[anamax]

> If the objective is to create well-rounded, cross-disciplinary citizens, then no, that is a horrible idea.

How about some evidence that liberal arts graduates have anything to do with "well-rounded, cross-disciplinary citizens"?

As someone noted above, STEM folk are far more cross-disciplinary than liberal arts grads.

[reissbaker]

I think the key there is the plural. If you're given two subsets of the population, where:

Subset A roughly corresponds to the current population's mix of educational backgrounds, and

Subset B is the transformation of A where all liberal arts majors have been replaced with STEM graduates,

I think it's obvious that subset A would be more "cross-disciplinary" and "well-rounded" taken as a group. It's not that individual liberal arts majors are more well rounded, it's that having a well-rounded collective of citizens is important.

[anamax]

> I think the key there is the plural.

I don't think that that's the intent of the claim, but I'll play along.

> It's not that individual liberal arts majors are more well rounded, it's that having a well-rounded collective of citizens is important.

But, how much do liberal arts majors contribute to said "well-rounded collective" and at what cost?

For example, it might be more cost-effective to add a bit more "rounded" to STEM majors.

And, that's ignoring the benefit of having this "rounded" within individuals instead of across groups.

[reissbaker]

I'm down for some banter. Let's try this out.

> But, how much do liberal arts majors contribute to said "well-rounded collective" and at what cost?

Are you asking how they contribute to well-roundedness, or are you asking to value their individual contributions to society while ignoring contributions to well-roundedness as a valuable asset? How they contribute to well-roundedness is handled with the whole Subset A vs Subset B thing, I think. In regards to value -- I'm pretty sure that Hunter Thompson guy was good to have around. I dunno.

As to the cost: I guess that depends on whether you view liberal arts majors as a detriment to society, or at least intrinsically inferior to STEM majors. If they're equal then they're no additional cost, because their education costs exactly the same dollar amount.

> And, that's ignoring the benefit of having this "rounded" within individuals instead of across groups.

Certainly well-rounded individuals are important. But unless everyone is forced to be dual-degree, there will inevitably end up being biases towards the main major -- and I say this as a well-rounded STEM grad.

And doesn't requiring the well-roundedness to be at the individual level ignore the benefit of having some number of single-focus specialists within a society? It's not like Salman Rushdie spends his spare time proving P=NP, or Dijkstra's out writing papers on critical race theory.

[anamax]

>> But, how much do liberal arts majors contribute to said "well-rounded collective" and at what cost?

> Are you asking how they contribute to well-roundedness

Yes.

> How they contribute to well-roundedness is handled with the whole Subset A vs Subset B thing

Not clear. You're claiming that an LA degree has some "roundedness" value. That's not obvious. And, even if it's true, that doesn't imply that we need a lot of LA degrees to get whatever benefit there is. For example, how much worse off would we be with half as many English majors?

> I'm pretty sure that Hunter Thompson guy was good to have around.

I'd agree, but would ask whether his existence depended on the existence of a large number of LA majors. I'd point out that similar folks existed before we had a lot of LA majors and we don't have more Hunter Thompsons now.

> If they're equal then they're no additional cost, because their education costs exactly the same dollar amount.

Huh? It doesn't matter whether LA majors cost more or less than STEM majors. The question is the relationship between the cost of LA majors and the benefits of LA majors. (There's a similar question about STEM majors.)

It's interesting that we had a thread a while back about how China was better because its political leadership had engineering degrees....

[reissbaker]

> You're claiming that an LA degree has some "roundedness" value.

I think I understand our point of disagreement.

I don't mean to claim LA majors have a "roundedness" value. I'm claiming that the collective average of STEM and LA leads to a rounded group, assuming "roundedness" in this case is considered to mean equally proficient in the diverse areas of knowledge.

As a metaphor, assume we have a bag full of red, purple, and blue marbles, where the purple is equivalent to roundedness (having equal amounts of red and blue). Replacing all of the red marbles with perfectly-purple ones actually decreases the purpleness of the bag -- it shifts the average color towards blue. Even if we give the blue ones with "a bit more 'rounded'" purple, to echo your call, the average remains shifted more towards blue than it was when there was red to balance it out.

LA majors don't have a roundedness value -- pure-LA is as unrounded as pure-STEM. I'm generally working under the assumption that "roundedness" means that you're knowledgeable in many areas, instead of only knowledgeable in a single one. Replacing a specific set of specialists with jacks-of-all-trades leaves the group with less average knowledge in the direction of the replaced specialists' knowledge base.

You could be arguing to make everyone completely and equally rounded/purple -- replacing both the blues and the reds, so that everyone would graduate with both a full LA degree and a full STEM degree. But your call for adding "a bit more 'rounded' to STEM majors" instead of having LA majors didn't sound like that, and making everyone be dual-degree seems a bit infeasible.