Comment by Krafty Kactus@sopuli.xyz on Boats can't bend steel beams!

Engineering is one of the few non-scam college degrees

And what are the apparently majority scam degrees?

You’ll get a lot of people arguing arts degrees where there aren’t jobs are scams.

Frankly, I think there’s a divide between what we expect of education and what education should be.

There’s kind of a spectrum from required credentials like medical, law, or engineering degrees, to things like stem programs which are not required but open job doors, to arts degrees where there’s not really many direct careers being opened.

Charging an arm and a leg for arts programs is a scam because it’s not opening the same economic opportunities as career based degrees. Having or providing arts degrees is totally fine, they just need to be cheaper.

I think the main benefit of an art degree (for the average person) is learning to research, communicate ideas, and think critically. I have a degree in political science and work in an IT/business role but I absolutely don’t regret my choice of degree.

My Bach degree was in history, and I often wrote off the importance of the “critical thinking” skills we learned in that program.

Boy was I wrong, I know too many people who need nothing more than an unsourced headline to fully convince them of something ludacris.

So the correct spelling is ludicrous, but I prefer to believe that you really did mean to refer to American rapper and actor Ludacris. So carry on.

Arts education (which I mean to encompass not just visual art but also literature, plays, music, etc) is important because without it you get idiots with no media literacy. An arts degree, specifically, may not be important or beneficial for the average person, but classes in which one must think critically about the creator, the creator’s intent, the context in which the art was created, and the reception of the art are how you teach people to be well-rounded individuals who don’t just vomit out the first half-baked thought their curdled brain cobbled together from propaganda.

The E in STEM stands for Engineering

I like to think it stands for enlightenment

Stars, Tarot, Enlightenment, Mythology

Studying engineering is nothing like science technology or math, so I basically just forget it’s there at all.

I certainly remember a lot of math and technology.

College should be about the pursuit of education, plain and simple. For a specific education to be required for licensure makes sense, not for it to be a resume filter for admin assistants.

It’s only a scam if they’re being misleading. I’ve never heard anyone say “get an art degree, you’ll get rich!” It’s not a scam to study art simply because you want to develop your knowledge and talents in a structured way. Should art degrees cost as much as they do? Probably not, but “expensive” and “scam” are two different things.

People should study the arts, schools shouldn’t pretend they yield jobs just because you get a degree and charge the same as a career specific degree

I mean I’d love if my auto mechanic had a degree in ethics and philosophy. The world would be a much nicer place if everyone had a well rounded education imo.

Anything from Trump University?

Did anyone ever actually get a Trump University degree? It only operated for like 5 years. Imagine being the poor schmuck with a framed Trump University degree on his pawn shop office wall.

That would absolutely go on my wall of shame along with several industry certifications I have where the software I’m certified for stopped existing (sometimes within a few months of my certification).

Find any certification that isn’t a scam

I’ve got plenty of those too, mostly Microsoft and Cisco plus PMP, all of which I let expire because I have no use for them anymore.

When I was younger the company I worked for got into installing and maintaining EMR/EHR software at a time when the government was giving out cash to switch over from paper records. So a million little EMR/EHR software companies spun up all with their own certifications and most of which only barely adhered to HL7 to be able to send info to other health systems.

The owner of the company decided to send someone to get certified in a bunch of them that he was betting would pay off. I got paid to sit in a room and get free certifications for a year on and off because I volunteered. He was grooming me to take over a whole healthcare support division he was spinning up. Those companies folded and I ended up supporting Allscripts and NextGen without a team.

The next big idea he had was for supporting Seismic and Geological software. So while my certs for Kingdom IHS are still good, I never used them because all the oil companies had in house people supporting that plus support from S&P.

Plus my certificate from bartending school (for fun, not for money).

Computer Science and Business. I say that with 15 years of experience in both those industries.

Business school is for people who couldn’t hack it in any other degree program.

The limit as a STEM major’s GPA approaches 0.0 is a business degree.

CompSci is a legit subject, mostly as an area of mathematics, but doesn’t have a whole lot to do with building software systems.

The difference between computer science, computer engineering and software engineering is pretty nuanced in a lot of ways. Same core knowledge base. Sprinkle a little extra math and logic abstraction and you get a CS degree. More principles of development and team based work, and get a SE degree. More hardware and systems, and get a CE degree. And all three of them touch a bit on the other two.

More than a few of my team of software engineers and data engineers have degrees in things like chemistry or business. They just took a boot camp to learn to develop.

Yep. Strip it back to the basic physics of it all and you get an electrical engineering degree.

CS used to be the only degree that concentrated on software development.

I work with code both from people who have a degree in CS and people who learned on the job and there’s a huge difference

That may be more true today with more math heavy focuses like computer vision or neural networks. But most everything else is better learned on the job or via YouTube. Unless you plan to specialize like that, it’s almost certainly better to just teach yourself.

I’ve hired dozens of engineers from both university and self-taught backgrounds, and the self-taught ones are by far superior. In fact, it’s not uncommon that I have to break the bad habits taught in university - those courses are painfully outdated and the professors often have self-serving motives that hurt their students.

I agree with Computer Science.

Any degree that will put you in debt without actually helping you to get out of that debt.

I’d personally say marketing/publicity is a scam degree, though that’s because of a heavy bias I have against advertising and marketing in general

Art, philosophy, and English degrees :P

Edit: I was kinda kidding guys, I took philosophy classes, my father is a sculptor, and I dabbled in the fine arts.

That said, I encourage all of you in the traditional disciplines to have a plan for employment after school- teaching or related fields are fine! But have a plan!

Those kinds of degrees can lead to careers in things like politics, business, and education.

I don’t believe anyone managed to learn anything useful about history or economics or literature in high school. Or about anything else. I wish more people were able to seriously study these subjects as adults with the guidance and correspondence of a global community of fellow students and access to centuries of past discussion and debate.

People telling you there’s nothing more to learn (or that the “soft sciences” offer nothing better than your personal intuition) are the scammers.

It’s worse than that, most things you learn in high school end up being either false or so simplified it ends up misleading (think common misconceptions). Biggest offenders tend to be history and hard sciences, although that might be mostly since we don’t even offer things like psychology or sociology outside of a few elective APs (and imagine how prone to misinformation those classes could be if taught by someone following their personal intuition!)

Dunno how it is in other countries with a recent slave past, but Brazil did an excellent job in erasing both native and African ethnicities in my school years. You never learned about specific native tribes like the Aymore, Tupinamba or Goitacaz, it was always “the natives” and all African slaves were just that, “African slaves”, no difference between the ones from current day Mali, Angola or Somalia.

Whenever the books talked about the expeditions into the heartlands, the bandeiras, they rarely or never mentioned local tribes that might’ve helped them, whether in goodwill, in exchange of something like getting rid of old enemies, or by force.

Another thing that school glossed over was one of the many slave revolts, the Malês Revolt. I vaguely recall that the book said that slaves organized by leaving written notes, but it never mentioned that said notes were written in arabic, because those slaves were from Mali and most of them were muslim, thus they could read and write in arabic. It also never taught us that, after the revolt was quashed, nearly every slave from Mali was sent back to Africa and the city of Salvador, the focus point of the revolt, expelled every muslim and removed every mosque it had.

Man, I could go on for a while, just comparing what I remember being taught in school and all the stuff left out that’d make me really damn interested in paying attention to classes.

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