[shaftoe]

That sounds great, but there's no free lunch and when you ask people to pay (a lot) for something, you're going to get their opinion.

Here's mine. I roughly divide human activities into jobs and hobbies. One ultimately builds enough value to support existence, one is primarily done for enjoyment. Education for the former can and should pay for itself over the long haul, so we're discussing who pays for hobby education.

Personally, I don't want to pay for other people's hobbies. I've volunteered to teach people some of mine, spending hundreds of hours with educational groups. But, I can't imagine forcing taxpayers to pay for university education in these things.

[awinder]

I'm sorry but, insinuating that humanities and arts are "hobby educations" is pretty rude and smacks of superiority complex.

Look at the achievements that have stood the test of time and become valuable to us as a species. It's a pretty beautiful blending of scientific achievement and artistic achievement. If this system can't encourage both, let's not go to war with the arts, let's make the system that we invented, support the things that are important to us.

Beyond that, from my perspective, more of my tax dollars will go towards issues and causes that I am personally conflicted with than ones that I agree with. The college loan issue will never compete with the size and scope of something like the military. So it's beautiful that you would be personally affronted by this use of tax dollars but: welcome to the club, est. 1776

[zaroth]

Don't apologize for personal attacks, just refrain from them.

Any argument made by starting with calling someone rude or accusing them of having a superiority complex, can only be made better by instead empathizing with rather than dismissing opposing viewpoints.

What's even worse is patronizing a mis-characterization of someone's statement.

> I roughly divide human activities into jobs and hobbies.

This indeed is a rough characterization of life. At no point does shaftoe insinuate humanities and arts are 'hobby educations'. Rather it seems to me a simply capitalistic view that anything humans do well can be done for money, at which point we call it a job. Certainly that also includes artists and philosophers. Or another way to think about it, to be truly great at something you must spend the majority of your life doing it, at which point it probably also needs to pay the bills.

People should only be investing 5-figure sums of taxpayer's dollars to learn what they expect will be lifelong skills that will significantly increase their lifetime earning potential. In almost all cases, this is not Art History class.

[awinder]

Telling someone that their humanities education was all a hobby is a much greater insult than calling someone out, so I'll let the universe sort out who was the true meanie-head here lmao.

[cmdrfred]

If humanities are so valuable, why aren't they valuable?

[tsunamifury]

They are valuable. Myself and most of my colleagues make 6 figure+ with arts degrees. Journalism, Visual Arts, etc. On top of that, most of them manage engineers, or lead their projects. And the engineers who work with them would never be so naive as to insult their work or their education in the way that the individuals in this thread do.

[cmdrfred]

Great, you won't have any issue repaying your loans then I can safely assume?

I make 40k a year due to not growing up wealthy enough to attend college, I should be subsidizing people like you?

[orly_bookz]

You're right, they're not valuable in the capitalistic sense.

They're valuable if you don't want to live in the world depicted in Brazil (1985), or Neuromancer, or pretty much any cyberpunk dystopia.

[cmdrfred]

Why don't you tell me how much you have donated to "the arts" before you demand that everyone else does so.

For context, I give 8% of my humble income to charities that feed the hungry and care for the sick. Is my dollar better spent funding a play that few will ever wish to see?