Tuesday, October 11, 2011

My response to recent Yglesias post -I support defunding humanities, switching it over to STEM

I'm open to massive defunding of humanities and switching it over STEM (and also quantitative social science) -I don't think of this as liberal vs. conservative, even though you're framing it that way. I'm a bit skeptical that "mild quantitative analysis" has great utility that can't be improved upon with "threshold competent deep quantitative literacy".

I think it's pretty obvious that there's huge deadweight from the abundance of student loan funded humanities majors in the USA and maybe other western countries. I think they're epitomized not by the well-rounded liberal arts BA (or by the Harvard philosophy BA), but rather by the college dropout with about 3 years of English major and 5 or 6 figure student loans from podunk private university doing a job they'd qualify for with a high school diploma.

3 comments:

  1. Do you not comment there because the new commenting software prevents you from being anonymous? Isn't there some way to get around that?

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  2. Reconciling Yglesias' argument about humanities vs STEM with your views on the current problem, perhaps student loans are the place to attack rather than specific areas studied.

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  3. The terrible irony is I lost a detailed reply to both of your comments in my own blog, but I think I've figured out the system (or at least a workaround I can use).

    Hopefully Anonymous

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