The market speaks.
Saw this evil piece today from some engineering nerd who believes they're at the peak of critical thought.
For too long, these colleges have clung to the notion of being uniquely “noble”, insulated from market pressures and buffered by government funding and external endowments.
A particularly stubborn myth is that liberal arts education has a monopoly on cultivating critical thinking. This belief not only discounts the intellectual rigour demanded in Stem fields but also perpetuates an outdated hierarchy of disciplines. Critical thinking is not the sole attribute of literature and philosophy department
Rather than worry about funding cuts or condemning their threat to academic purity, liberal arts institutions should embrace a market-oriented mindset.
Fears about “dumbing down” degrees or commodifying education can be addressed through market accountability and employer feedback.
Now I'm no longer in school, it's been years. And I know there are a range of "sympathies" toward higher education (ideological state apparatuses and all that jazz), and I could also imagine good points being made about the need for better engineering in the United States and the west.
But I still hated this article telling schools to bow down to the free market, shut down their English departments, and recognize the engineers at Palantir as the pinnacle of human thought.
Critical thinking absolutely should be embedded into STEM education (and research), but it too often just isn't. The idea that there's a hard distinction (or rivalry) between humanities thinking and STEM thinking is extremely pernicious in general, but it comes from the STEM side more than the humanities side. I rarely see humanities people saying that science and math have no value at all, but the reverse is very common.
In my experience, engineering is mostly preoccupied with teaching centuries of knowledge to students, who are then supposed to be able to reproduce it. I don't think that's wrong either. All that stuff that past engineers and scientists figured out remains true and usefull. Most engineers will never have to do something that hasn't been done before. But reproducing the past doesn't really involve much critical thinking at all. Only once people get to the tippity top of their field, they'll have to start figuring things out for themselves. The smugness of STEM is 100% based on the pure economic value.
some of it is hard numbers over vibes. the math for bridge building is far more rigorous and reliable than psychology or literary analysis... but that's how you get creationist engineers though, they can't handle not having a concrete answer and wind up believing any old bullshit outside their training.