Comment by collinmcnulty

> Do all colleges require engineering students to take liberal arts?

15 credit hours of liberal arts education isn't why college in the US is so expensive, and if one pays attention, they might even learn something from it.

If nothing else, you'll learn how to read and write.

Liberal arts is a huge grab bag of courses with varying rigor, quality, appeal and difficulty.

One of the best courses I had in college was a metalworking course during which I learned to weld.

But like many (engineering) students, for most of the liberal arts credit, I went with stuff where I could get the best possible grade with the least possible work.

That's not for societal reasons, that's for practical reasons. People want to be able to get around.

By contrast, many people don't want to be forced to take classes unrelated to their desired area of study.

What do you suggest people were trying to buy, instead of cars?

You went from "median" job/employer to "best" employee in high value/pay/education roles. These best employee's don't want to work in the "median college-degree-required job", they likely have done some significant post-grad studies and have also likely been saddled with more debt thus requiring their high paying career outcome just to avoid collapse of their personal finances.

I think the median 4 year college graduate going after the "median college-degree-required job", did not care much about their studies at all. They slogged through it hung over from the night before. College was a social experience and gave them a sports team to root for on Saturday. It let them extend their childhood and eschew responsibilities for a few more years.

We have this weird cultural thing in the US where we put super high expectations on education systems but we actually don't value education. We value the social clout and whatnot. Public schools are a prime example, parents are the problem. Make your kids do homework! Take away the video games/phone/tablet/wifi/whatever. It translates to college as, do just what is necessary to get a degree. Often the bare minimum, etc. Cheating runs rampant and so on. It manifests itself in so many ways. Just a core part of youth right now is much more interested in being an influencer, popular, a good athlete, no sorry good athletes are a dime a dozen - you need to be an elite athlete, etc. Being a bookworm or just studious simply isn't seen as cool, it has no social reward, quite the opposite in fact.

This might not apply to many students at ivy and top schools, but I'd argue it's certainly the median for the nation's college students the past few decades maybe longer. I think colleges allow it to happen. They don't grade as harshly as they used to, they have dumbed down the courses, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the "median undergrad" education was more on par with the "median high school" education from a few decades ago.

Then sell it to doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Those fields aren't really the issue.

It depends highly on logistics like class size. Many programs brag about small class sizes, which are great for students but anathema to university bean counters. These programs often try to subsidize the small program specific courses with huge gen ed courses, making the whole student body effectively subsidize these underperforming programs. Real nasty fights occur over which courses to include in the gen ed program because every department wants a piece of that pie to prop up their poor numbers. And this dynamic is definitely much worse in humanities.

Edit: also instructor composition, meaning the proportion of instructors in a program who are senior/tenured vs new vs adjuncts. Class size and instructor salary are nearly the whole equation.

"if you can't prove something, then it isn't true" is an obvious logical fallacy.

American high schools are already doing a form of this, with certain classes earning more than a 4.0 score in GPA calculations. 5.0 is quite common now, with 6.0 and even 7.0 scores on individual classes being possible.

Many games already have an S-tier in class/stats/builds, whatever the criteria is. Would be funny if higher ed ripped that off. Life mimicking art and all that.

That already exists, it's called an A+.

There's that Jerry Yang quote:

Middle class is a state of mind

IMO Middle Class = PMC (Professional Managerial Class) in Marxist terms. They are the members of the working class (they have to work or they will starve, go homeless, etc) but are highly compensated because they are essential to functioning of the system and have rare skills. Engineers, Lawyers, Doctors, Managers, Accountants, etc.

We're talking about academia, not hobbies. Academics expect to get paid in both money and social status.

As do churches and community theaters, by the way. They tend to expect donations. If nobody ever donated money they'd shut down.