October 27, 2015
All non-engineering students: your majors are kind of pointless. I mean, psychology is interesting and everything, but you could just like, learn that from a book. Honestly, all you have to do is read and then you get a college degree. And those business kids, all they do is party. Like, I could take ECON102 drunk if I wanted to.
Before you get offended, I’m not being serious. But I am pulling the corner on an issue that’s present on this campus. To many, “north of Green” is this untouched, intangible territory crawling with stress and caffeine-fueled engineers. There’s a sense of division between the two blocks of campus: there are the engineering kids up north and the Liberal Arts kids down south, and we’re on different tiers. Speaking as a Computer Science engineer, I understand the paradigm that many of my classmates subscribe to. We engineers are high-achieving and pre-professional, while everyone else is just throwing money at useless degrees.
In addition to that, think about what activities you’re engaged in. Maybe you run 5k’s for cancer, maybe you’ve gone to a Panic! at the Disco concert, maybe you’ve watched a movie about the Palestinian refugee crisis. Think about the content of those things – they’re centered around people or the arts or both. You won’t learn any of that in an engineering class. The more we discourage people from the humanities, the more we lose these other things that help define us. The more we discourage people from the humanities, the less our future generations are going to have exposure to this diversity. The more we discourage people people from the humanities, the more we forget what being human means.
People are continuing to sideline English, History, and the Arts in favor of everything that is currently marketable, hirable, and attractive. I mean, just take a look at the number of people rushing to squeeze into those programming courses on campus. CS125 and CS225 are consistently overloaded, and it’s because our student body and faculty is collectively hopping on the tech train these days.
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This might be because people have stopped seeing the value in a well-rounded education, in favor of salary and security. But statistics show that the job prospects for these same kids aren’t actually that bad. According to a Georgetown study conducted on graduate unemployment rates by major, there’s only a 1-2% difference in favor of engineers over social science and other humanities majors. https://cew.
As someone who’s pretty involved in the language department at this school as well as the Computer Science department, I’ve seen both sides of the coin and know we’re headed down a bad road. Too often, I hear from other engineers about how useless those communication and journalism degrees are. There’s this thriving sense of superiority that pulses throughout our engineering department here at UIUC, and it’s hinged on high salaries and large tech companies that are “influencing the way we live today.” And yeah, that might have a grain of truth. But engineering isn’t the holy grail of academic involvement
And this is why a push back is necessary; we should recognize other majors as still relevant. The education is different, that’s for certain, but that doesn’t make it inferior. Engineering is only a way to supplement our lives, as with anything else, but not define it.
