[bh23ha]

You must have had a truly great “liberal arts education”!

I for one am extremely sceptical that a large set of deeply understood diverse experiences can be obtained in 4 or 5, actually anything less then 10 years, at college.

In my experience, a "liberal arts education" is a great way to spend a lot of money while having a hell of fun time and learning about history and stuff, in an extremely safe environment.

Obviously a tiny percentage of students with true passion for knowledge will seek out challenges and get a lot more out of college.

But the difference between the average liberal arts student and the average science/engineering student, is that the average science/engineering student does not need to seek out the opportunity to work hard and be wrong.

And that is why if I am forced to pick with no other information, I pick science and engineering.

[sudont]

Ah, thank you for describing the condescending attitude I was talking about!

[rorymarinich]

I agree with sudont, bh23ha; you have more than a streak of condescension with your response right here. But more than that, I think you're wrong, or disagree, with how idea of what a college ought to be. It's worth a conversation.

I'm not strictly a liberal arts student, but my curriculum involves a series of liberal arts courses, required. I'm also in Communications, meaning that among the arts I study (art school) I'm getting a fairly diverse set of courses, ranging from film to screenwriting to poetry to interface design to a few other things that aren't strictly involved in my major. So even that study is more "liberal arts" than the average technical degree concentration.

> I for one am extremely sceptical that a large set of deeply understood diverse experiences can be obtained in 4 or 5, actually anything less then 10 years, at college.

I think you're assuming that everybody who's attending college is going there to learn a specific skillset that'll help them in their career, and work hard at developing those skills. I view college rather as a place for people to learn more about themselves, and to have the freedoms to discover things they would never discover on their own.

I didn't enter college for Communications. It took me a little while to figure out what I wanted. And in the process of searching I took a variety of classes — programming classes, religious studies, Japanese, an industrial design class — and each one helped me understand a little bit more about what I liked and what I didn't.

What's more, I find that the classes I take that offer me nothing that I'll apply to my eventual business future tend to offer me unexpected flashes of insight. That religion course, for instance, taught me more about social experiences that human beings seek out than any social design course I've sat through; it helped me understand and come to terms with a phenomenon I at once point actively hated as a child. Similarly, a flamenco class I'm taking right now is unexpectedly teaching me a lot about my misconceptions of what music is and how it works socially. (If you don't know, the way flamenco musicians approach their work is much different than the way band musicians do, and the resulting society is vastly different and interesting.)

For a creative mind, all of these things aid both in specific studies — I could reel out a list of scientific discoveries formulated by scientists who were inspired by an utterly different line of thought — and in the more important study, which is: realizing that the world is interconnected in a lot of ways, and that those connections tend to mirror other connections elsewhere, and that studying all these other things will lead to a richer and deeper education/human being.

I do agree with you that my major doesn't force hard work out of people like engineering majors do. I'm a mix myself: I work hard on my out-of-school projects but my classwork depends on how interested I am in the course. I breeze through a lot of things and do pretty well. But I think that's an advantage, too. I don't like that some technical colleges sap a student's soul and make it impossible for them to do stupid college things, or to experiment on projects with their friends. I have friends who want to do things which they simply can't because freshmen-level courses are taking hours and hours out of their every week. And I'm really sad about that, because I know that a lot of people who give up creative projects in college never pick them up again.

College isn't about me getting a job. It's about me becoming a better person. Liberal arts is geared towards making me more diverse and thoughtful than I would be otherwise. It's working.

[bh23ha]

Thanks for the thoughtful response.

Let me first clarify that I'm not talking about education as a type of technical school that will teach you what ever skill is hot at the moment.

Rather I think the original point of this discussion started with the claim that good design is not just how things looks but rather a deep understanding of how the whole thing works. Knowledge which is both wide ranging and deep is a prerequisite for good design.

That is something I strongly agree with.

A liberal arts education was suggested as the thing which provides both deep and wide ranging knowledge. And obviously I am bit sceptical of that.

For example:

I view college rather as a place for people to learn more about themselves, and to have the freedoms to discover things they would never discover on their own.

Exactly! Except I don't quite agree with never discover on their own. College happens to coincide with the time of your life where you are learning the most about yourself.

And if you decided to travel the country (or the world) on a motorcycle, I bet you would learn a lot about yourself and have incredible freedom, and discover things you'd never even dreamt about.

But I don't mean to disparage college. College also brings together other students and professors and it's very safe, so an absolutely great experience.

However, I do find that often people who defend liberal arts education imply that self discovery without it is just not as good. I strongly disagree with that, I don't think you even need college for self discovery. Curiosity and a sense of adventure is just as good. Add travel to that mix and I think few colleges can beat that.

The other unfortunate implication is that people who don't have a liberal arts education are a bit shallow or narrow focused, or not quite as well rounded. This I find frankly offensive. But never mind how I feel about it, I think it's plainly wrong.

Science and engineering don't sap student's souls. Scientists and engineers are not all boring, grey people, with no sense for art or music. I recall the Ad Council commercials with a boy telling the street musician to get a job, and a little girl asking her dad to read to her from the Federal Reserve meeting notes.

Actually, if I had to name the one area of study which saps people's souls with overbearing work loads, it would be medicine. And MDs aren't exactly known to be shallow or not well rounded.

Scientists and engineers love music and art too. I mean how can you look at the Millau Viaduct http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/01/wonders_bigdigs/sour... and not see the art and beauty in it?

Your paragraph:

For a creative mind, all of these things aid both in specific studies — I could reel out a list of scientific discoveries formulated by scientists who were inspired by an utterly different line of thought — and in the more important study, which is: realizing that the world is interconnected in a lot of ways, and that those connections tend to mirror other connections elsewhere, and that studying all these other things will lead to a richer and deeper education/human being.

Is a perfect example of implying that scientists and engineers are just not as aware of the nature of the universe, the subtle connections in it, the beauty in it. That scientists and engineers just aren't quite as "creative".

College isn't about me getting a job. It's about me becoming a better person. Liberal arts is geared towards making me more diverse and thoughtful than I would be otherwise. It's working.

And amazingly science and engineering work in exactly the same way for science and engineering students.

I mean literally no one wants to hire software engineers right out of collage. So yeah, pretty much exactly like a liberal arts degree :)

[quanticle]

>College isn't about me getting a job. It's about me becoming a better person. Liberal arts is geared towards making me more diverse and thoughtful than I would be otherwise. It's working.

I'd really, really like to agree with you. Unfortunately, for myself and a lot of others, college is about getting a job. Why did I go to school and get a computer science degree? All of the employers in my area simply expected a B.Sc. in Computer Science or something related before they'd even consider you as a programmer.

I actually disliked a lot of my computer science curriculum -- I felt that it shortchanged the actual craft of coding and working in teams to build large systems, but I had to do what I had to do in order to get the job I wanted.

EDIT: I also believe that the necessity of liberal education in college is declining as more information becomes more widely available. Yeah, when you had to go to the university library to look up philosophy and history, liberal arts courses were necessary to make someone a well-rounded person. Today, however, there is such a rich variety of liberal education available for free on the Internet that one can make themselves well rounded without stepping foot inside a formal educational setting.

[rorymarinich]

> I'd really, really like to agree with you. Unfortunately, for myself and a lot of others, college is about getting a job. Why did I go to school and get a computer science degree? All of the employers in my area simply expected a B.Sc. in Computer Science or something related before they'd even consider you as a programmer.

It's hard for me to have this conversation with you, because I can't imagine living my life with the end goal of simply finding employment. I'm incapable of going a day without creating something or adjusting something or trying to somehow change myself. So the only jobs I want are the ones that let me make things. And there are always jobs like that available, and they're really easy to find, too: You just hunt down other people that are making things and you ask them what they want you to make.

But I'm still surprised that people have trouble applying for jobs even as programmers. Isn't it relatively easy? You just spend some time making really flashy things, real show-off-y stuff that demonstrates you're more than competent at what you're doing. Write a cocky cover letter that says "I didn't go to college but I'm better at what I'm doing than most college graduates", even if you're not, and then let your work speak for itself. I'm biased also because the year I spent learning Computer Sciences was the easiest year of classes I ever took. I still don't fully grasp why the major seems so demanding for so many students when a lot of the work they have you do is fairly trivial.

> EDIT: I also believe that the necessity of liberal education in college is declining as more information becomes more widely available. Yeah, when you had to go to the university library to look up philosophy and history, liberal arts courses were necessary to make someone a well-rounded person. Today, however, there is such a rich variety of liberal education available for free on the Internet that one can make themselves well rounded without stepping foot inside a formal educational setting.

One can convince himself of his well-roundedness. But there's a difference between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge. Sort of like the parent post to my original one said about not suspecting most liberal arts college students of being willing to put in an effort. I too am suspicious of college students reading "liberal arts subjects" on the Internet and bothering to apply them in any practical way, to test out their ideas for their own.

Having experienced, wise professors guide you through courses of study is a luxury we don't have yet on the Internet.

[quanticle]

>It's hard for me to have this conversation with you, because I can't imagine living my life with the end goal of simply finding employment. I'm incapable of going a day without creating something or adjusting something or trying to somehow change myself. So the only jobs I want are the ones that let me make things. And there are always jobs like that available, and they're really easy to find, too: You just hunt down other people that are making things and you ask them what they want you to make.

It really depends on where you are and what sort of contacts you have. Yeah, if you already know a lot of people who are into programming or if you're in an area where there are lots of people making things, then you can let your work speak for itself. Unfortunately, I'm not in one of those areas. Here in the Midwest, if you don't have the degree, your resume gets placed directly in the circular file.

One of my friends is a better programmer than I am, but due to family circumstances he couldn't finish his Computer Science degree. He's stuck in a relatively dead end sysadmin job, while I'm moving ahead in the programming world. He's doing his best to finish his degree, but it'll be a couple of years before he can do so, and he'll be that much further behind when finally does graduate.

You may not be able to imagine a life with the end goal of simply finding employment. However, if you ended up in a situation where you were unemployed (or worse, unemployable) for a long period of time, then you would start looking for employment just for the sake of having employment. Its nice that its unlikely for you, but it is certainly a situation that many of us have to deal with every day.

>Having experienced, wise professors guide you through courses of study is a luxury we don't have yet on the Internet.

That certainly is true. On the Internet you don't have the challenge of defending your ideas against someone who's studied the topic for most of their lifetime.