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.
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.
Studying engineering is nothing like science technology or math, so I basically just forget it’s there at all.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!
Doesn’t sound like a scam to me.