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by javier123454321 356 days ago
This is exactly it. Are we surprised that civil engineering students forced to take a humanities class satisfied by psych 101 and having to pay thousands of dollars for the 3 credit hours are cheating on their term paper?
1 comments
ModernMech 356 days ago
It's not surprising, as there are plenty of technical-minded people who believe they should never have to study anything related to "soft sciences", and will do anything to get out of it. But I don't think that people doing so with AI justifies the idea that civil engineering students should not be taught any humanities.
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javier123454321 355 days ago
I am not against learning humanities. But I am against forcing students to participate in 101 level courses that are packed with over 100 students, listening to an uninspired lecturer talk at a crowd of disinterested faces on their phone and being FORCED to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on it. Education =/= academia anymore (in the US) and that fault falls squarely on the academia industry.
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ModernMech 355 days ago
> academia industry

Well there's the problem right there. Academia shouldn't be an "industry", it should be a public good. "101 level courses that are packed with over 100 students, listening to an uninspired lecturer talk at a crowd of disinterested faces on their phone and being FORCED to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on it." is an artefact of forcing a public good shaped peg into a capitalism shaped hole.

When academia is an industry, students and professors get treated like commodities that have to demonstrate an ROI to be allowed to exist. Humanities don't have a good ROI in our society, therefore they are not funded, therefore positions in humanities are scarce. The end result is overworked lecturers and large class sizes.

The alternative is to cut humanities altogether, which honestly is happening; we're headed to a situation where humanities programs in some areas will just cease to exist, and they'll concentrate in places that actually care about education. It's sad but that's where we are.

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javier123454321 354 days ago
Start with cutting the subsidized loan programs, that means that banks will have to give those loans and they will only do so for programs that make sense in terms of the ROI. That means that only the best programs that make the most exclusive admissions will have a shot. I'm not sure if humanities ever made sense to be a sort of 'default' option. I know more people that I can count that did something along the lines of this (all financed through debt):

Go to college without knowing their major, take two years of gen ed classes, realize they have to choose a major, choose the one which they happened to have more credits towards.

In a better system, studying english would be difficult, it would be for people that are passionate about it and excel at it. Not the default option because its the best way to capture money from subsidized 18 year old.

We probably agree on a lot, but disagree on solutions.

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