Insightful and concrete in a way I rarely see on this subject; strong upvote.
The question I’m left with is “Who actually wants this?”. Do schools think they need every subject under the sun for legitimacy? Schools clearly think this is a selling point based on how prominently student to faculty ratios and number of degree programs is advertized. Do students just so consistently have no idea what they want to do or what they should pay for it (oh you can just change majors it’ll be fine [not mentioned: at the cost of addtional years of schooling you’ll have to pay for]), and are equiped with a support system that just lets them sleepwalk into crushing debt?
When I think of my own college experience, it was awesome the wide variety of classes I was able to take and not slow down my graduation or impede my CS major.
Here are some of my favorites : 4 semesters of performance art, 3D sculpture, linguistics, constructed languages, scuba diving, skiing, tree-climbing, lesbian fiction, singing tutoring, computer graphics (wrote own raytracer), religion in the Middle Ages, history of film, judo, modern dance, Alexander Technique…
I am sure there were more, I was ravenous through the course catalog. I graduated in 2013 fwiw.
So, at least for me, it gave me a huge base of life experience and was extremely enjoyable to study so many subjects. And ended up with a job in tech that made the college cost a non-issue. I’d do it again and have already done it again—I spent two semesters doing more art classes at a local college after the startup I was working on was acquired
Professors likely prefer to teach smaller classes over teaching larger classes. Professors do like it when they are able to teach their pet subjects. If every professor teaches their pet subjects that likely results in every subject under the sun being taught.
A possibility for ‘who wants this’ is the faculty themselves, right? There’s been a steady increase in the number of people who actually have PhDs which might not be rising concomitantly with employment opportunities. More PhDs might lobby for universities to provide a greater diversity of courses, necessitating the creation of more employment opportunities for those PhDs. Since universities are subsidized and demand isn’t a great limiting factor on their behavior, lobbying by PhDs might be effective. (It’s possible to think of some reasons for this: administrators making decisions might want more PhDs either out of class solidarity—if they have PhDs themselves or think of themselves as academics in some sense—or out of a desire for power—since more PhDs employed at the college might add to its prestige, or give you more people to ‘rule’ over in a certain sense. Administrators are probably more directly invested in growing the raw number of administrators, of course, but growing the number of faculty might be an effective way of justifying administrative growth.)
Insightful and concrete in a way I rarely see on this subject; strong upvote.
The question I’m left with is “Who actually wants this?”. Do schools think they need every subject under the sun for legitimacy? Schools clearly think this is a selling point based on how prominently student to faculty ratios and number of degree programs is advertized. Do students just so consistently have no idea what they want to do or what they should pay for it (oh you can just change majors it’ll be fine [not mentioned: at the cost of addtional years of schooling you’ll have to pay for]), and are equiped with a support system that just lets them sleepwalk into crushing debt?
When I think of my own college experience, it was awesome the wide variety of classes I was able to take and not slow down my graduation or impede my CS major. Here are some of my favorites : 4 semesters of performance art, 3D sculpture, linguistics, constructed languages, scuba diving, skiing, tree-climbing, lesbian fiction, singing tutoring, computer graphics (wrote own raytracer), religion in the Middle Ages, history of film, judo, modern dance, Alexander Technique… I am sure there were more, I was ravenous through the course catalog. I graduated in 2013 fwiw. So, at least for me, it gave me a huge base of life experience and was extremely enjoyable to study so many subjects. And ended up with a job in tech that made the college cost a non-issue. I’d do it again and have already done it again—I spent two semesters doing more art classes at a local college after the startup I was working on was acquired
Professors likely prefer to teach smaller classes over teaching larger classes. Professors do like it when they are able to teach their pet subjects. If every professor teaches their pet subjects that likely results in every subject under the sun being taught.
A possibility for ‘who wants this’ is the faculty themselves, right? There’s been a steady increase in the number of people who actually have PhDs which might not be rising concomitantly with employment opportunities. More PhDs might lobby for universities to provide a greater diversity of courses, necessitating the creation of more employment opportunities for those PhDs. Since universities are subsidized and demand isn’t a great limiting factor on their behavior, lobbying by PhDs might be effective. (It’s possible to think of some reasons for this: administrators making decisions might want more PhDs either out of class solidarity—if they have PhDs themselves or think of themselves as academics in some sense—or out of a desire for power—since more PhDs employed at the college might add to its prestige, or give you more people to ‘rule’ over in a certain sense. Administrators are probably more directly invested in growing the raw number of administrators, of course, but growing the number of faculty might be an effective way of justifying administrative growth.)