Statistics indicate Millennial underemployment crisis is predominantly concentraded among liberal ar

In other news: water is wet.

Fear of a College-Educated Barista

"concentraded among liberal ar"

Liberal Arkansas?

I thought it was something about liberal pirates -- arrrr!

I type over 100 words per minute.

I just make a lot of typos.

But I thought liberals were a feared of them ar-47 assault riffles.

He must have died while typing it.

This just in: You should major in fields where there is actual market demand for those skills.

This is why I do not want to see an across the board move to free college education. I would like to see STEM and a few other high demand majors get free college tuition but if you want to major in useless stuff where graduates end up serving coffee then that should not be subsidized or encouraged.

So would you make high school students pay for classes such as English, Art, or History?

After all, if it's not Math or Science, why bother using tax dollars so they can take such classes?

I prefer that we were like most European education systems that get the college prep classes out the way in high school so you're just able to jump right into your major and not waste time on other nonsense.

Certainly would be practical. But there's also something to be said for being exposed to fields of study outside of one's major. Especially with STEM majors, it's a good idea to expose them to communication studies and creative thinking, which STEM courses might not provide.

High School is pretty good as it is though I would extend the day so that it was 7am to 5pm or something. That would bring classroom time closer to the Asian countries who led on test scores.

@Kilometres O'Brien :yeah, but two years' worth of classes?

Back when I was considering doing a year overseas, I checked out the catalogue for Oxford. Their curriculum was three years and "general education" was in reference to the basic classes within the major, not taking three science courses when your major is in journalism.

Expanding the mind is well and good, but you know and I know that no one is going to college for that purpose any longer.

You're kidding, right?

God, no. The last thing we need is to teach to the fucking test.

There is no one size fits all solution. But if you look at the best high schools in the country, I bet very few are following the Asian model. There are some states with test scores in the same top tier as Scandinavia, Japan, and North Korea. They aren't making students go from 7am to 5pm.

Looking at the class requirements for the engineering degree I'm working on and 40 out of 120 credit hours must be spent on humanities, fine arts, social/behavioral sciences,and foreign languages, with a forced 3 credit hour "Diversity" class. I don't mind the college offering courses in these fields, and I'd probably take a few of them just to satisfy my intellectual curiosity, but to have that much filler crammed down your throat for what is essentially just a glorified trades degree just seems like it's more of a waste of time than anything else.

What are you options for the foreign language?

Arabic, Latin, Greek,French, German, Italian, Russian, Chinese and Japanese.

I did not mention teaching tp the test pr any other teaching method. I spoke about making school days longer.

Is this a bit?

I'd rule out Arabic. It's one of the hardest for an English speaker to learn and doesn't operate remotely like an Indo-European language.

They need to offer something easy like Norwegian, Dutch, or Swedish. You already almost speak those.

He shouldn't rule it out if he wants the challenge.

I know enough German and Japanese that if I took either class I'm sure I could do well. I tried at Arabic once but just couldn't get it down.

2 years of General Ed requirements is nothing out of a total of 6-8 years of higher education required to get a set of degrees that actually means something in the STEM fields.

Arguably, college undergrad has become the new high school.

Italian is probably the easiest on that list if you decide not to go with German or Japanese.

Plus, you'd have the full command of the Axis languages.

The only advantage with Arabic is that you don't have to learn capital letters because the Jews stole them all.

Languages by difficulty, according to the Foreign Service Institute.

Category I: 23-24 weeks (575-600 hours)

Languages closely related to English​

French
Italian

Category II: 30 weeks (750 hours)Languages similar to English
German

Category IV: 44 weeks (1100 hours)

Languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English​

Russian
Greek

Category V: 88 weeks (2200 hours)

Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers​

Arabic
Cantonese (Chinese)
Mandarin (Chinese)
*Japanese

* Languages preceded by asterisks are usually more difficult for native English speakers to learn than other languages in the same category.​

Italian is closely related to English because we already know most of their pasta words.

Related:

Why Chinese is so damn hard

I found this bit amusing:

I remember when I had been studying Chinese very hard for about three years, I had an interesting experience. One day I happened to find a Spanish-language newspaper sitting on a seat next to me. I picked it up out of curiosity. "Hmm," I thought to myself. "I've never studied Spanish in my life. I wonder how much of this I can understand." At random I picked a short article about an airplane crash and started to read. I found I could basically glean, with some guesswork, most of the information from the article. The crash took place near Los Angeles. 186 people were killed. There were no survivors. The plane crashed just one minute after take-off. There was nothing on the flight recorder to indicate a critical situation, and the tower was unaware of any emergency. The plane had just been serviced three days before and no mechanical problems had been found. And so on. After finishing the article I had a sudden discouraging realization: Having never studied a day of Spanish, I could read a Spanish newspaper more easily than I could a Chinese newspaper after more than three years of studying Chinese.​

I would categorize French as slightly harder than Italian simply because in French the spelling vs. pronunciation is more difficult. In Italian, every letter is always pronounced exactly the same way (with some only minor, intuitive exceptions). French is just a fucking alphabet soup of nonsense.

Plus you have to learn the gender of each French word because it's not obvious.

When I get back to it, I'm taking classes on and off, I think i'm gonna go for the Latin class.

I think you'd get more enjoyment out of volunteering to be a root canal test subject at the university's dental school.