Further reflection has since led me to consider another factor. Our teachers were very often beneficiaries of the GI Bill that provided college educations to large numbers of returning WWII vets that might not have had that opportunity to go to college. The sixties college generation was, to a great extent, the kids of the working class, and their teachers were the kids of the working class. That is not a situation that is likely to repeat itself now. I’ve often wondered how much of that reality is due to blind social forces, or an implementation of deliberate government and business policy.

The university had a core curriculum of what it called Basic Studies that every student had to complete prior to graduation. This consisted of a review of the basic divisions of human knowledge: science, mathematics, social and behavioral sciences, literature, composition, languages and the humanities. It was an almost medieval concept, the fundamental liberal arts grand tour that connected us all to the community of scholarship founded in the Middle Ages, one of the great cultural achievements of Western Man. Students were allowed to bypass those survey courses which related to one’s major, for example, I skipped math and science, but I eagerly plunged into the others, it was like my old days at the neighborhood library. USF took this program seriously, it was taught by the best scholars on the faculty, and it was emphasized as a major part of our education, not just a preliminary to be gotten through prior to starting on our majors. Each course lasted two trimesters, so it was possible to go into the material in some depth. The middle sixties was the calm before the storm, the intellectual seed of what was to explode on the world by the end of the decade, and we were systematically prepared for what was coming without either us or our teachers realizing it. We learned that there were always reasons why things happened, but we also learned that they were not always immediately obvious. As a generation, we learned that the events of our time were not conspiracies of the present, but the result of cultural and social forces that had roots in the past, and that failure to realize this was in itself a major moving force behind those events. We read Mead and Harrington, McLuhan and Weiner, Keynes and Fanon, Jung and Skinner, Horney and Heilbroner. It was a heady mix and an excellent education for survivors of the Florida secondary school system, and the music of the Beatles and the bands of the British Invasion was everywhere.

In today’s job market, though, its unlikely I could get entry-level employment in the fields I worked in without a specific degree (or recent experience) in those fields. I was hired as a “Senior Software Engineer” for a major oil company even though I taken only one geology course, had never actually worked as a programmer and I had not written a line of code since I was a student seven years earlier. That could not happen today. In fact, if I were to re-enter the job market today in my field I would be unemployable, in spite of three degrees, one at the graduate level, and 40 years work experience in geotech, remote sensing, image processing, automated cartography and geographic information systems (GIS).

STEM training may allow the student entry into job fields with a high demand for advanced academic technical preparation, and there is no question that the work is exciting, rewarding, useful to society, and promotes analytical thinking skills. But the job market doesn’t want scientific knowledge, it expects familiarity with certain industrial technologies. Fundamental engineering science and math haven’t changed that much since I was in college, but the technology in the workplace has, and it continues to change on a daily basis. I couldn’t log on today to some of the computer mapping software I used while at my last job, and an employer today expects new hires to sit at an idle work station and start grinding out product immediately, in fact, he may expect his new employee to have an advanced degree or classroom experience in specific versions of software. He doesn’t have the time or money to teach him on the job.

I was first exposed to GIS in the 1990s. My boss had just purchased ArcInfo software to start a major municipal mapping project and no one in the lab had ever heard of GIS. The entire staff had to pick up the manuals and learn how to use it before we could even start the work. Today, they give graduate degrees in GIS and the students right out of college already have extensive training in how to use it. Experience in related fields doesn’t have the career value it used to have.

A similar issue occurred when I was an undergraduate in the astronomy program at USF. The main focus of astronomy in the department was positional astronomy, or a form of stellar cartography–GIS in the sky. The old timers who ran the department were unfamiliar with programming, and now relied on the undergraduates to code up the algorithms now required to do the complex statistical and mathematical reductions on massive data sets that were coming to define the field.
Now I know exactly how they felt. They had this detailed knowledge of the field, but couldn’t do the work any more.

The point I’m trying to make is that STEM, unlike science and math, has a shelf life. You may be able to graduate from college and move right into a high paying specialty, and if you stay in it you can keep up with the changes, but if you switch jobs, for whatever reason, you will find that you’ll have to start on the ground floor at your new position, competing with sharp young kids willing to work for peanuts. Unless you move into management, you will always be “just a tech”. And before long, you will be an “overpaid, out of touch, tech”. To paraphrase Mr Spock (who was speaking of military secrets), “Technical skills are the most fleeting of all.”

I was fortunate that my university recognized the importance of the humanities, (or “Basic Studies”, as we called them) and expected even the STEM students to take a rigorous program in those disciplines to supplement their technical training. These were serious courses, not just meaningless electives. They were integrated together to give all students a solid grounding in where our civilization was, how it got there, and where it was likely to wind up. Our readings were assigned from what were recognized as the most far-seeing philosophers and thinkers of our time and the courses were taught by the best scholars on the faculty. College in the 1970s was not about football, fraternities and business administration. At the time, I resented having to take courses in the Humanities, Behavioral Sciences, Social Sciences and so on, but today I can see how that expanded my thinking and made me a better citizen and an educated human being. And that knowledge does not have a shelf life. I may no longer remember how to solve a differential equation, and my fading skills at Assembly Language Programming won’t get me a job, but I use that “Humanities” stuff every time I vote, watch the news or read the President’s Tweets.

The trend today is to educate youth in the bare minimum of what will be of value to industry. A well informed citizenry is not a high priority for our political and business leaders, to put it as charitably as possible. It is now possible to take courses and earn degrees in such lunatic disciplines as “Analytical Laboratory Management” without having to sit through even the most basic chemistry course. I may have no training in advanced Chemistry or Education, but my Basic Studies curriculum at USF gave me the ability to recognize bullshit when I see it.