<p>The problem with learning a body of knowledge is that knowledge quickly becomes outdated. The more valuable skill is problem solving and the ability to learn, because that is what people will repeatedly need to do on the job.</p>
<p>“problem solving and the ability to learn”. So THAT’S why sci/tech/business people can’t think - after four years they’re just chock full of outdated info!</p>
<p>I think it simply boils down to the affordability of vision. It’s not some competitive sport, visionaries v. implementers. Both teams are essential, or game over for all.</p>
<p>"The problem with learning a body of knowledge is that knowledge quickly becomes outdated. The more valuable skill is problem solving and the ability to learn, because that is what people will repeatedly need to do on the job. "</p>
<p>I’m not sure I would completely agree with that. The fundamentals of a field like economics, or I would think like engineering, are still true. </p>
<p>This all way too abstract for me. Both Toodles anti LA position and and the above “pro” LA position.</p>
<p>It depends what you are doing, eh? Whats the nature of the position, the level, etc. I dont think I would want to be in a large building that whose structural safety was approved by someone with general thinking skills, as opposed to a structural engineer, or at least an Architect with Struct engineering training. OTOH, if I was about to design an ad campaign, Im not sure having someone whod majored in market communications would necessarily always trump someone with, well, good critical thinking skills and creativity, as long as they had at least a vague idea of marketing concepts.</p>
<p>No one is suggesting that history majors build bridges. But, what I am saying is that there are extremely valuable skills learned by people in the humanities.</p>
<h1>22 and #23</h1>
<p>Pardon me, Im not a creative LA type, nor a rigorous engineer.</p>
<p>Im just an economist, and to the way of thinking I was trained in, this all makes no sense. What SPECIFIC position are you talking about, in what organization? Without specifics its impossible to speak of the relative values of different skill sets.</p>
<p>“But, what I am saying is that there are extremely valuable skills learned by people in the humanities”</p>
<p>I dont disagree. You did say there was a problem with learning a body of knowledge. I am wondering what you meant by that. Who is it who only has a body of knowledge, and what jobs are they not qualified for?</p>
<p>I have often heard from people in the IT field that they find it hard to compete with newer grads because the field is changing very quickly and the newer grads are more up to date than they are.</p>
<p>I once tried to make a career shift from Econ to IT. </p>
<p>They asked if I had ever coded. NOT what in what computer language, but simply if I had programmed. They believed that there were kinds of issues and problems programmers had dealt with that transcended any particular computer language - IE that programmers did NOT simply possess a body of knowledge, but a way of thinking and problem solving.</p>
<p>Yes, there is some obsolesence of knowledge in every field. a new CS grad may do better in IT than an old one (in some fields continuing education is possible). But would a LA grad do better in IT than an old CS grad? </p>
<p>My question is, what field is it where having a body of knowledge is such a handicap, that having a humanities degree is preferable? </p>
<p>I really dont think its that humanities degrees are preferable (outside, of, you know, humanities jobs). I think its that there are MANY positions where it doesnt matter either way. </p>
<p>And its also true that a broad, questioning liberal arts way of thinking is good - but of course you dont need to be hum major for that - not only soc sci, but nat sci are also liberal arts. I hope at least at the best schools engineers too are taught broader questioning, though I fear at some schools they are not.</p>
<p>Everytime there’s a thread about the merits of LA v. vocational studies I always :rolleyes:. Why does it matter? </p>
<p>Really. Why does it matter? </p>
<p>Both sides make valuable contributions to society. What’s worth fighting over? LA majors aren’t harming the vocationals. The vocationals aren’t harming the LA’s. Why does everybody get so defensive and insulting? I just don’t get it.</p>
<p>It reminds of the Miller Lite “Tastes great!” “Less Filling!” commercials. Both sides are RIGHT. But neither is BETTER than the other.</p>
<p>I don’t know what year your experience is from. The IT field has changed a lot. I know from people I know that now what you described is not what is going on. One friend of mine switched from IT back to psychology because of the problem I mentioned. </p>
<p>Also, as an employer, I would much rather have a humanities or social science major than a business major, because of their skills-writing, problem solving and creative thinking. These are valuable skills in my work and they are found much more often in humanities or social science majors than in business majors.</p>
<p>"I don’t know what year your experience is from. The IT field has changed a lot. I know from people I know that now what you described is not what is going on. "</p>
<p>Are you saying its now possible to enter the IT field with only a general set of thinking skills and no experience at programming? </p>
<p>“Also, as an employer, I would much rather have a humanities or social science major than a business major, because of their skills-writing, problem solving and creative thinking. These are valuable skills in my work and they are found much more often in humanities or social science majors than in business majors.”</p>
<p>I’m not the biggest fan of business as an undergrad major, myself. I think thats rather a different ball of wax then natural science or technology.</p>
<p>BTW, do you hire for different positions? Are your criteria the same for all of them?</p>
<p>30#</p>
<p>to speak personally, as an economist, I find questions of what we call “human capital investment decisions” fascinating, and looking at how that is evolving on a societal level. </p>
<p>but more generally, people on CC tend to get heated mainly when they are insecure about a decision they have made on their own behalf, or for their children. Tech vs LA, Private vs Public, taking loans vs finding a cheaper path, famous vs CTCL, etc all get emotional for those reasons. </p>
<p>Plus there are political overtones, from the sense that teaching Humanities is teaching political liberalism, to the fears some have that Student loans will take down the economy like subprime mortgages did.</p>
<p>
Hmm. Not necessarily. Think fashion or music. There are trends and fads and there are “classics.” The others come and go, but the classics remain, withstanding the test of time. ;)</p>
<p>Imo, grad schools are where one should go to specialize in something. That is what they are there for.</p>
<p>You dont need to major in the humanities to study Plato or Aristotle.One can always do that at bedtime,after finishing math or engineering assignments</p>
<p>^ That’s like saying you don’t need to major in engineering. Why not read some books just before bed?</p>
<p>Plato and Aristotle (and their successors) aren’t easy. In point of fact, you would probably be more successful teaching yourself engineering – where there’s usually a right way and a wrong way, and you can find out what the right way is – than in teaching yourself philosophy without seasoned faculty helping you.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I hear the similar a lot here in CC debating between humanities/social science major vs. engineering/business majors. My question is - </p>
<p>Is it true that only the LA majors can develop the problem solving skill and have the ability to learn but the non-LA majors can not? Or I miss the point.</p>
<p>many of the colleges we visited touted the liberal arts advantage. they would cite anecdotal evidence of the history major who now’s an investment banker. i’ve never seen hard quantitative evidence that LA majors end up getting hired into professional careers. something like: x number of history majors graduated between 2000-2005. here’s a distribution of their current employers. here’s a distribution of their job titles. </p>
<p>does anyone have any references to this kind of data for different LA majors??</p>
<p>The whole debate about practicality of degrees, ‘what use are they’ and so forth, is not exactly new, it was going on when I went to college, and what a college is has been debated for years. Part of the problem is that people look at careers and assume it is the same for all of them, that you go to school, major in something , get on a career track and away you go, and that is all you do…and that isn’t necessarily true. When working, when getting out into the real world, what happens is not fixed, and all kinds of things happen. Some paths are easier, others aren’t, but they do happen.</p>
<p>-Obviously, with fields like engineering, for example, it is not all that likely that a person who majored in English will end up doing that, Engineering takes math and specific skills in science to be able to handle the job. Once upon a time there were people who did this, self taught engineers and such, but if it exists today it is extremely rare.</p>
<p>-With IT, it is more a mixed bag, because quite frankly college IT training is not vocational training per se. In a college IT track, you do a lot more then simply program, you learn about things like compiler design, you learn about data structures and theory in areas like efficiency of algorithms, you learn about things like network theory and theory of computation and so forth…but want to know something? A lot of that is very theory oriented, that a very limited number of people would need to do their jobs (few IT programmers are designing compilers or writing network OS’s or designing OS’s). </p>
<p>Yeah, kids come out knowing the basics of programming, but want to know something? Most kids come out of college with IT degrees needing a lot of training to do the job, what is taught at a college level is a basic grounding relatively, they learn how to write code, they learn how to build code and so forth, and the basic techniques on how to put it together…but other then that, they are not ready day 1 to jump in (with some exceptions, some kids have already done coding of real applications, done work for companies or within a school, so they have more real world skills). The reality of an IT job is the skill set is huge and every companies needs are different. If you go program for a financial services company, besides the fact odds are you will be working on existing systems, you have something that is way different in design and scope then you ever did in school, plus you need to learn about the business, about just what they are going to be programming, and learn the kinds of techniques that apply to that system. </p>
<p>And unlike engineering, most programming on a commercial level doesn’t require rocket science math and science the way engineering usually does, it is very different. There are a lot of programmers out there and other IT people who never took a college CS course, and rather have taught themselves or had professional training, so someone with an LAC humanities degree could end up programming (or a musician or whatever).</p>
<p>-There are a ton of kids who study business in college, who learn all the basic courses in accounting, financial accounting, organizational behavior, marketing, etc and get their BA in business…and then find out how little they know about working in a real company. And quite frankly, a lot of that knowledge, at least at an entry level job, may not be needed or be relatively invaluable (depends what someone is doing, if the kid majored in accounting and got an accounting job, obviously would be relevant)…but a kid with a degree in history could well end up working as a trader at a hedge fund, or as a management trainee, it happens all the time. </p>
<p>Do some paths in college make it easier? Yes, if you are looking for an entry level IT job (if any still exist, that is another story), having an IT or CS degree is the more common route, and if someone came in with an english degree and applied for an entry level IT job, without any background in programming, it would be a difficult fit; but a kid with an english degree who had experience programming could very well get the job…</p>
<p>Likewise, there are kids who get IT degrees that I wouldn’t hire, because they are great at getting good grades in classes in IT, giving the professor what they expect, but in the real world of IT, where you are solving real world problems with no time and with limited specs and design, that kind of kid can fall flat <em>shrug</em>. </p>
<p>As far as humanities degrees being a waste, the real waste is what the kid makes of the experience. I have known a lot of kids who majored in ‘practical’ stuff like engineering, accounting, business administration, etc, were miserable, and found another path, after struggling, because their parents told them they had to be ‘practical’. One of the things about the job world is despite what people say, it isn’t just ‘a job’, people who say they have their job because ‘it is a job and pays the bills’ often are not very happy, nor successful (some pretty good studies on that) and considering how much of our lives we spend on the job, more every year, it is better to find something you like that hopefully is practical. If anything, maybe the kid who studies humanities finds a passion in something else, like international relations or whatever, and actually lives into that. Likewise, maybe the kid who studies economics (which is not an easy field to get a job in) or history understands the consequences of financial shenanigans, and ends up in the financial industry running a business with a couple of ounces of ethics, instead of trying to gobble up all the marbles <em>shrug</em>.</p>