There is an effort to erase student loan debt and I'm mad as hell about it ...

I don’t know what kind of teachers you had in school, but mine were pretty smart. I understand the concern, but I think there are very good teachers, good teachers, average teachers, below average teachers and bad teachers… just like all employees in pretty much every field.

I mean how many of you know if your physician graduated last in his or her class?

I had much better teachers overall at the community college I got my associate’s at than the mid sized 4-year state school I went to. There were very few CS educators anywhere in that whole facility that gave a single shit about teaching the undergrads anything.

This is a total aside, but about the doctor thing. I always thought that the real thing that seperated doctors (besides the science training of course) from the other health are workers was not the degree. It’s the fact that they have dissected a real life dead person and the others haven’t. I haven’t been to med school but I think that experience would really give you perspective, especially when you are doing something like degloving the face from the skull. Pretty wild experience, I bet.

I only took a handful of classes at a CC, but I never had a really had a bad one there. I agree with Bill Gates we don’t pay our good and great teachers enough. But the average and below are very well paid IMO and we do a shamefully poor job at getting rid of the bad ones. I think that is even more true at the college level than the K-12.

I figure I had roughly 50 teachers in K12 of which 4 were great and at twice that were terrible. Meaning that if I learned anything in their class it was because I read the book or sometimes learned from classmates.

In undergrad and grad school, I estimate I had 70 professors of which 4 were great. One of the great ones was Eric Shmidt, of Google fame, who was actually a teaching assistant not a professor. I had at least 15 who were terrible with incomprehensible English, and/or a sleep-inducing monotone and seemingly no interest in if the students learned anything.

The private college I went to (Edgewood) was pretty much 90% great teachers. It really helps getting a science education from a smaller school. In many of the large schools, the Phd’s teach lectures, and have their jobs based on the research money they pull in. The TA’s do all of the real teaching there.

That is probably the biggest endorsement I have for attending a small private liberal arts college, the professors actually give a shit, and are paid enough to enjoy the teaching part.

There were duds of course, but I can only think of 1 professor I didn’t like, and he was over 70.

When I left the biggest university in the state to a smaller school, you know what else happened besides the professors actually teaching the class, they knew my name. They kept office hours, would talk after class and you didn’t have to flash your ID all the time because they knew who you were.

I know liberal arts are supposed to be the devil or something, but those professors were awesome. When I finally chose my major, the head of the department spent an hour with me discussing the pros and cons between a degree in Business, Economics, Finance/Economics and the ups and downs of extended school, again, for Computer Science which I took at the very tail end of it all. I also traveled abroad on scholarship… which some might think is a waste of money but I don’t think being exposed to a different culture is a waste. Too many people live in their bubbles. Nothing bursts that bubble quite so well as being put in uncomfortable situations in a culture you only sort of understand.

I’m so angry about smallpox vaccine because I have an ancestor who died from the disease. It’s totaly unfair. :(

One reason a lot of four year schools have issues with actual teaching is that Ph.D. programs do not teach you to, well, teach. With very few exception, they teach you to be a researcher. When you get a job at a college or university, often there’s a rude awakening. Unless you’re hired on tenure track at a R1 (big research institution) and are really hot stuff, you’re going to be teaching a lot more than you might have expected or wanted. This is especially true for the people who are considered the best prospects, because that evaluation too often ignores everything but scholarly ability and production. What it all amounts to, too often, is people in classrooms who don’t necessarily want to be there, and who don’t have any interest in or knowledge of the profession of teaching, of curriculum development, of standards or assessment.

Many of us over the years have had to learn these things, and for a lot of us it’s opened up a whole new and very welcome world of education at the college level, that is satisfying in ways that far exceed slaving over yet another article or monograph on some obscure bit of our discipline that, face it, no one is going to read or care about. But there are still lots of opportunities for students to wind up in classrooms with very ineffective, disengaged teachers. That happens less at two-year and community colleges, as often the people teaching there are actually in to teaching. Not always, but pretty often.

As an aside, I was watching a Wheel of Fortune with my wife (we DVR them and watch them over dinner often), and it was College Week, where they bring on college students as contestants. One of the puzzles was in their new “crossword” format, which has like four words connected crossword-fashion. The category was something like “college life,” and the words were “quad,” “dorm,” “major,” and “grade” I think In the popular mind, still, “college” is as much or more about that oasis in a young person’s life between high school and work, than it is about actual education. Hence the battle of the amenities discussed above. I mean, having a “quad,” or even dorms, really, has little to do with most education. Yes, there is a great benefit to learning how to interact with others, and in sharing time and space with people who are also trying to learn. But there are many ways to do that that do not entail massive expenditures of money. Time and again, though, people keep shelling out money they don’t have for the image of the fraternity sweater, ivy covered halls, and a marching band.

And there’s value with just the meeting of the minds. How many business are created by young people in college dorms or libraries. I mean there has to be a way to cut costs and maintain the value that isn’t so readily available to be shown a spreadsheet. Also, a world without art, books, pictures… isn’t going to be too fun to live in.

Undoubtedly. But this can happen for a lot less money than is required for the traditional college experience. Sharing apartments, having social gatherings, networking in various ways–none of that requires mega-University expenditures. Art, literature, and the rest of the humanities don’t depend on ivy-covered brick buildings, tweed jackets, and tens of thousands of dollars a year in tuition, either. But we’ve created a culture of the university in this country that tells people the one goes with the other. It’s one reason why the humanities get so little respect in some quarters, too; they’re associated with this culture of liberal excess, rather than being seen as a foundation of socially beneficial thought.

I like the idea of a big community strong apartment building you have to apply to and be innovative, bright and ambitious to get accepted. I like that idea a lot! A young person’s co-ed entrepreneur dorm, if you will. But you don’t have to attend college to apply/get in.

Nice theory but I am not likely to move across the country to join some apartment coop. College puts together a lot of personalities from literally all over the world which engages people in encounters and thoughts they would never get if they stayed home.

I suspect one reason liberal arts receives so little respect is linked to what was seen here: people just make up their own definition to fit the narrative they want in order to dismiss something easily rather than the hard task of tweaking a system. After all, our system is so terrible how many people come here to study and want to stay on Visas?

Why would people stop creating this stuff? There’s a big market for it. People buy this stuff. You don’t need to go to college to learn how to write a novel, paint a painting, etc. It probably helps, but it’s not necessary.

Art is what people do in their spare time to express themselves and relax. If you want professional artists to exist you don’t need to have college courses and tuition and accreditation, you need patrons and commissioned works. It’s worked for thousands of years, not sure why the model should change.

I am not sure where you are getting this idea that people here are dismissing the liberal arts. Hell, I have three degrees in the liberal arts; even though I don’t actively teach those subjects, because the curriculum I work with now is a lot more interdisciplinary, I remain a firm believer in the value of liberal arts as a component, even the foundation, of a truly educated person. I’m pretty sure many if not most of the folks here have a similar respect for the humanities.

That’s not what we’re talking about, though. We’re talking about how the paradigm of the four-year college as a social bubble, insulating young people in the years between high school and work, providing in many cases a sort of luxury resort where students can exist in a not-child, not-adult fairyland while they study, is increasingly unsustainable and unaffordable for many if not most (especially if you consider debt as, well, debt, and not as being affordable). At the high end, schools actually deliver this wonderland for the young, but you pay through the nose for it. In the middle and lower tiers, you get various knock-off versions of the ideal, but at similarly inflated prices, because the paradigm of higher ed still demands the full-on trappings even if they have zero relation to the actual utility of the degree or the experience.

I fully agree college can bring together a huge diversity of people, so that there are a lot of rich encounters. This is, however, not a guarantee. It is entirely possible to build a college community that is one big echo chamber. It’s also possible to build a community where everyone is siloed into their own private Idaho and where interaction is limited. More importantly, a college can do all the good stuff without having students pay $60k a year; the worthwhile stuff is a function of the diversity and intellectual intent of the college, not its weight rooms, snack bars, and manicured lawns.

No man, you need an industry able to sustain said professional artists. Whether that includes formal training can be questioned, of course.

That said, once you have an art industry, you start requiring trained professionals (and not only in the Mass Media, popular art category). Maybe not artists necessarily (although many art industries do) but also people who support artists jobs, like (for example in the field of High Art) curators, museum managers, gallerists, agents… etc. A lot of those need Art History Degrees to be competitive.

I think you need to read the rest of this topic where a number of individuals specifically say they don’t want to support liberal arts, basically want to defund it. Once challenged, they didn’t back down until they realized that that definition of liberal arts is not something they get to just make up in their head. It’s already defined. I knew they had no idea what they were talking about which is why I asked them to pick out the liberal arts from the starting salary list and of course asked if we could get rid of the degrees that actually fell below a few of the liberal arts.

Art is not just canvas and pottery. It’s a part of everything we use. If the purpose of a vehicle was only to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible, we wouldn’t need sleek, or fancy stereo systems or something that doesn’t look like a bread box on wheels.

And I don’t know about the rest of you, but watching some amateur who studied at home turn Ecce Homo into Monkey Jesus was not the highlight of my day. And that’s just Art one of the many examples of liberal arts… the stereotypical one people use when they don’t realize what the rest of liberal arts covers. The other one is English.

Ah, well, I see where you are coming from. People have been denigrating the humanities forever, particularly in the USA for some reason. Weird thing is, virtually all of the technically educated people I’ve worked with over my life–and that’s a fair number of people–who have been any good at all also happen to have had solid humanities backgrounds. I rarely find good engineers, programmers, financial analysts, or whatnot who combine excellence in their craft with complete ignorance and disdain for the arts. Usually, almost always, it’s entirely the other way around.

I will say it’s not unreasonable to suggest that for many people, going to college is a balance between skills and credentials acquisition and broader intellectual growth, and that choosing what one studies should reflect this. That’s a far cry though from categorically rejecting studying humanities.

I really don’t see that on the thread. What I see is the unwillingness of many of us to further subsidize individual obtaining college degree (especially graduate degrees) in the form of student loan forgiveness. After all we pay taxes to support state public universities, Federal grants to university and variety of federally subsidize loans and grants to individual students. These taxes pay for liberal arts professors and students as well as business and engineering
professors and students.

If you needed to get a graduate degree to get a job in Engineering degree and students were wracking up 100K in debt at MIT and then taking $35K a year jobs and demanding that their debts be erased after 10 or 20 years, I’d be bitching about entitled engineering students.

We have to start prioritizing things better in society. We simply can’t afford to let Sam walk away from 50K of debts because he decided at 23 D&D was cool and he wanted to study Medieval History got a master degree in the subject and wrote his thesis on weapons of the period. It may suck for him that he is paying $350/month for 25 years. But maybe that will inspire one of the younger folks in his D&D campaign to choose his major more wisely and/or spend less money.

I think Wombat summarized the quasi-adult problem of college perfectly. Financially the problem is less the 18-year-old undergrad, than the 23-year-old grad student. At that age, they need to take responsibility for their actions.

So you didn’t see this?

Keep in mind, Economics, an liberal arts, earns higher average than some of the non-liberal arts… oh but… i forgot, we were just making up the definition of liberal arts as we went right:

So we’ll just keep morphing the term liberal arts, or just stick quotes around it, until it fits a very narrow made-up definition until we can just write it off entirely, and once we’ve done that pretend like we’re not trying to write those degrees off entirely.

I fully support the idea of more guidance when it comes to taking on a certain amount of debt vs likely earning potential but that’s not what’s been said here.