-5 points

The Liberal Arts being a joke degree holds up.

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31 points

Only if the only point of college is to get a job.

There’s more to life than work and a good liberal arts degree exposed you to a lot of it.

… It’s not worth 200k of debt but it’s great to learn.

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-3 points

Only if the only point of college is to get a job.

When it comes with that 200K of debt the ONLY point is to get a job. Employers want employees with degrees because degrees come with debt and people who are in debt are less likely to quit a shitty job.

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1 point

Having a degree that might not necessarily be relevant to the job does suggest to an employer that you have the ability to complete tasks as assigned to a satisfactory degree and generally indicates some amount of communication, problem solving and other soft skills.

Also technical colleges and community colleges exist. You can spend a lot less than 200k getting a degree

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23 points

In my mind it’s not so much a joke degree inasmuch as it really relies on the student to have their own plan for employment and the usefulness of the degree.

Some people have connections, ideas, outside the box thinking, or independent wealth.

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1 point

Sounds about right coming from… vlad of 1976

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60 points
*

I’d be really interested to see the specifics of how that data is collected, but also fucking duh recent college grads are underemployed. Also, having that degree sets people up for career advancement as they gain experience and that educational background becomes even more of a prerequisite for the jobs they’re moving into

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26 points

If you are employed in a junior job within the field you have been trained in, you are not underemployed.

What this graph shows however, is that there are a ton of degrees that seem to teach hardly any transferable skills. A sociologist without proper statistical training has almost zero value in the business world. And that’s a problem.

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17 points
*

What this graph shows however, is that there are a ton of degrees that seem to teach hardly any transferable skills

This graph absolutely does not show this lol…how could you possibly derive that from this graph

And sociologists are absolutely trained in statistics

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-4 points

How does the graph not show that? The chart clearly shows there are a lot of degrees whose holders have “insufficient jobs for their training.”

I.e., they were unable to find jobs that utilized the skills they got with their degree. The skills are not sufficiently transferable to jobs.

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4 points

That’s why I explicitly qualified my statement, because not all sociologists are in fact trained in statistics. Many just had the statistics 101 class and went into the more philosophical part of the trade.

The real question is: what else does this graph show in your interpretation?

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3 points

Maybe the business world is the problem.

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1 point

Or maybe we just don’t need hundreds of thousands of people trained in liberal arts.

I’m not trying to defend businesses here, but there’s only so many places for people who are trained in over-analyzing paint and clay.

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10 points

Any decent sociology program will teach a hefty amount of statistics. That’s the basis of research.

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5 points

Sometimes that’s the difference between a BA and BS

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2 points

I find that a bit misleading. Me and my gf both work only 4 days a week (aka not full-time). I’d say it barely makes a difference in our field when we’re tired on Fridays rotting at work or home.

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2 points

Full time is often defined as 32 hours per week.

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2 points

Oh I see… In the two countries I worked in it was 40, ok then.

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3 points

Colloquially it is 40 hours per week but for other purposes its somewhere between 30 and 40. Lot of places the cut off for benefits is 36 hours.

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13 points

This smells a lot like . . . not bullshit as much as . . . bullfart?

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-3 points

The Art History majors? Yeah I know what you mean.

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16 points

I double majored in History of Art and Philosophy for my undergrad.

Surprisingly philosophy led on quite neatly to a career in software development. Especially analytic philosophy is all about breaking down complex problems into premises and a conclusion. Sometimes it’s algorithmic in the sense that premise 4 might refer you back to premise 2.

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6 points

That’s super interesting to me, any references for a software person who wants to find some overlap with philosophy? I know very little about the subject.

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6 points

I suppose studying basic formal logic would be a good place to start because that is the place where there is the most overlap. In philosophy an argument can be ‘valid’ by conforming to certain conditions such as

P1: All men are mortal
P2: Socrates is a man
C: Socrates is mortal

This is an example of deductive reasoning where the form or structure of the argument guarantees the conclusion to be true. Process is called ‘deductive’ reasoning where a conclusion is drawn from the truth of the premises. The ancient Greeks called this a syllogism.

Computer programs are similar in the sense that they are using formal logic with tokens that represent variables to the compiler. Given these arguments exist; we can perform these operations and get a specific result.

As an aside the counterpart to deductive reasoning is inductive reasoning. That’s where the premises may be true but the conclusion might not necessarily follow from them. People throw around the word ‘fallacy’ quite often online but essentially every fallacy is just an example of inductive reasoning where the premises do not guarantee the conclusion. Philosophers study different types of formal fallacies like ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’ (because this happens, something else ought to happen) since there are different ways where combinations of premises can lead to an untrustworthy conclusion.

Intriguingly all science is speculative and uses inductive reasoning where we infer from what data we gain in experiments to a conclusion of what might be happening, however there is no logical guarantee that experiment results will be true. There’s even a thesis called pessimistic meta induction which states that: Given all scientific theories we held in the past have been proven false (or refined to a slightly different conclusion), we can safely assume that every scientific theory we currently hold is ‘false’ in some sense.

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4 points

This is a good introduction to formal logic. It was required reading in my undergrad - https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Paul-Tomassi-Logic.pdf

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