STEM is important, but its importance should not be asserted at the cost of less technical studies. Does the world need another art history major? I don't know — how many is enough, and how many art history majors are able to apply the concepts of what they learned about art, about history, about human behavior, about design and its evolution, to new in different disciplines.
I was a history major. I ended up as an IT manager not because I took a ton of CS courses (though that would have had some value) but because I applied the experience of being a history major to a technical experience (how do I make this user-friendly?), and went on from there, and I applied the analytic and communication skills I learned as a liberal arts student to engage with others using tools like email and PowerPoint even today.
Would it be good to be graduating more engineering and math and science majors? Sure. But we can encourage that without disdaining the values and skills that liberal arts studies can provide.
Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous
Alongside technical skills, America needs the creativity that a liberal arts education provides.
Same here, degree in English but working in IT. Although it was really grating continually fielding the, "Oh, an English degree, why aren't you using that?" question in interviews.
To be fair Dave, you pretty much got into IT, if not on the ground floor, the second or third floor. These days, unless doing IT work as a hobbyist, it is doubtful you could make that same kind of transition of teacher to IT.
We have many Admins working here with 4 year LA degrees, not one of them in the field that their degree is in. If they had gotten an Engineering Degree, they'd be way better off pay wise.
For the most part, as with many aspects of our country, returning to the Gilded Age has made LA degrees a purview of the 2% who can send their kids (spend $50K to $200k, depending on the collage) to collage to get a degree in a field that won’t get them a good paying job when the graduate because they can always fall back on a healthy trust fund. Basically this has been the movement since the 70s and 80s starting with St. Ronnie of the Raygun killing California’s collage system, and continuing through to today with insane costs and grinding debt loads.
If you’re an 18 year old today (and not part of the upper 2%), and your only real choices are hoping to get a scholarship, furthering the US’s empire and getting the GI Bill to pay off your schooling, or being responsible for a $50k to $200k debt load the day you graduate from collage; getting a non-STEM degree is just damn foolish.
So yes, in many ways state schools should be getting out of the LA game, since it is irresponsible to be taking money from students who will be graduating into a job market that cannot support them with the degree they got and start going back to the A&M model from back in the last Gilded Age and let the private collages continue to provide LA degrees.
Where I see the risk is things like senators talking about "eliminating blow off classes" (i.e. Liberal Arts) as if they have no value.
And in things like my daughter, taking engineering classes, having to take "engineering centric" writing classes, rather than letting her take creative writing, film-as-literature, radical thought, or similar classes.
We don't want is to turn 4 year institutions into nothing more than STEM trade schools–we need to keep things broad, as well as deep…and we also need to let our students take that weird class that they want, once in a while.
It seems to me the debate is largely based on an assumed false dichotomy. You don't have to choose between STEM and LA, you can have both. Secondly, I think a major problem is that employers don't openly promote the value of LA education. Most emphasize STEM skills, and as a result, LA skills are devalued. For some reason, employers assume that people with STEM skills will gain needed LA skills on the job, but they also assume that people with LA skills will not or cannot gain the STEM skills they need on the job. Admittedly, there are some LA majors that don't really educate their students well, but that isn't a reason to ignore all the able and intelligent LA students who did get a good education.