True, but learning in a vacuum without discussion with other “learners” is a little empty.
I agree that it’s easier than ever to learn things on your own, but I don’t agree completely with the sentiment expressed here. Both of my daughters recently graduated from highly regarded LACs with humanities degrees, and I don’t regret it for a moment, nor do I regret the $500K + it cost us for the two of them. They’re much better writers now, for one thing—not that they were bad writers before college, and not that it’s impossible to become a good writer on your own, but it’s much easier if you get some good guidance,mentoring, and feedback along the way. They’re also better critical thinkers—again, not that they were bad before college, but their critical thinking skills were honed by daily interactions, discussions, and arguments with other bright students and some very bright faculty members. Hard t get that sitting in front of a computer screen. They also met a lot of people with interesting and diverse backgrounds, and were exposed to many ideas and ways of thinking that they might have never stumbled across on their own, or if they did stumble across they might have shrugged off as uninteresting or unimportant if not forced to confront those ideas and ways of thinking through concentrated study and/or face-to-face interactions. They also both wrote (IMO) quite interesting and even brilliant senior theses, quite significant pieces of serious and original academic work under the tutelage of knowledgeable professors. Very few people are going to have the self-discipline to do that on their own, and again, without guidance, mentoring, and feedback, it’s difficult to even know if you’re on the right track. In short, I think they got a ton our of the experience, and it leaves them in a stronger position to continue the lifelong learning track that we’re all on, but that many people don’t actually do all that well.
It’s also been my experience that many auto-didacts don’t actually know nearly as much as they think they know about a particular field. This isn’t universally true, of course, But it’s easy to read a few books and articles and online sources on a particular topic and convince yourself that you’re fully knowledgeable about it when you’re merely scratching the surface. One of the great benefits of a good formal education is that it makes you appropriately humble about what you don’t know, so that when you read a few books and articles and online sources on a particular topic, you know that you’re just a novice dabbling in it, and not a genuine expert…
There are not too many schools where ABET-accredited engineering programs have only 10% in humanities and social studies general education requirements (Brown requires 13%). Or are you saying that you paid less attention to your humanities and social studies courses, spending only 10% of your time on them even though they were 15-25% of the course work you took?
I earned a BA: International Studies - Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. As the wife of an engineer, the sister to an engineer, the daughter of an engineer and the friend and family member to scores of engineers, I have spent a good portion of my adult life justifying that major…you will never completely convince an Engineer of the value of a liberal arts degree nor any degree, that is not an engineering degree, lol! Engineering degrees are the hardest to earn, most worthy, well-rounded degree out there. God forbid you suggest that it is “just a technical degree”. That gen ed sociology class they took makes them an expert on sociology, I mean that stuff is all common sense clap trap anyway, right? Of course, this is all anecdotal and doesn’t amount to a hill of beans to an Engineer.
I say this good naturedly, tongue in cheek. I love Engineers. I am currently trying to convince my Chem E husband that it will be ok for DD’18 to major in psychology (we will just convince her to marry an engineer) 
I think you will appreciate this, from the Rede Lecture, delivered by C P Snow in 1959:
“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had”.
Majoring in the liberal arts at a top college is unlikely to be risky because the students and colleges in general have plenty of resources during and after their college years. Majoring in the liberal arts at a non-selective, under-resourced college might be more of a risk. Here’s a relevant quote from the article:
“Selective college is sort of like an intellectual summer camp for a lot of people because they don’t intend to stop, so for a lot of advantaged people, they get their job training in graduate school,” said Anthony Carnevale, director at the Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce.
I’m wondering if so many of our perceptions are colored by experiences many of us had so many years ago. When I was studying for my first degree (BSEE) at a highly regarded state school, the vast majority of my classes were sciences, math, and electrical engineering. There were minimal requirements for arts and humanities, and none for language. Fast forward to today, and many engineering curriculum are quite different. The curriculum our son is following (Stanford 2020) seems to have the best of both worlds - in-depth math, science, and CS along with requirements for meaningful writing, humanities, and language classes. While the tuition is steep, the value appears clear.
Forget about many years ago. Even if we confine the comparison to super-selective private schools today, there can be significant differences in amounts and types of general education that different schools require. For example, compare MIT and Brown. Or Harvey Mudd and Amherst if you prefer LACs.
This leads me directly to Kenneth Anderson’s advice to his daughter. Bullet-point (2) is particularly pertinent:
@Canuckguy Wow is that article offensive! The author dismisses out-of-hand any schools that are not ranked as high or higher than Rice. What a pompous jerk.
He asserts that for more humanities inclined students: “What you are looking for is a technical track designed for a student who is Yale quality in history or philosophy, but who needs something more like State College for technical skills.” As if state schools (and I would infer private schools not “like Rice - and any universities ranked above it”) are incapable of offering challenging undergraduate STEM curricula and as if they never attract “our brightest elites”.
He then goes on to paint the picture of the LA majors at elite universities as students seeking the easiest A’s possible and doing whatever it takes to game the system so that they can get into a top-tier law or business grad school. So much for the concept of studying what you’re passionate about and learning for enrichment!
Oh, and very clearly none of these LA majors accepted to elite schools could possibly have scored above 600 on the math portion of the SAT.
If you aren’t a helmet sport athlete, try getting accepted to an elite school-- even with a humanities bent-- with a 600 in math! This is hilarious.
But if the field has little to no practical application to the field they are working in, so what? Consider two people working in finance, one that did a self-defined undergraduate major related to Gothic Architecture, and one that has developed the interest over time through reading different books, watching documentaries, and touring sites. The person with a degree may be much more knowledgeable about the details of Gothic Architecture, the economic drivers behind it, the lives of the craftsmen that built them, etc. However, does that knowledge help them professionally or make them any happier than the auto-didact?
You bring up several good points though. We should be more demanding than every major focus more on developing critical thinking skills and writing skills. I would also say that there aren’t many majors that are truly useless. Just some may be more supplemental than others, and that can be very powerful when combined with other areas of study. For example, I was pretty impressed with the “Human and Organizational Development” major and Vanderbilt’s Peabody College. If that were combined with a degree in math or economics, I think a graduate would have an exceptionally strong foundation in business.
@shortnuke I find it interesting that you and I focuses on entirely different aspects of the article. His advice to his daughter, and the analysis behind it, strikes me as exactly right. My other area of interest is why students choose liberal arts even though a more quantitative course of study would yield better prospects, which the article also touches on.
Are students going to college for an education, or are they using it as a springboard to a career? The research mentioned in this article are suggesting the latter:
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2011/11/grade-inflation-and-choice-of-major.html
I don’t know too much about Anderson, but I do know his undergrad work was done in UCLA… and then Harvard Law. The quality of his writing, and his defense of the humanities in this piece tells me he is most likely a humanities grad who does not hide from inconvenient truths:
http://volokh.com/2012/02/05/defending-the-humanities-or-sisyphus/
I think Anderson was using mid 600s, not 600. He based it on the following work:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/01/classicists-are-smart/#.WZa2QOmQwdU
Someone last year quoted numbers from the 2014-2015 Common Data Set on a related topic. For CR+M, the bottom 25% in both Harvard and Yale scored 1410. For Harvard, about 81% have scores of 700-800 in M, (and Yale was 79%). So on average, 1 in 5 students have scores below 700 M in two of the very most elites. There can not be that many helmet sport athletes, can there?
Since Anderson wrote the piece in 2011, it is important to remember the bottom 25% in Harvard scored slightly lower, 1390 (CR+M) in 2010-2011 than 2014-2015.
No, I don’t think he is that far off.
No, he does not.
He’s a law prof of a 2nd tier law school, and like many of those, only sees the world thru the lens of getting more students into his school (so he can maintain the good life?).
I think Anderson’s second suggestion for his daughter is too strong for getting into a good MBA program; I cannot comment on getting into a good law school because I only have experience in MBA admission.
Yes, high GPA is very nice for MBA admission, but its role is probably less critical than Anderson would think. Most elite MBAs student would have 3-5 years’ work experience before their MBA education. Since undergraduate GPA was established several years ago, it is less of an indication of student quality. Instead, the quality of work experience to some degree takes over the role of GPA. Note that the average GPA for Harvard MBA is like 3.71, whereas the average GPA for Harvard Law is like 3.86. This says something about the lesser role of GPA for MBA admission.
Now this is the suggestion for my D who is a HS rising Junior with an intension to work in lower Manhattan (she loves lower Manhattan) and then pursue an Elite MBA eventually:
The usual pathway is to try to work for a prestigious employer, such as McKinsey or Goldman Sachs, along with many others, for a few years and do well with some evidence of corporate promotion or performing increasingly important tasks. Have a good GMAT. To get into a prestigious firm, she would need to pass undergraduate GPA hurdles; some prestigious firms make it clear it has to be at least 3.5. She would need to network and do it fairly early. Networking can be more important than whether her GPA is 3.5 or 3.9; this is particularly so if her undergraduate institution does not have a big name. Keep on doing ECs that interests her, which in turns shows that she has an interesting life and not a robot. If she is able to get into a prestigious liberal arts undergraduate institution, the choice of undergraduate major is not that critical, although economics is a natural choice. The “name” of the undergraduate institution, as a screening mechanism, will provide enough of backing. On the other hand, if she is not able to get into a prestigious undergraduate program, her choice of major would become more of an issue if she wants to have realistic chance of getting into a prestigious firm in lower Manhattan. At a less prestigious undergraduate institution, finance would be a natural choice.
Of course, this is just one of many pathways.
The data puts engineering more common at selective schools…
In at least my HS, to be successful at standing out and getting into the selective colleges you have to be more well rounded persay. In HS the “liberal arts” are weighted more heavily than math/science. You’ll be taking one more year of literature courses than your math courses to graduate and/or if you take the full set of APs for math/English. The social sciences too outnumber the sciences. And if you want to take engineering courses, that’ll hurt your weighted GPA because they aren’t AP. Furthermore, the old SAT was 2/3 English and 1/3 math. And in English, you didn’t write the standard argumentative essay I found in college. No… On the AP track most of it is some type of literary or passage analysis which carries over 0% to engineering. (My graduating class in HS’s top 10 had no engineers, not to exclude one from being in the top 10)
TL,DR I believe HS weights more on the liberal arts than math/sciences in terms of at least class rank and standing out to colleges. So those who are good in those areas are more likely to go to a top college.
I graduated at a less selective school where GEs outside of major courses should represent 25% of the degree. However, with APs you can cut that down to 7% so 4/6 semesters were nothing but math/science/engineering courses.
Also, math/science I’d say is easier to study via memorization than some of the other subjects.
re#37:
When I took biology courses I had to memorize a ton (though also be able to apply what you’ve memorized). However, ditto for foreign languages. Other areas of liberal arts also involve some memorization.
But I hate memorization. I majored in physics so I wouldn’t have to memorize hardly anything. It’s all about what you can derive, from the few things one has to memorize. In my experience, math also does not involve so much memorization, but rather what you can do with the principles you memorize.
Math and science are liberal arts.
The typical college prep recommendation is 4 years of English and math through precalculus or higher (depending on initial math placement), which would mean 4 years except for students so advanced that they run out of math courses after taking the most advanced one offered.