[tyleo]

I think folks would agree with you in valuing arts and humanities, just that they shouldn’t do it on someone else’s dime. I suspect you’d find that a widely held belief and not just an American one.

It’s hard out there and I have some non-college educated family who also struggled in life wondering why we should pour money into degrees people can’t pay off when they received no help themselves.

[atomicthumbs]

This sort of attitude is how you get a culturally impoverished nation.

[tyleo]

Yeah, I don’t know why people worry about feeding themselves when they could be reading books and looking at art instead.

[rightbyte]

> do it on someone else’s dime.

Money is just a social construct and the amount of tax dollars spent on classes in progressive tea pot clay handcraft is minuscule.

Non-tech academics were more or lessed forced into getting degrees by the job market.

There were no choice involved on part on the victims of a systematic issue, which is, gatekeeping access to middleclass jobs by the parents' bank account size with usury lending as some sort of pressure release valve.

[tyleo]

> Money is just a social construct

I'm not sure what you're trying to say but it hardly matters if "X is social construct" if having it is the difference between struggling and not.

TBH this is the exact thing that frustrates people who get screwed by the system, "Silly peasants! Don't they know that money is just a social construct!"

[rightbyte]

I am trying to say that the game is rigged and the profitability of different university studies is a very bad indicator of anything.

I don't know what to say to those "screwed by The Man" to make them feel better.

[beej71]

> amount of tax dollars spent on classes in progressive tea pot clay handcraft is minuscule.

Seriously. Our debt goes up by $1T every 7 months, but I'm sure dropping even all student loans from all education won't stop it.

I guess I get way more value from having artists in society than most people do. I get a lot of value out of city parks and libraries, too, both perpetual money-losers.

[nradov]

And yet many of our greatest artists never attended college at all.

[rightbyte]

Computer science is not about computers anympre than liberal art studies is about singing etc ...

[nradov]

OK but what's your point? Colleges usually classify performing arts like singing and fine arts like painting or sculpture as separate from liberal arts.

It would be good if more colleges offered majors suited to students interested in building commercial software rather than the theory of computation. Something like a "Bachelor of Fine Arts in Software Development".