SparWeb, thanks. I was merely building off your argument. I think you made a lot of key points.
Debaser, are you suggesting that someone with an engineering degree (only) can work as a lawyer or accountant in the UK? I don’t know the standards of qualification that well for British lawyers and accounts but I’d venture a guess and say that they can’t. They’d need to return to school to do a law or finance degree. In which case, I have no idea how that is an argument against, or for, my position.
KENAT, I appreciate your efforts to clarify your position and try to understand mine. The key thing is that I’m not trying to say a technical focus is bad as much as I’m trying to defend the inclusion of some humanities. Thus far, the post have all had to do with the former and no one has really touched on the latter, except a few disparaging, throw-away comments attacking the arts. I’d argue that this actually supports my point; a lack of education in the humanities leads to a lack of appreciation for the humanities.
Furthermore, no one has defended how more technical classes would improve the quality of engineers. Aside from anecdotes, there is no real evidence to suggest that the quality of engineers is degrading. Technological development continues at an exponential rate. Planes aren’t falling from the sky, buildings aren’t crumbling to the ground. The “kids these days” argument was said about your generation and the generation before that. I feel the voice that says “this generation’s fresh grads don’t know enough coming out of university” comes from businesses. It allows them to pass the buck for training back to universities, it allows them to undervalue new grads and it allows them to get more H1B visas (and my issue is not with immigrant workers “taking” local jobs, my issue is with the fact that H1B workers become indentured servants). I see nothing, aside from improvable anecdotes, to support the position that the quality of new engineers is fading. Furthermore, I see nothing to support the claim that replacing the humanities with more specialized technical education will solve the problem (which I don’t believe exists).
I do agree that more internships and real-world placements can improve the quality of young engineers but that is normally always done as an extension of the degree or in-between the school year. Co-op terms or internship programs never take away class time, they are in addition to it. Therefore, this argument cannot be used to call for less humanities courses as the two do not overlap.
I'd also add that it's rather odd that many of the same people that are arguing for an increased focus on the specialized technical elements of an engineering degree, at the expense of a few humanities classes, also argue against the usefulness of doing a masters or PhD. So is more specialized technical education a positive or non-beneficial thing?
Your comment about the period where a “well-rounded” education arose affecting the reasoning behind it is an interesting one. However, the increasing depth and number of sub-disciplines is, to me, more of an argument against a more specifically focused technical education than for it. The amount of things someone can do with a “mechanical engineering degree” is so vast that it is impossible to teach, at depth, all those areas. Furthermore, the students themselves don’t know which sub-discipline they will end up in. If we want to sacrifice the universal benefit of education in ethics, critical thinking and cultural understanding that the humanities provide, what specific technical area should take its place? More thermofluids, stress analysis, hydraulics, pneumatics, machine design, FMEA, vibrations, acoustics, coding, calculus? It’s a guessing game where over half of the technical classes you take will not be applicable to your job.
(IRstuff, although slightly off topic, I did want to say how much I agree with you that “sports culture” skews priorities and places emphasis and praise on the wrong areas. I say this although sports have been a major part of my life; I played and now coach soccer at a fairly high level. At times I feel I’m complicit with promoting this sports-mad culture however, as a coach, I have always placed emphasis on using sport to develop positive personality traits (teamwork, dedication, dealing with strife and criticism, etc).
But it’s insane how lost this message can get, particularly among the adults. Some of the most talented kids I’ve worked with have been the most problematic. The problem is that other coaches and technical directors think that producing talented players will reflect positively on them, so they constantly gloat over their star players and shower them with praise and love, as a farmer would over his prize-winning pumpkin. They become the golden child of the club and can do no wrong. When you have adults kissing your feet from a young age, of course you will develop a superiority complex - you begin to accept that you can do no wrong. So when I get these kids that don’t want to work, don’t want to be a teammate and don’t want to listen, they get a rude awakening when I’m on their back. They complain and threaten to move their kid to another club and some technical directors bend at the knee. It’s a shame to see these kids be encouraged to be selfish, conceited, jerks. So I completely agree with you and am happy to see there are others that can see the issues as well.)
![[sadeyes]](/data/assets/smilies/sadeyes.gif "[sadeyes] [sadeyes]")