I think STEM has become so overused that it's starting to lose any meaning. When many schools now offer a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science, something has gone wrong.

 

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It may be the same from the perspective of the student but in terms of how to fix the problem it's totally, completely different.


All the crying about increased costs creates a false narrative which makes people misidentify the problem. The result is threads like these where RWNs become convinced that giving people student loans is the problem, when that really just isn't true.

I don't know about the overuse of the term - I suppose I may "overuse" it when I talk in these threads, but it's far easier than saying, biology, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, physics, computers...

With that said, and regarding the whole "BA" of Computer Science thing - the terms "BA and BS" are actually meaningless.

When I graduated in 1992, it was from a "liberal arts" college. I had the choice, based on the curriculum I studied, to have my degree be a BA or BS - as did every person there who graduated with a science degree. The humanities degrees were only given the option for BAs...

I just think that it's stupid to have the BA/BS delineation any longer - either you have a bachelor's degree or you don't. The courses in my transcript don't look any different than any other person's with a physiology degree from any other good college back in 1992.

 

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At my school I had the option of either BA or BS for my degree. Only difference was if I wanted a BA I had to take 6 credit hours of a foreign language.

/shrug

 

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They built all the "BA" stuff into our curriculum as part of the "core requirements" for getting any degree at my school - not that it was specifically foreign language, but they required us to take various "humanities" courses outside of our major... not too much unlike any 4 year college - but the options were a bit more directed - I couldn't have done say a physiology and biochemistry dual major and bypassed all the humanities coursework and still gotten my degree...

 

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I don't necessarily mean you in particular. I hear it at work, too, and usually it's to refer to a cohort of students that fits the needs of a particular study at a particular time.

These days, the curricula around CS degrees can vary widely, from one or two programming courses with a lot of project management fluff to upper level math, compiler and OS design and the like.

 

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My school had meaningful differences in BA vs BS degrees. I graduated in '92.

I had to take at least: 5 extra credit hours of higher math, 5 extra credits of a 300-level course from a selection of hard science courses related to my degree, and a third related course (in my case, accounting).

If you didn't know by Sophomore year about the BS requirements and you filled up instead on softer BA-related elective courses, you wouldn't finish your degree in 4 years.

 

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Fair enough - I am fairly out of touch with what exactly a "CS" degree really means nowadays anyway, I suppose my understanding of that is somewhat lacking. Point taken and thanks for the clarification and correction.





I can't really remember what the specifics were for it in my school - but I had to take a number of credit hours and classes up to 200 level in humanities, not just English.

There were some oddball key course requirements, like you had to take all the specific classes for your major which went all the way into 12 credits or more of 400 level coursework, then you would have like the option as a science major to take either this, that, or the other 300 level humanities course, each of which were offered only every other spring or fall semester or the like - if you didn't plan ahead on those you would DEFINITELY get burned. Also there was no taking O-chem 2 in Fall semester for example - all the usual stuff with that...

For example, if you went to Penn State for a physiology degree, you would take all the same exact courses within your major that I took - I had an option for an undergraduate (mostly) independent research project as a matter of course that I think a lot of people in larger schools didn't get the opportunity for, and instead of adding coursework randomly as pure electives like at a school like Penn State back then, I was required to take various humanities to some depth... I don't know if I think one was more rigorous than another, and I don't think it really mattered in the end except with respect to some nebulous concept of receiving a "well rounded" education.

The truth is, I could have finished the coursework within my major in about 5 semesters rather than 8 with the remaining 3 semesters just being used to make me more "well rounded" - which really meant more drinking time and in which case, I literally became more rounded at least - especially after my shoulder stopped working and I couldn't play baseball during spring semester my senior year

 

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