Don't you just love when people suddenly "realize" the value of liberal-arts degrees (probably obtained by rich or connected colleagues) over the apparent total inability of engineering and science majors to think for themselves?
/s
No really, what gives people the impression that STEM majors can't think independently or well?
a decent percentage can't. trying to talk to some of my friends about political topics or history or anything else is frustrating because of their lack of knowledge. They know their major and they know about the video games they play but that is it. "who is joe Biden?" is a real question I've heard. many perform abysmally on critical reading portions of tests and can't form persuasive arguments effectively.
Are they capable of critical thinking if you choose an area of discussion that they are knowledgeable about? Can they make clear, reasoned judgements within the limits of their knowledge? If they can't, then you have a point (which is really sad).
yes I'd say so. problem is sometimes they may not know when they are arguing about something they are knowledgable about versus things they aren't. once again I'm talking from anecdotal experience and there are always exceptions.
honestly the biggest problems I've seen from my peers(college aged and new grads) are superiority complexes and not realizing when they are out of the bounds of their knowledge base.
I can relate to you about the "Frustrating lack of knowledge aspect" I've tried to engage people who are in the Psychology department where I hang around, about other topics such as stuff like VR and they dont even care about it. No matter how much you dumb it down or try to make it sound interesting,
To be fair, the VP is only very slightly more powerful than a typical senator, and less powerful than at least one of them. Do you know all the senators?
The VP is also less powerful than a supreme court justice.
The VP is also less powerful than the house majority leader.
Things are less clear with governors, but I think the argument can be made that the VP is less powerful than the governors of California, Texas, Florida, New York, etc. Do you know those?
Also, remember what Feynman said his dad taught him about knowing the names of birds. Memorizing names gives a false sense of knowledge.
I've been in CS curricula where, were you to ask the students what they wanted, they would casually dismiss any liberal-arts subject as a waste of time. I've been in liberal arts curricula where the students themselves either think it is a waste of time (but that STEM is too hard) or that STEM is a waste of time because it doesn't appeal to their desire to "never be wrong" about anything.
I have met very few people who look at either situation and see the breadth of information that exists and how valuable it can be to analyze and model.
A high quality liberal arts education is years of full-time deliberate practice, under constant feedback and guidance from experts. It's also exposure to the enormous volumes of arguments and ideas that have already been explored.
Someone who has been working for years under the engineering culture and code review regime on an elite Google distributed systems team is probably going to write better code (at least in that domain) then someone who did a couple of side projects after reading the Rails tutorial.
Well yes, of course. What I object to is equating "able to think critically and independently" with "has years of domain expertise in academic liberal-arts and humanities fields." The whole point of talking about "critical" or "independent" thinking is that they're supposed to be domain-general cognitive skills.
I have this reaction when I read these articles as well. I'm sure that there are plenty of people who are dismissive of humanities majors, but I've experienced a real problem, over the course of my career, with people who want to put engineering and science majors in a box, defining them as people who can handle technical tasks but can't think independently outside their narrow and well defined technical skill set.
I wonder if this attitude is more prevalent in the US, where people routinely say "you can do anything with a law degree", viewing law as a generalist degree, while viewing engineering or math as a narrow, task-specific degree with no real use outside those subjects…
Although I double majored in English Literature and Math, I did notice the extent to which I would have been required to study humanities as a math major in college (UCSD) without the double major in lit. My general education requirements included a two year undergraduate survey course on world history, a required upper division sequence in a humanities field focusing on a specific region (such as a one year upper division sequence on European or Asian history), two years or proven competence in a foreign language, a year of arts (fine arts, art history, theater), and a minor in a humanities field.
That may be a bit heavier than usual, but in general, math and science majors are required to take a great deal of humanities. The humanities majors, by contrast, had to take two courses in "math" which could be fulfilled with symbolic logic in the philosophy dept and stats for the social sciences (no calculus or even a modicum of advanced math required). The science could be fulfilled through "physics for humanities majors" and bio classes not intended for science track students. Again, that may be a bit light, but it's pretty consistent in US universities - humanities majors get away with minimal math and science, whereas science, engineering, and math majors must take substantial humanities coursework.
One more thing - although the humanities were rigorous, the partiers were pretty much all humanities or social science majors. At least at UCSD, it was nearly impossible to survive in engineering or science as a "partier". Not to say these students were never at the parties, but they spent a lot more time in labs and the library, it was pretty clear. Those and the pre-meds. The humanities majors who got good grades were serious students, sure, but it's pretty clear to me that they didn't have to work anywhere near as hard for good grades (this was also my personal experience in upper division lit classes vs upper division math classes).
This is why I think the most well-rounded students tend to be the STEM students. Not all STEM students are well rounded, many resent and minimize their humanities coursework, but the well-roundedness tends to be more deeply built into the curriculum for STEM than for humanities.
>This is why I think the most well-rounded students tend to be the STEM students. Not all STEM students are well rounded, many resent and minimize their humanities coursework, but the well-roundedness tends to be more deeply built into the curriculum for STEM than for humanities.
That seems like a good statement that accords with my experience at school.
I also have a peculiar resentment towards the humanities requirements: I had to take extra humanities requirements, on top of basically everything you already mentioned, for the "honors college" that was giving me the scholarship by which I avoided Student Loan Hell, so pretty much every semester when course selection came up, I had to make some sinister choices between fulfilling my scholarship requirements and taking sufficient coursework in math, CS, and the hard sciences to give me a good base of knowledge for the future.
The result is that I basically squeaked by in hard math (stopped after multivariable calculus and linear algebra) and CS, didn't take enough hard science (I really should have taken a physics course), and was under-prepared and even under-advised for the kind of research I wanted to do in graduate school. Graduate school notified me of this by forcing me to fight to have my degree considered a four-year Comp Sci degree at all.
In defense of the Technion, I really should have taken more rigorous coursework in undergrad: physics, better vector calculus, real analysis, category theory, a proper type-theory course. In my defense, my undergrad institution didn't even offer those latter two subjects, and my scholarship conditions simply did not have a track available for hard-science students.
The institution's idea of an "honors" or "honorable" education, deserving of financial support, was a humanities education finished inside of four years. They provided no coursework options for taking a scholarship-supported education in the hard sciences, and also would not give you additional years of scholarship so you could take their honors humanities education and your own rigorous science-and-math degree on top.
Basically, we pay people not to take science courses.
That's interesting. A professor at Berkeley told me once that Berkeley Engineering, along with a bunch of other universities, once threatened to withdraw from ABET, largely because they felt that the requirements were getting so heavy that students were no longer able to remain well-rounded. There is also some support for making Engineering more of a 5-year or graduate program. Sounds like that wouldn't have worked for you because of scholarship requirements, but at UCSD, many students who had the choice simply took 5 years to graduate in Engineering. It is truly difficult to manage the rigor of these classes while giving proper time to general requirements.
On a related note, what you've described in terms of graduate preparation is also a serious problem for domestic (US) students. I think there is merit to the more generalized approach to undergraduate education in the US, but we specialize very late in the US compared to other educational systems.
This becomes a problem when combined with the high attrition rates in PhD programs. When I enrolled in a PhD program at Berkeley, I noticed that the coursework seemed like review for many of my fellow students who had degrees from overseas. Some would chalk this up to superior mathematics education outside the US, but I do think that the late specialization plays a big role here as well. While I was taking those classes in literature, theater, arts, history, and so forth, my graduate classmates were specializing in mathematical optimization and stochastic processes much earlier, and in much greater depth.
I don't think that this would be an issue if attrition rates weren't so high, but PhD programs in STEM fields typically have attrition rates between 35%-50%. If you aren't ready to hit the ground running, odds are very good you won't survive the first two years. This isn't an issue in graduate programs in medicine and law in the US, which don't expect undergraduate specialization (and, at the elite level, have vanishingly low attrition rates anyway, typically below one half of one percent). Nobody is expected to study law prior to law school or medicine prior to medical school, and the overwhelming majority of students who start elite programs in these fields do finish (again, 99.5% or more typically do).
Unfortunately, the result is what the RAND institute already identified - top US students behave rationally by avoiding PhD programs in the sciences in favor of professional degrees in law, medicine, dentistry, etc. This is only one factor, but I do think the situation you faced - less specialization at the undergraduate level - also plays a role here.
>Sounds like that wouldn't have worked for you because of scholarship requirements, but at UCSD, many students who had the choice simply took 5 years to graduate in Engineering. It is truly difficult to manage the rigor of these classes while giving proper time to general requirements.
That's exactly what a lot of my peers did. It's what I should have done, if not for the money.
>Unfortunately, the result is what the RAND institute already identified - top US students behave rationally by avoiding PhD programs in the sciences in favor of professional degrees in law, medicine, dentistry, etc. This is only one factor, but I do think the situation you faced - less specialization at the undergraduate level - also plays a role here.
I think the financial factor at the undergraduate level is just as strong. If it takes five years, or an inferior curriculum, to finish a degree in the sciences, and students have to pay large sums for each semester (and often face "bonus charges" from loss of financial aid after finishing four years without having completed a degree program), then as it occurred to me when summing up: we are paying people not to study science, and penalizing them when they try anyway.
Another interesting factor just occurred to me, that supports what you've said here - at UCSD, by the time you'd done your two year undergraduate survey and year of upper division regional focus through the history department, you were only six courses away from a history major. So yeah, if you were limited to four years, the system definitely pushed you away from science or math or engineering. It's not just the rigor, it's that you can apply general ed requirements to a major - and if those requirements are much more substantial in the humanities, then absolutely, that would deter people from majoring in the sciences. If undergrad general requirements included two years of science track calculus, a year of upper division science or engineering, and so forth, then it would be the humanities majors who would have to find some way to cram in all that extra coursework instead.
The reason this drives me batty is that my elected officials (and silicon valley execs) constantly talk about a terrible "shortage" of STEM students, but our universities really do an amazing job driving people away from these fields, and it's not just the rigor of these topics, it's structural.
I hadn't thought of it this way before, but yeah, our undergraduate general ed requirements, while worthy in terms of getting a well-rounded education, probably do increase the attrition rates from science programs (and, because they reduce the amount of undergraduate specialization in math and science, may also increase the attrition rates from graduate STEM programs). Damn. Quite an accomplishment for universities in a nation that constantly frets about a "shortage" of students going into STEM.
Well, I just went back to UMass Amherst's honors-college's website, they made it better at some point, and then made it worse again. Where they once consolidated the honors course (a special stamp a course has to receive from the Honors College itself, not just any old upper-division course) requirements into Honors English Writing, a 3+1 credit sequence of Honors Seminars, two honors courses of any kind, and two in-major honors courses of any kind, they've now taken the "of any kind" and turned them into Honors Gen-Eds. This means a scholarship student has to find two courses which were stamped by the university bureaucracy with two special shiny stamps: a Gen-Ed stamp and the Honors stamp. And if you skip Honors English Writing by having a high score on the SAT Writing Section, that adds on another Honors Gen-Ed you have to take.
In my day, you only had to take one Honors Gen-Ed, a high SAT Writing score exempted me from the Honors English requirement, and you could fill those horrid Any Honors Course requirements by just getting a certain number of professors from in-major courses, or an undergrad research supervisor (only once in your career, though) to write you a letter declaring that you were taking an Honors Colloquium.
(Mind, the idea of writing classes for everyone isn't actually that bad. UMass has a Junior-Year Writing requirement that every department has to fill with a course customized to their degree material. We Comp Sci kids had a writing course that taught us how to compose things like tech-marketing presentations, technical research papers, start-up pitches, and game designs. It was a great idea at core to give us a communications course specialized to our prospective line of work, even if they didn't teach LaTeX or anything that in-depth.
The objectionable thing is to have two writing courses, one of which is explicitly a gen-ed, and which actively penalizes students who try to eat into their coursework requirements with exam scores.)
Dear Lord, it's like they actually dislike the idea of depth. The very least they could do is ditch the stupid Gen-Ed stamp and just require a number of courses outside your own department or college. That would at least let Comp Sci students fill requirements in with physics or intro to analytic philosophy or something.
Or they could encourage breadth-with-depth by declaring that any student who double-majors can receive honors and scholarships without all the stupid stamps.
Oh, and now they charge a fee to be in the honors college, which is of course how you qualify for merit scholarships.
That's it, I'm writing them a letter. I hated this stuff when I was an undergrad, and it turns out that was entirely justified. Five years later, time to tell them.
>I hadn't thought of it this way before, but yeah, our undergraduate general ed requirements, while worthy in terms of getting a well-rounded education, probably do increase the attrition rates from science programs (and, because they reduce the amount of undergraduate specialization in math and science, may also increase the attrition rates from graduate STEM programs). Damn. Quite an accomplishment for universities in a nation that constantly frets about a "shortage" of students going into STEM.
"A well-rounded liberal arts degree establishes a foundation of critical thinking."
There are enough truly bad Liberal Arts degrees out there that the more difficult ones (philosophy and economics spring to mind, at least at my school) get dinged by proximity. What people are really worried about hiring is someone with four years of multiple choice and BSssays under their belt - that is, experience only in perverting performance metrics. A college experience like that is almost impossible in STEM, rare in a few LA fields and extremely common in the rest.
Also: taking the initiative to learn to program and switch careers is a strong signal that you weren't one of the people who tried to engineer their good school into behaving like a degree mill.
> A college experience like that is almost impossible in STEM
I wager that a lot of people disagree with you here. There are definitely cheap tactics to dupe lazy teachers at both ends of the educational spectrum.
Example: Even if you don't know the answer, write as much work as possible to get partial credit. Look at backwork to learn the form of the exam, memorize the form of the solution and then just plug in the new numbers and calculate.
I got an English degree from a middle-ranked state school and never once had a multiple-choice exam and only had two classes with fill-in-the-blanks style exams:
1) A chemistry class I took and
2) An art history class where we were given photos of pieces and asked to write in what culture and epoch produced them.
Although the art history tests were in the above format, that class also required us to go to the local art museum, find a relevant piece, and photograph it; then go to the library and research the piece developing a thesis and a ten page paper supporting that thesis.
Besides that all my coursework consisted of developing theses and then writing papers defending those theses with the grade being determined by how well we argued our point. Is this bullshit? I would say it's subjective, yes, but a part of a liberal arts education is learning to embrace the subjective nature of the human experience.
Not sure most undergraduate CS (these days?) stresses the hard problems (that is, the mathematics) of the field enough. Took until graduate school to come to serious grips with interesting problems.
But it seems that philosophy at least opens up fast and hard with difficult problems.
So a degree in philosophy - in my STEMmy opinion - merits serious consideration as someone willing to think about a problem.
Just for another data point, I double majored in English Literature and Mathematics with a CS emphasis, and I did have to work harder to get a lower grade in the advanced math and CS classes.
Just to be clear, I do consider humanities to be an excellent subject for study, and philosophy and literature, when studied with integrity, are rigorous fields. There's also, of course, a chance that I'm just naturally a bit stronger at humanities and weaker at math, and I suppose it might be the opposite for you.
I did have to work meaningfully for my "A"s in humanities, but I had to struggle hard for my B+ in real analysis.
Also, I do recognize you mentioned CS, not upper division math, but lower division data structures and algorithms pushed me pretty hard. And the course I saw my friends go through at Berkeley looked insanely difficult.
If you were good at both, and expecting to get "A" grades, I could see that. If you were bad at both, and just hoping to pass, it's probably the other way around.
I would expect philosophy to hand out "B" grades to nearly everybody. I would expect computer science to hand out everything, especially the extremes. There would be both more "A" and more "F" than in the philosophy classes.
Where I'm from we don't really use the term 'Liberal Arts' and instead we generally refer to the specific field (psychology, philosophy, literature, etc.). The only group-term we use is 'social sciences', but at least at my university the overlap in classes, especially the first two years, justified that label.
Much less dinging by proximity going on because of that, I think. It's generally accepted that studying philosophy is much more difficult than social sciences, for example. Of course, as a result we probably have a richer collection of more specific stereotypes for each field though.
In my humble opinion, it really depends on what you're programming:
3D Gaming engine: A genius with lots of CS training/education.
Simple business app with weird rules that requires a lot of customer feedback: A kind-hearted person who can listen and noodle around and is tenacious.
I agree that more technical projects require more cleverness/training, but most things don't require genius. Terry Tao, field medalist, argues strongly that one does not need to be a genius to be a professional mathematician. https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t... Likewise, this implies that one does not need to be a genius to program difficult things.
Someone who majored in liberal arts but is able to themselves to code is likely to be an intelligent and motivated individual. I suspect that more readily explains the successes of these individuals than their liberal arts studies.
It's also my personal observation that someone's college major has no bearing on their ability to think critically.
Yeah, there's a lot of selection bias with this sort of thing. The average computer science graduate is probably going to go on to become a software engineer or otherwise work in tech in some way. This means that you will meet all of the average CS graduates every day. The average liberal arts major will not go on to be a software engineer. The only liberal arts major software engineers you will meet are the ones who are interested enough in programming to bother learning it and talented enough to become proficient in two mostly unrelated fields.
I do think there's a lot of value in studying non-technical, potentially useless, even esoteric things, but this argument is not extraordinarily convincing.
This. Most people with liberal arts degrees don't have pre-existing knowledge of/interest in all things tech/programming. The people on here who say they have graduate degrees in history, etc aren't even remotely the average LA degree holder. Without a lot of extra studying/bootcamps/programming since you were 12/post bacc certs/second BS degrees in computer science, a plain old average liberal arts degree I'd wager is much, much less valuable than a BS in CS.
A better recommendation, and a path that some STEM students have already taken, is independent study of the Liberal Arts curriculum.
Unfortunately, even if you do this, you will still have to deal with condescending fools telling you that you can't see the forest from the trees, and are constrained by memorizing commands or syntax.
The fact of the matter is that you have no critical thinking skills, can't see the big picture and lack the soft skills – the people skills – that help to understand customers and bring the staff along. Everybody here can see it, why can't you? You'll never make anything of yourself, nerd.
(Those quotes are directly from the article. It's super condescending towards STEM people. No better than similar articles aimed at Liberal Arts students.)
One would argue that we could consider it a societal good to have good critical well rounded thinkers. Nowadays college is more like a capitalist transaction in order to make money. If thats the point of college, then its definitely not worth the cost. I'd love to go back and be able to do a full course of liberal arts - I'd probably be a much more well rounded person.
In all seriousness, my linguistics degree was worth every penny. Spending that much time with incredibly bright people with broad perspectives focused solely on sharpening your understanding of the world is something that's very difficult to replicate independently.
I can imagine that even if it is difficult to replicate broad perspectives independently it is worth trying to do so. I think the internet will certainly make it easier to do so now, too.
Additionally you have a lot longer than 4 years to engage with material. Autodidactism eventually wins because it is unconstrained; though the educational experience might get a lot of breadth out fast.
Yes, but it also doesn't mean they aren't meaningless. I have yet to see any evidence whatsoever people with Liberal Arts degrees possess better than average critical thinking skills compared to other college graduates.
An Arts major is great for your personal growth because it's broader and more generalist than STEM but it doesn't add much value to society on short term. Once it doesn't add direct value to society, society doesn't reward it also. This translates into an high probability of a stagnated life after graduation. Choose carefully.
I wanted a degree in physics but it doesn't pay as much as a programming job would. So I took computer science instead. Teacher/Education degrees are good to get because of a teacher shortage but don't get paid as well as most other jobs.
When I went to a university it was 1986, I learned Turbo Pascal which is nothing compared to modern IDEs now. I learned Turbo C in 1987 and that helped me learn Ada, COBOL, FORTRAN, Visual BASIC, and many others. Once you understand the concepts you can learn almost any other language.
The trivium and the quadrivium are what a true "liberal" education is about, and are things that shouldn't be restricted to any particular major and should be taught even before high-school.
The real issue is that the oligarchs don't want a populace that is truly educated in critical thinking.
For a treat, try page 7 of the Norman Dodd report to the Reece Committee.
I have a post-graduate degree in History, and even though I've never "used" my degree in my professional career, the benefits have been incalculable. A good understanding of history is what allows one to have a good understanding of the present.
Why do many people have a knee-jerk reaction against the humanities? I'm genuinely curious what others think. I mean - where do they think Game of Thrones, The Wire, The Sopranos, i.e. all of our culture (popular and otherwise) come from?
technocracy is en vogue here and humanities experts are not seen as experts in anything """useful""", which usually translates as "economically lucrative" or ""rational and objective"".
It isn't knee jerk reactions to liberal arts degrees. The world needs better books, movies, tv shows, painting, music, etc.
The thing is, that was once thought a decade ago or so, was that a liberal arts degree did not qualify someone for a programming job as much as a computer science or engineering degree would.
Python and Ruby on Rails made it easier to program, when it was thought that a liberal arts major can't program we used C and Pascal, pointers, had to do garbage collection on our own, had to allocate and then free up memory, etc. Programming Languages evolved with Java and C# that did away with pointers, does garbage collection on their own, and allocates and frees up memory when an object is closed. Then Python and Ruby on Rails made it even easier.
Microsoft had to make a Express and then Community version of their Visual Studio Dotnet languages to compete with FOSS languages, Borland suffered and kept getting bought out, suddenly there FOSS languages got easier to use, understand, and program in.
I think every degree should have a Critical Thinking class and maybe a Small Business class to learn how to balance a checking account and learn to save money instead of living paycheck to paycheck. How to run your own business and make it a startup by bootstrapping what you saved working a job.
Several aspects in American culture contribute to this:
- prioritization of the ability to make a buck over all else. This is an old tendency, dating back to the early 1800s.
- Postmodernism ruined the general reputation of the fields it touched. The Sokal Hoax was very famous.
- Most liberal arts majors didn't seem to work hard, or to work on hard problems. This in contrast to the engineering major slaving away until midnight 6 hours per week.
- pg has an essay on this; I forget its name, but the "drop-out-to" lattice in college - people often drop out to easier majors. Psychology or English are roughly at the bottom of that lattice where I went to school; things like CS, Math, Chemical Engineering or Physics are near the top of the lattice. So... yeah. "Couldn't hack it, got a English degree, now serving coffee" stories show up enough to, at minimum, distort perception.
Add those together, and it's a pretty potent mix for looking coldly at the humanities as a useful thing.
These discussions are always so stupid. I was a lit major, have worked as a PCB designer, taught myself some coding and all that jazz, and now put around on the internet doing digital marketing stuff. College major is a terrible indicator of intelligence, work ethic, and so on. Sure, liberal arts majors can be annoying (I probably have a lot more first hand experience with that than you do), but at the same time, plenty of STEM folks write like freshman in high school and start stammering when asked to explain whatever declarative statement they just made further. The condescension from the STEM crowd sure gets old though.
The attitude from the STEM "crowd" is a real issue. I've experienced it myself while talking to kids about technology. People have interrupted a comverstation just to say that art is stupid. I just change the subject and continue with the conversation. But its really hard to motivate kids and young people to be creative with such an idiotic attitude. We don't need more engineers, programmers or whatever. We need more creative people with drive. Period.
People like this are why I don't like to call myself an "engineer" anymore. They've ruined the word for me.
I spent a year at WPI, and its fucking lousy with these stuck up losers, sharing lame "engineering memes" putting down lib arts majors. Mind you, these were not even engineers, just engineering students, most of whom hadn't built a single useful thing in their life outside of school.
Certainly not always. Even mentioning Visual Basic, Perl, Lisp, or .NET around these parts tends to work like a sort of bat signal for similar comments/memes. And that's in a forum where a lot of the people who visit code. Imagine a place where you have different interests mixed in.
By the way, I will say it: I like .NET. My first paying job was in Visual Basic / C#. Used to spend nights writing Perl. Lisp is not special, but it is powerful.
I agree about how insipid these discussions can get. The bottom line is there is no degree requirement that guarantees the individual possesses curiosity about our world or an ability to grasp and then explain complex ideas.
What clouds the discussion even further is that many of the people involved are far enough removed from that time in their life that they can't remember what they knew or didn't know about anything. I look back and think about how much I could have learned if I had spent less time doing things like video games, or watching sports or whatever, without realizing that so much has changed in 15+ years that alot of what I find interesting may not have been invented then. Or if it was, it wasn't that important to me.
Honestly, I think the failing is that computer science majors (unlike some other STEM majors) are rarely offered as liberal arts programs with stronger breadth requirements that are typical in B.S. programs (in lots of institutions, you can get a B.A./A.B. in other STEM fields like Mathematics or Chemistry, but not Computer Science.)
While I don't think all (or even most) CS majors need to be produced out of liberal arts programs, I think it would be good for the field and the software industry to have more of those.
It depends if the CS department is in an engineering college/school as part of the larger institution. In colleges without engineering programs, its often in a liberal arts and sciences school.
Often, "liberal arts and sciences schools" offer both liberal arts (B.A.) and sciences (B.S.) degrees, the former having more breadth requirements and the latter more depth in the major field; quite often they offer both types of degrees for some STEM fields. IME, which may not be representative, Computer Science is far less likely to have B.A. programs than either Math or most physical sciences.
BA vs. BS can be quite confusing in STEM fields. In the United States, there is no standard for how they differ. All of the following exist in the wild:
• BS only. (Caltech, for example. In fact, Caltech only offers BS for everything. Even English majors--and yes, there is an occasional English major at Caltech--end up with a BS).
• BA only. UC Berkeley is an example in this category for math and physics.
• Both are offered, with identical coursework and requirements. You can have whichever you want. Some will even for a small fee give you two diplomas, so you can use whichever seems appropriate for the situation.
• Both are offered, from the same department, with different in-major coursework and aims. One may be aimed toward students aiming to go into research, and one toward those aiming to go into teaching, for instance.
• Both are offered, from different departments. For example, UC Berkeley's College of Letters and Sciences offers a BA in chemistry, and the College of Chemistry offers a BS in chemistry. Computer science can be taken at Berkeley in the College of Letters and Science for a BA, or in the College of Engineering for a BS.
• Both are offered, with the same in-major coursework, but differ in out-of-major requirements. So, the BA and BS would require the exact same science and math courses, but the BA has specific breadth requirements to produce a well rounded education, whereas the BS lets you take pretty much what you want as long as you satisfy the math and science requirements and any general requirements of your school.
I generally just say that I have a bachelor's degree in mathematics. If someone thinks they need to know if it is a BA or a BS, I ask what they are really trying to figure out.
She was studying Latin and Greek, then was exposed to APL, enjoyed it, and was apparently very good at it...
Fine, that makes some sense. But, if the goal is learn APL (or any programming language), why not just learn APL? Is it really true that learning French prior to Ruby on Rails gives you a unique advantage?
Even just within programming, I'd say ever successive language you learn gets easier, as you're able to apply labels to patterns you see, and think abstractly about language features.
I don't think that if your goal is to learn RoR, the best way to accomplish it is to learn French first. But if you take two programming newbies, and one of them knows a couple foreign languages and the other doesn't, the former will have an advantage.
So degrees like Philosophy and Economics aside, since rigour is assured no matter the university, my issue with the statement:
"How can this be? It’s very simple. A well-rounded liberal arts degree establishes a foundation of critical thinking."
Jumps the gun. The brevity of my counter argument may belie it's truth:
Selection bias perfectly explains his experiences.
Of course I'd rather an English major that has learned to code at the level I require over a Computer Science major. The English major that is able to hustle his or her way into a programming career almost certainly has a greater IQ than the average Computer Science grad. What is not seen is the vast sea of English majors not going down that path, but rather ending up in a career that is far less challenging.
> What is not seen is the vast sea of English majors not going down that path, but rather ending up in a career that is far less challenging.
It's almost like they went to school for something completely different ;)
I don't see why selection bias matters though, as it's not terribly relevant to the author's point that humanities students bring a different/valuable perspective to the table and shouldn't be written off as technical hires. To me, the real goal should be encouraging students from both STEM and humanities backgrounds to learn from each other and cross streams a bit. No more Physics for Poets or Shakespeare for sysadmins.
This is a terrible thesis/headline position that doesn't even reflect the author's own experiences. He posits that the STEM label don't work well, then proceeds to use another label in its place. What his experience should tell him is:
"Critical thinking and the ability to learn and adapt independently is the most important ability in a professional. These abilities are more pertinent than one's conferred degree. Find people with these characteristics wherever you may find them. Independently acquired skills outside of one's undergraduate studies may be correlated with an increased likelihood of possession of such aptitudes."
Not judging people by their labels cuts both ways. Plenty of liberal arts majors lack critical thinking, and vice versa and any combination thereof.
> A well-rounded liberal arts degree establishes a foundation of critical thinking.
So, not those liberal arts majors who are protected in "safe spaces", who have "trigger warnings" on their classes, who complain about how they feel threatened when someone wrote pro-Trump messages at their school.
Look, there are a lot of good, high-quality liberal arts schools that are teaching students to think for themselves, and giving them a good breadth of background to orient them to the stuff that they encounter. But there are unfortunately also a lot of liberal arts schools that just coddle the kids, and turn out little better than 22-year-old high-schoolers. The first is valuable; the second a waste.
I remember a video where the early Steve Jobs is talking about the company he built. One of the things he mentioned was that Apple stands at the intersection of art and computers. He then mentioned that every person at Apple is not just a software developer but also a poet, a musician, and other liberal arts type professions. It is for that reason, he believed, they come up with an incredible computing experience.
Personally, I always complain I wish I knew what a normal person would want. A technical person very quickly falls to an abnormal and complicated approach of doing things.
I'm sure hobbyists with liberal arts majors and liberal arts majors with computer science minors can both be very good developers and leaders, but to really be "by far the sharpest, best-performing software developers and technology leaders" I think would still require a CS degree.
I have a BS in CS, but from a program with relatively lax minimum course requirements, particularly in math, from what I've read about other CS programs. (Only Calc II and Discrete Math.)
This allowed me to actually take more non-STEM than STEM courses while still earning a CS degree. If I was required to take higher-level math or more advanced CS subjects, I probably would have failed at the time. Yet I still got aspects of a CS education that I wouldn't have if I just minored in CS, which have provided a good base for exploring higher-level CS topics on my own.
At the same time, the program has everything available for students who want a more rigorous courseload.
So I'd say that except for producing top individual contributors in STEM domain programming (physics simulations, etc.), low-level algorithms, and high-performance system-level programming (which admittedly comprise a large number of software engineering jobs, but probably not the majority), a high-quality CS program where you can still take mostly non-STEM courses, and that doesn't use math courses effectively to weed people out, would on the surface appear to be ideal for the vast majority of software developers and technology leaders.
Uh-oh, somebody better not tell this author that people can be great programmers, leaders, and team members without going to college at all. I really wish we could just kill this whole notion of "This degree I got X years ago makes me innately better at my job" and the pointless hierarchy that always seems to stem from it.
Engineering degrees don't magically turn someone into a robotic human with no capacity for creativity or self-leadership, and liberal arts degrees don't make someone incapable of understanding logical reasoning.
I would be interested in seeing what types of people are drawn most to each though. For example, many of my friends who went the engineering path did it because they wanted a stable career, and they knew engineering was a solid way to earn that, even if it's difficult. In contrast, some of my friends who went to smaller liberal arts colleges (in most cases for political science) cited "networking" opportunities and "making connections" as important for their careers and reasons why they went the LA path. Both sets of friends are very capable, but as someone from a solidly middle-class background who was raised to view hard work as the only way to succeed, the notion of "networking" and playing the social game to move up has always seemed alien to me. I know it's not true in all cases, but it makes me wonder if taking the risk on a LA degree in some cases is correlated to greater economic privilege (ie, people with better safety nets who don't need guaranteed income that more economically valuable degrees provide). I wonder if those are the people that the author is so enamored with here.
> Both sets of friends are very capable, but as someone from a solidly middle-class background who was raised to view hard work as the only way to succeed, the notion of "networking" and playing the social game to move up has always seemed alien to me. I know it's not true in all cases, but it makes me wonder if taking the risk on a LA degree in some cases is correlated to greater economic privilege
From my experience of college (and that of most people I know), especially in the social sciences, the degree itself was only worth it because studying is cheap here. About 1500 euro a year, and we received about 250 euro a month from the state, more if we lived in a dorm, and could top that off with a very, very friendly loan up to about 600 euro total.
The biggest value, aside from intrinsic interest in the topic and having mediocre-at-best lecturers provide us with reading suggestions, was indeed the connections we made during those years.
Most of the people I met in college now have interesting work or positions in their field (and often via said connections). I partied with them, hung out with them, had discussions with them, started book clubs with them, and became friends with them. If I need to talk to a good journalist, accountant, lawyer, entrepreneur about something, there's one from my network available. If I have questions related to philosophy, physics, literature, etc., well, that's just an appointment and a few beers away.
While it's possible to create these connections without going to college, it's much harder. By going to college it happens automatically, especially if you join some student organization.
Whether that's worth the insane student loans people have to burden themselves with in some countries is up for debate, but the value in the network is huge.
I'd also like to note that it doesn't feel like playing a social game and networking. It's making friends and acquaintances and sort of 'falling into' using the advantages. A bit like how I suppose most people who date other people are looking forward to getting laid, but it doesn't feel 'sleezy' because it's not your primary objective (of course, if it is and you're up-front or okay with that, that's fine too).
> A critical thinker is a self-learning machine that is not constrained by memorizing commands or syntax.
But is a critical thinker creative? They can think, but if you put them in front of a blank sheet of paper, a blank whiteboard, or an empty Vi terminal, can they create and build something new and original?
Creativity is not at all like critical thinking - one analyzes things that exist, one actually creates things.
Creativity is at the heart of software craftmanship.
Programming jobs need critical thinkers and problem solvers with a mathematical ability. What degree such students were attracted to at the age of 18 is neither here nor there really. An undergraduate degree is not really training you in anything formally. How many of us actually use, or for that matter remember, what we learned in our undergraduate degree program? In my case it was pure Mathematics, and to this day I have not had to use Field Theory, say, in my career (and I would likely fail abysmally if required to).
The most important bit is the 'critical thinking' coupled with a passion to learn, build and being creative. At the end of the day writing software has a huge creative component to it. Sadly most companies require STEM degrees for an entry level Software Engineer position. I agree with the author that we need to be more open and be the meritocracy we thump our chests about so loudly. Conversely for liberal arts jobs ...
Articles like this are ridiculous, because essentially all they say is "guess what, there are some smart people in X group!" There are smart/hard-working/passionate/etc. people in nearly every group. The question is, what are the ratios?
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No really, what gives people the impression that STEM majors can't think independently or well?
honestly the biggest problems I've seen from my peers(college aged and new grads) are superiority complexes and not realizing when they are out of the bounds of their knowledge base.
The VP is also less powerful than a supreme court justice.
The VP is also less powerful than the house majority leader.
Things are less clear with governors, but I think the argument can be made that the VP is less powerful than the governors of California, Texas, Florida, New York, etc. Do you know those?
Also, remember what Feynman said his dad taught him about knowing the names of birds. Memorizing names gives a false sense of knowledge.
I have met very few people who look at either situation and see the breadth of information that exists and how valuable it can be to analyze and model.
Someone who has been working for years under the engineering culture and code review regime on an elite Google distributed systems team is probably going to write better code (at least in that domain) then someone who did a couple of side projects after reading the Rails tutorial.
At least that's how it seems whenever this comes up.
I wonder if this attitude is more prevalent in the US, where people routinely say "you can do anything with a law degree", viewing law as a generalist degree, while viewing engineering or math as a narrow, task-specific degree with no real use outside those subjects…
Although I double majored in English Literature and Math, I did notice the extent to which I would have been required to study humanities as a math major in college (UCSD) without the double major in lit. My general education requirements included a two year undergraduate survey course on world history, a required upper division sequence in a humanities field focusing on a specific region (such as a one year upper division sequence on European or Asian history), two years or proven competence in a foreign language, a year of arts (fine arts, art history, theater), and a minor in a humanities field.
That may be a bit heavier than usual, but in general, math and science majors are required to take a great deal of humanities. The humanities majors, by contrast, had to take two courses in "math" which could be fulfilled with symbolic logic in the philosophy dept and stats for the social sciences (no calculus or even a modicum of advanced math required). The science could be fulfilled through "physics for humanities majors" and bio classes not intended for science track students. Again, that may be a bit light, but it's pretty consistent in US universities - humanities majors get away with minimal math and science, whereas science, engineering, and math majors must take substantial humanities coursework.
One more thing - although the humanities were rigorous, the partiers were pretty much all humanities or social science majors. At least at UCSD, it was nearly impossible to survive in engineering or science as a "partier". Not to say these students were never at the parties, but they spent a lot more time in labs and the library, it was pretty clear. Those and the pre-meds. The humanities majors who got good grades were serious students, sure, but it's pretty clear to me that they didn't have to work anywhere near as hard for good grades (this was also my personal experience in upper division lit classes vs upper division math classes).
This is why I think the most well-rounded students tend to be the STEM students. Not all STEM students are well rounded, many resent and minimize their humanities coursework, but the well-roundedness tends to be more deeply built into the curriculum for STEM than for humanities.
That seems like a good statement that accords with my experience at school.
I also have a peculiar resentment towards the humanities requirements: I had to take extra humanities requirements, on top of basically everything you already mentioned, for the "honors college" that was giving me the scholarship by which I avoided Student Loan Hell, so pretty much every semester when course selection came up, I had to make some sinister choices between fulfilling my scholarship requirements and taking sufficient coursework in math, CS, and the hard sciences to give me a good base of knowledge for the future.
The result is that I basically squeaked by in hard math (stopped after multivariable calculus and linear algebra) and CS, didn't take enough hard science (I really should have taken a physics course), and was under-prepared and even under-advised for the kind of research I wanted to do in graduate school. Graduate school notified me of this by forcing me to fight to have my degree considered a four-year Comp Sci degree at all.
In defense of the Technion, I really should have taken more rigorous coursework in undergrad: physics, better vector calculus, real analysis, category theory, a proper type-theory course. In my defense, my undergrad institution didn't even offer those latter two subjects, and my scholarship conditions simply did not have a track available for hard-science students.
The institution's idea of an "honors" or "honorable" education, deserving of financial support, was a humanities education finished inside of four years. They provided no coursework options for taking a scholarship-supported education in the hard sciences, and also would not give you additional years of scholarship so you could take their honors humanities education and your own rigorous science-and-math degree on top.
Basically, we pay people not to take science courses.
On a related note, what you've described in terms of graduate preparation is also a serious problem for domestic (US) students. I think there is merit to the more generalized approach to undergraduate education in the US, but we specialize very late in the US compared to other educational systems.
This becomes a problem when combined with the high attrition rates in PhD programs. When I enrolled in a PhD program at Berkeley, I noticed that the coursework seemed like review for many of my fellow students who had degrees from overseas. Some would chalk this up to superior mathematics education outside the US, but I do think that the late specialization plays a big role here as well. While I was taking those classes in literature, theater, arts, history, and so forth, my graduate classmates were specializing in mathematical optimization and stochastic processes much earlier, and in much greater depth.
I don't think that this would be an issue if attrition rates weren't so high, but PhD programs in STEM fields typically have attrition rates between 35%-50%. If you aren't ready to hit the ground running, odds are very good you won't survive the first two years. This isn't an issue in graduate programs in medicine and law in the US, which don't expect undergraduate specialization (and, at the elite level, have vanishingly low attrition rates anyway, typically below one half of one percent). Nobody is expected to study law prior to law school or medicine prior to medical school, and the overwhelming majority of students who start elite programs in these fields do finish (again, 99.5% or more typically do).
Unfortunately, the result is what the RAND institute already identified - top US students behave rationally by avoiding PhD programs in the sciences in favor of professional degrees in law, medicine, dentistry, etc. This is only one factor, but I do think the situation you faced - less specialization at the undergraduate level - also plays a role here.
That's exactly what a lot of my peers did. It's what I should have done, if not for the money.
>Unfortunately, the result is what the RAND institute already identified - top US students behave rationally by avoiding PhD programs in the sciences in favor of professional degrees in law, medicine, dentistry, etc. This is only one factor, but I do think the situation you faced - less specialization at the undergraduate level - also plays a role here.
I think the financial factor at the undergraduate level is just as strong. If it takes five years, or an inferior curriculum, to finish a degree in the sciences, and students have to pay large sums for each semester (and often face "bonus charges" from loss of financial aid after finishing four years without having completed a degree program), then as it occurred to me when summing up: we are paying people not to study science, and penalizing them when they try anyway.
The reason this drives me batty is that my elected officials (and silicon valley execs) constantly talk about a terrible "shortage" of STEM students, but our universities really do an amazing job driving people away from these fields, and it's not just the rigor of these topics, it's structural.
I hadn't thought of it this way before, but yeah, our undergraduate general ed requirements, while worthy in terms of getting a well-rounded education, probably do increase the attrition rates from science programs (and, because they reduce the amount of undergraduate specialization in math and science, may also increase the attrition rates from graduate STEM programs). Damn. Quite an accomplishment for universities in a nation that constantly frets about a "shortage" of students going into STEM.
In my day, you only had to take one Honors Gen-Ed, a high SAT Writing score exempted me from the Honors English requirement, and you could fill those horrid Any Honors Course requirements by just getting a certain number of professors from in-major courses, or an undergrad research supervisor (only once in your career, though) to write you a letter declaring that you were taking an Honors Colloquium.
(Mind, the idea of writing classes for everyone isn't actually that bad. UMass has a Junior-Year Writing requirement that every department has to fill with a course customized to their degree material. We Comp Sci kids had a writing course that taught us how to compose things like tech-marketing presentations, technical research papers, start-up pitches, and game designs. It was a great idea at core to give us a communications course specialized to our prospective line of work, even if they didn't teach LaTeX or anything that in-depth.
The objectionable thing is to have two writing courses, one of which is explicitly a gen-ed, and which actively penalizes students who try to eat into their coursework requirements with exam scores.)
Dear Lord, it's like they actually dislike the idea of depth. The very least they could do is ditch the stupid Gen-Ed stamp and just require a number of courses outside your own department or college. That would at least let Comp Sci students fill requirements in with physics or intro to analytic philosophy or something.
Or they could encourage breadth-with-depth by declaring that any student who double-majors can receive honors and scholarships without all the stupid stamps.
Oh, and now they charge a fee to be in the honors college, which is of course how you qualify for merit scholarships.
That's it, I'm writing them a letter. I hated this stuff when I was an undergrad, and it turns out that was entirely justified. Five years later, time to tell them.
>I hadn't thought of it this way before, but yeah, our undergraduate general ed requirements, while worthy in terms of getting a well-rounded education, probably do increase the attrition rates from science programs (and, because they reduce the amount of undergraduate specialization in math and science, may also increase the attrition rates from graduate STEM programs). Damn. Quite an accomplishment for universities in a nation that constantly frets about a "shortage" of students going into STEM.
Yeah. Damn.
There are enough truly bad Liberal Arts degrees out there that the more difficult ones (philosophy and economics spring to mind, at least at my school) get dinged by proximity. What people are really worried about hiring is someone with four years of multiple choice and BSssays under their belt - that is, experience only in perverting performance metrics. A college experience like that is almost impossible in STEM, rare in a few LA fields and extremely common in the rest.
Also: taking the initiative to learn to program and switch careers is a strong signal that you weren't one of the people who tried to engineer their good school into behaving like a degree mill.
I wager that a lot of people disagree with you here. There are definitely cheap tactics to dupe lazy teachers at both ends of the educational spectrum.
Example: Even if you don't know the answer, write as much work as possible to get partial credit. Look at backwork to learn the form of the exam, memorize the form of the solution and then just plug in the new numbers and calculate.
1) A chemistry class I took and
2) An art history class where we were given photos of pieces and asked to write in what culture and epoch produced them.
Although the art history tests were in the above format, that class also required us to go to the local art museum, find a relevant piece, and photograph it; then go to the library and research the piece developing a thesis and a ten page paper supporting that thesis.
Besides that all my coursework consisted of developing theses and then writing papers defending those theses with the grade being determined by how well we argued our point. Is this bullshit? I would say it's subjective, yes, but a part of a liberal arts education is learning to embrace the subjective nature of the human experience.
But it seems that philosophy at least opens up fast and hard with difficult problems.
So a degree in philosophy - in my STEMmy opinion - merits serious consideration as someone willing to think about a problem.
Just to be clear, I do consider humanities to be an excellent subject for study, and philosophy and literature, when studied with integrity, are rigorous fields. There's also, of course, a chance that I'm just naturally a bit stronger at humanities and weaker at math, and I suppose it might be the opposite for you.
I did have to work meaningfully for my "A"s in humanities, but I had to struggle hard for my B+ in real analysis.
Also, I do recognize you mentioned CS, not upper division math, but lower division data structures and algorithms pushed me pretty hard. And the course I saw my friends go through at Berkeley looked insanely difficult.
I would expect philosophy to hand out "B" grades to nearly everybody. I would expect computer science to hand out everything, especially the extremes. There would be both more "A" and more "F" than in the philosophy classes.
Much less dinging by proximity going on because of that, I think. It's generally accepted that studying philosophy is much more difficult than social sciences, for example. Of course, as a result we probably have a richer collection of more specific stereotypes for each field though.
3D Gaming engine: A genius with lots of CS training/education.
Simple business app with weird rules that requires a lot of customer feedback: A kind-hearted person who can listen and noodle around and is tenacious.
It's also my personal observation that someone's college major has no bearing on their ability to think critically.
I do think there's a lot of value in studying non-technical, potentially useless, even esoteric things, but this argument is not extraordinarily convincing.
A better recommendation, and a path that some STEM students have already taken, is independent study of the Liberal Arts curriculum.
Unfortunately, even if you do this, you will still have to deal with condescending fools telling you that you can't see the forest from the trees, and are constrained by memorizing commands or syntax.
The fact of the matter is that you have no critical thinking skills, can't see the big picture and lack the soft skills – the people skills – that help to understand customers and bring the staff along. Everybody here can see it, why can't you? You'll never make anything of yourself, nerd.
(Those quotes are directly from the article. It's super condescending towards STEM people. No better than similar articles aimed at Liberal Arts students.)
Is this the result of independent study? ;)
In all seriousness, my linguistics degree was worth every penny. Spending that much time with incredibly bright people with broad perspectives focused solely on sharpening your understanding of the world is something that's very difficult to replicate independently.
I can imagine that even if it is difficult to replicate broad perspectives independently it is worth trying to do so. I think the internet will certainly make it easier to do so now, too.
Additionally you have a lot longer than 4 years to engage with material. Autodidactism eventually wins because it is unconstrained; though the educational experience might get a lot of breadth out fast.
This is the sort of thing you tell people when you can't point to anything measurable. It's the college grad's equivalent of "I'm a people person!"
An Arts major is great for your personal growth because it's broader and more generalist than STEM but it doesn't add much value to society on short term. Once it doesn't add direct value to society, society doesn't reward it also. This translates into an high probability of a stagnated life after graduation. Choose carefully.
I wanted a degree in physics but it doesn't pay as much as a programming job would. So I took computer science instead. Teacher/Education degrees are good to get because of a teacher shortage but don't get paid as well as most other jobs.
When I went to a university it was 1986, I learned Turbo Pascal which is nothing compared to modern IDEs now. I learned Turbo C in 1987 and that helped me learn Ada, COBOL, FORTRAN, Visual BASIC, and many others. Once you understand the concepts you can learn almost any other language.
The real issue is that the oligarchs don't want a populace that is truly educated in critical thinking.
For a treat, try page 7 of the Norman Dodd report to the Reece Committee.
https://www.scribd.com/doc/3768227/Dodd-Report-to-the-Reece-...
Bonuses:
https://www.amazon.com/Leipzig-Connection-Basics-Education/d...
https://www.amazon.com/Deliberate-Dumbing-America-Revised-Ab...
The thing is, that was once thought a decade ago or so, was that a liberal arts degree did not qualify someone for a programming job as much as a computer science or engineering degree would.
Python and Ruby on Rails made it easier to program, when it was thought that a liberal arts major can't program we used C and Pascal, pointers, had to do garbage collection on our own, had to allocate and then free up memory, etc. Programming Languages evolved with Java and C# that did away with pointers, does garbage collection on their own, and allocates and frees up memory when an object is closed. Then Python and Ruby on Rails made it even easier.
Microsoft had to make a Express and then Community version of their Visual Studio Dotnet languages to compete with FOSS languages, Borland suffered and kept getting bought out, suddenly there FOSS languages got easier to use, understand, and program in.
I think every degree should have a Critical Thinking class and maybe a Small Business class to learn how to balance a checking account and learn to save money instead of living paycheck to paycheck. How to run your own business and make it a startup by bootstrapping what you saved working a job.
- prioritization of the ability to make a buck over all else. This is an old tendency, dating back to the early 1800s.
- Postmodernism ruined the general reputation of the fields it touched. The Sokal Hoax was very famous.
- Most liberal arts majors didn't seem to work hard, or to work on hard problems. This in contrast to the engineering major slaving away until midnight 6 hours per week.
- pg has an essay on this; I forget its name, but the "drop-out-to" lattice in college - people often drop out to easier majors. Psychology or English are roughly at the bottom of that lattice where I went to school; things like CS, Math, Chemical Engineering or Physics are near the top of the lattice. So... yeah. "Couldn't hack it, got a English degree, now serving coffee" stories show up enough to, at minimum, distort perception.
Add those together, and it's a pretty potent mix for looking coldly at the humanities as a useful thing.
I'd emphasize that many humanities people and professors are doing an impressive job of soiling the name of the humanities.
I spent a year at WPI, and its fucking lousy with these stuck up losers, sharing lame "engineering memes" putting down lib arts majors. Mind you, these were not even engineers, just engineering students, most of whom hadn't built a single useful thing in their life outside of school.
By the way, I will say it: I like .NET. My first paying job was in Visual Basic / C#. Used to spend nights writing Perl. Lisp is not special, but it is powerful.
Did you just make a broad generalization about people because you're pissed off you've heard broad generalizations about people?
What clouds the discussion even further is that many of the people involved are far enough removed from that time in their life that they can't remember what they knew or didn't know about anything. I look back and think about how much I could have learned if I had spent less time doing things like video games, or watching sports or whatever, without realizing that so much has changed in 15+ years that alot of what I find interesting may not have been invented then. Or if it was, it wasn't that important to me.
While I don't think all (or even most) CS majors need to be produced out of liberal arts programs, I think it would be good for the field and the software industry to have more of those.
• BS only. (Caltech, for example. In fact, Caltech only offers BS for everything. Even English majors--and yes, there is an occasional English major at Caltech--end up with a BS).
• BA only. UC Berkeley is an example in this category for math and physics.
• Both are offered, with identical coursework and requirements. You can have whichever you want. Some will even for a small fee give you two diplomas, so you can use whichever seems appropriate for the situation.
• Both are offered, from the same department, with different in-major coursework and aims. One may be aimed toward students aiming to go into research, and one toward those aiming to go into teaching, for instance.
• Both are offered, from different departments. For example, UC Berkeley's College of Letters and Sciences offers a BA in chemistry, and the College of Chemistry offers a BS in chemistry. Computer science can be taken at Berkeley in the College of Letters and Science for a BA, or in the College of Engineering for a BS.
• Both are offered, with the same in-major coursework, but differ in out-of-major requirements. So, the BA and BS would require the exact same science and math courses, but the BA has specific breadth requirements to produce a well rounded education, whereas the BS lets you take pretty much what you want as long as you satisfy the math and science requirements and any general requirements of your school.
I generally just say that I have a bachelor's degree in mathematics. If someone thinks they need to know if it is a BA or a BS, I ask what they are really trying to figure out.
I guess an example of this is the Italian girl that won last year's Dyalog APL student competition: http://www.dyalog.com/news/102/420/2015-APL-Programming-Cont...
She was studying Latin and Greek, then was exposed to APL, enjoyed it, and was apparently very good at it...
Fine, that makes some sense. But, if the goal is learn APL (or any programming language), why not just learn APL? Is it really true that learning French prior to Ruby on Rails gives you a unique advantage?
I don't think that if your goal is to learn RoR, the best way to accomplish it is to learn French first. But if you take two programming newbies, and one of them knows a couple foreign languages and the other doesn't, the former will have an advantage.
"How can this be? It’s very simple. A well-rounded liberal arts degree establishes a foundation of critical thinking."
Jumps the gun. The brevity of my counter argument may belie it's truth:
Selection bias perfectly explains his experiences.
Of course I'd rather an English major that has learned to code at the level I require over a Computer Science major. The English major that is able to hustle his or her way into a programming career almost certainly has a greater IQ than the average Computer Science grad. What is not seen is the vast sea of English majors not going down that path, but rather ending up in a career that is far less challenging.
It's almost like they went to school for something completely different ;)
I don't see why selection bias matters though, as it's not terribly relevant to the author's point that humanities students bring a different/valuable perspective to the table and shouldn't be written off as technical hires. To me, the real goal should be encouraging students from both STEM and humanities backgrounds to learn from each other and cross streams a bit. No more Physics for Poets or Shakespeare for sysadmins.
"Critical thinking and the ability to learn and adapt independently is the most important ability in a professional. These abilities are more pertinent than one's conferred degree. Find people with these characteristics wherever you may find them. Independently acquired skills outside of one's undergraduate studies may be correlated with an increased likelihood of possession of such aptitudes."
Not judging people by their labels cuts both ways. Plenty of liberal arts majors lack critical thinking, and vice versa and any combination thereof.
So, not those liberal arts majors who are protected in "safe spaces", who have "trigger warnings" on their classes, who complain about how they feel threatened when someone wrote pro-Trump messages at their school.
Look, there are a lot of good, high-quality liberal arts schools that are teaching students to think for themselves, and giving them a good breadth of background to orient them to the stuff that they encounter. But there are unfortunately also a lot of liberal arts schools that just coddle the kids, and turn out little better than 22-year-old high-schoolers. The first is valuable; the second a waste.
Personally, I always complain I wish I knew what a normal person would want. A technical person very quickly falls to an abnormal and complicated approach of doing things.
I have a BS in CS, but from a program with relatively lax minimum course requirements, particularly in math, from what I've read about other CS programs. (Only Calc II and Discrete Math.)
This allowed me to actually take more non-STEM than STEM courses while still earning a CS degree. If I was required to take higher-level math or more advanced CS subjects, I probably would have failed at the time. Yet I still got aspects of a CS education that I wouldn't have if I just minored in CS, which have provided a good base for exploring higher-level CS topics on my own.
At the same time, the program has everything available for students who want a more rigorous courseload.
So I'd say that except for producing top individual contributors in STEM domain programming (physics simulations, etc.), low-level algorithms, and high-performance system-level programming (which admittedly comprise a large number of software engineering jobs, but probably not the majority), a high-quality CS program where you can still take mostly non-STEM courses, and that doesn't use math courses effectively to weed people out, would on the surface appear to be ideal for the vast majority of software developers and technology leaders.
Engineering degrees don't magically turn someone into a robotic human with no capacity for creativity or self-leadership, and liberal arts degrees don't make someone incapable of understanding logical reasoning.
I would be interested in seeing what types of people are drawn most to each though. For example, many of my friends who went the engineering path did it because they wanted a stable career, and they knew engineering was a solid way to earn that, even if it's difficult. In contrast, some of my friends who went to smaller liberal arts colleges (in most cases for political science) cited "networking" opportunities and "making connections" as important for their careers and reasons why they went the LA path. Both sets of friends are very capable, but as someone from a solidly middle-class background who was raised to view hard work as the only way to succeed, the notion of "networking" and playing the social game to move up has always seemed alien to me. I know it's not true in all cases, but it makes me wonder if taking the risk on a LA degree in some cases is correlated to greater economic privilege (ie, people with better safety nets who don't need guaranteed income that more economically valuable degrees provide). I wonder if those are the people that the author is so enamored with here.
From my experience of college (and that of most people I know), especially in the social sciences, the degree itself was only worth it because studying is cheap here. About 1500 euro a year, and we received about 250 euro a month from the state, more if we lived in a dorm, and could top that off with a very, very friendly loan up to about 600 euro total.
The biggest value, aside from intrinsic interest in the topic and having mediocre-at-best lecturers provide us with reading suggestions, was indeed the connections we made during those years.
Most of the people I met in college now have interesting work or positions in their field (and often via said connections). I partied with them, hung out with them, had discussions with them, started book clubs with them, and became friends with them. If I need to talk to a good journalist, accountant, lawyer, entrepreneur about something, there's one from my network available. If I have questions related to philosophy, physics, literature, etc., well, that's just an appointment and a few beers away.
While it's possible to create these connections without going to college, it's much harder. By going to college it happens automatically, especially if you join some student organization.
Whether that's worth the insane student loans people have to burden themselves with in some countries is up for debate, but the value in the network is huge.
I'd also like to note that it doesn't feel like playing a social game and networking. It's making friends and acquaintances and sort of 'falling into' using the advantages. A bit like how I suppose most people who date other people are looking forward to getting laid, but it doesn't feel 'sleezy' because it's not your primary objective (of course, if it is and you're up-front or okay with that, that's fine too).
But is a critical thinker creative? They can think, but if you put them in front of a blank sheet of paper, a blank whiteboard, or an empty Vi terminal, can they create and build something new and original?
Creativity is not at all like critical thinking - one analyzes things that exist, one actually creates things.
Creativity is at the heart of software craftmanship.
The most important bit is the 'critical thinking' coupled with a passion to learn, build and being creative. At the end of the day writing software has a huge creative component to it. Sadly most companies require STEM degrees for an entry level Software Engineer position. I agree with the author that we need to be more open and be the meritocracy we thump our chests about so loudly. Conversely for liberal arts jobs ...
The hard sciences and engineering are accountable to reality while Liberal Arts is accountable only to popular opinion.