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