<p>No, I said that many people who major in HSS in general are looking for easy majors and diplomas. </p>
<p>To give you a case in point, I went to a college that shall remain unnamed that had a major Division 1 football program. Only a tiny handful of the players - and practically never the stars - majored in technical subjects. The vast majority chose to major in certain soft subjects that were notoriously undemanding such that their eligibility to play on Saturday was not threatened. Those majors are basically ‘football majors’. </p>
<p>Nor was my school an exception. I think all of us who went to a school with a major college football program has noted that the players tend to congregate within certain majors notable for lax standards. To quote former University of Michigan quarterback and current Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh:</p>
<p>“Michigan is a good school and I got a good education there,” Harbaugh said. “But the athletic department has ways to get borderline guys in and, when they’re in, they steer them to courses in sports communications. They’re adulated when they’re playing, but when they get out, the people who adulated them won’t hire them.”</p>
<p>Frankly, I’m surprised that anybody would continue to dispute this point. Isn’t it obvious to all of us that certain majors are easier than others? Isn’t it also obvious that the easier majors tend to be predominantly found within the humanities and social sciences?</p>
<p>Probably the most disconcerting aspect of an engineering education is having to spend inordinate amounts of time studying and working simply to survive the program, only to notice students in other majors enjoying life.</p>
<p>but many of those who move out of engineering have the talent to excel. In conversations with them, I have heard a common story about seeing people in dorms partying away and wondering, Why not me?</p>
<p>It can only be a benefit to society as a whole? Then allow me to reinvoke Sowell:</p>
<p>*"Formal education, especially among peoples for whom it is rare or recent, often creates feelings of entitlement to rewards and exemption from many kinds of work. In India, for example, even the rudiments of education have often been enough to create a reluctance to take any job involving work with one’s hands. In the 1960’s it was estimated that there were more than a million “educated unemployed” in India who demonstrated “a remarkable ability to sustain themselves even without gainful work, largely by relying on family assistance and support.” Nor is this social phenomenon limited to India. Other Third World nations have shown similar patterns.</p>
<p>Such attitudes affect both the employed and the unemployed. Even those educated as engineers have often preferred desk jobs and tended to “recoil from the prospect of physical contact with machines.” In short, education can reduce an individual’s productivity by the expectations and aversions it creates, as well as increase it by the skills and disciplines it may (or may not) engender. The specific kind of education, the nature of the individual who receives it, and the cultural values of the society itself all determine whether, or to what extent, there are net benefits to more schooling. Blindly processing more people through schools may not promote economic development, and may well increase political instability. A society can be made ungovernable by the impossibility of satisfying those with a passionate sense of entitlement - and without the skills or diligence to create the national wealth from which to redeem those expectations…"
*</p>
<p>Certainly true, but that then begs the question of why the parents and, especially, the taxpayers (through state university subsidies) should have to pay for it. How exactly do you justify to the taxpayers spending tax dollars subsidizing the social and dating scene of young adults? If they want to enjoy life, perhaps they should pay for it themselves.</p>
<p>Well, one simple counterargument that has nothing to do with money is that many patents nowadays are patented for defensive reasons. If you don’t patent an idea, you run the risk that somebody else will, thereby preventing you from disseminating the idea to the world for free. </p>
<p>For example, many computer/Internet technologies are patented, but available to all with a royalty-free license. But they’re nevertheless still patented, with the express intent of preventing somebody else from attempting to patent the same technology and then charging for it. </p>
<p>Your point would therefore be stronger if you asked: why don’t all patent holders provide royalty-free licenses?</p>
<p>While I can’t speak for others, I have never subscribed to such a position. Indeed, I have always stated that humanities and social sciences majors are perfectly worthy topics of study. The problem is that it is simply too easy to weasel your way through many HSS majors by cherry-picking a sequence of undemanding courses to reach graduation, thereby leaving plenty of free time to enjoy the social scene, which for many students seems to sadly be the true purpose of the college experience. I can think of quite a few people who freely admitted that during their college days, they spent more time partying and clubbing than they did on studying, which was supposed to be the entire point of the college experience.</p>
<p>Wow, sakky, you have a lot of posts in a row!</p>
<p>In replying to my post about architecture studio and how you can work extremely hard and still get a poor grade (this was in reply to your assertion how only in engineering can you work your butt off and still get poor grades)…you wrote:</p>
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<p>Actually at my D’s MArch program, if you even get two C+s in studio, you will be asked to leave the program even if you have straight A’s in the other required courses. Yeah, you don’t get an F, but hey, you have to leave the program. </p>
<p>Then, you quoted another post of mine and replied:</p>
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<p>Uh, that is close to what I wrote. So, you qualified it with “many people” and “in general”. Sorry, but most who I know who majored in the humanities were not motivated to do so in order to do an easy major or easy diploma. Rather, their interests lie in those fields and they worked their butt off in college. </p>
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<p>The point wasn’t which majors are easier than others but about students’ motivations for choosing certain majors. Most people I know choose majors around their true interest areas. Further, many areas of study that are not in the sciences are truly demanding. I already cited that my own D’s BFA program was extremely intense and demanding, more so than many BA majors, just the time commitment alone. Same with my other kid’s major in architecture. But I can think of many other examples. You mention how engineering students are filling their days and nights studying while others are partying. Let me tell you, neither of my kids were in engineering and their days and nights and weekends were entirely full with barely ever any free time.</p>
Virtually any course of study can ocassionally be stressful.
The typical implication of traumatic is that it is excessively painful or stressful, to the point of causing some sort of injury. </p>
<p>I believe your original post implied that engineering and similar courses of study are uniquely traumatic. And as I said, I did not find it to be. In fact, I enjoyed most of my laboratory classes, and some of my non-laboratory classes . Not like going to a party, but I certainly did not find them to be traumatic. I struggled, and was quite happy when I made some breakthrough. And sometimes I never made that breakthrough, but I pushed on.</p>
<p>And I know many colleagues who actually loved it, and couldn’t imagine having studied anything else.</p>
<p>BTW, a couple of addenda -
My first degree was in physics, technically biophysics. I never mention the “bio” part because I was horrible in biology, and think it took me three times to squeak by in O Chem. To me that was stressful.
I don’t know if you are an engineer, and if you are perhaps you went to some extremely rigorous school where you really had to have a firm grasp on everything to pass. With the advent of “partial credit” in almost all technical areas, I believe it might be possible to get through an engineering degree without ever actually getting an answer 100% correct. There were a couple classes (digital control theory and complex analysis come to mind) where I had a very tenuous grasp of the material and still managed to get by.<br>
Because of this, it doesn’t surprise me that on another website I frequent (engineerboards.com) there are numerous students with BS degrees that can’t pass the FE exams, which are really pretty rudimentary.</p>
<p>Which is still a vast improvement over the current engineering system. C+'s surely aren’t great grades, but they at least allow you to truthfully state that you never flunked a course, thereby preserving your transfer candidacy. Engineering coursework will expel you by flunking you, which gravely damages your chances of transferring to any other program. Like I said, no respectable school wants to admit a transfer applicant who flunked out of his previous school. Nor do they care that you flunked out because of demanding engineering coursework - all they’ll see is that you flunked out. </p>
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<p>First off, I never said most, I said many. The truth is, many students in the HSS majors are indeed trying to sneak their way to an easy degree.</p>
<p>Put another way, of all of the students (in all majors) who are looking for easy majors, the vast majority of them tend to congregate within the HSS majors. Again, I would invoke the football players at a major football school, few of which would major in the hard sciences or engineering. The vast majority of them would instead major in HSS. Ask yourself - why? How many star football players major in electrical engineering?</p>
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<p>Which gets back to this previous point:</p>
<p>*students are twice as likely to enroll in a course with an A-minus average as they are to enroll in a course with a B average. The big losers are the natural science and math departments, since they grade hardest, and the big winners are the humanities, since they grade easiest. Johnson writes, “On average, American undergraduates take 50 percent fewer courses in the natural sciences and math than they would if grading practices were more equitable.” *</p>
<p>Now, certainly I have never disputed that not every student chooses a major solely for the easy grading - heck if that was the case, the number of students majoring in engineering would be precisely zero. But the fact remains that there are many students who do just that. See below. </p>
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<p>Which then begs the question of what happens when you choose a major that you are truly interested in…but then find out that it’s simply too difficult? I know many students who were (and still are) interested in engineering, but simply couldn’t pass the weeders. What do those students do now? You still want to graduate, so you have to major in something, and that something often times is an HSS major. It’s not what they’re really interested in, but it at least allows them to graduate. </p>
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<p>So it seems to me that you’re conceding the point that many college students are indeed spending much of their time partying. Then let me ask you - what do you think those students are majoring in? </p>
<p>Now, to your point, nobody is arguing that the technical majors are the only difficult majors. But what is undeniable is that the technical majors are difficult, whereas many of the HSS majors are not.</p>
<p>Uh, now I’m confused. I thought you said you were an engineering undergrad, which is what my discussion was confined around. </p>
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<p>Ha! Not only is it possible to obtain an engineering degree without ever scoring 100% of an answer, I know for a fact that many engineering graduates never actually did fully complete a single exam question. </p>
<p>To give you a case in point, I recall one engineering exam that consisted of 3 questions, each worth 33%. The mean score of the class was a 25%, which therefore meant that the average student wasn’t even able to score full marks on a single question. Heck, I knew one guy who scored a 30% - and celebrated, simply because his abysmal score was nevertheless higher than the mean, and that’s all that mattered for the purposes of grading. That exam was utterly incomprehensible, which meant that the grade curve was therefore determined by ‘relative incomprehensibility’. I believe only one student actually got any of the 3 questions entirely correct (and he did so only for 1 of them). </p>
<p>But the point is that partial credit hardly makes a program less traumatic. The fact that you can earn partial credit doesn’t help you because other students are earning partial credit as well, and all that matters - and the source of the stress - is that your grade will be determined by your score relative to the score of the other students. To extend the example I proffered above, if you scored 20% worth of partial credit on that exam, but the average score was a 25%, you failed.</p>
<p>I think a reasonable case could be made that engineering exams might actually be less stressful if no partial credit was offered, and where points are awarded only for completing an entire question correctly. Like I said, if you can earn partial credit, so can other students, and so the exams generally devolve into a game of trying to score as much partial credit as possible, which means that each partial credit ‘checkpoint’ in itself becomes a mini-question. With no such partial credit, you would score more zero’s, but so would most of the other students, so you would be no worse off relatively speaking.</p>
<p>The real problem is the weeder curve that dictates forced failure. A certain percentile of students is required to fail, and every student is scrambling to avoid belonging to that percentile.</p>
My first BS was in Physics, which I started straight out of high school. I earned a BSEE later, as a working adult. In both cases I was an undergrad. Or at least I was in an undergrad program if that’s not what you call someone going for a second bachelor’s.</p>
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This part may very well be true. I had to take a two year hiatus from my first degree because my main desire at the time was to go to the beach during the day and parties at night. A couple years working in a restaurant for minimum wage convinced me of the error of my ways.</p>
<p>Nobody is denying that technical majors are difficult and demanding. Simply, those majors do not have a lock on challenging and demanding. The notion that the reason people pick majors in other fields is because they are easier is not true for many many people. Many pick a field of study because they like it, not because it is easier to get an A in it. I also was not conceding that many college students spend their time partying. I was replying to the notion that those who are not in scientific fields have lots of time to party. That is not the case and surely was not the case for either of my own two kids. The point is that science fields are not the only demanding ones. Those opting for majors in other fields are generally not motivated to do so because the grading is “easy.” And those in fields outside of science are not all having lots of time to party. Some do, but not all students or all other majors. </p>
<p>You give football players as an example which is one very small subset of college students. There are all types of students. My kid was on a varsity sport team at an Ivy League school and her teammates included pre-med students. Her teammates have gone onto law school, med school, architecture school, etc. No, it wasn’t football, but simply another example.</p>
<p>Then I would consider your case to be special - not only because you had a proficient technical background before embarking on an engineering major (which most engineering students lack), but more importantly, because you already had a degree which can never be taken away from you. If you flunked out of the engineering program, oh well, you still have your prior degree to fall back on. Other engineering students had no such safety net - if they flunked out of engineering, they may have difficulty earning any degree at all, for as I said, few respectable programs want to admit transfer students who flunked out of their previous schools. </p>
<p>Lest you think that to be an imaginary concern, I know one guy who flunked out of EECS at Berkeley, and so couldn’t transfer to a lower UC or even a CalState, because he had flunked out of his previous school. He freely admits that he would have been better off had he never majored in EECS at all (or, at least, had never done so at Berkeley). </p>
<p>As I’ve always said, what engineering programs should do is simply cancel the grades of students who flunk out of the program. They’re not going to major in engineering anyway - who cares what their engineering grades are? Let them walk away with a clean slate. But they refuse to do it. </p>
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<p>Forget about getting an A - many students pick a field of study simply to pass. Like I said, those students who love engineering but find that they can’t surmount the weeders still have to major in something that will allow them to graduate. </p>
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<p>Well, all I can tell you is that there are a lot of parties at the typical school. Heck, Playboy Magazine used to publish a list of the top party schools in the country, and even schools not on that list nevertheless offered lavish party atmospheres. Some students are obviously attending those parties. </p>
<p>Let me add to my own post and say that what was equally, if not more, disconcerting to the gentlemen in the program when I attended school (over 25 years ago), was the unfortunate fact that there were at most two or three young ladies in any engineering class. I certainly hope (and believe) that has changed.</p>
<p>When I was in college, the liberal arts kids envied the engineering students and vice versa. Both groups felt the other had it easy. Personally, I felt that what made the engineering curriculum “easier” was that the kids could form study groups and work on all their problem sets together. In this way, they could benefit from each other’s knowledge and intelligence and so an occasional adverse situation such as illness, over-busyness, or even a particular academic weaknesss didn’t have to mean failure for the individual. Your classmates could carry you now and then. Also, when you finish the problems you’re done. When you understand the material, you can stop studying. </p>
<p>In contrast, you can’t collaborate on a research paper or an analytical essay. For one thing, the ideas and work are supposed to be one’s one, and for another, often the student must choose his own topic and so each person is doing a different thing. Also, suppose your Englsh class required you read 12 novels, or your history class required thousands of pages of reading. When exactly are you “done” studying for the final? And when is a paper good enough? There’s always more you could do, and a paper one teacher might love, a different professor could hate. I won a writing award from the English dept., but my religion professor told me he hated my style of writing and wanted to rip up my papers. That was interesting! Subjectivity in grading can very negatively affect liberal arts majors.</p>
<p>No one major has the monopoly on difficulty.</p>
<p>PS–The consensus was that the engineering majors were more difficult as far as brain-power required, but the liberal arts majors were more difficult because the work and reading was more time-consuming.</p>
<p>My argument is that all college degrees have some use, whether it be grad/professional school preparation, teaching, or something al together different. I used the word “useful” to describe sciences and math because that is what others have described them as.</p>
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<p>I was commenting on the trend in education to discourage students from majoring in a humanities discipline, which can be just as useful as a math/science degree. It was worded wrong. I did not mean to imply that no one should major in the sciences. I appreciate the sciences and know that the world would not be where it is today without them. </p>
<p>I think that we both can agree that if either field was removed from the education system, or discouraged to the point where there are not enough students for many universities to offer the degree, it would be destructive to the system. I see the trend of discouraging people from majoring in the humanities as alarming, particularly when the UK education minister said a few years back that he thought the decline in humanities majors was a good thing.</p>
<p>As to your point about the UK universities offering law without having a BA first: undergrad here in the States is about weeding out those who aren’t up to snuff. As has already been discussed on this thread, the UK and European nations do a good job of weeding out in secondary school. In the US you can graduate high school illiterate.</p>
<p>“I can think of quite a few people who freely admitted that during their college days, they spent more time partying and clubbing than they did on studying, which was supposed to be the entire point of the college experience.”</p>
<p>Oh really? There is nothing to gain from a four-year college experience than studying? What a rip-off. All that wasted opportunity to learn other essential life skills.</p>