Comment by brailsafe
20 days ago
> Personally, I kind of pitied the non-STEM students.
The only time I've had this opinion is when I was younger and conceited, holding onto an attitude that they're all wasting their money, probably fueled by envy.
Although there are moments—largely driven by other aspects of bureaucracy—where I wish I'd completed my bachelors, I'm quite happy in retrospect that I instead chose a bunch of random off-topic interesting humanities courses and non-cs-stem stuff, some of which I failed for inane reasons. Aside from a few moments in data structures and algorithms, I barely remember anything from the CS courses, they were unbelievably dull and poorly structured. In one case I believe I got nearly 100% on all the homework but failed both exams because I just kind of zoned out and wasn't driven to write java by hand for 2+ hours, which generally shocked the profs because I was typically the most engaged, personable, and probably older than everyone else by like 4 years.
>> Personally, I kind of pitied the non-STEM students.
Well, as a STEM university graduate myself I admit being guilty of this thought and I think it's just something "hard science" thinks of "humanities" in general. Mostly due to mercantilism, most non-STEM studies have very poor job perspectives.
But ... it all comes down to numbers. The elephant in the room is that THERE ARE TOO MANY COLLEGE SEATS FOR STUDENTS. This has multiple causes but it's a societal problem and a pretty dire one.
Take one of the universities in my city: https://www.ubbcluj.ro . In 1989 (at the fall of the communist regime in Romania) it had 5,619 students. Overall, in all specialties and all years, took 4 years in general to graduate.
Today just at the admission exam were accepted 16,800 new students. Taking all years that makes about 55,000 students. 50 fucking thousand! That's 10 times the level during commies.
And that's the problem. A lot of people who have no business being in the academic environment are now funneled through it. Reason is first, because "The West" had every man, women and their dog get a college degree so we had to play catch up. Problem, as the article states, they are getting that degree on paper only, de jure, not de facto.
But the even deeper problem is the dissolution of white collar jobs. That happened both in the West and the East. Agriculture used to employ 90, 50, 30% of the population, now there's 2 to 5% working there. Industry used to employ 90, 50, 30% of the population, now there's 5 to 10% working there. And the rest? God have mercy! We're all in "services". We're fucking servicing the shit of each other.
So in order to avoid fixing the hard problem (what the fuck to do with people who don't have the skill and intellect to do academic stuff but are good enough for plowing in agriculture or operating a CNC machine), the powers be have opened the gates of colleges. Get a college degree, that will compensate for the lack of activities to do with it!
I could write more.
Bottom line, what you expecting from peasants going to college? You can take the peasant out of the village but you can't take the village out of the peasant, they say.
> Well, as a STEM university graduate myself I admit being guilty of this thought and I think it's just something "hard science" thinks of "humanities" in general. Mostly due to mercantilism, most non-STEM studies have very poor job perspectives.
What does mercantilism have to do with that? The problem with the job perspectives of students of many non-STEM subject is rather that it is often not easy to find economic applications of the knowledge that is taught in the humanities courses (which is made even more complicated by the often "left", "woke" bias that many humanities faculties have).
So it's a natural progression. From agriculture (primary) to industrial (secondary) to services (tertiary). The AI revolution means services go the same way as industrial. Everybody goes to the 4th level.
<Narrator Voice>: There is no fourth level.
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At some point you’d think we’d learn that our economic system, and the way that we manage work, has stopped making the sense it made centuries ago when we developed it.