you need to include in a lab report. This is a 3000 level class. For all the intelligence in the world, I have found that a lot of STEM majors fail at effectively communicatiing it. Often times, they don't see it as necessary to be able to communicate this stuff, a trait I see commonly in pre-med students. 

I think grades and tests are a poor measure of the difficulty of a subject. Because in my experience with STEM, enough time to memorize and work practice problems will yield the skills to get through a degree. The same cannot be said about literature, where all the time in the world can still yield poor results if the professor decides that they don't like your argument or disagrees with your sources. In STEM, if your sources are valid, they will likely not contradict, whereas in literature valid sources contradict all the time.

It boils down to skills. The skills to be a STEM major are not the same as being a literature major or an art major or a poli-sci major. Even within STEM, being a software engineer is very different from being a microbiologist, which is different from a medical biologist. They aren't comparable because the skillset needed is completely different and the preparation you may or may not have received to succeed in a college-level version of that course are very different. 

2018-04-humanities-student-major_316_singapore.txt
You don't see the hypocrisy in your actions? By shitting on non-STEM students, you're perpetuating the very system you claim to hate. SG is the way it is, because we were poor. We needed money, so we were materialistic and only valued what would allow us to achieve that. That's the previous generation. We as the next generation, can build a better society based on our own values. Our society is the way that it is only because we keep thinking that earning money and making it big is the only thing that matters. Collectively, we can change that. But that is never going to happen if we have people like you with your cynical, defeatist attitude. You think the African Americans won their civil rights by sitting on their ass, blaming society and wallowing in self-pity? You want to change the system, the first step is changing yourself, your own mindset. You can't even take this first step. And instead, you are destructive to the cause.

Maybe as an “enlightened”, soon to be rich, STEM major you aren't aware of this, but already more and more young Singaporeans are willing to take the path less traveled, in the arts, poetry, music, dance. And maybe they're not going to earn as much as they were if they decided to be a lawyer, doctor or engineer. But at least they're happy and doing what they love. If you, or the previous generation don't see the value it that, that's fine. I know even if my children decides to “waste” my money by taking an arts degree and ends up in Starbucks, as long as he's happy with his decisions, I wouldn't begrudge a single cent. Who knows, maybe one of these students may end up as the next Stephen king, or Kanye west. (Both English majors) Or maybe even the next Steve jobs or Jack Ma (liberal arts and English major respectively). Ironic right? In the end, you can't  see that even within your own materialist metrics, non STEM majors are still needed to drive entrepreneurship and to generate wealth. Because a healthy economy and society doesn't work with people blindly pursuing money. Some things are just too abstract to have a dollar value attached to it. The economy flourishes when people are free to pursue their interests, where they can do the best they can and allowing for a diversity in ideas and thinking. That is the Singapore I want to live in. 

BTW it's not like most STEM majors are guaranteed to be doing what they want and making it big. Science majors in NUS are faring even worse than FASS majors according to the employment survey. And engi majors going into finance is pretty much common knowledge by now. So by your metric the best major would be business majors since finance dominates the Singapore economy. Which is not even a god damn STEM subject. 

2018-04-humanities-student-major_4032_EngineeringStudents.txt
1. I am one of your peers. I have a chemistry degree. I also have experience in Non-STEM fields, as I had previously been a student in International Relations, before transferring and changing my degree. 

2. I don't think that's a valid justification to diminish the accomplishments of others, who might not have a STEM degree. Every one has difficulties, and there are aspects of non-STEM courses that can be very challenging, even moreso than my chemistry degree was. Humanities often demand that you apply critical thinking, and reflect on your own ideals and how they may fit into the world. Confronting yourself in that manner can be very difficult, just in a different sense than "How can I model a buffer equilibrium in the reaction A+ 2B - AB2 in Mathematica?" You may have had a difficult time, and you may have felt complaining was one of your only outlets, but my question would be, why does your complaining necessitate the denigration of others' accomplishments?

It's my impression in reading this sub that many STEM majors don't even give those courses the basic respect they deserve to internalize their importance. If you walk into a political science course with the opinion many of the posters here have expressed, of course you won't find any value in it because you didn't apply yourself and treat the material meaningfully. 

I have no idea the context behind you bringing up r/iamverysmart. I haven't once mentioned it. 



2018-04-humanities-student-major_4087_uofm.txt
CoE requires more technical classes while LSA requires more humanities classes. Some of the technical classes will be unrelated to CS (physics, chemistry) but some of them are extremely important depending on what field you want to go into (calc 3, linear algebra are important for things like computer vision and machine learning, for example). Also CoE gives more leeway to count additional CS/technical classes towards your degree with Flexible Technical Elective credits. 

If you want to take a ton of STEM classes, especially math or stats, it's probably better to try to swap to CoE. I'd wait to get here and take some of the classes to see if you actually like them before making that decision though -- just because you enjoyed math in high school does not mean you will enjoy it here. 

Also, it's much easier to get a STEM minor if you're in CoE (CoE is much more lenient about allowing you to double count credits towards both a minor and your major, and many STEM minors have overlapping prereqs with CoE or have upper levels that could satisfy some of your major's requirements).

If you want to branch out and do more humanities/non STEM stuff then LSA is a better choice. Also if you're interested in double majoring, it's much easier if both majors are in the same college (many people try for CS + MATH, which would make CS-LSA the better choice since MATH is in LSA). 

2018-04-humanities-student-major_4101_college.txt
You don't.  

You see, I'm a great speaker, talker and listener. I like talking politics, I like to write creative stories and I'm really good at debates etc. So, I have lots of friends and I love to socialize, I teach little kids in my free time, I help homeless people out at the shelter and in general I care about my community. So it's obvious that I should do well in the Arts/Humanities.

But I'm actually a Computer Science major sitting somewhere right now trying to muster up some random code to make my assignments compile. I spend my days, nights and weekends studying CS theory and how it works. I'm no good at this, I'll be honest.  

However, I am GREAT at everything else I mentioned in the first paragraph.  

So I walk into a tech interview and I do awesome. I spoke elegantly and professionally and they're excited because they think they're going to get some well spoken and competent programmer but I'm no programmer.  

Because here lies the problem with us students who are good at the humanities but not yet good at STEM. We have the other set of skills that most STEM majors lack. So why am I in STEM if my strengths are elsewhere? Why choose to struggle? Why choose to do more than you have to?  

That's the point isn't it? choosing to struggle when you don't have to, choosing to study an area you know nothing about. I get told this all the time "You're crazy to do all that extra stuff", "This is why you're losing your scholarhips", "This is why your GPA is dropping", "Stop taking Cal III or Diff Equation if you don't need it" but my end goal isn't to become some programmer, engineer or desk guardian. For right now, I'm happy to just be learning new stuff. I understand how the world 'ticks' at a much deeper level than most of my STEM peers because I'm not just all about STEM.

There's no need to view the Arts/Humanities as less. They serve a big purpose on the other side aswell, just like STEM serving their own big purpose.

2018-04-humanities-student-major_58_hapas.txt
It's a STEM boy culture thing for sure. Before I changed my major, I was in biochem and I was relentlessly pursued by STEM boys (I look full Asian to white people). Once I switched to humanities (sociology), I got less attention, and the attention I did get wasn't yellow fever-ish. I feel like with humanities boys, they are somewhat to fully aware of the implications and nuances of different interracial relationships because they have to study it, and more successfully avoid playing into stereotypes or dating someone just because of their race. STEM boys tend to be nerdier (a lot at my school were obsessed with anime), and also STEM doesn't include studying things like prejudice and social justice and racism, so they don't really think to examine their own fetishes. (Of course, this is not to say all STEM boys are racist and all humanities boys are angels!! I'm just giving my opinion of what I've observed in both cultures) As for the Asian girls, it could definitely be a white-worshipping thing. It could also be that they're more forward too. The important thing for you to remember is that you are beautiful and smart, and that doesn't change no matter how many people are pursuing you or not. I know how it frustrating it is to feel like you're being passed over, but I promise you'll find your way to a place where you are valued for who you truly are. 

2018-04-humanities-student-major_793_AskWomen.txt
High schools where I live actually strongly encourage students to look into tech and trade schools.

That's awesome! You sound unaware of the social phenomenon of STEM in the US then. STEM is a long-standing, promoted pathway for students in the US, with entire classes often given in middle school to "introduce" STEM careers as better-paying, "smarter" alternatives to the arts and humanities. Frequent media and education seminars focus on how to get more women into STEM, more kids into STEM, making STEM more comprehensible, making STEM less dorky, promoting tech startups, etc etc. Entire magazines like Gadget and Wired are devoted to making STEM careers "the future of America". We get the "how can we push women into STEM?" question on this subreddit frequently. If you haven't experienced any of this, you're incredibly lucky! 

Wherever I've lived in the US, STEM is the major push, so I've never really heard of STEAM. I've lived in primarily urban areas, so while the push for STEM gets a little ridiculous sometimes, most people I know (male and female) chose to follow the arts and humanities anyways (myself included). You educated me in that the A in STEAM stands for not just art as a medium, but also the entire genre of arts and humanities studies, which sounds ridiculous to me. When you look at a program that promotes Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, English, Art, History, and everything else that people go to school for... what's left? Isn't STEAM just "school" in that case? Why the need for a new buzzword? 

To me, "pushing" for STEAM as OP says sounds ridiculous to me because if it really means all the arts and humanities as well as the STEM subjects, all that term seems to do is belittle people in blue-collar work as not worthy to be pushed for. We need blue-collar workers, and "pushing" for more education in a world where most college graduates don't get a job in their careers sounds silly.

I hope that cleared up your confusion! From your comment, it sounds like you live in a much different world than the rest of us.

2018-05-humanities-student-major_1823_cscareerquestions.txt
Your mom is kind of right in that the STEM major adds value to your resume. [Liberal arts students who take on a second degree in a STEM field earned, on average, 9.5 percent more than their liberal arts peers with only one major](https://theconversation.com/does-it-pay-to-get-a-double-major-in-college-74420)

**However, that's because the liberal arts are oversaturated and there's low supply and high demand for STEM right now. I'm not saying liberal arts are inherently less valuable I'm just saying they're oversaturated.**.

[Combining a liberal arts major with STEM or business fields does not increase earnings, indicating little private earnings incentive for students to combine STEM or business majors with liberal arts.](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-benefit-cost-analysis/article/div-classtitlethe-private-and-social-benefits-of-double-majorsdiv/CD1696DBF93DEFE3C2D3A759D6F0895B)

The recruiters wanted the STEM major not the liberal arts degree. Not because double majoring is inherently more valuable. While she's right about the current market value of the STEM degree, she's wrong about the market value of a double major, there is none for employers. 

There's no benefit to employers for you to double major in these two.

The critical question is what would you do with the double major that you couldn't do with one? Do you know what you actually want to do?

You could become a technical writer, essentially a journalist who reports on science and technology. But you don't need a double major for that. 

All of this said, life is not about doing what's best for employers. Double majoring isn't a bad thing by any means if you have the time and money, but for improving employment prospects it's a waste of time and money. It would be purely for your own edification, just make sure you know that. 

2018-05-humanities-student-major_2244_UCI.txt
Ok here's the rundown, there is some hip stuff going on around campus, but you got two major groups of potential event goers on campus: FOB Asians, and STEM guys. The following are generalizations.

STEM guys tend to shit on anything that involves leaving their lab or not studying.

FOB Asians are super status obsessed. Because of this they only go to high profile events (more for the Instagram photos than the experience) like Coachella, Insomniac events, etc. 

With this perfect shitstorm of potential audience, most interesting events on campus don't get great attendance, so people don't bother to host them again. I'm in the film dept. and we have a steady attendance at screenings, but very VERY few outsiders. 

This comment will get mega downvoted because it's true, and most of the subscribers on this subreddit are the aforementioned STEM lab-dwellers. Sometimes you get a mirror held up to your life and you don't like what it looks like, I get it. **If you want proof that I'm not a tin foil hat girl** As of my posting there's one comment that's actually addressing your question. The top comment right now is a snarky remark. 

The student body at UCI primarily consists of students that are either averse to events that won't boost their status among peers, or averse to events in general. Despite this, if you go over to the art or humanities departments and strike up a convo or look at posters you will find stuff. Most of us just don't post the events here because of the extreme adverse reaction, and overall negative stance of most subscribers towards anything that isn't "normal".

Congrats on your admission btw - and no offense if you are STEM, you can break the stereotype maybe!

2018-05-humanities-student-major_2711_PurplePillDebate.txt
This is such nonsense. In my country you can get into a STEM faculty at a bad or below average university with Bs and Cs. If you want to get into any faculty of a top university, you need a straight As.

My cousin  resat one of his papers in his high school graduating examination because he failed it, and he is now a STEM grad with a pharmacy degree. Is his IQ higher or lower than someone who passed their high school exams with As and chooses French literature in university?

I bet if you tested the students who get into the best universities, like Ivy League or Russel Group universities, all their non-STEM students would have higher IQ compared to STEM students at average to below average universities.

_____

Another major failing of your argument is that STEM degree or no STEM degree, people flock to what they can easily make money in. Meaning, they choose a field where they think they have a competitive advantage in maximizing their earning capabiity. Some people choose non-STEM fields because they are very good in Latin or Chinese calligraphy, and wish to become experts. Some people choose subjects which their parents studied, work in or have expertise in, STEM or non STEM, because they are better able to find jobs in that industry.


 If a good-looking woman or man with good vocal range wants to study Theatre and become an actor because he or she has a competitive advantage in that industry, who are you to say they have lower IQ because they did not pick a STEM degree? They are simply maximizing their earning capabilities using their god-given abilities and good looks which 99% of the population do not have, and that is what an actual high IQ person does, not pick STEM and comfort themselves that they are smarter than that other STEMlord. There are people from my high school who scored straight As and went into public relations or advertising after doing a liberal arts degree, because they are quick-witted, creative or naturally sociable and saw that it would be easy to rise to the top in those industries with their personality type. How is that low IQ? They picked the industry where they can compete best in and they probably earn more than the average STEMlords as creative directors in ad agencies.

I have a friend who did a chemistry degree and modelled in university after she won a campus beauty pageant, she became an actress and model who runs her own fashion store even though she could have had a lab rat career. Her main regret? Not starting her modelling and acting career earlier in her teenage years and losing out to more experienced actresses who studied acting professionally. I bet if you gave STEM degree students a chance to instantly become a professional actor, composer, filmmaker, musician, singer, model, sports star, author, or DJ, many of them would choose that over their STEM degree because you can make money easily while having massive social cred. If one lacks the uniquely creative talents to stand out, you pick STEM and comfort yourself that you must have higher IQ than everyone else. It genuinely is sad, because higher IQ does not translate into higher earning capability or an easier and more enjoyable life.

 Actual high IQ people choose fields that they are uniquely suited to compete in, where they know they can stand out, they do not pick STEM because u/Reven311 thinks STEMlords have higher IQ. If I know I can make more money being an art director or cinematographer with my skills, why on earth would I study STEM and do the low IQ thing of pissing my talent away?

2018-05-humanities-student-major_3142_UCSD.txt
Just so you know, humanities majors do have to take STEM classes.  There's no college where they don't have physical science and maths GEs.

You might point out that humanities majors can just take the easy classes like the Phys 1 or Math 10 series while there are no such easy versions of e.g. histroy classes.  Further, some of the colleges require STEM majors to take humanities upper divs (lookin at you TMC significant writing).  But ask yourself how there coud be easy version STEM classes in the first place.  Answer: because there are so many students taking classes in those departments (since everyone needs the maths and the physics to do everything else).  Because there is funding in those departments.  Because, as a consequence, they can actually hire more professors to teach and can therefore have classes at both an advanced and basic level even within lower div classes.

There is no funding for the humanities.  No one enrolls in their classes; no one needs to aside from fulfilling GEs.  So there just isn't even the possibility of offering easy version classes.

Of course, as any STEM major knows, humanities classes are easy As.  You'd think that's a surprise since they can't afford to offer easy versions of their courses.  But note that qualifiers like "easy" are comparative.  And in fact it's better to think of it as there being no hard versions of the humanities courses.  There is no Phys 4 series equivalent, let alone a Phys 2 series equivalent.  There is only the Phys 1 equivalent: all lower div humanities courses.  And once you enter the realm of upper divs, the difference is really that between Phys 1 and Phys 2, not even between Phys 2 and Phys 4.  Why?  Because no one enrolls in the humanities.  Because the department needs those enrollments.  So the humanities are forced to make their classes stupidly easy to up those enrollments.  

Ever notice that there are no pre reqs for almost all philosophy, history, and literature (in English of course) upper divs?  Ever notice that here are pre reqs for almost all STEM upper divs?  That's not because topics in the humanities don't build on each other like they do in maths and science.  You need to understand the Pelopponesian War to understand the rise of Macedon; you need to know basic epistemological and metaphysical distinctions to do philosophy of science; you need at least a passing understanding of past English theatre to understand current English theatre.  But these classes don't have the requisite pre reqs.  Because if they did, no non-major or non-humanities major would enroll in them.  Because if they did, the humanities here would die even more than they have already.  Though maybe death would be better than the sad state they've been reduced to.

So yes, this is a salty post by a humanities major.  But I'm just tired of STEMlords complaining that they have to take history classes and claiming that humanities majors have it easier since they don't have to take hard maths and science courses.  I agree that a humanities major is easier.  But I think it's important to understand why it's easier - it's not because of the subject; it's because the subject exists in a modern STEM-oriented university context.  And I disagree that there are unequal GE demands on humanities vs. STEM majors; there are simply unequal opportunities.

2018-05-humanities-student-major_3673_lostgeneration.txt
But on the other hand, why is engineering always getting bashed on as a discipline in the leftist subreddits? 

I agree with your premise, but there are a lot of STEM people that say things like, "all English majors make ironic BuzzFeed articles and latte art." And yes, it is a trap. If you look around on Reddit about people majoring in History, X Studies, English, or whatever, it is pretty standard to hear people basically chide anyone that majored in those field and went into debt or question if they learned anything at all. So, I think a fair bit of that STEM bashing is reactionary. 

Though, I also think it's a bit of jealousy as well. STEM departments get funded in Academic circles better than many liberal arts programs, and to that end, they get frustrated at that. 

I think as far as progressing socialist ideology, I think they view STEM as the current capitalist idol, and so they bash it for that reason. (Outside of what may be argued about funding allocation in schools and all that.)

Personally, I get the frustration when you've worked hard toward getting a degree in some field, only to have someone as them if they ever considered STEM, especially if they're not math-oriented or that sort of thing. Though I also think it's really malproductive and pointless. 

I majored in a liberal arts field at a major engineering university, and the animosity between the two fields seemed to be to the detriment of both. Engineering for people requires understanding people's culture, and sometimes engineering is a part of culture. Weird academic fields like folklore will gladly look at "foodways" as a topic, but assumes that toolmaking is strictly utilitarian and has no culture to it, which is far from true. Assuming that the two can't benefit from one another is shortsighted and highlights the the worst part of the critics.

2018-05-humanities-student-major_637_lostgeneration.txt
Aren't nearly as needed? We can't all be in STEM, or there wouldn't be any jobs in STEM at all for all those new STEM grads. This argument is asinine, and always has been asinine. That's the first part.

The second part of your insinuation is also based on feelings and not hard data. [A vast majority of new bachelor degrees] (https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=37) are in STEM already, with most liberal degrees having gone down between 5-15% in the last 5 years. The reason why STEM is paying so much atm is because there is a huge job market to fill... but do you think those competitive wages are going to stay around with more and more people going into stem? Supply and demand definitely matters in the work world too. We're just gonna ignore the elephant in the room when it comes to [ageism in the tech side of things](https://www.cio.com/article/3198472/careers-staffing/the-hard-truths-of-navigating-ageism-in-it.html) - where most computer folks don't make it to retirement age before being canned for younger workers.

And, as a third point of contention... where are we gonna get teachers, or historians, or music, or art, or literature, or a SLEW of important things society needs? A society is only worthwhile if it has both technology/science/mathmatics WITH cultural things like the humanities and social sciences.

 a lot of the bullshit degrees that people are getting today wasn't even around

*weren't* even around. See. You DO still need folks in those "bullshit degrees" to teach you tech folks grammar/spelling!

2018-05-humanities-student-major_705_college.txt
What about the STEM majors who don't find jobs after graduation? What about STEM majors who focus on a niche, non-lucrative portion of science that needs to be studied and appreciated but doesn't pay bills?

Why should we limit the studies of non-STEM topics to the wealthy? What if a student from a poor neighborhood wants nothing more than to be a music major, and he's accepted to Julliard School of Music and has the potential for an extremely successful career, but can't pay for college himself?

Why wouldn't we want to maintain a well-rounded society? We need philosophy majors, history majors, even women's studies majors because these people focus on niches and become experts in things that benefit others. 

Should we give loans to finance majors? They don't really help people for the most part, in fact most of them simply want to make some bank. 

Should we give loans to people that earn money, or should we give loans to people that better others' lives?

Who gets to decide which majors are worth spending loans on?

What if someone decides to change from an approved to a nonapproved major? 

I totally get why some people think STEM etc. should take top priority in schools. Hell, I'm a biology major. The key thing to remember though is that we need smart, diverse people in every field. Loans shouldn't purely be given to those who will major in something hugely lucrative, that would be a shameful waste of our resources and a huge dig against minority populations. 

I would highly recommend you read a website like aeon.co and gain some appreciation for those fields that are not STEM. STEM isn't the end all be all of education, not even close. In fact, universities used to focus purely on liberal arts. People who studied liberal arts were respected. Unfortunately industry has created a shift to STEM, and the accessibility of university has resulted in a lot of easy liberal arts majors, resulting in a lower concentration of brilliant liberal arts students. 

2018-05-humanities-student-major_758_TrueReddit.txt
First, I just wanna say- you're using American stats for Scotland. I'm sure STEM is big there too, but just FYI America doesn't represent the whole world. 

Scotlands economy is very different from Americas economy- work *in general* is simply harder to come by, so naturally it's rate of under employed people will be higher than the rate in the US. 

Anyways, this is a great time to get in to STEM- if your grades are good enough to get in to an impacted college.

Meanwhile, many colleges are so full of STEM majors that they're begging for humanities majors. 

UCSD in San Diego, for instance, has the PATH program where they will literally pay you to go there during the summer you transfer from a community college. 

Lower GPA requirements, classes that are easier to get in to, and other programs/incentives can very well make getting a humanities major worth getting if you don't have the 4.0 needed to get in (due to STEM being severely impacted).

That being said, you should still choose your major wisely- a degree in foreign language like Mandarin, a philosophy major, an English/Writing major or a History major will all be infinately more useful than a major in interpretive dance.

The humanities absolutely still have their place in society- and as more people get STEM degrees and humanities majors become more rare, demand for them will only go up. 

Not everyone can be a computer programmer, nor does everyone want to be, or should be.

2018-05-humanities-student-major_877_ApplyingToCollege.txt
Normally, I'd be ok with different opinions. I didn't even downvote you because I don't believing in downvoting. I think that the discourse that we're having (which by the way, is language, and thus humanities) is great and allows for discussion to be had. However, you seem to have a very contemputuous outlook on humanities, going so far as to sneer them. You literally say that they are not as important as STEM fields.

For your first point. Let's take kanye west as an example. True, all his instruments we're probably invented by some sort of engineer or stem person. You might argue that music is based upon physics. However, there would be no use for these inventions if there were no humanities majors. Where would the engineers, sound designers, and scientists be without Kanye to employ them? Think of how many people he needs in order to run the show, how many jobs he creates in all sorts of industries. In doing so, this stimulates our economy.

2. I didn't say that you don't think in STEM, I said that humanities also makes us think. There are so many notable philosophers that have shaped the world around us. Im not gonna name them all, but how many people have the influence of Sarte, Camus, Nietzsche, or Socrates? They have shaped our way of thinking, even in scientists.

3. Meaning in life is extremely necessarily, it allows us to live. It gives us will, motivation, to do what we want. Perhaps we want to chase money, in which case we'll open a business. Perhaps we want to create something, in which case we'll choose a STEM major. Perhaps we want to create art, in which case we'll go into humanities, etc. From humanities we derive our own meaning of life, in which we can apply it to whatever we want in this world.

4. True, writing utensils were created by engineers, but they were put to use by artists. What's the point of building a bridge if you can't draw it out first? What's the point of deciding to out up a stop sign if you don't take into account how it should look? Humanities has enhanced stem, and continues to do so.

5. Not necessarily. It is stems objective to be efficient. It is humanities objective to be moral. Sometimes these morals clash. Obviously it's in our best interest to wage war, because if we win, we get spoils. This is what happened up to the 20th century, when artists, writers and the like captured the ugliness of war. When we built the atomic bomb, humanities said not to use it. When we made chlorine gas, humanities said not to use it. Our world would be desolate if we allowed science to control it.

I hope my answers give you much needed insight into our world. I hope you're able to change and see past yourself. I think you would benefit in reading Nietzsche's The Gay Science and Thus Spake Zarathustra, as it will explain the advancement of science

2018-06-humanities-student-major_1628_vancouver.txt
hey bud. I work in the arts, actually making art. I don't have a side gig. It's all I do.

When I graduated with a Fine Arts degree, it was common knowledge that 5 years after graduation only 20% of the class would be working in the arts, and in 10 years, only one in ten would still be in the arts. This has largely held true. It's not exactly an employable degree when comparing graduate numbers to employment numbers. Or, the jobs available aren't of a calibre to support the standard of living that people hope for or expect. An especially large falloff happens when people start to have kids. So people who study art end up migrating to other fields to be able to support themselves. To a field that's more gainful. It's the sensible thing to do for a lot of people. 

There certainly are a lot of jobs in the creative industries, especially in Vancouver. On average, their rate of pay is lower than that of people in stem fields. The exceptions in stem are the fields which have been over-run by global talent, and wages are kept nice and low to the advantage of the employers.

We notice the decline of cultural activity in Vancouver as people in the arts get forced out because they can't afford to stay. Although the problem of affordability in Vancouver exists for people in all fields (except for students and homemakers), I don't see the stem field workers having as hard a time.

I agree that the push for stem has overloaded certain fields, but on average I highly doubt the number of people who graduate from stem fields and end up somewhere different is as high as it is in the arts. I equate that to employability.

But ok, tell me to get fucked, I clearly don't know what i'm talking about.

2018-06-humanities-student-major_2046_GenderCritical.txt
How are you certain it was family and societal pressure and not personal preference?  WTF is wrong with going into the humanities or health sciences?  Apparently only stupid people go into them.    Oh, that's right:  they are often female-dominated, and those are always "shitty" careers, right?  Guess what?  STEM careers are not all that, but female-dominated careers like teaching, social work, and nursing are often fulfilling in another way even though they are denigrated in pay and prestige.

The problem here is the denigration of what women do.  STEM jobs tend to be overpaid because MEN do them--NOT because of "supply and demand" or that "intelligent" people go into them, or that they are "hard."  It is because MEN do them.  The minute women dominate a field, the pay goes down EVERY SINGLE TIME.  This is the major reason why women are harassed when they go into a male field.  Men think they are entitled to make more money than women thanks to the "family wage" idea, and women who try and enter the field challenge this notion that men should make more because they are men and providers for families.

As an aside, being an engineer does not confer a person as a "genius."  Case in point is sociopathic billionaire Charles Koch, who has three engineering degrees from MIT.  Even the author of the book *Democracy in Chains* was bowled over by his "impressive" degrees by claiming he is a "brilliant" man because he has three engineering degrees from MIT.  No,  he is a sociopathic crackpot who simply earned three engineering degrees decades ago when he was a young man.  He is anything but a "genius."

2018-06-humanities-student-major_225_college.txt
I know plenty of people who make six figs and majored in the humanities. If you're prolific enough in a given field, move to a place where the job outlook is good for it (a lot of people miss this part), and make connections in the right places, there are potential six-fig salaries for almost any given major.

However, that takes a whole lot of extra work (and sometimes luck) than getting to six-figs with a traditional STEM field major (biology, econ, engineering, etc.) or track (pre-med). My advice is to find what you're good at. If you know you're decent in STEM now and you can keep up the momentum (in the case of pre-med, getting as many A's as possible), I think it would be wise to stick with that. If it doesn't work out and you consistently struggle with the classes, don't stay on a sinking ship and unnecessarily jeopardize your GPA. As you take the intro classes and pre-reqs you'll have a good idea pretty early on which STEM field (if any) suits you best.

If you fall in love with a humanities course, you can major in it while still being pre-med track (this is the route I'm taking right now). A lot of the time pre-med students become Bio or Chem majors because the reqs happen to  overlap, but you don't necessarily have to. Dealing with two unrelated sets of reqs can be kind of hard, but I think it's worth it. I've even heard that some humanities majors have a higher acceptance rate into med school than science majors.

2018-06-humanities-student-major_2345_relationships.txt
I had a guy friend in college who was a neuroscience major, president of the neuroscience society, accepted into med school, and all this other stuff. One time I was telling him about my liberal arts classes and started hedging, "Well I know it's not as hard as majoring in science..."

He stopped me right there. "Don't say that. It's still difficult, it's just different."

I'm telling this story because I want to demonstrate that being into STEM/medical fields doesn't mean degrading non-STEM fields. Men can go to medical school AND say 'wow art history and makeup are out of my depth." TBH that interaction with my college friend was really formative for me; it gave me a lot of confidence in what I do and taught me not to degrade it just because it doesn't directly involve science. Your boyfriend appears to be going the opposite way, denigrating 'artsy shit' because he perceives it to be easy or for unintellectual people, when it's not. There's definitely a gendered component to this too, since STEM is male dominated. 

I think it is a red flag for a man to put down certain hobbies/fields immediately after meeting friends in those hobbies/fields. It shows that he doesn't value the skills your friends have because of a stereotype, and pulling a "you're not like other girls" move is just a way of saying "i don't respect women...except for you." This is a dangerous and unsteady pedestal to be on. And at 32 years old, he should have a broader view of what women can like and become. 

2018-06-humanities-student-major_2497_ChapoTrapHouse.txt
Mech. Engineering & Physics major (junior year undergrad) here. Yeah, we're obviously not all like that. However, the relevant principles STEM fields teach are time-invariant and based on a mechanized, Cartesian analysis of systems (which is definitely necessary for analysis in those fields). I believe the combination of these two aspects of STEM education do indeed cause many 'STEMLords' to feel like the whole world functions like this or is meaningfully analyzable in this way.

This causes an unfortunate ignorance of historical factors as well as emergent phenomena from 'particulated' physical systems, which culminates in a lack of understanding in biological/ecological, psychological, sociological, and importantly Marxist theories, as well as the history, humanities, and the social/political sciences in general imo. On top of this, the bestowed prestige, real difficulty, and mathematical, objective certainty focus involved in  STEM fields cause some people who obtain a degree to fall into the iamverysmart category and speak out with 'higher-level knowledge' in other fields as well with hubris *more often than others* (because tbh we all sometimes speak out about fields of study we don't know about too well).

It's not totally a STEMLord's fault for the way that they are though; it all comes back to the system if capitalism and the division of labor, which has a great impact on what, how, and why we learn.

But that's just my take.

2018-06-humanities-student-major_2601_AskEngineers.txt
I remember I commented on a STEM meme I saw on a non-STEM subreddit a while back with the same humor I use with my peers about engineering majors being overworked and liberal arts majors having it much easier. I even tried to joke about some stereotypical engineering mannerisms, like telling people they won't ever make money in x non-STEM field. I was sitting with quite a few downvotes before I edited the comment clarifying I wasn't trying to be an asshole, and upon reflection I realized that what I wrote could have been construed as rude: from my experience as an undergrad in an engineering program the major can be a bit of an echo chamber with an unusual way of empathizing. "Race to the bottom" mentalities of "oh I am more overworked than you are" are common, as is deflecting stress by putting down other fields, which I think can come across as cold to those who aren't used to it. At the point I am at right now, everybody seems to be of a mind to one-up each other in something, typically professional development.

Every now and again I'll say something to my non-STEM major friends and it will come across a bit too cold. Everyone in my major has severe gallows humor, and I remember one time I made a dark joke a bit too soon that would have been par for the course with other engineering majors, but was a bit too much for other casual social scenarios.

Social isolation can be common in college, aside from study groups, and even then everything can become a little "goal oriented" I find, where I rush through social interactions the same way I might try to get through a lab report efficiently. The only time I had a serious relationship I didn't know what I was doing and just let it stagnate until she broke up with me, and I always feel better working with concrete subjects that I can at least have the potential to understand: humans are complicated and sometimes I just do not want to have to deal with all of that.

TL,DR: Can confirm, I've had complaints. Might actually be unable to empathize with people anymore.

2018-06-humanities-student-major_436_ABCDesis.txt
Lots of factors:

----------------

* Back in India, the demarcation between arts and science and commerce begins at grade 10. There are few arts and humanities classes after that grade for science students. Which is a good thing because ... 

* The fields are taught badly. It is easy to see tons of outright BS being peddled in those fields, particularly history. This becomes apparent at some level to everyone by high school. It figures because ...

* Those fields are filled by 3rd rate intellects, and there are a ton of sycophants and nepotism is rife. There is little quality control and even the top people in the fields get away with blatantly unethical practices. In some cases unethical practices become the path to career advancement. This is unlikely to change because ...

* Driven by jobs, by and large the best students go into science, the next cut into commerce and the bottom of the pack into arts. This is useful for employers. They use this trend for filtering, even for non-STEM jobs. This has been happening for generation after generation, with the result being that those fields are associated with 3rd rate intellects. This is less pronounced in the US, but the same trend is there.

So it goes in a vicious circle .. as long as you consider the fields formally. 

Informally though, Indians love those fields. 




2018-06-humanities-student-major_751_csun.txt
Holy shit I never met a more fucked up person than you. Looking around your post history you spend an unhealthy amount of time hurting other peoples feelings and justifying it because you maybe have a few good points. Learn some empathy. You have no idea what my family situation is and you throw that shit around.

Actually, I can be just as shit to you as you are to people.

You joined the military (thank you for your service) because you didn't amount to anything when you graduated high school. You still don't amount to anything remotely respectable now because you're probably taking an internship at a small firm doing bitch work and you'll graduate making shit money because that is all you are good for. Have fun always being middle class. Unlike you I plan on being better than what my parents achieved because thats how the world works.

Edit: I'll stoop again to your level again.

You criticize people for not being a STEM or Business Major because you think people with humanities, arts, or social sciences are useless. How does it feel pretending that you can actually do the math required? You probably can't even pass basic calculus. If you think these majors are useless, then what does that say about your own? We are both Accounting majors, but the major doesn't mean anything. It is what you do with it. Unlike you I am going to have more power than you, more impact in society, significantly more money than you, and a more substantial life than the pathetic one you call your own.

2018-07-humanities-student-major_1674_premed.txt
Public health/English lit.

I'm definitely happier in these majors than I would be studying biochem or pursuing another STEM major. I don't really have a backup plan for medicine and I knew med school would be essentially all science classes, so I decided to study something I enjoyed.

Literature and language classes are incredibly underrated. In my opinion, most premeds and many STEM majors (not all, but definitely a large portion) aren't very convincing writers or conversationalists. They may have perfect grades and know the names of every bone in the hand, but they cannot "sell" themselves on paper or in person. I've gotten several competitive pure science internships and scholarships, despite being a humanities major and having an average sGPA, and I'm pretty sure my personal statements played a role in this. Also, these classes help to develop critical thinking and analysis skills, something that cannot be memorized. 

Public health has been particularly helpful in developing my interpersonal skills and ability to articulate health topics. As part of my field work requirement, I do a lot of community outreach with disadvantaged communities and have a lot of practice speaking to people with varying levels of health literacy. I think premeds forget that part of healthcare is the *care* itself. Medicine is not just about knowing (through memorization) the disease and its treatment; you also have to be able to communicate these ideas and their importance to the patient. 

My parents are actually proud that I'm studying English haha. My dad was a chem/physics major and they're bothimmigrants, so it's huge to them that I'm pursuing a degree in a "difficult" field.  

2018-07-humanities-student-major_2703_languagelearning.txt
A major in Spanish is going to be similar to a major in English or Latin or just about any other humanities subject.  There are *some* jobs that will deal directly with the subject, but most of the jobs you open up by getting the major won't.  At least, most jobs in the U.S. won't.  That's not to say that jobs are hard to come by.  It just means that it's easy to overlook a whole world of stuff you could be doing.

Most humanities majors land in some variation of a generic office job.  This probably doesn't sound exciting to someone who is 21, but in the long run, it means you get opportunities to move up and make a bunch of money, and you get to work in an air conditioned office, and you get to go home at 5 every day.  There are far worse things to be than an office worker.

A lot of office jobs are dull, but there are some that are at least somewhat stimulating.  I've seen people with degrees similar to yours landing jobs as business analysts.

These jobs do require gaining some more technical skills, but you'll need those skills no matter what you do.  You can go out and get a STEM PhD and you'll still need to learn some basic office skills to be employable.  Those skills are *really* easy to pick up,

Really, most bachelor's degrees don't prepare you for any *specific* job, because you're always going to fall behind the candidate with a master's or a doctorate unless you get one of those yourself, so you're getting a lot of vague advice because that's just how it works.  You need a bachelor's degree to get most office jobs, but the specific type of degree won't dictate which industry you land in, usually.

Obviously, there are a *few* exceptions, since engineering majors get engineering jobs, and math, statistics, CS, and physics majors can get certain technical jobs with just a bachelor's degree (those even they do a lot better with an MS -- I can tell you from experience that you learn a heck of a lot more in grad school than you do as an undergrad in those subjects).  There are some programs that are more professional than academic, like nursing, too.

Enjoy what you're studying, and leverage it as well as you can, but don't expect anything too specific.  Not only are jobs doing things with different languages hard to come by, you have a ton of competition for them.

2018-07-humanities-student-major_3272_slatestarcodex.txt
Edit: I missed the fact that this was already [discussed last week](/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9174vt/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_23_2018/e364cz6/)

--------------------------------

Bed Schmidt on *Sapping Attention*: [There is a crisis in the Humanities](http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2018/07/mea-culpa-there-is-crisis-in-humanities.html).

In short, the number of college majors in US universities in the Humanities areas (English, History, Languages, etc) has fallen dramatically since 2008. Check out the graph at the link.

Schmidt writes:

One thing I learned in a humanities field is that people with strong opinions are always eager for a crisis because it gives a chance to trot out solutions they came up with years earlier. Little-c conservatives tend to argue that the humanities must return to some set of past practices: teaching Great Works or military history. As I said above, these arguments tend to be misguided--they often assume laughable propositions (yes, colleges still teach Shakespeare), and they don't match the contours of the humanities' decline. Practicing academics tend to write pieces arguing that some pedagogical tactic they've found to work (flipped classrooms! joint majors with CS! community integration! non-traditional assignments!) needs to be more widely adopted. Big-picture thinkers argue that we need to "make the case" for the skills taught in humanities fields, since a society where citizens lack empathy (which you get from reading novels) or a sense of their history (which is often generalized into a pan-humanities virtue) or an ability to realize a figured base at the keyboard (which is what I spent my humanities credits on) is an impoverished and endangered one.

I don't have a solution to peddle. But the drop in majors since 2008 has been so intense that I now think there is, in the only meaningful sense of the word, a crisis. That is: we are in a momentum of rapid change in which decisions are especially important, and will have continuing ramifications. If you still have the same opinions you did in 2010 or 2013, it's worth reassessing the situation. Unless current trends reverse rapidly and for several years, humanities education in the 2020s will have to be different than it was in the 2020s.


For what it is worth, as a full-time English professor for 14 years, I can confirm this same trendline at the small private unverisity where I teach.

Schmidt again:


Here are the general points.

1\. No matter what baseline you use, virtually every humanities major from big, old ones like English to small, newer ones like gender studies went into significant decline around the time of the 2008 financial crisis.

2\. Rather than recover with the economy, that decline accelerated around 2011-2012. That period constitutes an inflection point for a variety of majors in and out of the humanities. Though it may have slowed a bit in the last few years, there's little sign that the new post-2011 universe holds signs of a turnaround.

3\. More humanistic social sciences like sociology or political science are also caught in the undertow: the big winners are mostly concentrated in the STEM fields.

4\. These trends are widespread across institutions that they may reflect student preferences formed before they see a college classroom.


2018-08-humanities-student-major_2000_NavyBlazer.txt
I 100% agree, along with biology and chemistry.  The days of "oh teehee, I don't need math and science!" are over.  Learn it when you're in college and not when you realize that the best lawyer jobs are in biotech and you haven't taken a science class since high school.

And don't @ me with some nonsense about how you want to go into corporate blah blah law and you're not interested in biotech/pharma/tech/STEM.  Guess which corporations you're going to be representing?  

And this isn't a push to major in STEM, it's a push to be well-rounded.  Pick your major and focus on it, but take that anthropology course, take some STEM classes, take a few history classes as well.  

Other suggestion: take one class that you think will be complete and utter humanities bullshit and go in with a good attitude, try hard, put effort in, and figure out why that course might be important, or at least why it's being offered.  The class itself might not actually teach you practical, applicable information, but it will most likely benefit you intellectually by making you at least examine your own biases.  Why did you think it was useless and can you articulate why, and if that changed?  Do you understand why it's offered, and apply that lesson elsewhere, or did you think it was a waste of time for everyone, and can you articulate why?  Were you engaged and thinking?  Was it enjoyable -- did you like learning about that stuff?  Was it interesting?  Did it give you a new perspective?  Did you learn how to approach something differently?  Those are skills and perspectives you need as a lawyer, and are just as important as econ if you want to be halfway decent.

2018-08-humanities-student-major_2509_TrueReddit.txt
From this [report](https://cgsnet.org/ckfinder/userfiles/files/Graduate%20Enrollment%20%20Degrees%20Fall%202015%20Final.pdf) (Table B.18), 82% of graduate students in business are US citizens.  Fields with  80% domestic students were: Arts/Humanities, Business, Education, Health Sciences, Public Administration, and Social / Behavioral Sciences (biological sciences was 77%).  Fields that international students outnumbered domestic students is Engineering (55%) and Math / Computer Science (56%).  

Granted, this study comes from the GRE people so maybe their data related to business schools is not complete.  Also, this just classifies US citizen or not.  I would argue that all international students should not be lumped together.  What a student from Brazil is looking for could be quite different than a student from China. 

The more I have thought about this, there is another big reason that number of graduate student is a poor indicator of academic success.  Universities want international students.  My university has an entire department dedicated to recruiting international students.  They have recruiters that go to other countries.  They pay people in other countries to steer students our way.  It is a big, big operation.  We want them because they pay full out-of-state tuition.  For us, the entire rest of the university has 2 recruiters for domestic grad students (and they really just get students into the MBA or MEd programs).  It was once said by someone here that it is easier to recruit a student from India than from Indiana.  

2018-08-humanities-student-major_2940_CriticalTheory.txt
That's what you get with capitalism.

​

In the country where I live public funding for higher education has consistently been cut since the late 70s, leaving most of the funding to private investors and donors (i.e. the business world). Even though almost all of the universities in this country are public, it is now large companies who decide what is a worthwhile education. The humanities, sociology and anthropology have disappeared into the margins of higher education in this country as  a result. (Coincidentally these are all disciplines that are inherently critical of society. They justified it during the cold war with the threat of communism.) While the stem, management, law and international relations departments get major corporate funding. The current government is the first to increase spending on higher education since the 70s, but it is to make up for the fact that they have been starting to engage in trickle down economics. Furthermore, all of that extra funding is going to stem.

​

Meanwhile a lot of people complain that barely anyone knows the history of this country, and the atrocities that have been committed in name of profit, anymore. (You get taught straight up lies about this country's colonial history in secondary school.) And people deny the existence of everyday racism, sexism and homophobia. And poor people are considered people who have never tried doing things. It's laughable that this country is considered socialist by our own media and the anglophone world. There has never been a socialist government.

2018-08-humanities-student-major_3182_AskReddit.txt
[Median earnings for a person  with a humanities degree in 2015 was $52,000](https://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatordoc.aspx?i=64)

Beyond that, [the earnings gap between humanities and other fields is well within the margin of error](https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/08/the-humanities-face-a-crisisof-confidence/567565/)

**"Much of that evidence does indicate that humanities majors are probably slightly worse off than average—maybe as much as one more point of unemployment and $5,000 to $10,000 a year in income. Finance and computer-science majors make more; biology and business majors make about the same. But most of the differences are slight—well within the margins of error of the surveys. One analysis actually found that humanities majors under the age of 35 are actually less likely to be unemployed than life-science or social-science majors. Other factors, like gender, matter more: Men with terminal humanities B.A.'s make more money than women in any field but engineering. Being the type of person inclined to view a college major in terms of return on investment will probably make a much bigger difference in your earnings than the actual major does.**

**In other areas of the economy, we view these kinds of differences with equanimity. The difference between humanities majors and science majors, in median income and unemployment, seems to be no more than the difference between residents of Virginia and North Carolina. If someone told to me not to move to Charlotte because no one there can make a living, I would never take them seriously. But worried relatives express the same concerns about classics majors every day, with no sounder evidence."**

2018-08-humanities-student-major_3192_lawschooladmissions.txt
Thanks for writing in. To your first question, about applying ED, I'm really not an ED expert, so I'm hesitant to provide potentially misleading advice. I will say that I did not apply ED and I suspect that, for most applicants, applying ED doesn't confer a significant advantage and may, in fact, be disadvantageous (in terms of reducing chances of getting merit funding).

To your second question, GPA and LSAT are the two most important factors, by far, in an application. A degree from a very small handful of tippy top colleges probably confers an advantage, but that effect is probably limited to schools like MIT or Yale or Princeton or whatnot. And a degree from, say, an unaccredited or online-only school would probably raise a red flag. But aside from these few exceptions, I don't think law school adcoms really care about where applicants went to college.

A STEM major also confers an advantage, since the lion's share of applicants have liberal arts backgrounds. But school prestige and STEM major are both "soft" factors. GPA and LSAT are still the most critical, and IMO should be maximized at all costs. I certainly wouldn't recommend that someone major in STEM solely to increase his/her chances of getting into a good law school - such a move could very well backfire, as it's often harder at any given school to get a high GPA in a STEM major.

All in all, I think it's good that you're starting to think about this now and plan ahead, but all you really need to focus on for the next few years is doing well in college. And make sure to enjoy the experience as well! You only go to college once, and you don't want to miss out (or even worse, burn out) by pushing yourself too hard.

2018-08-humanities-student-major_3263_Economics.txt
I agree with the first bit you've stated, but the last chunk is nonsense. It's easy to look down on people who didn't major in engineering or some other field with a strong job market, but it's important to remember a few things to put everything in context.

First, not everyone wants to be or can be engineer. Many are not interested in the work. Others don't have the math skills. There are other similar technical fields out there, but it's the same principal. Nursing school isn't for everyone either.

Second, if everyone did go to school for engineering, your job prospects would be in the toilet. It only pays well because it's a difficult job that not everyone wants to do. If everyone eschewed the arts and humanities in favor of STEM positions, the job market would tank for many fields.

Third, the education requirements for many jobs have increased substantially over the last few decades. The jokes about anthropology degrees making qualified applicants to work barista positions evoke contemptuous laughter, but people forget that to get a job as a middle manager pushing paper you need a bachelor's in *something* in this day and age. For every engineering position out there, dozens of positions exist for someone with a generic bachelor's degree and half a brain.

It's anecdotal, I know, but my wife made more with her MA in dance (working in fields entirely unrelated to dance) than I could with BS degrees in biology and chemistry. I ended up landing an awesome job, but they hired me because of the experience I gained while getting a master's in anthropology. My job prospects expanded significantly when I had 'M.S.' after my name when my STEM degrees got me nowhere.

2018-08-humanities-student-major_455_askphilosophy.txt
It looks like research is still pretty sparse and mixed on the subject. There's some consensus that double-majoring in a STEM subject increases the earnings of liberal arts majors, but it's still debated whether that's because the combination is desirable or because employers just think of them as STEM majors. See i.e. [here](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-benefit-cost-analysis/article/div-classtitlethe-private-and-social-benefits-of-double-majorsdiv/CD1696DBF93DEFE3C2D3A759D6F0895B)

A number of my students are hired as business consultants, and have directly reported positive remarks from employers about their philosophy/STEM double majors. Prestigious consultancies like to hire people with STEM degrees, since they (wrongly, IMO) regard them as the clearest and most rigorous thinkers, and rightly regard them as able to work with any data the business world might throw at them. But they're not keen on hiring nerds or wallflowers, and philosophers are trained to write and communicate well, give effective presentations, etc. So I've had students report back that employers were impressed with their combination of analytical abilities and presentation skills.

My own experience as a math/phil double major was similar. Briefly, people find math majors intellectually intimidating, rigorous and clear, but suspect they're all incapable of interacting with clients. (I neglected to tell my interviewers that my philosophy major was far more intellectually challenging). They said I was one of the more articulate and presentable math majors I'd encountered, and that they valued my combination of skills. Now of course, there are other double majors that would have opened me up for particular specialized positions (math/stats;  math/comp sci; math/physics; etc.) which I was locked out of due to lack of skills. But I think that a number of other doors were opened.

There's often an unfair evidential burden imposed in discussions of employability. Namely, the person who raises the question is perfectly aware that the academic literature on these subjects is sparse and woefully inadequate, but expects their target (usually an advocate of the humanities) to document the employability of their students with the same rigor as they might establish the effects of taxation on the labor market.

I hope that one day we'll be in a position to meet that burden, but in the meantime a few students, plausible argument, and some anecdotal evidence is the best I've got for you.

2018-08-humanities-student-major_941_rpg.txt
Let me see if I can explain better.  
You seem to be utilizing some definition of STEM that assigns a certain level of difficulty or worthiness or shared requirements to the fields contained in it (albeit without disparaging the worthiness of other fields, to your credit.)  
I'll speak from experience- some feats of engineering are stupid, easy, or both.  Some technologies are worthless.  Many non-STEM jobs require much more critical thinking than many engineering positions.  


Secondly- of course the arts aren't automatically included in STEM- that's why the article you took issue with referenced STEAM instead.  STEM as a term isn't meant to describe a field in the way that engineering, or science, or even humanities is.  It was originally used in attempts to steer young people towards certain careers that tend to be beneficial for them and for society.  That's what the 4 (now 5) disparate categories have in common- not their difficulty or value or even a similar required set of skills or aptitudes.  Since the Arts are now considered to have the same value to individuals and to society, that's why they are shifting to STEAM.

Finally, (and this is a point that hasn't really been touched on) including Arts in a STEM degree doesn't degrade both.  In my experience, people who venerate STEM tend to struggle in areas of creativity, open-mindedness, and social tasks.  Adding more Arts-centric courses to a STEM degree doesn't dilute what an individual can achieve in, say, an engineering career but actually enhances it.  I can't say for sure, but I'd assume the opposite is also true.

2018-09-humanities-student-major_1407_Negareddit.txt
I know there are regular posts in the philosophy subreddit that go to great, inflated word counts to talk about how philosophy courses are needed to build a foundation for critical thinking early in education but...

I'm not sure I've seen people saying that STEM fields don't use/teach/need/whatever critical thinking. I mean, I'm sure those comments are out there. I guess I'm just not noticing them because I'm not in STEM?

The whole issue is the push for STEM majors, the stripping of funding from humanities programs at state universities and redirecting to STEM programs. This is a result of state colleges becoming more "results-oriented" and being run with a mindset closer to that of a for-profit company, so programs that lead more directly into private sector jobs are given more emphasis in terms of funding and development. The kneejerk reaction from the humanities has been to shit on STEM fields and programs, trying to call out things people learn in the humanities that they (supposedly) cannot learn anywhere else. Things that would be useful even if you're a civil engineer. Things like critical thinking.

I would imagine that whether or not you learn critical thinking in a way that is useful would depend a lot more on your early education (thus the repeated calls for philosophy courses in middle school) and your individual instructors in university, less on your particular program or desired field of study.

2018-09-humanities-student-major_1408_Negareddit.txt
Two things:

1. STEM majors aren't the problem. STEM-lords are. The difference is a chasm. STEM majors are nice people who studied Engineering, or Biology, etc and went to work as a pharmaceuticals researcher or software developer. STEM-lords are the subset that say women aren't good at math and science.

2. A lot of critical thinking comes from the arts. STEM majors, to be blunt, teach you how to think about a specific class of problems in a specific manner. To actually gain critical thinking skills in STEM, you either go into research as a PhD or have several years work experience to get exposed to real-world phenomena, instead of toy problems. Most liberal arts majors such as Literature (in is various forms), Philosophy, Political Science, and Gender Studies have critical thinking at their core. STEM majors teach you how to understand engineering and biological phenomena in a toy setting, etc, and how to solve problems of that nature. Liberal arts expose you to real world problems and writings and thoughts from the get-go. In Literary majors, you actually read stuff written by people and published out there. In Philosophy, you learn about the evolution of ethics over the span of history, and how it actually impacted the world. In Political Science, you analyze actual legal documents. In Gender Studies, you study the effect of social constructs on gender disparities. None of these are spherical chickens in a vacuum. A STEM major gets exposure to such a level of work after a few years at work or during PhD studies.

I say this as a Electrical Engineer BS - CS PhD who took several Liberal Arts classes to broaden their perspectives. They do help tremendously improving your scope and hone your ability to think critically - far more than STEM classes. Ignoring the grading disparities in some institutions, I think STEM is easier than Liberal Arts because almost anyone in STEM can get a job, but you really have to be the best of the best to make an impact in the Arts. The person who comes in last in medical school is still a doctor, but a music professor at even a public institution is often one of the best in their field, having performed internationally, won awards and fellowships, and been commissioned by national Symphonies and orchestras. 

2018-09-humanities-student-major_1903_changemyview.txt
I was recently listening to Kara Swisher's podcast interview with Nicole Wong, who was a Product Attorney at Google and Chief Technology Officer under President Obama. One of the points she made was the lack of people building technology who know or have a curiosity about the implications of what they're creating.

An English PhD is a fairly specified track, but your title mentions the degree alone and discusses humanities writ large. As we witness technology wreaking so-called havoc on institutions and peoples' attention spans (among other things), there is a clamor from citizens and consumers alike to have a better understanding of what impact technology has on the human brain, our physical behavior(s), and our ability and willingness to digest information rooted in fact, or at least subject to some rigor.

STEM professors will necessarily tell you that humanities has little value because we live in a world where, in order to build, you must have a STEM degree. But as I've outlined above, building is only the first step. You can't out-engineer a cultural norm, and all the most brilliant computer scientists in the world likely would not have predicted the way in which information technology has been manipulated. Even in more obvious risks and harms, such as cybersecurity, you need STEM majors to partner up with national security and policy experts to come up with plans that execute STEM skills in the way most impactful for policy goals, including domestic safety and warfare.

Finally, this is personal, but I have a humanities degree, and I make quite a bit of money to the point where (knock on wood), I just might be able to pay off my graduate and undergraduate student loans before I'm 35. This is not because I am especially smart, but I did work quite hard to leverage my humanities background within a technology company. I don't build our software, but I do ensure that its impact is safe, legal, and enjoyable to the customer. The future won't be linear career paths where one picks a major and moves vertically within the same role. Rather, it's going to require a lot of lateral movement (and lateral thinking) to constantly reposition oneself as society destroys old technology and jobs in order to fuel new initiatives. STEM majors hold and will continue to hold a strong position in this economy, but it's still an information economy, and those who can adapt will have the most value, rather than those with a religious adherence to their STEM track.

2018-09-humanities-student-major_199_BinghamtonUniversity.txt
I did my undergrad at SBU and am now a grad student at Bing, so maybe I can offer some perspective. I don't think one school is objectively better than the other. It just depends on what you're looking to do. 

SBU is usually considered better for STEM majors. It's just a well-known school for STEM that employers respect and there are a lot of research opportunities on campus. It's also just nice to go to a school with a lot of STEM majors if you're a STEM major since you're all in the same boat. Bing is definitely better for business and most liberal arts majors. It's much more of a well-rounded school than SBU is. That's why it's overall higher ranked than SBU by a bit. It has a lot more connections with businesses and I've seen people get some great business jobs from Bing. Just based on this, if you're sure you're going to do STEM SBU might be a better choice, but if you're unsure what you want to do or want to do business/liberal arts then Bing is probably a better choice. 

Of course, academics isn't everything though. Despite not having a football team, Bing definitely has better school spirit. It's also a much better college town than SBU is. SBU isn't even a college town at all. Sure, you can take the train to the city, but no one ever has the time/money to do that all the time. Bing is deff better for parties and stuff like that too. SBU students tend to be the kinda people who study all the time, lol. 

I think the campuses are kinda comparable in terms of prettiness. Bing is beautiful with the Nature Preserve and the surrounding mountains, but there are some pretty spots on campus at SBU and I think the dorm areas are generally nicer (not necessarily the dorms themselves lol). SBU is a lot bigger. I think you have more food options there (maybe) and there are definitely a lot more places to study. I liked the libraries at SBU much more than the ones at Bing. There's only like two places to study at Bing, whereas there were like 10 at SBU. 

Edit: Oh one thing I forgot to mention related to school spirit is that SBU is a big commuter school. Like half the kids commute and another quarter will go home on weekends. It can definitely be lonely on weekends and it just seemed like everyone stayed off campus as much as they could, lol. I mean if you join clubs and meet friends there's deff stuff to do, but you kinda got meet people you know will be around on weekends. 

Edit 2: Alright people are gonna kill me for this but I'd also say that STEM is *very* hard at SBU. The classes are super difficult and the profs barely help. You're also just competing against very smart STEM kids. If you want to do STEM but aren't sure you're that great at it you might be better off at Bing. I knew people who failed out of STEM at SBU who ended up succeeding elsewhere. Also, if you're worried about dropping out of STEM you'd have better second choices at Bing than SBU. 

2018-09-humanities-student-major_2432_TrueReddit.txt
there simply isnt a need for so many anthropologists

I beg to differ. 

State and federal law requires that an *archaeologist* (a subset of anthropology) survey most new building construction.

The census needs people who are anthropologists so that they can do proper studies.

Marketing companies love antheopologists because it helps them get their message out to specific groups of people.

If you're planning on going to law school, then it makes a great niche to get in to as a lawyer.

Also, anecdotally speaking, my college only has *9* anthropology majors out of a student population of ~8,000 (and I'm one of them). In comparison, there are about 5,000 STEM majors.

In fact, the UC system in California has a *glut* of STEM majors that's gotten so bad that they're practically begging for humanities majors, instituting programs like PATH which offer humanities majors some really fucking nice financial incentives (which means humanities majors might not have to get student loans, or they can enter with a lower GPA than STEM majors for example).

Just because anthropology isn't tied to *one* very specific job (like nursing or computer engineering) does not mean it's useless.

That's cool though. I prefer people to think that there are too many anthro majors. It limits the risk of a bubble.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a date with some coal and an x-ray fluorescence machine.  

2018-09-humanities-student-major_3156_changemyview.txt
For clarity's sake, my university does have very robust liberal arts departments, but none of them are funded nearly as well as the STEM departments, and they're definitely not what the school is known for. Several Fortune 500 companies hire straight out of the STEM majors here, so they're fiercely competitive and also world class. Not everyone is here for STEM, but something like 85% of students come intending to major in a STEM field (me being no exception).

I think you're right that people have the opportunity to explore the arts if they want, but even if they don't want to it's still something they should be required to do at least minimally. I have too many friends here who have never recreationaly read a book, which isn't bad in itself, but they also have a difficult time articulating their ideas with precision, which I think is one thing the liberal arts teaches incredibly well. No matter what job you're in you're going to have to know both what you think and the best way to communicate it, and both of those can be very unclear to even the most accomplished writers and speakers, let alone someone whose exposure to articulated thought peaked at Hamlet.

I truly get that the money can feel like a waste to anyone who doesn't intend to do anything remotely artsy for their career. I just think that people are thinking about this incorrectly; liberal arts classes are meant to organize your mind (assuming you come with it open), even though it's not always obvious how that's being achieved, and that's valuable for nearly everyone.

2018-09-humanities-student-major_3168_changemyview.txt
 To whom are psychology, history, and philosophy worthless areas of study? How are they irrelevant to anyone?

To people who don't find them terribly interesting or have any need for them. My hobbies and interests are primarily outdoor activities. I *COULD* read a book about John Muir, but I'd rather just hike the John Muir Trail. I *COULD* have some esoteric philosophical debate at work, or I could just get the job done and make everyone's lives easier. I *COULD* play armchair psychologist, but I'm old enough to know that's not going to result in any meaningful results in the real world. I'd rather focus on what I enjoy and what is effective, not conform to some standard that a group of pseudo-intellectuals have developed and want to project on others.

 If students aren't required to study these subjects, half the educated population will be ignorant about major aspects of our existence and culture.

By your logic and following comments, all students should be required to learn electrical engineering, cybersecurity, and computer science because they are major aspects of our modern existence and culture. I assume you would agree, since you admit that technology is so important?

 I always hear STEM folks saying they don't need to learn liberal arts topics, as if software engineering and data science somehow exist independent of the greater culture.

Considering Facebook, it seems that STEM exists to exploit culture for financial gain. My anecdotal experiences mirror this. Will this deeper knowledge of culture really lead to this enlightened era you seem to think it will? Or will it just lead to further exploitation of culture for financial gain?

2018-09-humanities-student-major_3280_lakers.txt

Average salary is 80k... Where are you getting the .1% of sociology majors make money?? That's a false claim.

Law schools prefer people with majors like Sociology because it's less focused on law and more focused on society as a humanities course. They aren't biased against that kind of major. They're biased against PreLaw majors. 

STEM majors are having to get underemployed at a job they are overqualified for because he market is bloated and 7 out of the 8 highest qualities in the S&P 500 STEM market don't come from a STEM degree... they come from a humanities degree like sociology. You're mixing up STEM MAJOR annual salary and STEM WORKER annual salaries. Different things. Also sociology majors make almost $8000 more every year on average than STEM workers and majors and Psychology is $10,000 less. That's a simple google away from you knowing that fact. 

Sociology is purely based on science. Everything used is based on the Scientific method. It's literally intra personal psychology. Nothing is different between the two but the fact that psychology studies the interpersonal and sociology studies the intrapersonal. Sociologists also have take approach that objectivity is impossible when studying society so that's why it's not “objective” but I'm sure you didn't know that. Subjectivity is a major part of sociology.

I'm a double major in political science and sociology. Everything you stated was completely false and not backed by any evidence. Simple google searches would have shown you the truth but instead you decided to be ignorant and stubborn.

Edit: Statistics.

2018-10-humanities-student-major_1018_Braincels.txt
Dude unless you're in Silicon Valley, some professional computer scientist is already figuring out how to automate anything you're capable of doing so stfu.

Chances are, a woman in social work will have a longer, more stable career than you, because you cannot automate every nuance in social interaction.

You are better off learning people skills nowadays, or having a humanities background combined with an ability to program, so that you can come up with more unique solutions to society's problems.

Lmao, holy shit are you retarded? Not all of us STEM types want to be a coder. I have other aspirations that are just as lucrative. And another thing. You assume I don't have people skills. A common retort I hear alot in university. Let's set the record straight. **I know how to pretend to be normal, socialable and happy IRL despite looking like harambe's aborted step-child. And guess what? I've gathered a decent network due to my people skills.** It doesn't take much to gain people skills (albeit I'm bad at spelling at times). That time you spent learning the humanities (even if you're studying STEM with it)? Could have been doing projects/focused on career development and making connections.

You know what takes hard work and dedication? STEM. If you're at a decent school these degrees are still fucking hard and will weed out anyone who isn't serious at some point. **You can't BS your way through a STEM degree at a decent university, but you sure as hell can through the humanities at any school.** I know people who've attended the ivy league and majored in the humanities who are still jobless. The engineers, math people, and CS guys post graduation had no issues getting jobs from low tier universities.

And telling women to get into social work? Are you fucking serious? Idiots like you wonder why the wage gap/lesser employment opportunities exist for women in general. I'm not going to tell women how to live their lives because I'm not arrogant like you but I will suggest that they study something in demand (not even just STEM, accounting is another great choice for example) so they don't have to think about the wage gap or their employment opportunities. STEM jobs are not BS like those humanities orientated social work jobs where it's sucking up to managers for your entire career. If you're good at what you do and can work with others you're set (along with having the experience/projects of course). That's all that matters.

I'll end this by saying STEM degrees garantees you nothing alone, but they are the door opener.

2018-10-humanities-student-major_1446_premed.txt
A STEM program is not superior to a Liberal Arts program and vice versa. There is a chance for success no matter the route any student takes, so I have no reason to mock the liberal arts path. After all, I do attend a mostly  liberal arts university and will also be getting a BA in addition to my BS in engineering! 

I don't necessarily think it's the STEM majors that look down on the liberal arts fields

While I do agree that there seems to be a morbid fascination with the death of humanities, the humanities crisis is largely a positive feedback loop created by stressing out over economic outcomes. Research by government bureaus held that people who studied STEM disciplines had better employment prospects [ I can't refute this]

Given these findings, state and federal education budgets consistently made these subjects a priority! 

While there are plenty of English and history majors that are stacking bands,  It's irrefutable  that many do no find gainful employment! For every one English graduate getting paid, I know two more who are steaming lattes or walking dogs instead of  doing anything even peripherally related to their college curriculum.

Having said that, it's probably better to do a liberals arts degree if you're Premed and are sure that the MD/DO route is the only thing that defines your being! 

Those easy A's came in handy for my overall gpa :)! 



2018-10-humanities-student-major_146_circlebroke2.txt
Look, do what you feel you have to do for your situation but youre making a lot of assumptions about the OP, while also being disingenuous yourself. You call him privileged but considering only 30% of the US (tops) has a four year degree any kind of higher ed is a privilege. And STEM especially so since those courses tend to be more expensive due to lab fees (some fields). You also assume he must be especially privileged or gifted to get a funded MA/PhD but consider the fact that one reason there is a shortage of certain kinds of developers in the US is that most american schools dont prepare kids well enough in math and science to complete STEM (I hate this distinction by the way, for other reasons) degrees. 

Also (not that im telling you what to do) but depending on your school it may be possible to complete a history minor or double major if that is what you're passionate about. in my experience hiring managers prefer people who are well rounded anyway bc a lot of adults dont have good writing and communication skills, which are better developed in the humanities and social science (which history is, technically). anyway just something to think about. 

ETA: nobody is attacking people for wanting to be upwardly mobile, theyre attacking reddit assholes who shit on any kind of knowledge they dont think is economically valuable (ie the “mickey mouse degree” you were just disparaging). which, by the way, includes a lot of stem fields since companies arent exactly lining up to to hire biology BAs. go ask researchers how much they make in labs. the job market is good for very few. 

2018-10-humanities-student-major_1785_technology.txt
If anything, STEM prepares one to deal with complex issues with precision and focus.  The prominent field dealing with complexity is nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory, which is not taught in the humanities as far as I know, because it requires a rigorous math background.  Another good example is the study of carcinogenesis, something that most of the society is thankful for, but is a complicated process consisting of lifestyles, genetics, epi-genetics, pharmacology, animal models and nonlinear feedbacks.  I don't think any argument can be made that it is simple or better handled by the humanities in some sense, but STEM has made major progress towards treating and understanding cancer and its genesis to the great benefit of the entire society.

I enjoy the humanities and see their value in the enrichment of my life, but I can't understand this claim that somehow complex issues are better understood by humanities majors compared to STEM.  

I think Feynman (a famous physicist) once commented to his artist friend about the stereotype of how scientists reduce reality to abstract bits and can't appreciate the beauty.  Feynman replied saying that when he sees a flower, he can appreciate the shallower things about the external beauty of such an object, but also how it is intricately biological with wonderful mathematical patterns, which is made up of complex chemistry, driven by a lot of physics.  That is an appreciation that is made up of many layers of nuance, instead of surfacial-only.

2018-10-humanities-student-major_1865_technology.txt
There's a reason people hire engineers and not phil majors. Both sides have the reputation of being able to solve problems and answer questions... except one side has a definitive expertise in math and science, both of which are needed right now.

There's always this push to kind of frame the humanities/liberal arts as being this valuable skillset. Its probably the reason this headline is even gaining traction in the first place.

I wouldn't say it is intrinsically wrong; there are definitely meaningful attributes to be gained from that kind of study, but these kinds of headlines and the resulting conversation always ignore two basic things:

For one, engineers and technical staff from America have already had a ton of this kind of education by the time they graduate college. Even if they are foreign, I can nearly guarantee they can pick up whatever skills those humanities graduates are supposed to have faster than the converse.

For another, the real bottleneck is technical skill, not philosophizing. If anything, you could make the argument that questionable philosophical decisions are a result of needing to allocate technical resources as efficiently as possible. With less pressure on the technical, you could afford more efforts in the other end.

Both of which also ignore that the most meaningful changes that can be made from this direction are at the management level rather than the technical one. I get the sense that this is just normal scummy business practices being sold as a "sore need of humanities" as a PR move.

Anecdotally, I've known my fair share of people from both ends of that spectrum, and I've never found the liberal arts crowd to be particularly better suited for this kind of task, rather that they end up focusing on it more. When any of the STEM people I know bother to try, they are at least as effective.

2018-10-humanities-student-major_2165_UBC.txt
I think what u/planetZucchini is saying is that an arts degree provides soft skills in communication and critical reasoning. Soft skills are more adaptable to varying environments. With Science and STEM, it's more applied and hard skills when it comes to critical reasoning (EG: math, chem, physics). Correct me if I'm wrong, but I find that students in STEM and Sciences have the comfort of knowing there's a correct answer. Whereas, in my arts, from my experience, there will never be a right answer. Therefore, in arts students must learn how to communicate in a way that is creative, adaptable by taking into account different perspectives. Also the comfort in knowing that there is no right answer, and to handle subjective criticism is an invaluable skill.

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Also, even though STEM students are required to take English courses, arts students write at least around 3-6 papers per class and 6-100 pages of readings per week per class. That is not to discredit STEM students taking Humanities and Social Sciences courses to meet requires and beyond, but to simply note that arts students put in considerably more time in analysing a variety of text due to the nature of their program. I also recognise that STEM students also have a huge workload, however in this context I am referring to how most arts students are better at communication and critical reasoning (soft) skills. 

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Ultimately, it is not which faculty is better it is just which profession is better. I'm sure arts trains students well, it is just the profession they are trained for are less valued than STEM specialties in the job market.

Unfortunately true, however i find my current employment and career path satisfying, even though it's not the most lucrative path. It also comes down the individual and their personal motivation factor. I find that most arts students thrive on intrinsic motivation, rather than extrinsic ones (though, I find that those who want to pursue law have extrinsic values and find their arts degree to be a means to an end). This is because most arts students know their degree won't lead to the highest paying jobs (unless they have connections). That is not to say that STEM students do not have intrinsic motivation, I  find that knowing there are stable opportunities available makes it more appealing for students with extrinsic values to go into a field that has a bigger job market. 

2018-10-humanities-student-major_31_unpopularopinion.txt
Here's the thing about degrees:  Unless your STEM ("M," by the way, is part of the *liberal arts* and always has been) or "business" degree are from a very competitive institution, you probably won't be making much more than a first-year teacher.  We also know liberal arts degree holders and "STEM" and "business" degree holders are basically equally well employed and equally employable -- and not earning *significantly* different amounts.  Add to that the *FACT* that "STEM" degrees are time-sensitive in the sense that your "knowledge" is obsolete within a year or two, so if you don't have *the* job right out of the gate, you're not likely to be getting *the* job.  


"Business" degrees are a dime a dozen, so no need to elaborate on why they can't get *the* job.  In fact, "business" grads are less employable than those with degrees in things like English or History, since business is not -- and never has been -- an academic subject (save for economics and perhaps accounting, which is basically math).  


The biggest difference between a STEM degree and a liberal arts degree is that a liberal arts education doesn't ever become obsolete.  Math will always be math, English will always be English, the natural sciences will always be the natural sciences.  There will be breakthroughs in research and so on, but those breakthroughs occur based on the foundational knowledge that is taught as part of the liberal arts.  This is why a liberal arts degree is the requirement for entry to medical school, law school, dental school, teacher education, etc.  "Pre-med" and "pre-law" are liberal arts degrees with a set number and type of *basic science* courses -- courses which, up until very, very recently, have been housed in colleges of "liberal arts" and/or "arts and sciences."

2018-10-humanities-student-major_415_ncssm.txt
 In NC at least, almost all of the STEM academic competitions are dominated by Asian males from Charlotte/Raleigh so I could not help wondering if they are the ones getting into HYPSM from NCSSM. 

Kind of true. There are a lot of Asian students winning things here as well.

  I do realize that males often have advantages at LAC since they tend to have more female applicants, but by the same token STEM is not typically going to garner favors to Asian/white males and I would guess that most NCSSM graduates are STEM?

Acceptance rates are a bit better at top LACs vs. schools like HYPSM, especially for guys. They're still competitive but definitely get less applicants. I know some of them are also trying to attract more STEM students. They (schools like Harvey Mudd, Carleton, Swarthmore, etc. ) are actually really good choices for STEM. 

 Anecdotal for sure but I have seen strong STEM students from my CD go to NCSSM and often gravitate towards humanities after a year or two. I was told that many of the rural kids enter and then realize they cannot "catch up" since others have prereqs out of the way upon entering.

Pretty much my experience. I came from a relatively rural area and was quickly turned off from STEM at NCSSM after nearly failing physics in junior year. I started gravitating towards humanities and didn't really take hard STEM courses afterwards. I still enjoyed my time in the humanities department but now that I'm more confident with STEM again in college (majoring in STEM now), I wish I wasn't scared off so easily back in high school. 

 So I guess, it is the Charlotte/Raleigh kids that are already accelerated that are primarily going to the most selective colleges.

Mostly. IMO your chances aren't too good otherwise unless you're a URM, athlete, legacy, or just a genius (USAMO/Intel/Siemens/etc. tier). 

2018-10-humanities-student-major_730_changemyview.txt
I remember your posts from before/u/asianviolinist98. Your dislike for classes that you think are "beneath you" is pretty well established. So I don't know if anyone will be able to change your mind, and I don't actually know if you're open to changing your mind.

Maybe you are, though.

But let me offer two alternative purposes for general education classes that you may not have considered:

**First**, they open students up to subjects and majors that they had never considered or even been exposed to, but that might be much more enjoyable than the one they start out thinking they wanted.

You can see a few stats **[here](https://www.studentresearchfoundation.org/blog/statistics-about-changing-college-majors/)** and **[here](https://dus.psu.edu/mentor/2013/06/disconnect-choosing-major/)**.

In short, significant percentages of college students change majors at least once, and many of them change multiple times.

Furthermore, people in STEM majors tend to be more likely to switch majors than those in non-STEM majors. This is partly because they discover that at the college level, these courses are much harder than they anticipated. But it's also that they may discover that the surface level understanding they had in high school (and that they made their decisions based on) isn't really what the subject is about.

**Second**, gen ed classes open students up to ways of thinking that they need, but might not get if they went through college with blinders on. This applies to people in STEM and non-STEM majors.

Creative thinking is something that scientists *need*, but most science courses, even at the college level, don't really teach the subjects in a way that encourages creative thinking. Similarly, many humanities courses don't necessarily teach analytical or mathematical / scientific ways of looking at things. And folks in those majors will and do need that kind of perspective as well.

Gen ed courses are designed and intended to broaden you as a college student. College isn't just about learning facts, it's about learning how to think in sophisticated ways that you may not have picked up elsewhere.

It's about making you a more well rounded person, and that's something that *anyone* will benefit from. Engineers who can't think creatively are useless. English majors who can only think in terms of sonnets are useless.

As a freshman, bound and determined to be an engineer, you may not have run into the issue of dissatisfaction with your major. And maybe you won't. But the odds are, statistically, that you'll change majors at least once. Maybe you'll just switch engineering subfields. But maybe you'll find that you dislike engineering-- or that you really like some other major that you were exposed to in a gen ed class a lot more.

I entered college as a bio major, certain that I wanted to go on in molecular bio. I left as an archaeologist, and now have a PhD in that field.

It's hard to see now, as a first year college student, but your outlook on things will change a lot in the next two or three years. 

**EDIT:** I think it's also worth noting that *every* college determines which courses are appropriate to fulfilling your gen ed requirements. The courses that work for an engineering student are selected by the engineering college, and are intended to help you become a more well rounded engineer. Specifically. The gen ed classes that a history major takes are very different from yours.

In other words, your gen eds are selected specifically by people in your own college who have your best interests at heart. Their goal is to give you what you need to become a good engineer. It might be useful to consider that they-- as people who are much older, and more importantly have much more experience, than you-- might know what they're doing.

Some of them may even have had the same complaints as students themselves. They probably did, because what you're complaining about is very common among *especially* engineering students.