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<p>What I said is that they can’t get the better engineering jobs. At the very least they can compete for the same jobs that the American Studies graduates with the 2.1 GPA’s can obtain. </p>
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<p>Actually, it’s the ones that you pointed out (and derided): the low-level labor jobs that those low-performing liberal arts grads obtain. However lowly those jobs may be, that’s still better than no job at all - and let’s face it, without a college degree nowadays, you may well end up with no job at all. </p>
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<p>Um, that is actually what those programs do. Sure, those programs may admit however many PhD students that their funding may allow, but that doesn’t mean that all of them will obtain PhD’s. In fact, generally the majority of incoming humanities PhD students will never complete the degree. </p>
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<p>And that’s precisely my question: exactly what is the definition of ‘adequate’? Apparently, during the 1960’s, the level of ‘adequacy’ - at least within the HASS disciplines - was predicated on whatever was necessary to provide students with draft deferments to avoid the Vietnam War - a deeply dubious determinant of adequacy. After all, why should the fact that the nation was fighting an unpopular war that plenty of college students were trying to avoid have anything to do with the level of ‘adequate’ humanities knowledge necessary for a degree?</p>
<p>But be that as it may, that’s a historical fact. And we have to adjust to its consequences: specifically the fact that, however inadvertently, those HASS majors have developed historical inertia in being easier majors than others. </p>
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<p>Yet we still do it anyway. Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer can complain all they want that they’re “unfairly” not receiving Best Picture Oscars, but we’re still not going to give them one. So why is the Oscar committee apparently so capable of ‘judging’ movies, but humanities professors cannot?</p>
<p>And indeed, they actually do… for their PhD students. Like I said, you can’t just slap together some random literary analysis and then demand that Harvard grant you a PhD in English on the grounds that nobody can truly judge the quality of humanities work anyway. If you don’t meet the standards that the Harvard English department demands from its PhD students - however arbitrary those standards may be - they’re simply not going to grant you a PhD, even if you spend decades trying. If they, in their wisdom, decide that your dissertation doesn’t pass muster, then you don’t get a PhD, no matter how loudly you complain. </p>
<p>So again, why are humanities departments so capable of harshly judging PhD students, but not undergrads? </p>
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<p>Tell yourself that if it helps. After all - could you tell what the grading meant? If somebody got an A in engineering, what exactly does it mean? Did he obtain a 30% on his exams, or a 90%? You have no idea. </p>
<p>I think what you mean to say is that the scoring is not arbitrary - but the grading of those scores (hence whether a 30% translates into an A or an F) is arbitrary. This seems to be a notion that you conceded yourself in a prior post, but you’re apparently struggling with it now. </p>
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<p>Ironic that you would use such an example, because Apple actually probably will, as long as the Ipod is under warranty. After all, Apple is interested in keeping you as a long-term customer. </p>
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<p>Seems to me that 0.2-0.3 is itself an important difference. </p>
<p>But if you don’t think so, then you should have no problem in removing that difference. After all, it’s not an important difference to you anyway, so why object to something that isn’t important? Either that, or you have to concede that you do think the difference is important. </p>
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<p>I never said that you never had to issue grades. What I said is why do we have to insist on grading people who decide to leave the major anyway? </p>
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<p>They’re the same jobs that you pointed out (and derided). But they’re still better than no jobs at all. Let’s face it - however bad the jobs may be for those American Studies 2.1 GPA students, they’re still better than the jobs available for those with no degrees at all. </p>
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<p>Ok then, so if that’s your position, then it seems that you have no reason to object to inflating eng grades to match HASS. After all - you said it yourself - some incompetent engineers are already being hired anyway. If the 1.99 GPA engineering student being allowed to graduate won’t really change the # of engineers working anyway, then why the objection? </p>
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<p>Then if the firm was truly rational, they would simply raise their screens to avoid the increased search costs. But you already said that they aren’t really rational anyway. </p>
<p>To be clear, I’m not insulting HR. I recognize that HR has the difficult task of ascertaining the quality of human capital, under pain of being blamed for a bad hire. Hence, one way for HR to protect itself in the inevitable internal political battles of any firm is to simply implement a GPA screen simply as a CYA scheme: they can then point to the existence of the screen as a way to offload responsibility for a terrible hire to the school. {Hence, they can defend themselves by saying that the terrible employee had good grades, and it’s the university’s fault for giving him good grades, not the fault of HR.} That’s entirely rational for the HR department as a internal political tool, but not necessarily rational for the firm. </p>
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<p>I already said that it has important positive effects: it allows those poorly performing engineering students to at least graduate. Sure, they won’t get top jobs, but at least they’ll have college degrees. That’s better than no degree at all. After all, we give the 2.1 American Studies students degrees for doing basically nothing. </p>
<p>More importantly, it allows highly talented, but risk-averse, people to try engineering. </p>
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<p>And what exactly would these negative effects be? You said yourself that we already produce some incompetent engineering graduates anyway. </p>
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<p>I would argue that engineers are the backbone of innovation in the economy. After all, both Romney and Obama have publicly touted the need for the nation to produce more engineers. This therefore seems to be an area of rare bipartisan agreement. </p>
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<p>I would argue it’s the same reason that plenty of jobs nowadays (unfortunately) demand a college degree for even the most menial job, even if the degree had nothing to do with the responsibilities of the job. Engineering employers can demand engineering degrees because it’s a cheap way for them to screen for work ethic and talent. Whether you actually learned anything useful during the curriculum is unimportant. </p>
<p>After all, why do investment banks and consulting firms often times recruit at Harvard - even for humanities majors? Seems to me that the reason is that the Harvard brand allows them to screen for students who come from elite social/family networks and who have displayed general intellectual talent and work ethic. </p>
<p>But the job screening function - if that is all that a college provides - is a deeply wasteful use of society’s resources, because all you’re doing is simply distributing human capital without increasing the total amount of human capital. </p>
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<p>If that’s the case, then we could simply increase the challenge of those other majors. For example, if American Studies - as currently taught- is simply too easy for the average cross-section of the population, then those departments could simply assign more books to read and more essays to write (and, more importantly, those who refuse to do the extra work will get an F).</p>