China To Cancel College Majors That Don't Pay 463
theodp writes "The WSJ reports that China's Ministry of Education plans to phase out majors producing unemployable graduates. The government will soon start evaluating college majors by their employment rates, downsizing or cutting those studies in which more than 60% of graduates fail for two consecutive years to find work. What if the U.S. government were to adopt China's approach? According to the most recent U.S. census data, among the first majors to go: psychology, U.S. history and military technologies. Lest you computer programmers get too smug, consider this."
Economics, or stability? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd be interested to know how much of this is purely about resource allocation and how much of it is about ensuring that absolutely as many people as possible are doing something practical, chasing the brass ring, and generally staying out of idle theorizing and similar such trouble...
move IT / MIS to tech school / apprenticeship. CS (Score:4, Interesting)
CS should be for the higher level theory based stuff.
But the other stuff like tech work, programing, web, it security, IT management needs to have less theory and more hands on work. As well class room with more of tech school based course load.
Difference (Score:4, Interesting)
Isn't there a fundamental difference in that China pays outright for the student to go to college, whereas the U.S. provides loans which the student repays with interest for years afterward? So in the U.S. there's anti-incentive to cut people off from going to college; it's yet another way to skim off the value of the working people's lifelong labor. China pays for the student, whereas the U.S. gets paid by the student.
Re:Economics, or stability? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it might be a combination of both. People who are busy working seldom have time for thinking, and majors that focus on employable work rarely lift the mind to contemplation of things like human rights or freedom.
Most of the great thinkers in human history have been educated (self or through establishments) in the "liberal arts" (literally, the freeing arts, specifically geometry, astronomy, music, arithmetic, grammar, logic, and rhetoric). Nowadays, liberal arts has an extremely poor reputation, because those who seek it seldom do so out of interest in the higher things, but it used to be that people who learned them did so because they were interested in advancing the state of human knowledge, and in lifting humanity as a whole towards higher and better things. Also, because today's culture focuses so highly on productivity, and people who study those areas are rarely great producers of goods.
What they do produce are things like the concept of human rights, new (and sometimes better) political and economic systems, great works of literature, and new areas of mathematics. Sure, you can use some of those things to produce money, but generally the more important thing is the evolution of human knowledge. It is quite unfortunate that society does not generally value that, because our culture would be tremendously impoverished did they not exist. Don Quixote wasn't a work that paid a lot of money: but it did greatly enhance human culture.
Oh yeah, and those people also tend to produce revolutions in human society (such as Marxism, somewhat ironically). It is pretty obvious that governments which are interested primarily in preserving the status quo and not in the good of it's citizens wouldn't encourage such leisurely pursuits.
Re:Why is education socialized anyway? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because otherwise education is only available to rich people. It means you filter people to get a high education based on the money their parent have instead of the natural ability of the kid. It is first extremely unfair (but you would classify that as a socialist problem) but it also mean that you prevent very smart people to get a reasonnable education and contribute positively to the society. Instead they are going to work for walmart.
Re:Is it that bad? (Score:4, Interesting)
I both agree and disagree with that. The survival of a species during a sudden change is enhanced by the diversity of individuals, viz. Von Neumann's theory that random moves are the best strategy in any sufficiently complicated game. So I am for Liberty and against government manipulations, whether to provide a basic standard of living or to subsidize education.
Re:Is it that bad? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is CHINA we're talking about here. The United States would never "cancel" degrees or otherwise dictate to colleges/Universities, private or otherwise, what classes or degree plans they can and can't offer. HOWEVER, it could happen that government funded student loan programs could be optimized to only go toward degree plans that have a reasonable chance of resulting in a decent job later. This helps to insure that the loan gets repaid. You can still study nuclear underwater basketweaving if you so desire, but you'll get to spend your own (or more likely your parents') money on it instead.
-Restil
Re:Is it that bad? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah, another Philistine. Way back when, long ago before your simple mind has read, there were physicists who thought about amazing things yet those things had no relevance to the then modern life. They thought about atoms and particles and forces and such. They built grand theories, mathematics that would cause a grown man to cry, but not you since you haven't a prayer of understanding it. It happened, in the long distance future that their theories and mathematics created the foundation of many modern industries.
But you argue, mathematics and science were bound to give us untold riches, surely we wouldn't axe those. However, it turned out that these crazy scientists built their new theories on older mathematics and older understanding. How could this be? Well, those precursors surely had no idea where it would all lead.
Further analysis reveals even these old "natural scientists" based their theories on even older philosophers. They deemed of "atoms" composing everything material. Forces moved the particles. The heavens controlled the forces.
Back in those ancient times, geometry was esteemed and developed to align human thought with the heavens and how they influenced life on this earth. They conceived of the universe as a giant machine. This notion seemed pervasive, it never seemed to go away, no matter how many influential people declared it void of any practical use.
The precursors of the atoms and particles and forces and such conceived of machines which moved in lock step of gears and wheels and such. The common folk (you) laughed and exclaimed it was all worthless and would come to nothing.
But lo, machines were built, textiles made, the machines became reified. Astounded, compatriots of the atoms and particles and forces people conceived of mathematical theories to describe precisely what the ideal machines could actually do.
Inconceivably, some wild-eyed engineers thought to build approximations to these machines. The approximations were not robust, they broke down a lot, needed lots of spare parts.
Then lightning struck! The engineers read what the scientists were saying about atoms and particles and forces and such. The transistor was born.
The rest is history. Think of how educated you'd be if you understood this.
Re:Not really (Score:1, Interesting)
Stupid old people advocating policies that not only don't favor them as a class but might even hurt them as a class. Whatever can they be thinking of?
Maybe Stewart, Colbert, and (now with extra class!) Jimmy Fallon can explain it all to us poor senile fools, your grandparents.
Re:Is it that bad? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that in practice it doesn't work.
During the dotcom bust I spent three years unemployed, it sucked graduating from college on an economic downturn. Sure, I had the odd job fed my way by the temp agencies I'd registered with but it was sporadic at best, a month here, six weeks there, followed by months of nothing; I ended up working 6 months out of every twelve, just enough to continue qualifying for Unemployment Benefits. No matter how many resumes, interviews, call backs, meetings, and hitting the job boards I did I got no nibbles. It was demoralizing as hell trying to find full time work.
Oddly though it was also the best part of my life so far.
I got up every morning and would check the job sites, call the temp agencies to let them know I was still available, comb through the newspaper, do my call backs, check my e-mail, set up interviews and then send out the next batch of resumes. Most days I was done "work" by 11:00 AM. Once I had done what I could to find a job I had the entire rest of the day to myself and damn, was that ever freeing. Knowing the unemployment cheque was still coming meant I didn't need to worry about the roof over my head or the food in my stomach, I actually got to live. One of my favourite things to do on a nice day was to sit under a shaded tree at the park on a weekday afternoon curled up with a good book, I'd watch all the worker drones quietly grumbling about how much they hated their jobs and would just love to take the afternoon off and curl up with a good book under a tree.
I got to catch up on my reading, watch movies and interesting documentaries, play games, try new recipes in a cook book, look up things online solely for the pleasure of attaining knowledge, etc... Hell, I even found time to use the workout equipment I'd bought when I was previously employed and was on my way to getting a six pack. I was technically "poor" but I was amazed at just how much living a person can do with a limited budget and loads of free time. With all that freedom, and keeping in mind my limited budget, I found I could do what I wanted when I wanted and not have to worry about my basic existence.
Once a person's basic needs are taken care of anyone with even the tiniest hint of imagination will be able to figure out what to do with their day and be fully and completely fulfilled with it. Up to the point of my unemployment I had never had as much satisfaction or enjoyment in my life as I did when I wasn't working. Now, I make enough money to be considered on the low end of the middle class and have all kinds of cool toys and tonnes of spending money but I'm not happy. I've tasted real freedom and now so much of my day is filled with doing things I don't want to do but need to in order to survive. If I knew I could collect a cheque that would keep my stomach full and a roof over my head and there were no strings attached, I'd quit my job right now and spend the rest of my life doing what I want to do when I want to do it.
And so would a lot of other people.
Until the day someone invents Star Trek replicators, giving people the bare necessities with incentives to work doesn't work. Someone will have to work to provide the tax dollars we're going to divert to those who are on the basic allowance, eventually we would have a very small number of the population supporting the majority. The people who are working are going to get angry at being the only ones working while every one else stays at home and lives a happy fulfilling life.
Re:Is it that bad? (Score:5, Interesting)
You're just not being imaginative enough.
How do you provide housing to everyone? You have the government offer a zero interest, zero payments loan up to $150,000 toward the purchase of a home to every adult. The principal is payable in full the day you stop living in the house. The government can fund the program by itself borrowing the money, which it can do at extremely low interest rates, so that the cost to the government will only be e.g. $1500/year. Then pay that interest using property tax with a $150,000 personal deduction, so only homes costing more than the loan amount will have any property tax, and so that way the price of homes won't just go up by the subsidy amount because people won't be willing to pay that much extra property tax.
Think about that: We could have a relatively small tax that primarily falls on the rich (or at least, people with large houses) and provide the option of free housing to everyone. Which is the most expensive part of a basic income.
In addition to that, the idea that everyone is going to just quit their job is ridiculous. What will happen is that lots of people will quit and to get them back to work, the employers will have to pay higher wages and provide better working conditions. It will also provide a large incentive to automation, because of the higher labor costs. I don't see either of those as a bad thing.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)