Humanities Degrees and Stem Degrees Deserve Equal Respect

[ss20ts]

"Humanities degrees and STEM degrees deserve equal respect"

no

in fact, I think student loans should only go to STEM degrees

that should have the effect of actually lowering the cost of non-STEM degrees            
and actually weeding out the useless degrees

So no student loans for:

culinary and hospitality programs
nursing
psychology programs
social work and human services programs
elementary school teaching
business degrees
banking/finance and insurance degrees
accounting degrees
law degrees
law enforcement
emergency management
automechanics programs
agricultural programs
horticultural programs
carpentry and other building sciences which aren't considered STEM

How exactly would you propose one earns a degree in these programs and others without student loans?

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The practical impact of that would be to force many students who have no interest in STEM to pursue STEM degrees. India is actually an excellent example of this sort of thing actually happening. The IIT schools are the best in the country and teach, basically, STEM. Many of the best students go to IIT schools, earn STEM degrees and then go into business or other areas. I actually had 2 classmates in my history PhD program who were from India and had engineering undergraduate degrees. They earned their degrees because that’s what the best students in India did, never mind their lack of interest in the subject. If loans to non-STEM degree earners stopped, there would be many more people, I think, who earned their STEM degree but never “used” it. Perversely, if you didn’t dramatically increase the size of STEM programs, you would almost certainly worsen shortages for STEM workers, drive up STEM salaries, and likely have to bring even more foreign workers with STEM degrees. 

There are already shortages of professors in many STEM disciplines and they tend to be much higher paid than in many of the social sciences/humanities. Part of why universities love humanities/social sciences is they can charge the same tuition to someone earning a history degree and someone earning a physics, computer science, or accounting degree, but pay the history faculty say1/3-1/2 what they would pay in other disciplines.  More demand for faculty will drive up prices (salaries) for professors even more. It would also pull even more people from working in STEM to put them in classrooms, further driving up costs (salaries) across broad swaths of the economy. 

It also occurs to me that for centuries, from antiquity to the industrial revolution, what we now recognize as the humanities were really the most prized disciplines.  The precursors to today’s engineers, doctors, architects, businesspeople, and scientists were often not welcome in proper society. No proper gentleman or lady would condescend to studying in these fields. If there were no student aid for the humanities, might we return to that?  If STEM degrees become degrees for poor people, why would a wealthy or socially powerful person want one?  A history degree might become, by its cost and scarcity, a marker of social standing. Perhaps the history degree would become, as it’s precursor was a few hundred years ago, a way of confirming or even entering the highest rungs of society. 

That, or we will just stop teaching it in any meaningful way. Most of the state legislatures seem to be working toward that already, but that’s a post for a different board/different part of the board…

There are many people who have ZERO interest in STEM programs because they're not good at those subjects. Everyone's brain does not work the same. Creative people tend to be awful at math and science. They can study math until the cows come home and never understand it. 

So many people who have no interest in the STEM field especially those who aren't good at those subjects are to do what? Remain uneducated? Rely on the government to take care of them since they can't be educated? Are they to be homeless and starving because they don't understand math and science? That's really humane. STEM programs aren't any better than humanities or any other programs. They all are necessary. Someone needs to know how to repair diesel trucks so your computer parts can be shipped around the globe.