[chromacity]

It probably has to do with the fact that we condition children and adolescents to consider white-collar jobs as more noble than blue-collar jobs, then we tell them that to get a good white-collar job, they need a degree... and then we make STEM degrees hard by subjecting students to more math than most people realistically need. So we have a lot of frontend developers who know calculus and an oversupply of people with humanities degrees.

With that degree, you're generally pushed toward jobs in journalism, publishing, graphic design, teaching, administrative functions, and so on. Most of these pay relatively little.

[com2kid]

Calculus is required for English degrees in other countries. Heck a lot of countries require some amount of calculus just to graduate high school.

Same goes for the basics of statistics. A basic understanding of statistics is a requirement for any college degree in many countries, and for good reasons. Stats comes up all the damn time. From proper A/B testing, to marketing, to understanding public health emergencies, to making informed medical decisions.

[aworks]

I understand the value of statistics. But calculus? I say this, as someone who took 6 semesters of calculus in college.

[com2kid]

6 semesters seems like... a lot? IIRC getting a math undergrad at my Uni didn't require that many classes of calc.

I think calc 1 and 2 are extremely valuable. The concept of rate of change is fundamental to so many things in life, and understanding "area under the curve" is essential to understanding how many ideas are communicated, including lots of graphs in physics, chemistry, and economics.

Beyond that I feel calculus starts getting into specific applications and is less generally applicable to the populace at large.

[aworks]

6 quarters, not 6 semesters!

Decades later, I wish I had more linear algebra.

[tptacek]

Publishing : standard English major career track :: Gaming : standard CS major career track.

It's not much more complicated than that.

[rcxdude]

I don't think it's a matter of more 'noble', simply a more comfortable option if it's available to you. It has historically paid better and taken a lower toll on your body. The former is now less true, but the latter is still a big issue.

[x3n0ph3n3]

It's a shame that calculus isn't required by every college degree. Just because I'm not integrating functions during my normal work, doesn't mean I don't benefit from understanding the fundamental principles.

[chromacity]

Yes, totally. I was about to undero surgery but found out the doctor didn't even know about Laplace transforms. He small-mindedly spent his formative years learning anatomy, never benefitting from the knowledge of frequency-domain derivatives. I dodged that bullet by storming out.

[com2kid]

You joke, but if you talked to a doctor of radiology odds are they at least took a class covering Fourier Transforms.

[robocat]

Would you say the same about learning Christianity: maybe not directly useful for your job, however it is rather foundational to much of English society.

[x3n0ph3n3]

Yeah! I've found that learning the foundations of religions is a great way to inoculate people from worst aspects of those ideas.

[bpt3]

The number of people with humanities degrees who also could successfully obtain a rigorous CS or engineering degree is not very large.

I suggest you revisit your hypothesis with a little less bias.

[eszed]

The reverse is also true.

My current hypothesis is that as AI forces software development down less and less deterministic pathways, I suspect that the value of a basic CS degree will diminish relative to humanities training. Comfort with ambiguity, an ability to construct a workable "theory of mind", and to construct unambiguous natural-language prompts will become more relevant than grokking standard algorithms.

[bpt3]

The reverse most certainly is not true, and even if it were it wouldn't matter.

Humanities advocates have been hoping for the demise of valuable STEM degrees for at least the last 30 years. It's not happening for many reasons, of them being: All the skills you listed are also taught in an engineering and rigorous CS curriculum, plus those degrees provide validation that the individual is intelligent and determined enough to complete coursework that most people cannot.

[eszed]

I dunno, man. The difficulty (and resentment of having to even take them) most STEM majors had in my college-level writing classes causes me to doubt that, as does the general reaction on this board to any kind of problem / domain with irreducible ambiguity. But look, I'm not talking about the top ~10%, or whatever: the really smart kids can adapt to whatever gets thrown at them[0]. I'm doubtful that a 50th-percentile or below CS degree / student will retain the value that they've recently had - and given what I read on here about the present job market for new grads on here, that's maybe already happening.

Anyway, I had to pick one, my money'd be on philosophy degrees rising in value: they're already sought out by financial firms. Have you seen the sort of analytical / symbolic reasoning they do?

[0] In fact, in case you didn't know, rigorous humanities programs and research involve an awful lot of statistics and coding, even though the dinosaurs that run the MLA and most English departments aren't able to handle it.

[bpt3]

> I dunno, man. The difficulty (and resentment of having to even take them) most STEM majors had in my college-level writing classes causes me to doubt that, as does the general reaction on this board to any kind of problem / domain with irreducible ambiguity.

I don't think most STEM majors would be outstanding English Literature (or whatever humanities program you prefer) majors, but I do think they could manage to obtain a degree. Very, very few humanities majors could get an engineering degree.

And yes, the writing classes they force engineers to take are largely pointless and not enjoyable. Everyone with a degree got through them though, and I have to imagine the percentage of STEM students who washed out on that and not organic chemistry, compiler design, differential equations, etc. is extremely small (it was 0 out of the hundreds of people I knew at my school).

> But look, I'm not talking about the top ~10%, or whatever: the really smart kids can adapt to whatever gets thrown at them[0].

Sure. Very few of these kids are going into publishing, because they'll have more lucrative options and will pursue them.

> I'm doubtful that a 50th-percentile or below CS degree / student will retain the value that they've recently had - and given what I read on here about the present job market for new grads on here, that's maybe already happening.

That may be, but they're still in better shape than a 50% percentile humanities degree holder, who also is having the value of their skillset eroded by AI.

> Anyway, I had to pick one, my money'd be on philosophy degrees rising in value: they're already sought out by financial firms. Have you seen the sort of analytical / symbolic reasoning they do?

Lol, they are not "sought out" in any sense of the word. Philosophy majors at top tier schools are sought out because everyone at the school is sought out, not because they majored in philosophy.

And yes, I took a number of philosophy classes in college as an undergrad because they were easy (have you seen the analytical/symbolic reasoning required of EE or CS majors? It's a lot more difficult that what is required of philosophy majors).

[eszed]

> [50th percentile CS grads] are still in better shape than a 50% percentile humanities degree holder, who also is having the value of their skillset eroded by AI.

That's the crux of it, and right now it appears to me that the ability to write unambiguous natural language prompts - in a variety of contexts, not specifically heavy-duty dev work - is going to be increasingly valuable. The 50th percentile english / philosophy grad is better at that than the 50th percentile CS major - while, at the same time, the bottom rungs of the developer ladder appear to have been kicked out.

I'm trying very hard not to make this into a "who's smarter?" question. That's a well-trodden and pointless argument, particularly if money is going to be the measuring stick. Besides, if that's where we're going, the finance bros and C-suite win, and do either of us think they're the geniuses in the room?

But, we'll see. We're living in Interesting Times.