> You're claiming that an LA degree has some "roundedness" value.
I think I understand our point of disagreement.
I don't mean to claim LA majors have a "roundedness" value. I'm claiming that the collective average of STEM and LA leads to a rounded group, assuming "roundedness" in this case is considered to mean equally proficient in the diverse areas of knowledge.
As a metaphor, assume we have a bag full of red, purple, and blue marbles, where the purple is equivalent to roundedness (having equal amounts of red and blue). Replacing all of the red marbles with perfectly-purple ones actually decreases the purpleness of the bag -- it shifts the average color towards blue. Even if we give the blue ones with "a bit more 'rounded'" purple, to echo your call, the average remains shifted more towards blue than it was when there was red to balance it out.
LA majors don't have a roundedness value -- pure-LA is as unrounded as pure-STEM. I'm generally working under the assumption that "roundedness" means that you're knowledgeable in many areas, instead of only knowledgeable in a single one. Replacing a specific set of specialists with jacks-of-all-trades leaves the group with less average knowledge in the direction of the replaced specialists' knowledge base.
You could be arguing to make everyone completely and equally rounded/purple -- replacing both the blues and the reds, so that everyone would graduate with both a full LA degree and a full STEM degree. But your call for adding "a bit more 'rounded' to STEM majors" instead of having LA majors didn't sound like that, and making everyone be dual-degree seems a bit infeasible.
I think I understand our point of disagreement.
I don't mean to claim LA majors have a "roundedness" value. I'm claiming that the collective average of STEM and LA leads to a rounded group, assuming "roundedness" in this case is considered to mean equally proficient in the diverse areas of knowledge.
As a metaphor, assume we have a bag full of red, purple, and blue marbles, where the purple is equivalent to roundedness (having equal amounts of red and blue). Replacing all of the red marbles with perfectly-purple ones actually decreases the purpleness of the bag -- it shifts the average color towards blue. Even if we give the blue ones with "a bit more 'rounded'" purple, to echo your call, the average remains shifted more towards blue than it was when there was red to balance it out.
LA majors don't have a roundedness value -- pure-LA is as unrounded as pure-STEM. I'm generally working under the assumption that "roundedness" means that you're knowledgeable in many areas, instead of only knowledgeable in a single one. Replacing a specific set of specialists with jacks-of-all-trades leaves the group with less average knowledge in the direction of the replaced specialists' knowledge base.
You could be arguing to make everyone completely and equally rounded/purple -- replacing both the blues and the reds, so that everyone would graduate with both a full LA degree and a full STEM degree. But your call for adding "a bit more 'rounded' to STEM majors" instead of having LA majors didn't sound like that, and making everyone be dual-degree seems a bit infeasible.