There’s a news article on Seattle Times regarding the trend in UW, and higher education in general:
My thoughts while reading the article:
- We (the society) do need humanity majors, just not that many. A handful of philosophers and historians are good, but thousands of philosophers and historians are wasteful.
- I never realized that humanity majors are subsidizing STEM majors in college. Is that true? Isn’t STEM majors bringing in more research funding for the university and subsidizing humanities majors?
- UW requires all students to take 15 credits of English writing, even if you scored 5 on your AP English test. My son says all the English writing classes are taught by PhD students. According to the article, that’s how they fund the English PhD programs. Now, who’s subsidizing who?
- The article tries to refute the notion that humanity majors can’t find jobs and have lower pay even if they find jobs. But then in another section of the article, it admits that STEM professors get paid way more than humanity professors. Isn’t that contradicting itself?
I only skimmed the article, but I didn’t see the claim that Humanities majors don’t get paid less. They clearly do. The average Computer Science and Engineering intern at a tech company makes around $80,000-$90,000 a year (pro rated for their internship length) which will be higher than the vast majority of full time positions that your typical Humanities major will find after they graduate. There really just isn’t a comparison here.
It is true that the non STEM majors are subsidizing STEM though. It costs more to educate an engineering student at UW than they bring in through tuition, and many of the sciences at UW don’t bring in a lot of research dollars. The Computer Science research budget isn’t all that impressive, yet it is very expensive to provide a CSE student with all the credits they need to graduate. But state law prevents charging more for tuition for engineering students, so this is the system we’ve got.
uwcse2020 I think the point is that while STEM may cost more to educate, STEM also brings in far more money than humanities in terms of grant funding. And a lot of the funding goes straight into the university’s coffers–in the form of indirects but additionally essentially supporting faculty and graduate student (tuition and) salaries, equipment purchases, etc. And that money overwhelmingly comes from federal agencies. So STEM does cost more, much is paid for with tax $$. Humanity faculty don’t generally bring in a lot of money. I don’t think non STEM majors are generally subsidizing STEM.
@lostaccount What is your source on that? When I search for awards by department, I see the school of medicine and school of public health vastly overshadowing all other colleges within the university. The entire college of engineering brings in less than than school of public health and maybe 1/10th the school of medicine. I would be interested in seeing the stats youre looking at to draw these conclusions. Here is where I got my information
https://www.washington.edu/research/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Annual-Report-FY-2018.pdf
The idea that engineering students are subsidized by the other departments comes directly from the dean of the college of engineering here at UW.
@uwcse2020 , STEM include Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, so the School of Medicine and School of Public Health all belong to STEM. It’s true that Medicine gets the most funding (BTW, that’s why Johns Hopkins is always at the top of research funding rankings.) If they are arguing that the Medical School is subsidizing Engineering School, well, maybe. But the original argument is that Humanities majors are subsidizing STEM (including Medical School and Engineering School), which doesn’t make sense.
@bogeyorpar Medicine is not universally considered STEM actually. It depends on who you ask, but its not really a pure Science, Technology, Engineering or Math field. It is adjacent to them, and often uses them, but is something different. It depends on what agency you ask, but for example, the Dept of Commerce doesn’t consider it to be STEM.
But what really matters is cost to educate versus tuition. It costs more than is taken as tuition to educate an engineer. This is not true for the humanities. And since research dollars are generally used for well, research, you really need to look at tuition costs. Which is why its a fair statement to say that Humanities, or rather non-STEM, subsidizes STEM at UW.
The University of Washington typically receives more federal government research funding than any US university other than Johns Hopkins University. Even more than Michigan when focusing just on federal research money.