He makes some other weird points. Economics and mathematics on their own are almost as useless as renaissance literature. (I know, I studied mathematics and economics)
"that's a great way to end up wanting to kill yourself when you hit 30 and you realize you still haven't done anything with your life."
I think he's a bit off base, here. This statement describes most of the 30 something engineers I've met who didn't work at the right startup and therefore didn't become rich. In contrast most liberal artsy people (do artists count, or does "liberal arts" mean people who majored in something like sociology?) seem reasonably content.
I double majored in math and literature, but if I'd only done the minimum humanities coursework for math, I still would have been forced to do a ton of humanities. At my college (at UCSD), all students had to study:
2 years of world history and cultures 1 year of a foreign language 1 year of upper division history. literature, or other humanities course 1 year of fine arts or performance arts 2 courses in math, which can be fulfilled with symbolic logic in the philosophy dept and easy statistics (without calculus) through the psychology department. 2 courses in science, which can be fulfilled with "physics for poets" type courses (again, no calculus)
This is regardless of major. So an english major can get through college without ever really studying math or science in a meaningful way, whereas a math student who does the absolute bare minimum is still going to come away with a substantial amount of humanities coursework.
I think it's time to abolish the term "broad liberal arts education". If it's only liberal arts, and doesn't include math and science, it isn't broad. And I think this is what really separates the math/sci/eng students from the humanities majors. An english who took a ton of math not reflected in his/her degree would be just as well prepared - however, these people are very rare.
The best thing, in my opinion, is to get at least a minor, with either the minor or the major being in a humanities or math/science/engineering field. If you just want to get a job doing software engineering or some such, you'll probably have to make the technical field your major, but a strong minor in comp sci can be far more formidable a programmer than many a CS major.
If I had things my way, I would actually insist on undergrads having to major in the humanities, as I'm too familiar with CS majors graduating with an impoverished understanding of society and culture and a lack of critical perspective, often precisely because they did not consider their humanities classes to be "real" classes. The more I learn, the more I'm amazed that what I've learned is somehow considered "optional" by the rest of the populace. Democracies are only as smart as their ruling majority, and as much of the realm of smart decision making in national and international affairs is dominated by social/cultural knowledge and perceptiveness as by technical knowledge, if not more. (Though to separate the two this way is admittedly artificial.) Much the same applies to businesses.
In an ideal world, every undergrad has to double major, one in humanities, the other in math/sci/engineering. And I'm not even sure that the ideal is so difficult to achieve or unreasonable to demand.
The problem with arts degrees is that very few people end up doing what they originally wanted to do. Most of the journalism grads are going to end up in PR, or something even less related to what they supposedly studied.
So yeah, one might be more content if one had the talent and passion and stuck with the dream. But so many people don't and that's a ticket to a midlife crisis.
My conclusion is that Marc is being a bit sloppy here. Like 75% of the Y Combinator partners, I have a Ph.D.---and I think graduate (and, indeed, undergraduate) degrees are overrated. But given the small percentage of Ph.D.s even among technical people, it would be very surprising if most people having a high impact had them. More relevant is to ask whether Ph.D.s have relatively more impact than those without doctoral degrees. I don't know the answer, but I think it's a more interesting question.
A Ph.D. is a huge opportunity cost with an extraordinarily high risk/reward ratio. I have often had undergraduates ask me if they should pursue a Ph.D. I first ask them if it is their desire to teach at a research university. This desire is a little like becoming an NBA player especially in certain technical fields like physics. A horde of Ph.D. candidates is good for tenured Professors and research universities, but not necessarily for the students. Post-doc hell is left as an excercise for the reader.
If they don't have a burning desire to be a professor or happen to dislike trees, I don't really see the point of a Ph.D. I tell them to at least take a hard look at the costs of their decision either way: real financial, opportunity, time, etc. An objective tally will rarely be in favor of a Ph.D.
If you look at hardware, you really need a Ph.D. to make a serious contribution to theory, and a lot of important founders (Intel springs to mind) had doctorates.
Jesus, what a prick.
This isn't so much because engineering is great, or the only way to make your mark on the world. The problem is that today's arts faculties just suck. It's possible to graduate knowing things that only matter within the walls of the university, and you may not realize this until the very last minute.
That said, it's possible to graduate from engineering schools and not have a clue about history, current events, different sorts of people, what matters in life, and the fact that one cannot wear socks with sandals. You may not be starving, and you may be in a sense contributing to society more than many artists, but you may never have really stretched your own mind -- merely let your geek tendencies do their thing.
I think the best possible thing to do in university is to take the hard science courses, and then supplement them with intense and challenging arts courses. The ones where you have to do learn some serious art history, or do some sort of performance. This is the best of both worlds.
I might have just been lucky, but they always had the most interesting discussion and criticism of the stuff we were reading. One of the best discussions about the scientific method I've ever had came from in a Humanities class taught by a philosophy prof. One of the first things we read was Galileo's letters on sunspots. Later in the semester we demonstrated how Freud's theories were completely unscientific (because they were unfalsifiable/untestable). I actually never really understood the difference between axioms and theorems until I took that class. I mean, I knew vaguely that an axiom was a rule and a theorem was a confirmed hypothesis, but the fact that axioms are essentially arbitrary never really sunk in. In actual science classes I was always too busy learning details to think about the abstract stuff.
Who would suggest skipping college? Yet, if you have a clearly great opportunity lined up, it's not a bad thing to leave. And if you get yourself kicked out midterm like I did, you have great motivation to make something happen in the non-college world. When I was at college, there were many stories of guys who flunked out and ended up doing interesting things. Then I became one!
The problem with this entire line of thinking is that sure having an assault rifle is great but it doesn't do much good if you don't have any context to know where to point it.
Think of a technical skill or degree as the lens through which you focus a broader education.
The broader education allows you do apply technical solutions to non-technical problems and may even help you come up with that "big idea".
Look at PG, he seems to be doing pretty well on both accounts (undergrad liberal arts degree, grad technical degree).
This line is kinda interesting because the type-A personality he projects matches the profile of people who kill themselves when faced with a major setback.
I really cringe at his "change the world or you're a loser" pep talk bits. Chill out, man.
I think the life experience of guys like this makes their prognostications on the next 20 years useless. His formative career experiences happened during a historically unprecedented and continuous boom. Maybe I'm a paranoid nut, but severe and long lasting recessions and broken dreams are way more the norm than the last 20 years would indicate. The economy could blow up tomorrow and we could all be picking lettuce for the next eight years. Are you going to kill yourself over it?
Is it really worth uprooting from a region where you have deep ties for a career opportunity? Careers are ephemeral. Blood ties might keep you alive when the going gets rough.
