Home schooling

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by Jon Miller


A lot of liberal arts grads get jobs as secretaries (and hate it) because they can't get any better.

Well, this speaks to a different problem: it's too damned easy to get a liberal arts degree. The kind of person who ends up as a secretary -- forever -- with a liberal arts degree is the kind of person who shouldn't have gotten a degree, period, and who would have flunked out of a physics or science curriculum. As an ex-prof who flunked my fair share of liberal arts students, I'd be the first to say that liberal arts professors aren't tough enough on their students.

That being said, my closest friend graduated Georgetown with a liberal arts degree and went straight into temping for minimum wage while being mocked by his engineer friends. 20 years later, he's the marketing director for a major company and can buy and sell those engineer friends many times over.

We're back to DanS's point: engineering and science degrees start high but plateau early. They allow you to make a lot of money for a 25-year-old. But by the time you're 45, an equally-ambitious liberal arts grad has many, many more -- and more lucrative -- options.

[Sandman]

Originally posted by Oerdin
Then you'd be reckoning wrong. Just about everyone I know, including myself, who got degrees in science or engineering are working in their field.

I'm going by the people I know.

[Jon Miller]

Originally posted by Rufus T. Firefly



We're back to DanS's point: engineering and science degrees start high but plateau early. They allow you to make a lot of money for a 25-year-old. But by the time you're 45, an equally-ambitious liberal arts grad has many, many more -- and more lucrative -- options.

I don't see the many, many more options (then sci/eng degrees). An engineering major can be just as ambitious as the liberal arts major, and doesn't have to plateau (unless wishes to). Basically both Liberal Arts majors, and eng/sci majors can go into management (down the road..), only sci/eng majors can do sci/eng.

The reason why more people in management have liberal arts degrees is that there is more liberal arts degrees..

Jon Miller

[KrazyHorse]

Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of HTML) - Computer Scientist

Note: he was working for physicists at the time...

[Fake Boris]

Originally posted by Rufus T. Firefly
Well, this speaks to a different problem: it's too damned easy to get a liberal arts degree. The kind of person who ends up as a secretary -- forever -- with a liberal arts degree is the kind of person who shouldn't have gotten a degree, period, and who would have flunked out of a physics or science curriculum. As an ex-prof who flunked my fair share of liberal arts students, I'd be the first to say that liberal arts professors aren't tough enough on their students.

Where I study, half of the students don't make it to the second year of philosophy. It's also true for literature undergrads.

People who think that that liberal arts are easy probably never did some seriously.

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Sandman


I'm going by the people I know.

Statistically, of those who graduate with a physics or astronomy bachelor's degree in the US, less than 15% end up taking a job which is not science-related.

20-25% take a job which is science related directly from their undergraduate program

The rest do graduate work, and virtually all of these end up working in a science-related job. Many of those that don't will take a job in finance doing complex mathematical work.

[KrazyHorse]

http://aip.org/statistics/trends/highlite/emp/emp.pdf

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Jon Miller
I value liberal art degrees, and think they are good. I just disagree that they pay more then science degrees. I am not doing science for the money... (and would get a more liberally art degree if I didn't like science)

They do... eventually. I think it would be even more stark if you controlled for the large number of women who do liberal arts and then become housewives rather than working. Fewer women do science, so that skews the figures somewhat.

The point of a liberal arts degree is that it trains you to deal with people rather than with things. Most jobs and indeed most jobs with any kind of real authority over other people require that skill. You need to be able to communicate well both in writing and orally, and also to have some idea of how to deal with politics and human behaviour. I wish I had a dollar for every science grad I know who is absolutely hopeless at dealing with people or work politics.

As I've said before: the point of liberal arts majors is for the best of them to tell everyone else what to do. People who have had that sort of education are the kind of people who built empires.

If there is a problem with liberal arts degrees it is that they have suffered more than other areas from the "dumbing down" of our universities. In practice this means that the A students are about the same as ever, while the B students would have been C students 40 years ago and the C students would not have been admitted to college.

Some of this can be attributed to political desire to make higher education more accessible, some to general declining standards in education, and the rest to various anti-elitist trends within the liberal arts themselves in the last 30-40 years.

There are still some places that adhere to the old standards. The Classics department here at U of T is still notoriously hardass in many respects, but it could be better.

If the arts were taught the way they were 100 years ago, science would be pathetically easy in comparison (I still think it is). A proper education in the arts would require the learning of both classical languages to a reasonable standard of competence, a modern language other than English, and extensive knowledge of western literature, history and philosophy. It's a shame that our modern universities do not demand this much work from their students.

If you want a good test for telling a good liberal arts student from a good science student, give them both a novel to read. Then ask them what the novel is about. The science student will give a literal rendition of the plot and the liberal arts student will tell you what it's actually about.

[Jon Miller]

Originally posted by Agathon


They do... eventually. I think it would be even more stark if you controlled for the large number of women who do liberal arts and then become housewives rather than working. Fewer women do science, so that skews the figures somewhat.

No they don't. Which if you looked at my link you would see proved.

Only a very few number of types of jobs for liberal arts grads have pay that has a median income (and most of those are law and management) of ~100k. Every type of job for science/engineers have median pay of ~100k. And the science type people can do management also. A number of the areas that liberal arts peopel get jobs at the median income never rises above 40k, and most the median income never rises above 60k.

Your suggestion that liberal arts types get paid more is just statistically wrong.

Jon Miller

[Jon Miller]

Originally posted by Agathon



The point of a liberal arts degree is that it trains you to deal with people rather than with things. Most jobs and indeed most jobs with any kind of real authority over other people require that skill. You need to be able to communicate well both in writing and orally, and also to have some idea of how to deal with politics and human behaviour. I wish I had a dollar for every science grad I know who is absolutely hopeless at dealing with people or work politics.

You know that to be really successful in science you have to be able to deal with people (it is the prime thing really). Also, for any sort of science work you have to be able to communicate Orally and in writting (and well).

Success in science depeends on the ability to get grants.

[Jon Miller]

Originally posted by Agathon


If you want a good test for telling a good liberal arts student from a good science student, give them both a novel to read. Then ask them what the novel is about. The science student will give a literal rendition of the plot and the liberal arts student will tell you what it's actually about.

Lol.

I am great with literature. And most the science students I know were also (admittedly, I went to a liberal arts school, so perhaps that scewd my preceptions).

You don't know what you are talking about.

Jon Miller

[Wycoff]

I'm a liberal arts student. I double majored in history and political science in undergrad, and I'm currently a second year law student. I'm sorry to say that I have to side with the hard science guys on this one.

In my experience, getting a hard science degree takes more talent than getting a liberal arts degree.

I think the whole "yeah, but the science guys can't communicate" line is bogus. From what I've seen, the majority of the hard science people could be very successful in a liberal arts class. I know this because I had hard science friends who took upper level history / poly sci classes as electives and did very well. This doesn't seem to work the other way. If you'd put the average history major or political science major in a mid level math or physics class, I'd guarantee that most of them, maybe all of them, would fail. How many of you liberal arts majors took an upper level hard science elective on a whim and did well in it? I know I didn't... I took the easiest possible science and math classes just to satisfy my requirements and then never again looked at that part of the course catalog.

Another thing to look at is participation in graduate programs. I knew around thirty people in undergrad who applied to law school. I scored in the 97th percentile of the LSATs (168), the highest amongst my liberal arts peers. I went to a very good undergraduate school, I received honors in both of my majors, and I was admitted to 4 or 5 top-20 law schools. The only people I knew who beat me on the LSATs: two comp. sci majors, both of who scored in the mid 170s. One is going to Columbia Law, the other to Harvard. Probably a quarter of my fellow law students have a math/science background in undergrad. I don't know anyone who had a liberal arts major in undergrad and then attended a science / math graduate school. Hard science people can cross over to liberal arts if they want to, but I don't think many liberal arts students are capable of switching to hard science.

The pay issue is also skewed. IMO, there are two liberal arts type careers that skew the liberal arts pay scale: business and law. MBAs and lawyers can get into positions in which they make lots of money. Take those two careers out of the picture and the field changes drastically. What kind of job can a person with a B.A. in history or sociology get? People with B.A.s from top schools may stand a good chance at getting an analyst position, but a B.A. from a mid range school or lower is basically useless. A high school friend of mine graduated from a mid range state school with honors in history and a 3.5 g.p.a. He's currently working construction for $10 an hour.

I know that I'm strictly going on anecdotal evidence. Maybe my experiences are abnormal. However, I'm fairly confident that most hard science students could do very well in a liberal arts program, while most liberal arts students would fail in a hard science program. This is because liberal arts studies involves a more common type of critical thinking. I believe that any intelligent person can study history or politics or sociology or religion and be able to draw reasonable conclusions from their studies and come up with rational arguments. That's why its so common to have hard science people cross over into these fields for electives or graduate programs.

Currently, Liberal Arts study is like a hobby. I love reading about history and about political science, I love coming up with theories and getting into debates, but it's not something that takes years of training to be able to do. Sure, great historians / philosophers need years of academic training, but most liberal arts students don't leave their programs as great critical thinkers. They leave their programs knowing a bunch of trivia (soon to be forgotten), as well as knowing a bit about how to research and how to write. To me, learning how to research and how to write are the two most important parts of a liberal arts education, but it's not as if you have to have majored in liberal arts to know how to do those things. There's a reason why Liberal Arts programs at all but the best schools have reputations for being easy and worthless: they pretty much are. I guarantee that you find far more liberal arts majors than math/science majors in fraternities and on athletic teams.

Hard science / mathematical study takes a different type of thinking. People are either good at it or they aren't. Those with aptitude in this area train for years, getting into steadily more esoteric areas. They're dealing with concrete concepts, things with right and wrong answers. They're learning how to make scientific break throughs, how to design structures, how to improve computers. I've often wished that I was better in the hard sciences, because I think that those in the hard sciences do more to make a society progress. I think that someone working on new propulsion systems for space exploration or designing new computer chips is doing more for us than someone haggling over some term in a contract or someone writing the 10 millionth book on WW2.

[Wycoff]

Originally posted by Agathon
If the arts were taught the way they were 100 years ago, science would be pathetically easy in comparison (I still think it is). A proper education in the arts would require the learning of both classical languages to a reasonable standard of competence, a modern language other than English, and extensive knowledge of western literature, history and philosophy. It's a shame that our modern universities do not demand this much work from their students.

I very much agree with you here, Agathon. Liberal Arts courses today are very watered down, mostly because of the push to get every high school student into college. It's a function of no longer having plenty of available, well paying industrial jobs. While I don't think that a more rigorous Liberal Arts program would make the hard sciences look "pathetically easy," I do think that it would make Liberal Arts students more respectable. It would also remove 60-70% of current Liberal Arts students from college... not necessarily a bad thing, as I think that there are too many worthless colleges producing worthless degrees.

[mactbone]

This is not the direction this thread should be heading but I'm sick and tired of this BS.

There's a lot more to most BAs that you don't get. Not only that but there's a lot more crossover. I'm friends with enough engineers that I know that the work they did was hard. It was also specialized. To me, they seemed to be the ones learning how to crunch numbers and regurgitate answers. Whereas I was taught how to look critically at literature and look into the author's true meaning. There were also the design courses for learning how to set up any kind of writing on a page and understanding how words and space influence the reader.

Science is great, but let's not put values on which degrees or fields of study are more valuable than others because that is something that will not be resolved. There are lots of different jobs because people at some time have realized that there was a need for someone to do that job.

[KrazyHorse]

Hard science / mathmatical study takes a different type of reasoning. People are either good at it or they aren't

This is partly true. There is a spectrum of abilities, but there are two remarkable things about this spectrum:

a) Nobody who's really stupid is good at mathematical reasoning (i.e. math, "hard" science, CompSci, related disciplines), but being very smart does not mean you will be good at science. I have met a large number of people who are very intelligent when it comes to most things, but who don't even have the foggiest idea when it comes to thinking about physical or mathematical problems. The disability most people have when it comes to this mode of thought is severe and insurmountable. Most people are far less competent at such things than I was when I was a small child. This is not a statement about my prowess; rather, it is a statement of the starkness of the gap between those who can and those who can't.

b) There is a second step which many of those who can are incapable of taking: the generalisation of known methodology to previously unsolvable problems and the recasting of problems to fit known methodologies. This gap is almost as stark as the first one. My feeling is that this ability is related to general creativity and a certain liberality of thought. There are non-scientists who have this, but they are unable, of course, to apply this ability to scientific problems, as they cannot understand the problems themselves.

The ultimate step is the creation of entirely new frameworks to deal with ill-defined problems. This is the realm of genius.