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

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia


becuase you also bring in less endowments, and your graduates have no money to donate for new labs etc. thats why you pay the same.

It depends on the college. And the commerce people bring in plenty of corporate money.

Some of the grads from my old school ain't short of a bob. One was president of some ridiculously large bank.

You have a weird idea of the humanities. Half the time we are the people who end up telling you what to do.

And not everyone cares about money. I was really good at science and math, but I wanted to do something else. I could even make a lot more money than I do now if I went into the private sector: my academic record is certainly better than most folks (I should know, I've seen them).

On the other hand, I just don't care. I currently have more money than I know what to do with. I now own the computer I've always wanted; I have books and CDs coming out the wazoo, and I don't care for clothes, cars, or expensive holidays – all that stuff is pointless ****. I'd rather spend my time reading about Greek philosophy and talking about it with other people who like the same thing. It certainly has a more practical bearing on my life than anything to do with science.

[Alexander's Horse]

Originally posted by Agathon


You have a weird idea of the humanities. Half the time we are the people who end up telling you what to do.

We certainly convinced ourselves....but Arts is the biggest employer of graduates. Science is the worst.

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Agathon
It certainly has a more practical bearing on my life than anything to do with science.

You might not need the science personally, but you need someone to have the science. Otherwise, where would your computer & CD's come from?

[Lawrence of Arabia]

You have a weird idea of the humanities. Half the time we are the people who end up telling you what to do.

you are correct - why do you think they world is in the ****ter?

And not everyone cares about money. I was really good at science and math, but I wanted to do something else. I could even make a lot more money than I do now if I went into the private sector: my academic record is certainly better than most folks (I should know, I've seen them).

it doesnt matter what others care about - universities are a business. why do you think that almost everywhere, the 'hard' subjects have new buildings, state of the art stuff etc, while the music dept is in the oldest most decrepit building with grafitti all over it? there is more money in it for universities when they can educate students in 'hard' subjects, and thats why you pay the same as everyone else.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

is studying to be a manager a liberal arts thing? thats very important, because lab rats have no idea how to communicate.

[Caligastia]

Originally posted by Sikander


I agree completely. Thomas Sowell has written about this extensively. He studied the economic paths of immigrants and ethnic groups within the U.S. One of the surest indicators of a group on the rise economically was that its members tended to study the sciences rather than the arts. This is a particularly important point now that so many members of economically disadvantaged minorities in the U.S. major in ethnic studies and the like. This is a great way to create / feed / extend strife within a society because it increases expectations and demands while delivering mainly disappointment which can be conveniently blamed on "the man".

Encouraging minorities to study the sciences rather than some ethnic curriculum would be good except that any poor performace will be met with the usual "institutional racism" whine, followed by the usual capitulation and dumbing-down of the coursework. Until that changes, they can major in ebonics for all I care.

[CrONoS]

Best post of this thread.

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?postid=4378583#post4378583

Originally posted by Cyclotron
Education is beneficial to the individual and society in many various economic and non-economic ways. Students, however, will only realize their fullest potential when they are allowed to study that which interests them most. Is ir really in the interest of the state to cut off scholarships to liberal arts majors in need of money, forcing poor students to gravitate towards technical degrees that they are poor at and don't like, turning (for example) a great writer, musician, or educator into a engineering school dropout?

The underlying claim to the argument of maximizing the economy through cutting scholarships to liberal arts majors seems to take for granted that a student, when faced with financial crisis, will happily take up a new, cheaper, technical major and proceed towards a productive technical field where they will advance the economic progress of the mother country.

I can't see this as being true. People major in what they like and what they believe they are good at. I can't see why financial incentives - or, more correctly, coercion - would change that substantially and turn would-be liberal arts majors into better scientists and innovators.

I'm lucky enough that, if my financial aid were taken away, I would still be able to pull through college. I chose to be a Politics major (the department, interestingly enough, decided this described the field more precisely than "Political Science") because I found the subject interesting and I had a talent for writing about it. If offered free tutition to major in math or science instead, I wouldn't take it, because I wouldn't be happy doing it - and that is the aim of my life, not stimulating the economy.

As has already been mentioned, the best way to produce more technically-minded students is to hit them when they're young, with more math and science. Financial coercion of poor students with interests in liberal arts fields isn't a viable strategy, even if you agree with the goal of economic progress through more technical majors.

I thought I would also bring up an experience I had this past week. Our school was visited by a Sri Lankan scholar named Sudharshan Seneviratne, an advocate of the liberal arts education in his home country, and I had an opportunity to ask him some questions because he's a friend of my advisor.

His basic argument on the issue was that the university and educational system under British rule, at least in the later colonial period, was weighted towards the liberal arts because of foreign philanthropy and guidance that valued such an education. Upon Sri Lanka's independence, the government quickly redesigned the education system to stress only technical knowledge, which Sri Lanka's leaders saw as vital to competing and gaining prosperity in a global market dominated by technical fields.

The end of the colonial liberal arts tradition coincided with the rise of the ultra-nationalist movements among both the Sinhala and Tamil ethnic groups, which together compromize nearly all of Sri Lanka's population. Seneviratne credits this new education with a prominent role in that country's increasing sectarian violence, for two reasons - one, the ever more "IT" oriented schools produced students who lacked intellectual independence and followed violent ethnic movements readily; and two, the government's top-down control of the educational system, essentially a program of social engineering to maximize economic advantage, ended up creating a great deal of pro-Sinhala propaganda along with the science classes - with the government already heavily involved with the promotion of certain curricula, it proved all too easy for the government to add certain other curricula that served its short term interests, largely involving the marginalization of and incitement of violence towards the Tamils. The single-minded parochialism of the schools, created by Sri Lanka's profit-centered government, served ultimately to betray the interests of the people and can be implicated in the human misery and death of many Sri Lankans.

Now, Seneviratne and his colleages are attempting to effect change in Sri Lanka's education system, in an attempt to reintroduce more liberal modes of education that will, in his view, serve to advance an intellectually oriented, multicultural personality in the next generation, something lost when the educational system was stripped of its non-technical content.

One wonders whether the interests of our society as a whole, especially a time in which the multicultural character of our nation is being so hotl

[Alexander's Horse]

Originally posted by Caligastia


Encouraging minorities to study the sciences rather than some ethnic curriculum would be good except that any poor performace will be met with the usual "institutional racism" whine, followed by the usual capitulation and dumbing-down of the coursework. Until that changes, they can major in ebonics for all I care.

they also get uppity

[Patroklos]

Encouraging minorities to study the sciences rather than some ethnic curriculum would be good except that any poor performace will be met with the usual "institutional racism" whine, followed by the usual capitulation and dumbing-down of the coursework. Until that changes, they can major in ebonics for all I care.

That is how universities react to a whole host of problems, and it bugs me too. I was appauled at how easy some of my classes were, how my physics professors would curve so bad anything over 60% was an A.

And I wasn't even studying that, I am one of those loser liberal arts majors now making better money than my non or barely employed engineering classmates.

[Kuciwalker]

That is how universities react to a whole host of problems, and it bugs me too. I was appauled at how easy some of my classes were, how my physics professors would curve so bad anything over 60% was an A.

Eh, that's how it's supposed to be. Physics tests are usually designed to be so hard that 60% is a really good school.

[Patroklos]

I never had a problem doing far better than that. Now I know some of the tests were like that because of the number of questions, some of them take a hell of alot of time to do and so there will only be five or so.

If I have to get a 90 or higher to get an a in history, then I can't see why a physics student can't do the same. Are just not as smart?

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia

you are correct - why do you think they world is in the ****ter?

Because you sometimes don't listen.

it doesnt matter what others care about - universities are a business. why do you think that almost everywhere, the 'hard' subjects have new buildings, state of the art stuff etc, while the music dept is in the oldest most decrepit building with grafitti all over it?

Because universities have been undermined by cretins is the usual answer.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Patroklos
I never had a problem doing far better than that. Now I know some of the tests were like that because of the number of questions, some of them take a hell of alot of time to do and so there will only be five or so.

If I have to get a 90 or higher to get an a in history, then I can't see why a physics student can't do the same. Are just not as smart?

Because they're different tests with different means. The history test is designed for the mean to be, say, 80%, and the physics test is designed for the mean to be maybe 40%.

For instance, on some math competitions getting even a few of the questions correct makes you a genius.

[Pekka]

LoA, well, Unis are a business, however in here they are publicly funded. And there are no big tuition costs.

However there are businesses sponsoring certain fields, technology fields and especially anything to do with computer science is heavily sponsored.

For example mobile industry wants to have the ability to choose from a range of specialized graduates, there's a market for it and demand, so they sponsor the schools that put up special courses on that and special education on it, so you can specialize on it and go straight from school to work with those companies, locally.

There are of course few fundamental problems with that, for example you don't tend to make a lot of money by specializing to that subject, since the demand was there but the lines are starting to build up from applicants now, so it's once again employers market and they have all the strings in their hands, and that field of work is not exactly special anymore, it's becoming a standard issue.

Furthermore, if you would be sacked by such industry, you have nowhere else to go in this country, as competitors are far and wide. So it's not a win-win. But that's life.

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


Because they're different tests with different means. The history test is designed for the mean to be, say, 80%, and the physics test is designed for the mean to be maybe 40%.

For instance, on some math competitions getting even a few of the questions correct makes you a genius.

More importantly, patty was obviously taking intro physics classes. Hate to tell you this, boyo, but in the physics classes you took the physicists (or, more properly, those who were going to actually succeed in graduating with a physics degree) were all acing everything. The people who were doing badly were non-physics students doing the required physics course. Physics doesn't get hard until you're beyond the dumbed-down 101 type classes non-physicists are required to take.