Liberal Arts Value Debate

At the large public university where I am employed, there has been a recent sharp drop in enrollment in humanities departments, which has sparked a lot of concern about what the future holds for these departments. The business school, on the other hand, is overwhelmed with applicants and growing rapidly.From personal observations, it seems that students are becoming more and more focused on practical skills development. I would also say this seems to be the prevalent viewpoint on HN. But it i

I think in #1 they were trying to convey that Liberal Arts schools don't necessarily focus on teaching 'applied' skills. Some colleges get turned into job-mills, and have curriculums full of 'Applied X' courses, meant to enhance the resume more than the knowledge of the student.

Given how many of my fellow students in college studying math/science were convinced that the required english lit/composition course was a waste of time, and disdained the liberal arts generally, this is a problem that arises early in education somehow.How did we end up here? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxjT7veKi9c

Not everyone has the mathematical intelligence, willpower, mental health, and emotional stability required to make it through an engineering, science, or even business degree. In addition, many students feel they have to go to college just to get a job. For those reasons (and others) many students end up studying for a liberal arts degree. What should those students be doing instead?

The theory of higher education and a liberal arts degree, is what I'm assuming OP is talking about.The idea of a liberal arts degree at a university is to create a well-rounded individual. The idea of taking classes outside your major is to learn about life. The idea of even going to college (which is ENTIRELY optional) is to learn. Not just to pass classes and get an A.This is something that, traditionally, CS and Engineering students like to shit on - as an example, see the other po

She's not talking about humanities majors. She's talking about liberal arts educations.You can get an engineering degree at a liberal arts college, they just make you take some philosophy/arts/&c. courses also. There is enormous value in this, because people are humans, not merely workers. Liberal arts colleges should do a better job in getting their students technical skills also, though.

A decline in students majoring in humanist subjects doesn't necessarily correlate with a decline in humanism itself. The real issue is that if you're going to go into crazy debt for an education you better pick something that will get you out of debt. You can still study these things in an unofficial way.

The words you're looking for are "liberal arts education." The liberal arts are (roughly) fields concerned with the search for truth and the study of human life: math, philosophy, physics, biology, chemistry, anthropology, psychology, literature, etc. Some computer science programs should arguably be counted among the liberal arts, insofar as they're about something deeper than contemporary software engineering practice. Liberal is meant as in freedom: the objects of study w

And ironically, while you have a degree and express your opinions about education, your wording makes you sound like you are in high school. While I agree with the sentiment that there are other more in demand degrees, calling humanity studies 'arcane trivia about the past' or saying that 'such knowledge is not useful to solving any pressing problems that exist currently' reminds me of all those people for whom news are dumbed down to a 14yr old level because they don't understand any context an

Sounds like a use case for some of those humanities majors.