“I paid the tuition of a 4-year liberal arts college to learn a trade, now bow to my superior intellect!”
I’ve studied all of the above and the “applied sciences” were by far the easiest (and least intellectual) in my experience.
Learning the humanities, on the other hand, is like studying a proof inside-and-out without a proof to actually study from. There are no toy models, components cannot be isolated, there are no authoritative references, you can’t work backwards from the answer, you can’t coast off of your classmates, and even the best teacher does not guarantee that an idea is going to click in any student’s head. And that’s just for comprehension - a productive mastery is even more intellectually challenging, with even fewer guideposts on the path.
Wrapping vocational training into higher education has caused untold harm to the world imo. Trades like engineering and software development should never have gotten mixed up with the university systems. However capitalism made it all but inevitable.
This is literally the mirror-image of the STEMlord anti-humanities arguments, and it’s a silly argument in either direction. Both STEM and the humanities are academically rigorous and contribute great value to a student’s education–that’s why the best schools have so many gen-ed requirements.
STEM and the humanities would do much better uniting against their common foes in academia: administrators and athletics.
I’d like to think I’m being a little bit more nuanced than that. My complaint is not about any field of study or pursuit - they’re each great on their own - but about bringing together these very different things under one roof. The reasons why and consequences of.
If this was a mirrored anti-STEM hit then I would be criticizing myself with these statements. I’m not.
Traditionally universities were not vocational schools. They managed well enough for a long time, and they didn’t stand as an impediment to society. Then capitalism came and exploited it and now engineers, artists, and diplomats alike have to deal with the consequences (which often means competing against other). My argument is that we should simply reverse the exploitation - of the trades, of the universities, of the students, and of access to careers.
If we’re to go after the admins and loan servicers etc., I don’t see why we should normalize the abuses they did to the system. There’s really no point in going after the admins unless we’re aiming for systemic changes imo.
As for my comments on “intellectual,” it’s not like someone has to be intellectual to be a good person or that it’s really even that great of a quality. But since that is one of the arguments STEMlords like to make to belittle others, I think it is relevant to point out how training for a career in an applied science is not, all things considered, an especially rigorous intellectual pursuit. Which is fine because it is a horrible criteria to judge anyone by anyway.
Even between the life sciences and trades. I just finished a BS in biology as a mature student and a close friend is doing his in computer science part time, and the difference in what we have to do… So much of his assessed work can be entirely unsourced because it’s literally just coding. He’s a clever guy and was given an award for placing in the top 100 students institution-wide last year (~40k students), but I do wonder how many of the other 99 were in similar courses!
I can definitely believe it. And no hate to your friend, or any tradespeople, or trades themselves. Some of them are just caught in a systemic scandal, which probably hurts 99% of them as much as it does everyone else.
Oh, absolutely. He sees it himself. Fortunately (a) in Australia it’s partly subsidised and the loans are only indexed against inflation, and (b) he’s obviously enjoying it. Plus the few units that actually belong in a university are really interesting (but not as you say enough to justify the course being at a uni).
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“I paid the tuition of a 4-year liberal arts college to learn a trade, now bow to my superior intellect!”
I’ve studied all of the above and the “applied sciences” were by far the easiest (and least intellectual) in my experience.
Learning the humanities, on the other hand, is like studying a proof inside-and-out without a proof to actually study from. There are no toy models, components cannot be isolated, there are no authoritative references, you can’t work backwards from the answer, you can’t coast off of your classmates, and even the best teacher does not guarantee that an idea is going to click in any student’s head. And that’s just for comprehension - a productive mastery is even more intellectually challenging, with even fewer guideposts on the path.
Wrapping vocational training into higher education has caused untold harm to the world imo. Trades like engineering and software development should never have gotten mixed up with the university systems. However capitalism made it all but inevitable.
This is literally the mirror-image of the STEMlord anti-humanities arguments, and it’s a silly argument in either direction. Both STEM and the humanities are academically rigorous and contribute great value to a student’s education–that’s why the best schools have so many gen-ed requirements.
STEM and the humanities would do much better uniting against their common foes in academia: administrators and athletics.
I’d like to think I’m being a little bit more nuanced than that. My complaint is not about any field of study or pursuit - they’re each great on their own - but about bringing together these very different things under one roof. The reasons why and consequences of.
If this was a mirrored anti-STEM hit then I would be criticizing myself with these statements. I’m not.
Traditionally universities were not vocational schools. They managed well enough for a long time, and they didn’t stand as an impediment to society. Then capitalism came and exploited it and now engineers, artists, and diplomats alike have to deal with the consequences (which often means competing against other). My argument is that we should simply reverse the exploitation - of the trades, of the universities, of the students, and of access to careers.
If we’re to go after the admins and loan servicers etc., I don’t see why we should normalize the abuses they did to the system. There’s really no point in going after the admins unless we’re aiming for systemic changes imo.
As for my comments on “intellectual,” it’s not like someone has to be intellectual to be a good person or that it’s really even that great of a quality. But since that is one of the arguments STEMlords like to make to belittle others, I think it is relevant to point out how training for a career in an applied science is not, all things considered, an especially rigorous intellectual pursuit. Which is fine because it is a horrible criteria to judge anyone by anyway.
Even between the life sciences and trades. I just finished a BS in biology as a mature student and a close friend is doing his in computer science part time, and the difference in what we have to do… So much of his assessed work can be entirely unsourced because it’s literally just coding. He’s a clever guy and was given an award for placing in the top 100 students institution-wide last year (~40k students), but I do wonder how many of the other 99 were in similar courses!
I can definitely believe it. And no hate to your friend, or any tradespeople, or trades themselves. Some of them are just caught in a systemic scandal, which probably hurts 99% of them as much as it does everyone else.
Oh, absolutely. He sees it himself. Fortunately (a) in Australia it’s partly subsidised and the loans are only indexed against inflation, and (b) he’s obviously enjoying it. Plus the few units that actually belong in a university are really interesting (but not as you say enough to justify the course being at a uni).