[alphanullmeric]

A better title would be that some college degrees are worth their cost. Those averages hide a heavily skewed income distribution with arts majors living off government money or working a job their degree didn’t help them get, whereas STEM/medicine graduates quickly earn back their degree’s cost. Go to college if you want to be an engineer, if you want to write books you’d be wasting other people’s money as much as your own.

[dahart]

While there certainly is variation in the outcomes of people by degree, you would want to compare arts majors with degrees to artists without degrees, not compare artists to engineers. You might still find that the degree-holding artists are quite a bit better off than the artists who stopped formal education after high school.

> arts majors living off government money

What does this have to do with anything? There are lots of scientists, engineers, lawyers, construction workers, and basically every job under the sun being paid by government money. If you’re talking about financial outcomes, a job is a job, and govt vs private is irrelevant, right?

[alphanullmeric]

Scientists, engineers, lawyers and construction workers get paid for providing a useful service to the government. The government is not contracting artists to make paintings, it’s paying them with no strings attached because nobody else will.

[ethbr0]

Eh. I'd look at it a little differently.

We need both engineering and arts/culture in society. And it behooves us that those who produce arts and culture are educated to a higher level in their disciplines.

The Western capitalist system isn't set up to compensate arts/culture (at least outside of lowest-denominator, mass-market stuff).

Consequently, we explicitly create government transfer systems to fund these. Hard economic activity -> profit -> taxes -> funding for arts/culture

If we want to live in a capitalist society, that seems like a fair setup. There are alternative economic systems that fund arts/culture in different ways, which generally aren't as successful on the whole as capitalism.

Are there excesses and easy dead-horse majors to beat in arts/culture? Absolutely.

But part of progress is exploring ideas that seem silly, crazy, or anathema to people at one point. Individual rights and land ownership? Democracy? Universal sufferage?

Everything seems preordained, looking backwards through history. Looking forward, it often seems radical or stupid.

[logicchains]

>We need both engineering and arts/culture in society. And it behooves us that those who produce arts and culture are educated to a higher level in their disciplines

You don't learn how to make good art/literature in college, you learn it from doing. Most of history's greatest writers and artists didn't go to college.

[ethbr0]

> Most of history's greatest writers and artists didn't go to college.

Citation needed.