"It's time to prioritize what students want and need over what we want to teach"

[mamselle]

As Polly pointed out, at one time it may have been the case that a physics degree would have been considered a "liberal arts degree", in the modern usage physics would be identified as a STEM degree, and a liberal arts degree would refer to something non-STEM.

Well you'll have to tell all of the liberal arts colleges around the country that they need to stop offering science courses then. More generally, I think the distinction is really about politics and the attempt to classify STEM classes as useful knowledge and humanities ones as fluff.

...And I aaallmmoost...but not quite...want to suggest that, behind those distinctions, is the haunting echo of "science and math are for the boys and English and art history are for the girls," and THAT is fascized into the Polarity Bundle of "Boy are Strong, and Productive, and Important, while girls are silly and frivolous and don't even play Mommy very well..." thereby justifying a return to the "old" status quo, and defunding of "all those girly things", and ...I dunno....where's Mr. Ed when you need him?

M.

[quasihumanist]

The truth is that we have a terrible problem with K-12 math in this country.

I'm a math professor.  I think at least 75% of our secondary math education graduates are simply not good enough at math to stand in front of a high school classroom and teach it.  They're simply not quick enough on their feet to be able to respond when students come up with potential alternate methods to solve problems, and hence they can only teach math as following the prescribed procedure that they know, rather than as a variety of legitimate methods for which any legitimate use could get to a solution.

And - of course - the 25% who are capable find out how poorly they are paid and how poor their working conditions are, and, unless they are really dedicated, they realize they are smart and can do better compensated things with their lives.

[polly_mer]

However, taking a couple humanities classes is generally far less useful to getting a broader perspective and challenging one's thinking than being on a real project working with people of all kinds of backgrounds and having to square one's textbook knowledge of the physically possible with the needs and desires of actual people who have to live with the results of the project. 

The humanities knowledge from history, philosophy, and even novels can be very relevant to the situation at hand, but a random selection of courses is probably less useful than some targeted reading before shipping out to rural Guatemala or urban St. Louis.  Knowing generically about how power structures work can be valuable if that causes the team to interact with the locals to determine who the real decision-makers are, not just who has the expected title, but that's much less likely to happen if the humanities courses someone was forced to take focused more on a couple specific power structures and how to assign the desired *ist names.

Sigh, this is pretty frustrating. You just told us that people in engineering need to know the math or they won't be able to manage, yet apparently if someone wants to go "ship out" to Guatemala or St. Louis, they just need some quick "targeted reading" and they'll be able to figure out everything they need to know. This is basically like telling this engineer that they can skip the rest of the math in college and just read about some quick targeted calculus and then they'll be able to fix that bridge problem once they get there.

The world is filled with people who think they can just do some quick reading and then they'll understand everything they need to know about those pesky locals and they can get on with the building of their bridge. But, without various skills in interpreting sources and understanding them, they won't know how to evaluate whatever they read about Guatemala. They won't know if the arguments make any sense and most likely they'll be given something that just reinforces whatever existing ideas they have about Guatemalans and they won't have developed the skills to think more critically about any of this.

The solution is to assemble teams of experts who can work together to solve problems, not insist that the engineers have to learn all the humanities, social sciences, and everything else as well as engineering while somehow people with just a bachelor's degree in the humanities are on a good path.

The engineer doesn't have to be an expert on all of Guatemalan history to learn something useful regarding the two villages being connected by the new bridge.  Getting distracted in all the detail is probably the worst thing to do instead of getting a handle on the couple hundred people who are directly affected and figuring out what they need and want in terms of a bridge.  The people who do a lot of world traveling need to know much more how to interact with normal people in this area to address their needs than those traveling engineers need all the gory details of a thousand years of history and politics.  The frustrating part for me is knowing people who travel all the time for projects so that any three humanities classes N years ago are seriously insufficient today and are less useful than a constant stream of reading with some targeted reading as the next project is assigned.

That's a good thing, because no one is becoming an expert in all the world areas by taking the three humanities electives that Hegemony mentions.  Oh, and people do become experts in local knowledge all the time with a little reading and then a lot of listening to the locals themselves.  Being able to speak multiple human languages is much more useful than almost any other part of general education.  However, again, one doesn't have to take a ton of formal classes to get going on the language and actually learn it when other humans are around and interacting on what needs to be discussed instead of what someone somewhere thought would be nice to teach.

I don't remember having to pass a test to go to foreign countries and start interacting.  I just went and learned along the way.

[polly_mer]

As Polly pointed out, at one time it may have been the case that a physics degree would have been considered a "liberal arts degree", in the modern usage physics would be identified as a STEM degree, and a liberal arts degree would refer to something non-STEM.

Well you'll have to tell all of the liberal arts colleges around the country that they need to stop offering science courses then. More generally, I think the distinction is really about politics and the attempt to classify STEM classes as useful knowledge and humanities ones as fluff.

...And I aaallmmoost...but not quite...want to suggest that, behind those distinctions, is the haunting echo of "science and math are for the boys and English and art history are for the girls," and THAT is fascized into the Polarity Bundle of "Boy are Strong, and Productive, and Important, while girls are silly and frivolous and don't even play Mommy very well..." thereby justifying a return to the "old" status quo, and defunding of "all those girly things", and ...I dunno....where's Mr. Ed when you need him?

M.

What is this?  No one is saying that women are unimportant or that studying the humanities is unimportant.

What we're saying is that many people want something other than studying the humanities as a post-high-school experience.

A corollary is saying flat out that formal classroom experiences frequently don't result in the knowledge and wisdom that we want people to gain from those experiences, especially when people are forced into taking classes they don't want and see no use in taking.  How many of those who "took calculus" while undergrads could integrate by parts or do a u substitution in the next hour?  Who can balance a chemical equation or apply Newton's second law or do anything resembling that lab course you took?  Who wants to tackle a round of which European higher ed systems have anything resembling US general education requirements and why they by-and-large don't? 

It must again be time for the story that I took 5 undergraduate classes in math and 5 undergraduate classes in philosophy.  One of these results in me having jobs that pay well and one of them means that people keep telling me that I'm wrong for applying what I learned in those classes to things I read and experience and then dare to tell people what I see.

The distinction isn't men/women or even useful/not useful as some global category; the distinction is to what extent we continue wasting everyone's time by refusing to accept that individual humans have their own thoughts and goals and that formal classes don't work all that well for students who don't want to learn that topic.

[eigen]

As a faculty member at a liberal arts colleges, my experience is that the modern "liberal arts" want students majoring in the sciences to take more humanities, arts, and social science courses. And that's great- I'm a science faculty that pushes for it frequently.

But what I don't see is my colleagues in the humanities pushing their majors to get similar grounding in the mathematical and natural sciences portions of the liberal arts. In fact, I see them helping students avoid taking those "classes they don't really need" as much as possible.

My current university requires one quantitative course that does not even have to be math, and a natural science course. That is not going to lead to a liberal arts degree for someone in the humanities, in my opinion.

On the other hand, it requires courses in the arts, social sciences, history, several writing courses, several semesters of languages and courses the explore culture.

The imbalance between those requirements seems stark, to me.

[spork]

"there is often a disconnect between those who believe urgent and dramatic action is needed (generally trustees and presidents) and those who believe that what the institution offers is of such value or of such long-standing duration that it will be fine (often longtime faculty members and some administrators). Some people in the latter group believe the problem is that the institution just isn't marketing the excellence that they are certain they offer . . . In embracing the status quo, however, they ignore the national trends that are often creating circumstances beyond their control."

From https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/10/07/advice-institutions-facing-impending-financial-challenges-opinion.

[Caracal]

"there is often a disconnect between those who believe urgent and dramatic action is needed (generally trustees and presidents) and those who believe that what the institution offers is of such value or of such long-standing duration that it will be fine (often longtime faculty members and some administrators). Some people in the latter group believe the problem is that the institution just isn't marketing the excellence that they are certain they offer . . . In embracing the status quo, however, they ignore the national trends that are often creating circumstances beyond their control."

From https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/10/07/advice-institutions-facing-impending-financial-challenges-opinion.

Well, the problem is that the people who believe urgent and dramatic action is required usually don't have a well thought out plan. Instead they have a series of hackneyed cliches borrowed from people in business schools. Usually their dramatic action is going to do nothing but take out what is left of the underpinnings of the school and turn "struggling rural liberal arts college" into "pointless pre professional annex."

The whole discussion seems to involve conflating different sorts of problems. The schools that are in trouble because of structural factors are usually small private, non-elite  liberal arts schools. There's a whole discussion that could be had about this, but it is really a sort of niche issue. Then there are state schools which are in trouble because politicians want to defund higher education, often because they think the humanities or, sometimes, even the sciences, are basically worthless endeavors.

[polly_mer]

The whole discussion seems to involve conflating different sorts of problems. The schools that are in trouble because of structural factors are usually small private, non-elite  liberal arts schools. There's a whole discussion that could be had about this, but it is really a sort of niche issue.

It's a niche issue until one starts adding up all the jobs lost, which tends to be about 100 per school and then all the related jobs in the community that relied on having those 100 people as well as several hundred students.  Turning the Midwest and Northeast into the Mountain West so that only urban people have nearby post-high-school education options is going to leave a huge mark on society that won't heal. 

It's niche until you realize we're talking several hundred of these bitsy schools that will increase the widening divide between those who insist that a college education is for everyone and those who see a college education as disconnected from their lives.  The rural/urban/suburban split on who goes to college is looking pretty grim nationally.

People voting with their feet for something other than the small college experience that focuses heavily on the humanities is just one indicator of why the current system is broken.  When fewer people went to college, more of those folks were satisfied with their small college experience of  having classes spread as about 1/3 major, 1/3 general education, and 1/3 electives.  The world has changed and that's no longer sufficient for many people when the goal is having a solid enough foundation that one can do lifelong learning to read up on something and acquire new skills as the world continues to change at a rapid pace.

Continuing to provide education that would be recognizable to the students of more than 50 years ago and holding that up as the ideal is a losing argument to convince people who already have pretty good critical thinking skills and are using their unprecedented-in-human-history access to information to draw conclusions relevant to their lives.

Then there are state schools which are in trouble because politicians want to defund higher education, often because they think the humanities or, sometimes, even the sciences, are basically worthless endeavors.

I'm going with opportunity cost again.  The question in my mind remains: how many people do we need specializing in certain areas of human knowledge when we have so many other needs in society that are falling through the cracks?

When we do prioritization of all the needs and what's required to have people who can address those needs, the generic 4-year college experience where people explore big ideas for mostly personal gain falls pretty low on the priority scale.  That's not the same as worthless, but it does mean someone who can plan and allocate resources according to priorities is generally going to prioritize something other than a liberal-arts-in-name-only college education (i.e., not even going to provide the benefits of a liberal arts degree because the standards have slipped and math/science are not equal parts of the endeavor) for the masses.  The K-12 experience in some places is shockingly inadequate; doing remediation at that level has to be a higher priority than magically trying to provide a true college education to people who don't have the foundation to benefit.

When we go with wants and desires of real human beings who are choosing educational experiences, many of those folks want a good enough job where they can live inside, eat regularly, and have sufficient free time to spend with friends and family.  To the extent that a standard college education meets those needs, people will choose a standard college education.  However, the evidence is pretty clear in many quarters that just having a college degree is insufficient to move people into the middle class.  People who have social capital including a good network can be much less strategic about their time right after high school because something will probably work out and those folks will remain middle class.  People who are relying on education to bring them into the middle class don't have to do too much research to determine that the system as advertised doesn't work for people like them.

Higher education is one part of society.  With only 30% of the US adult population having a college degree and many of the things that need doing requiring specialized experience (formal classroom or otherwise) continuing to insist that a university system of one-offs is fine means wasting resources that won't fix the actual problems that ideally that university degree would help fix.

One of the recurring strong arguments against the generic value of a humanities-based undergraduate degree for everyone is the recurring saga of the death-marching adjuncts who insist they cannot do any other job by being unqualified.  It's nice that people can say the words related to how valuable a liberal arts education is; the evidence, though, is a good many people who claim to have a liberal arts education and are promoting a liberal arts education for everyone else are clearly just trying to keep their job.

A second recurring strong argument is personal experience being forced to take general education courses that are pretty clearly for the benefit of the person teaching and not for the students.  I continue to be amazed at the educational equivalent of insisting that because everyone must eat, we all must enjoy cooking gourmet meals that take hours that could be spent doing something else we'd enjoy more.  That doesn't work and contributes to even college-educated folks wondering how to modify the system to account for all the ways that people acquire knowledge and skills.  Many politicians have college experience, if not a full college degree.  They are drawing on that experience when they underfund the state branch school that should be smaller anyway in favor of targeted funding for different educational endeavors like certificates and apprenticeships.

To be clear, yes, people should be able to study the humanities and arts; we need experts with that knowledge.  However, we also need experts in other areas and cannot afford to waste resources making everyone expert enough in the humanities at the college level when the effort should have been at K-12 to teach enough history, literature, languages, etc. for a competent adult to continue reading up and benefit from that reading up.  The goal should be people who want to learn more and will make an effort to read up. 

Many people are discouraged from even attempting college because it's so clear that some types of college education are a racket not designed for people who really want to learn a specific area and that cannot even deliver on the sales pitch of helping people think deeply about the world and their place in it.

[marshwiggle]

As Polly pointed out, at one time it may have been the case that a physics degree would have been considered a "liberal arts degree", in the modern usage physics would be identified as a STEM degree, and a liberal arts degree would refer to something non-STEM.

Well you'll have to tell all of the liberal arts colleges around the country that they need to stop offering science courses then. More generally, I think the distinction is really about politics and the attempt to classify STEM classes as useful knowledge and humanities ones as fluff.

...And I aaallmmoost...but not quite...want to suggest that, behind those distinctions, is the haunting echo of "science and math are for the boys and English and art history are for the girls," and THAT is fascized into the Polarity Bundle of "Boy are Strong, and Productive, and Important, while girls are silly and frivolous and don't even play Mommy very well..." thereby justifying a return to the "old" status quo, and defunding of "all those girly things", and ...I dunno....where's Mr. Ed when you need him?

M.

I'd guess you've never seen science recruitment up close. Trying to recruit women for natural science has been a big deal for AGES; I was involved in a program here about 20 years ago to encourage girls in high school to consider science, and there have been numerous initiatives since*.  I think you'd be hard pressed to find many dinosaurs who still oppose women in STEM. However, that doesn't change the fact that many capable young women choose other things, and even in science, tend to go for life sciences rather than physical sciences.

*All kinds of universities have "women in engineering" and "women in math", etc. events regularly. It's pretty mainstream kind of stuff at this point.

[Caracal]

When fewer people went to college, more of those folks were satisfied with their small college experience of  having classes spread as about 1/3 major, 1/3 general education, and 1/3 electives.  The world has changed and that's no longer sufficient for many people when the goal is having a solid enough foundation that one can do lifelong learning to read up on something and acquire new skills as the world continues to change at a rapid pace.

Continuing to provide education that would be recognizable to the students of more than 50 years ago and holding that up as the ideal is a losing argument to convince people who already have pretty good critical thinking skills and are using their unprecedented-in-human-history access to information to draw conclusions relevant to their lives.


When we go with wants and desires of real human beings who are choosing educational experiences, many of those folks want a good enough job where they can live inside, eat regularly, and have sufficient free time to spend with friends and family.   People who are relying on education to bring them into the middle class don't have to do too much research to determine that the system as advertised doesn't work for people like them.

A few quick points.

1. The world is filled with people who have read four things about some places, gone there and messed everything up. Most of what I try to get students to understand in my gen ed courses is that things are complicated, history matters context matters and that you need to be able to think critically about sources. Its a way to try to process knowledge and question yourself and others. I'm glad you think that's just a pet project, but I don't agree, I think it is particularly crucial right now.

2. There actually never was a point where college gave people some particular set of skills that prepared them to get a job and have a satisfying life. Seriously, never. The whole thing wasn't designed that way. Basically, the valuable end result of a college degree is the credential. That's always been true. That credential has become increasingly important at the same time it has become increasingly expensive. What you're basically trying to do is retrofit a college degree so it somehow matches the importance of that credential and the cost of it. I don't think that's going to work, because colleges have never been able to provide that and aren't set up to do it. I'm not even sure it would be possible for any institution to do it well. The way to tackle the larger problems is by trying to deal with the cost and the over importance of the credential.

[marshwiggle]

2. There actually never was a point where college gave people some particular set of skills that prepared them to get a job and have a satisfying life. Seriously, never.

Um, the 4 faculties in the ancient universities were Law, Medicine, Theology, and Philosophy. The first 3 led to careers in law, medicine, and the church. Philosophy covered everything else. So unless you have a very strange definition of "never", the statement above is clearly false.

[Caracal]

2. There actually never was a point where college gave people some particular set of skills that prepared them to get a job and have a satisfying life. Seriously, never.

Um, the 4 faculties in the ancient universities were Law, Medicine, Theology, and Philosophy. The first 3 led to careers in law, medicine, and the church. Philosophy covered everything else. So unless you have a very strange definition of "never", the statement above is clearly false.

I don't really know enough about the history of medieval colleges. I was talking about colleges in the United States where basically the whole thing broke down pretty quickly. Colleges were designed to produce an educated clergy, but before long most of the people going to college had no intention of becoming clergymen. The law wasn't something you needed to go to college for, and Galenist medicine lost a lot of prestige.

[tuxthepenguin]

Well, the problem is that the people who believe urgent and dramatic action is required usually don't have a well thought out plan. Instead they have a series of hackneyed cliches borrowed from people in business schools. Usually their dramatic action is going to do nothing but take out what is left of the underpinnings of the school and turn "struggling rural liberal arts college" into "pointless pre professional annex."

This is true. It would be funny if it weren't so dangerous. "Business people" think they're experts on everything. Yet big, previously successful businesses are routinely run like crap until they shut down. Should universities be taking advice from the people that ran myspace? How about yahoo? A lot of the advice they give is given in ignorance and is, if we're being charitable, nothing more than an uneducated guess that has little chance of success. The mistake I see the most is that we should change strategy at a moment's notice to "move into a better market". They think you can force students to take online courses in an attempt to save money. They think you can drop "unprofitable ventures" and add "profitable ventures". No, it's not that easy, but then those are the same business people that sit on their couch and offer the same simple solutions for their favorite NFL teams to win the Super Bowl. It's nothing but a game for them.

[mamselle]

The difference above may be between "job" or "career" and "profession," i.e., the deeper, broader, more-higly-considered life of the mind tied to constant efforts to grow and absorb new information throughout ones life, and knowing how to apply those efficaciously.

-=-=-=-

I actually have tracked female entry into the sciences for quite awhile. One of my first editing jobs, while still an undergrad at THEOSU was for an astrophysical engineer who was proud of having helped get 3 young women admitted to the School of Engineering in c. 1974, I believe.

He also may have been the first to put one of their names first on a joint article they did, and to emphasize other womens' contributions to the field in the next few years after that. (His student may also have been the first, or one of the first few, females to have named a radio star that she discovered.)

In the 1990s I did tape transcription for an NHS funded project on women in engineering, and was interested to see that some progress had indeed been made. But the newly-founded college that went out of its way to seek admission parity by gender had to settle for 35-40% women admitted, because even by dropping the test score requirements about 10 points (to adjust for previous lack of role models and encouragement in high schools for women in the sciences) they couldn't reach 50% female acceptances.

Those reflect, earlier, a large state school, and later a newly founded private school (still going, I hear).

But I was thinking more broadly of the (still, in this day and age, I know) mostly older guys in long-term tenure within state legislative committees, holding the purse strings and voting their benighted votes against so much that would help to improve the things under discussion.

They're not the ones celebrating the star named by a woman, still. They're not interested in seeing if the private women's school that started it's own engineering program is outfitting its grads for doctoral work in the competitive schools down the road, or just doing "engineering lite for ladies"--or if the former, how that affects their state school's need to get on the ball (one of the study's search points when it began, I think.)

And I've worked as an AA and later, EA, in both large private schools and corporate pharma and software development offices where the balance of female hires is better--for the lab bench rats-- but still not as high for the exec levels, cross-corporation-wise. (And I've heard a couple very highly-placed CEOs say things you wouldn't believe about some of those females)

So, actually, while it's been a form of side-employment for quite awhile, I'm more in touch with it than a French medieval/ American colonial liturgical arts researcher and music teacher might otherwise be expected to be....

Why, just yesterday, I took pictures of the gravestone of one of Maria Mitchel's ancestors...

;--}

M.

[marshwiggle]

2. There actually never was a point where college gave people some particular set of skills that prepared them to get a job and have a satisfying life. Seriously, never.

Um, the 4 faculties in the ancient universities were Law, Medicine, Theology, and Philosophy. The first 3 led to careers in law, medicine, and the church. Philosophy covered everything else. So unless you have a very strange definition of "never", the statement above is clearly false.

I don't really know enough about the history of medieval colleges. I was talking about colleges in the United States where basically the whole thing broke down pretty quickly. Colleges were designed to produce an educated clergy, but before long most of the people going to college had no intention of becoming clergymen. The law wasn't something you needed to go to college for, and Galenist medicine lost a lot of prestige.

But post-secondary education in British colonies (including the US) was modeled after those universities. When the populous was mostly illiterate, there were certain professions which needed a more educated workforce. So universities started out as  "professional schools" and only later became sort of "advanced high school" for the wealthy.