Reply to WTF? Govt rewarding bad behavior Part II

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=TheManWithAUsername]I won't defend the other PP's ideas, but I think the response to this is that the question should be, "Why should the government subsidize theology and other liberal arts degrees?" (The subsidy here is in the guarantee of the loan.) I support government investment in the hard sciences, but generally not in the liberal arts.[/quote]
Why? This seems an indefensible bias. The country needs liberal arts majors as much as it needs hard science majors. Many of us English majors end up in technical writing, teaching, drafting tests, journalism, or other communication jobs. Similar fields could be outlined for other so called soft majors.[/quote]
You picked probably the most useful of them. Art history and comparative lit, e.g., don't have those "similar fields" other than teaching them to others.

While getting that English BA that prepares you for one of those useful jobs, you still probably spend the majority of your time in classes that have nothing to do with the job, e.g. all those lit classes. The combination of the BA and the liberal arts is what makes it so relatively useless.

Here's an easy test. You're starting the first university in a very poor country, and it will be 100% publicly funded. You have no good reason to employ any kind of degree system like ours. What's your ratio of engineering or biology classes to classes in history or philosophy, which are relatively useful humanities? How many students would you fund to learn medicine before you funded your first student of comp lit? How many would you fund to learn basic, vital trades before funding comp lit or art history students?

[quote=Anonymous]Enginners can end up as under or unemployed as lib arters[/quote]
"Can?" Anything's possible for an individual, but the fact is that they aren't as often unemployed or underemployed: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/the-college-majors-that-do-best-in-the-job-market/

I don't know if that's the point, though. The question is whether hard sciences or liberal arts are more important to society on average.

[quote=Anonymous]AND their degrees generally take longer to achieve, thus costing more.[/quote]
? What two things are you comparing? I guess a 3/2 engineering degree takes 25% more time than a BA in fine arts, but that's still a pretty easy call for me.

And one reason the 3/2 takes that long is that we force them to take a bunch of BS classes along the way. These are really apples and oranges. To compare, we would have to distill them down to the necessary classes, then question the utility of those.[/quote]

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