[calinet6]

Alternatively, these are MIT people, so perhaps the problem is that their education and career are both overly specialized.

Breadth would certainly be an asset to deal with change over a longer term. It's another great argument for a broad liberal arts education.

[brlewis]

An MIT bachelor's degree includes a decent amount of liberal arts. The HASS requirement has been around for a long time -- 1980s? http://web.mit.edu/hassreq/

[ghaff]

I don't know when that particular name for it dates to, but some sort of liberal arts requirement has been around for even longer. To be sure, if you take the minimum and take courses that aren't really liberal arts (e.g. accounting or microeconomics), it's fairly minimal. But the opportunity is certainly there to get a fairly broad education.

[madcaptenor]

Feynman writes about having to satisfy a liberal arts requirement in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, so the requirement goes back at least to the late thirties.

[mcguire]

It's been a while since I read it, but I seem to recall his approach to it was what I assume to be the normal MIT student's: take the minimum he could get away with and complain about how useless it was.

I could be misremembering, though, and that was written much later in his life.

[madcaptenor]

You're pretty much right, according to:

- this oral history: http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/5020_2.html (search for "astronomy", which apparently was considered a humanities course!)

- this transcription of the relevant section of Surely You're Joking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Paranoid/Feynman

[calinet6]

That's all well and good, but requirements are different from practice. In my understanding, engineering degrees and especially those from very technical institutions tend toward specialization. There also may be a factor in who chooses those institutions and how much they choose to specialize in both their education and career.

[darkmighty]

I honestly don't think there are many jobs an experienced MIT engineer couldn't do that a liberal arts graduate could. I think the matter here is most old folks with an MIT degree with a comfortable financial position would rather be unemployed just managing investments and other activities than work a low paying job.