[ExI] Greener Urban Environment

[Adrian Tymes]

On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 2:14 PM, William Flynn Wallace
<foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
> The point of the humanities is not to make money but to preserve and pass
> along our cultural heritage.  Thus the graduates are prepared to teach their
> subjects and no more.  They have not pretended otherwise.  If you find an
> English major driving a cab, or managing a McDonald's, then probably the
> colleges are graduating too many English majors, and the graduate should
> have looked at the job market and maybe picked up a teaching certificate
> along the way.

Indeed, but this is a common enough mistake so as to be presumed.

(There is a separate debate about whether "fill-in-the-human-type
studies" majors are even preserving actual heritage, as opposed to
making up heritage to justify themselves.  But that is a separate
debate, full of No True Scotsman and other fallacies on both sides.
In any case, the point stands: regardless of the intent, most
humanities majors appear to be ill prepared for what happens after
college in practice.)

> Putting a price of the contribution of the humanities is looking at it the
> wrong way.

The price, rather, is on the preparation of someone to contribute to
the humanities.  An argument could be made that engineering tuition
should be higher, and humanities lower, because engineering graduates
can pay more while humanities should be subsidized - but that is not
the current situation in most places.  In practice, relative to their
post-college income, humanities students are charged more than
engineering students are (the actual charge is the same, but "tuition
/ income" is greater for humanities than for engineering).