Obama's Student Loan Forgiveness plan.

[Thanas]

I wonder if it's just a regional difference of terms. Most people I know, when we say "liberal arts", are talking about a set of assorted introductory level classes meant to give a basic foundation of general education - high school, second try.

If you were doing a specialized history degree, we (maybe just people I know, or maybe it's an American thing) wouldn't call it liberal arts anymore. Then we'd call it a history major or whatever.

Ah. Okay. I thought all specifc subjects (aka history, music etc.) would fall under the umbrella of liberal arts. If it just denotes some sort of general study, I can definitely see the appeal of streamlining that to a lower level, provided that lower level is actually aedequately equipped (not the case in the community college library I linked to).

[Broomstick]

Ah. Okay. I thought all specifc subjects (aka history, music etc.) would fall under the umbrella of liberal arts.

Nope, I think it's another one of those tricky language barriers involving English dialects. How the term "liberal arts" is used in North America is different than how it is used in Europe.

[Bakustra]

I have never heard the phrase "liberal arts" used that way. I've mostly heard it used for "liberal arts school/college" where it refers to a non-state, non-technical private institution that focuses on a broad education overall. General-education credits are called "gen-ed" in my experience. I've also heard it used to refer to the humanities in general, but never to general-ed credits. So it's probably just a local thing.

[ChaserGrey]

"Liberal arts" in the U.S. usually refers to a general background education in English literature, history, philosophy, and depending on the institution and student inclination may include study of other languages, art, and music. (In theory it should include a background in math and natural sciences as well, but don't get me started on that subject.) I would think it's possible to get a decent education in those subjects at the community college level, although not every community college would be up to the task.

It's possible to major in "liberal arts" at some places, but it's generally not a very good idea. It means undertaking intermediate courses in all those subjects without doing rigorous advanced study in any one area, which means it's basically a fluff degree you can get without doing a lot of what would be considered upper-level work and is sometimes a secondary choice for those who fail advanced courses in another subject. Understandably, it's not very well regarded. Majoring in a specific *subject* considered part of the liberal arts, such as history or philosophy, is a completely different story.

EDIT: I've heard "liberal arts" used for what you call gen-ed, Bakustra. Might be regional, or it might just be an indication of how pretentious a given school is.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The term can be used either way in American English but mostly in the circles I travel in of engineering students, "liberal arts courses" is just used as a catchall for any course not actually useful to engineering unless it's like our one mandatory biological sciences course or something, which is treated more seriously. The main thing is that these aren't just lower level classes, usually a couple upper level classes are required due to the American belief in a "generalist" education, but as a practical matter these courses are, even though they're third or fourth year, completely trite and trivial because you're taking them with no real prerequisites simply to fulfill the belief you should have some advanced courses in areas far afield from your specialty. But since you can't teach advanced courses without a background in them, they get watered down severely. And then they let the people who are actually studying in those fields take those courses too as if they actually contributed something useful to their education! This just breeds contempt in engineering and science students which I am admittedly guilty of, because you see people studying in that degree field struggling in this retarded, notionally senior-level course that you skip half the sessions of (even when there's a point loss for doing so), whip up all the papers for the night before with a shot of vodka and a glass of wine to help, and still consistently get A grades in the course and do better than the people actually studying in that field. Granted my experience here is for very soft degrees like "Digital Technology and Culture" and Women's Studies, but also more distressingly also for things like anthropology and history, which I also have direct experience with.

[Thanas]

Well, in that context I can understand wanting to change that.

[Starglider]

From http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalr ... rsold.html

Educated people have higher wages and lower unemployment rates than the less educated so why are college students at Occupy Wall Street protests around the country demanding forgiveness for crushing student debt? The sluggish economy is tough on everyone but the students are also learning a hard lesson, going to college is not enough. You also have to study the right subjects. And American students are not studying the fields with the greatest economic potential.

Over the past 25 years the total number of students in college has increased by about 50 percent. But the number of students graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) has remained more or less constant. Moreover, many of today’s STEM graduates are foreign born and are taking their knowledge and skills back to their native countries.

Consider computer technology. In 2009 the U.S. graduated 37,994 students with bachelor’s degrees in computer and information science. This is not bad, but we graduated more students with computer science degrees 25 years ago! The story is the same in other technology fields such as chemical engineering, math and statistics. Few fields have changed as much in recent years as microbiology, but in 2009 we graduated just 2,480 students with bachelor’s degrees in microbiology — about the same number as 25 years ago. Who will solve the problem of antibiotic resistance?

If students aren’t studying science, technology, engineering and math, what are they studying?

In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.

The chart at right shows the number of bachelor’s degrees in various fields today and 25 years ago. STEM fields are flat (declining for natives) while the visual and performing arts, psychology, and communication and journalism (!) are way up.

There is nothing wrong with the arts, psychology and journalism, but graduates in these fields have lower wages and are less likely to find work in their fields than graduates in science and math. Moreover, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don’t require college degrees and these graduates don’t get a big college bonus.

Most importantly, graduates in the arts, psychology and journalism are less likely to create the kinds of innovations that drive economic growth. Economic growth is not a magic totem to which all else must bow, but it is one of the main reasons we subsidize higher education.

Non-STEM courses have absorbed all of the increase in graduates in the last quarter century (and then some if you exclude foreign students) and hence the lions share of all the increases in state subsidy over that time. We could cut the number of media/arts/history/etc grads by a full third and that would only bring them back to parity with sciences and engineering. It would not cause any significant problems for research, unless you believe that history and language faculties had a crushing shortage of competent researchers in 1985. In the face of these statistics it is hard to deny that most of the increase in university participation rates came from the need to have some sort of degree to get a decent job, and these people took liberal arts because it was the easy option. In the long run this does not benefit anyone.

[Simon_Jester]

The term can be used either way in American English but mostly in the circles I travel in of engineering students, "liberal arts courses" is just used as a catchall for any course not actually useful to engineering unless it's like our one mandatory biological sciences course or something, which is treated more seriously. The main thing is that these aren't just lower level classes, usually a couple upper level classes are required due to the American belief in a "generalist" education, but as a practical matter these courses are, even though they're third or fourth year, completely trite and trivial because you're taking them with no real prerequisites simply to fulfill the belief you should have some advanced courses in areas far afield from your specialty. But since you can't teach advanced courses without a background in them, they get watered down severely. And then they let the people who are actually studying in those fields take those courses too as if they actually contributed something useful to their education! This just breeds contempt in engineering and science students which I am admittedly guilty of, because you see people studying in that degree field struggling in this retarded, notionally senior-level course that you skip half the sessions of (even when there's a point loss for doing so), whip up all the papers for the night before with a shot of vodka and a glass of wine to help, and still consistently get A grades in the course and do better than the people actually studying in that field. Granted my experience here is for very soft degrees like "Digital Technology and Culture" and Women's Studies, but also more distressingly also for things like anthropology and history, which I also have direct experience with.

Speaking from my own experience, which in some ways parallels Duchess's (physics undergrad) and in some ways doesn't (we're very different people)...

I'm sure you can find liberal arts courses that are effortlessly easy for science and engineering majors who are accustomed to several hours of doing calculus problems every week. I'm not sure I ever did, though. Or rather, my liberal arts courses were challenging during specific periods (papers were due) and not others. One week that History of World War One course might be relatively easy; the next you're sinking as many hours into "read the book and write the report on Canadian Corps tactics on the Western Front" as you do on your lab report, and the lab reports are not easy.

I'll grant that they didn't make up anything like the majority of the work I was doing, but then I was usually only taking about one upper-level humanities course a semester, versus two or three physics-and-math courses, so of course physics and math would take up the majority of the time and energy.

Now, lower-level humanities were often effortless, and I did take some of those, but then I didn't have much trouble to speak of passing introductory level chemistry or physics either...

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I suppose there are still difficult courses, but why would anyone in engineering take them other than out of personal interest? I'll readily admit to consciously choosing other classes to minimize courseload, because everyone does that. The problem is when those are the classes you're getting a degree in, rather than ones they're just saddling you with which are distractions toward an end goal.

[Simon_Jester]

I suppose it depends. On the one hand you've got the 'real' history/literature/art/whatever majors who take classes out of honest interest and aren't just in it to avoid having to do calculus. They genuinely like what they're doing, would probably be able to do something else if they really wanted to, but feel a sense of commitment to this subject.

On the other, you've got the ones who aren't, and are calculating "how can I get a degree while spending the least amount of time, sweat, and possibly money?"

The US has a problem with the latter, not the former, because they are the ones least likely to be able to pay off student loans. Someone who's genuinely self-motivated to study history has at least a chance of paying off, even if their long term job prospects aren't good and they wind up working in another area. Someone who views the entire degree program as a process for getting credentials to do they-don't-know-what isn't nearly as good a bet.

[Thanas]

We got the same problem over here.