That one jumped out at me when teading think-right-not-deep/ blog post "observing the response to Rick Scott's suggestion that Florida public universities focus on STEM,

"1 - The professoriate seems inordinately hostile to half the political spectrum. That's fine if you're drawing from private resources, but this is not usually the case.
2 - Those without social capital derived from family connections need to accrue specialized technical skills to compensate for their deficit. Upper class and upper middle class individuals with an entree into white collar jobs by virtue of their class status can afford to focus on becoming more polished. Everyone should not be given the same advice, because not everyone starts from the same life circumstances.
3 - The average American college student doesn't learn much, because they aren't that bright or intellectually oriented. They don't do their reading until the last second, and have only marginal passion for the books which they purchase. Your mind can't be broadened if you barely use it.
4 - Those liberal arts graduates who are very bright are too often enamored of the latest intellectual fashion, and are keener upon signalling their ideological purity and intellectual superiority than actually understanding anything."



Edited: 10/26/2011 at 08:44 AM by WG

That blog is almost as worthless as focusing too much on STEM.

Any engineering accreditation board will hold ethics and knowledge of current affairs/contribution to society as one of their outcomes in an engineering curriculum.
Where do you think broader understanding comes from?

I know this because I have been part of the accreditation process.

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Learn something.  Anything.  Please.

"Those without social capital derived from family connections need to accrue specialized technical skills to compensate for their deficit. Upper class and upper middle class individuals with an entree into white collar jobs by virtue of their class status can afford to focus on becoming more polished. "

This one rigs true to me. If you want a pure intellectual career, it's way easier to get there and sustain it if you have support resources.

If you're digging for a class status upgrade, STEM is a much safer bet.

STEM cells.



(sorry! couldn't help myself! )

"This one rigs true to me. If you want a pure intellectual career, it's way easier to get there and sustain it if you have support resources."

Probably true of me...of course it helps that I was born a gadget nerd and not a small lawyer. On the other hand I could have enjoyed
being a physics professor, but as you say there was no example of that for me. I kept hearing "do you want a job or not?". Then it ended up I got a Ph.D. anyway.

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Learn something.  Anything.  Please.