Is it good policy to give financial aid to liberal arts majors?

[Sandman]

Great posts, Cyclotron.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
I meant went to graduate schools, not law or business schools specifically.

No doubt- after all, most biology majors go to higher education as well.

And anyway, my dad went from a technical field (Actuarial Science) directly to law school. It just depends on how useful law is to the field.

Many people go into law school to practice law....I would say most. Did he go a a prestigious Law School?

Every engineer I know has a Master's or PhD.

EDIT: engineering major I know, that is - many of them are scientists.

And then the question becomes, who earns more, a scientist, a lawyer, or someone in finance?

Is that a question that really needs to be asked?

[monolith94]

Originally posted by Asher
Liberal arts people are important to themselves and likeminded people. In the real world, most people who can make it to engineering can do their job given equal amounts of training.

Liberal Arts is where you go if you can't cut it in the the sciences or engineering. That's why they get paid ****, too, in general.

I could have been a fine chemist if I wanted to pursue that, Asher. But the fact is, my heart was in the humanities.

I have a friend who's in rel. studies - she's from an extremely poor background, the first of her family to go off to college. Rel. studies is her primary interest, and without financial aid for the humanities, she wouldn't bother with college at all, because that is what she wants to do with her life. She's already packing off for grad school. It seems to me the proposal suggested would do very little to improve our rate of science majors and have the negative effect of limiting study of a select group of majors to the middle and upper class.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by GePap
Many people go into law school to practice law....I would say most. Did he go a a prestigious Law School?

Does UVA count, or only Yale?

[Agathon]

Originally posted by TCO

Showing that you lack the ability to think logically. It actually plays well into my thesis that the better guys in poly sci were also better in math. Math is very challenging. It requires brains. Somehow, I doubt that the converse will hold true as such a good predictor, though...

It requires a different kind of brains. Philosophy is different, if you aren't or weren't a good mathematician, you probably won't do well at the subject (at least in the Analytical tradition).

But for things like English Lit, intuition matters more than logical skill. It's required in philosophy too, but not as much. I wish I had a dollar for every engineering type who was simply too dopey to understand the basic meaning of a novel.

But if you want an academic pissing contest, everyone loses against the people who do Classics the traditional way (there are still a few schools like this). I pity those people.

[Asher]

While "Classics the traditional way" is hard, the people who do it must be monumentally stupid on the basis of taking Classics in the first place.

[Whaleboy]

But for things like English Lit, intuition matters more than logical skill. It's required in philosophy too, but not as much. I wish I had a dollar for every engineering type who was simply too dopey to understand the basic meaning of a novel.

True, but their standard defence is that the novel, or the article, or the paper etc, is irrelevant. A fantasticly quick route the ignorance.

Certain people in this thread are needlessly polarising the issue. Perhaps they have certain stereotypes that they're working to.... the hard working pramatist against the ivory tower intellectual. The very same people who are using those stereotypes are most likely sad little losers sitting in their bedrooms spending half their time on the internet, and half the time thinking of clever ways to pretend they have sufficient "life experience" and wisdom to make such sweeping generalisations.

The simple fact is that while you might want to create an artificial divide between your perceived two types of people, there is no distinction between "liberal arts" and the sciences, engineering, etc etc. Mathematics and analytic philosophy are one and the same; business studies and economics, social sciences, and the like all overlap. Even something like engineering is precluded by the same ideas of communication that you get in a creative writing course!

It all boils down to what I said earlier; that the skills you pick up in a "liberal arts" (why do people call them that anyway; what is "conservative arts"?) course overlap with real life perhaps more so than something like business studies, which is a skill far better attained through experience than academic study.

You have two ways of looking at the problem. If you look at the per capita investment and return for an individual studying an art, and an individual studying a "science", then yes you will probably see on average the former will earn more than the latter.

Now take a wider view, over decades and the whole population. Investment in the arts diversifies culture, provides people with opportunities to actualise themselves, promotes concepts and ideas that end up serving the economy. An interesting question would be were it not for the likes of Poe and Verne, would man have ever walked on the Moon? An extreme question, worth thinking about.

It is the arts which stops society from stagnating, keeps it questioning itself and provides a path for individuals to truly make something of themselves. I think it is of crucial importance that the arts at all levels of education receive equal funding to any other subject so that it is down to the individual to pursue whichever path they choose, in arts or business. No-one should be held back in their life through "lack of funding".

[GePap]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


Does UVA count, or only Yale?

Yale? Harvard, Chicago, Princeton, Stern at NYU, so forth.

There is a difference between studying law to aid in a non-law career, and studying law to be a Lawyer, because for the latter, prestige of school helps in getting a job as a Lawyer.

[Whaleboy]

Originally posted by Asher
While "Classics the traditional way" is hard, the people who do it must be monumentally stupid on the basis of taking Classics in the first place.

Have you any experience whatsoever with the classics, and if so, please explain them.

[Alexander's Horse]

I can just see Asher running Canada.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Whaleboy
Have you any experience whatsoever with the classics, and if so, please explain them.

My experience with classics is limited to understanding what it is, and understanding its purpose in permitting excessive snobbery in people who decide to study it.

It's one of those fields that is rather useless in the modern world.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Alexander's Horse
I can just see Asher running Canada.

If I ran Canada, heads would roll. There is so much taint in our government by corrupt Liberal Arts politicians like Jean Chretien that damage control would take a long time.

[TCO]

Actually Aggy, I think you are right that there is a certain skill in pulling themes out of a literary work and it is not easy for the young or untrained. I'm not sure how much is a type of brains or how much some learning. I remember in 10th grade, I had to compare and contrast various themes of Huck Finn and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the physical journey was not allowed to be one. It kicked my ass. Wrote a really crappy essay. Afterwards talked to teacher and we both understood then, that such an assignment was beyond me since I could not extract sufficient themes. She told me a bunch and I was like aha. And she also said that when I was that stumped to come talk to her vice soldiering on when I couldn't even do stop one properly.

Later at USNA, I had a very challenging class which required compare and contrast of 2-3 chapters of history (same period but written with different schools of thought--revisionist, Wilsonian, etc.) I was bad at that at first, but then learned the trick and was good at it.

I'm sure that there are some differences in aptitude for that sort of inference. I also think though, that a lot of liberal arts try to mystefy what they have out of compensation.

I do think there is something called issue analysis which is important for real world problems (management consulting) and has elements of both. But in general physicists kick ass at it, since they're so damned generally smart.

And I dated (a little) a St. Johnie. That school and USNA are both wierdly anachronistic but in different ways. And USNA closer to the norm. But we still had to go to the board at USNA. Basically USNA was the college of years ago. Basically more like high school in methodology, but covering college material. St. Johns...well they study Euclid in Greek!

P.s. My friend dropped out and went to a local commuter college.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by GePap
Yale? Harvard, Chicago, Princeton, Stern at NYU, so forth.

There is a difference between studying law to aid in a non-law career, and studying law to be a Lawyer, because for the latter, prestige of school helps in getting a job as a Lawyer.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/law/brief/lawrank_brief.php

UVA's eigth.

Anyway, Actuarial science is, since you obviously don't know much about it, a subject deeply concerned with the law (especially pension actuaries). However, lawyers are a bad example of liberal-artsy people; law is a far more technical field than, say, philosophy, and requires actual logical reasoning.

[TCO]

I wish I had learned Latin formally and English grammar formally. It helps with other languages, with logic, with things that you see sometimes...