One of the most disappointing aspects of American College life is how incurious everybody seemed to be. I had grown up with Reddit & Twitter and easily, many times over, had more interesting conversations, read more nuanced takes, and learned more about the world than I did in any of my college classes.
Granted, I was a STEM major with very few humanities classes. But going to parties and clubs, nobody seemed to be curious about anything in the world. It seemed more a goal to "be a writer" than to "write," for instance.
Most of the world is like this, for sure. But I spent some $30k a year to attend. What was that money for? What did I get out of it?
I will say that in the STEM degrees people were far more curious than in the humanities. Kind of odd given the never-ending cries of "we need engineers to learn more ethics!" from journalists who themselves never bother to learn to code.
> One of the most disappointing aspects of American College life is how incurious everybody seemed to be.
This reflects the world as a whole. Most people aren't curious about things that don't directly affect them, so I'm not surprised to see it reflected in the college population.
Many people in the US treat college as a vocational school, probably in large part because the US pushed hard to increase college attendance. So 75 years ago, someone would graduate high school and apprentice at a job and work their way up, today, they likely start at colloege then jump into the labor force, but they pick their major based on the job they want (just like apperenticing in a field.)
Personnaly, I treated college as an instructor led encyclopedia, and just took classes I wanted to learn about. I have never earned a penny with the degrees I received, but I never intended to. Most of my college carreer was spend in tandem with working a full time job. I've only stopped college for a while because my job is sucking up too much of my time. Once I retire, I'll go back to college to get a PhD in math (probabilities, specifically) as background for what I want to study in philosophy (bayesian epistomology)
> One of the most disappointing aspects of American College life is how incurious everybody seemed to be.
Agreed here.
> I will say that in the STEM degrees people were far more curious than in the humanities.
Don't think it's quite so simple to draw the line here. Or, at least, my anecdata doesn't support this. As someone who teaches undergraduate students in STEM at a public ivy, who mostly has friends in comparable positions in the humanities (poetry, creative writing, that kinda thing), when we chat about the goings-on in our respective classes we all come to the same conclusion regardless of academic background: students are just incurious in general. Not all, but most. 80%-90% maybe. They spend a lot of effort optimizing exactly to the requirements of every assignment, treating the work as transactional – I check the boxes, you award the points. This forces teachers to adapt their teaching style to a different set of expectations.
Teaching any material past purely practical knowledge for the exam is usually met with blank stares. While this could certainly say more about my rhetorical abilities as lecturer than it does about "kids these days", it's pretty clear to see that college in the US has become nothing more than a glorified credentialing institution. I wonder if this doesn't have something to do with the way public schools are run, mostly teaching to the test and thus preparing students how to retain only the information necessary for success by that metric.
If our cultural expectation of college is that it provides job training and nothing else, then students' attitudes (consciously or not) are going to reflect that.
Wow, as someone who went to a much more humble institution than an ivy school, that sounds terrible. We did have some kids like that in my classes, but our groups were small and somehow more than half of us truly wanted to engage with the subjects and I look back very fondly in the “luxury” to sit around debating the ins and outs of Plato’s allegory of the cave and how the Matrix (a recent movie at the time) seemed to portray the same theme and story.
> I will say that in the STEM degrees people were far more curious than in the humanities.
Maybe?
I found Philosophy people to be curious, maybe not as curious as I was, but more curious than others I've met. And I'm sure other humanities degrees would say the same. I think curiosity probably comes with passion.
Now I'm dealing with finding programmers I meet to not be curious. Of course there are some very curious programmers, but lately I've been asking people _why_ they don't find programming itself interesting. I mean something more fundamental than "web programming is interesting." Not that it's not interesting (lots of interesting rfcs) but using a framework and doing the request/response isn't.
I think above is probably due to I am passionate about programming/comp sci, and others probably are passionate about other things.
I have a humanities type degree and graduate degree, and I found you don't get the real interesting people and conversations until grad school. Then it's awesome. Is my degree "useful"....eh, maybe. But was my time in grad school enormously influential on me and how I view the world, and can I see the difference it has made on me when I have conversations with people who didn't take the same route? Yes.
> I will say that in the STEM degrees people were far more curious than in the humanities.
In my experience, this was not really the case. A lot of STEM people I met were very interested in some topics, but were either a) only superficially interested in things like ethics; b) only interested in a very specific view of ethics (some form of ultra techno-utilitarianism/utopianism for instance); or, c) immediately dismissive of whole conversations or areas of research without actually bothering to engage in any of the discussions. The more galling thing is they often thought that they could simply comment on those topics without any of the research. So just as there are journalists calling for people to learn ethics without learning to code, there are people who work on code who comment on art, or history, or philosophy, with little to no understanding of the long debates and research in those fields. It really goes both ways.
TBH, I don't think it's really about the whole STEM v. Humanities thing that people make it all about. It's really about the cost of higher education across the board.
> I will say that in the STEM degrees people were far more curious than in the humanities.
That's surprising. I found that the humanities students (sans Communications) were far more intellectually curious. My friends in Philosophy, Classics, Economics^1, and Art were particularly great. Communications not so much.
Out of curiosity, did you attend a public "Tech"/"Mines and Ags" style university? At least in my state, that university was famous for churning out stereotypical engineer types and everything I heard from high school friends who attended sounded a lot like your assessment -- the STEM folks were incurious at best and huamanities was worse (because who would go to a Tech for a huamanities degree?)
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^1: At the college where I did my undergraduate, the Economics degree was kind of non-standard and really was more of a humanities degree.
> One of the most disappointing aspects of American College life is how incurious everybody seemed to be.
I would love the opportunity to engage my curiosities, sadly school is expensive as shit and the only way it seems possible is to be wealth now or take a vow of poverty.
> I will say that in the STEM degrees people were far more curious than in the humanities.
I suspect this is a bias on your part. It's certainly been my experience that people into the humanities are curious about different things than STEM types; some people have no inclination towards building things, or learning about quantum mechanics, or solving problems in complex analysis. But they might be able to talk your ear off about Edith Wharton or Nazi themes to be found in Heidegger's Being and Time.
At least where I went to school people studying the humanities were not appreciably less curious or more "here because I have to be" than engineers.
One of the most disappointing aspects of American College life is how incurious everybody seemed to be. I had grown up with Reddit & Twitter and easily, many times over, had more interesting conversations, read more nuanced takes, and learned more about the world than I did in any of my college classes.
Granted, I was a STEM major with very few humanities classes. But going to parties and clubs, nobody seemed to be curious about anything in the world. It seemed more a goal to "be a writer" than to "write," for instance.
Most of the world is like this, for sure. But I spent some $30k a year to attend. What was that money for? What did I get out of it?
I will say that in the STEM degrees people were far more curious than in the humanities. Kind of odd given the never-ending cries of "we need engineers to learn more ethics!" from journalists who themselves never bother to learn to code.