I consider myself a feminist and I agree with you.
Removing the barriers that make STEM a challenging choice for girls who have an interest is one thing.
Telling girls that “we need more women in STEM” and pushing them into fields where the individual girl does not want to be is quite another.
I can confidently say this is complete b.s. There are lots of boring college majors that are super easy with minimal work, and there are others that have really fascinating subjects (like Physics) that are immensely hard and have exams *designed *to cost you an A or worse. Physics courses are especially infamous for mimicking a teaching style that is 50 years archaic but was what the famous physicists of the past did.
You know, working out endless (and generally useless to the student) derivations on the chalkboard, then you get slammed with some homework problems you do not have the ability to solve because the textbook does not cover the “trick” each problem needs. Better hope you have good TAs or Chegg.
The exams are going to be 4 problems, generally harder than anything on the homework you were assigned, and also nothing like what the professor yammered on about writing in illegible handwriting on the chalkboard all semester, either. So right off the bat, if you come in well prepared but don’t spot the ‘trick’ on problem #3, boom, you’re down to a C…
Physics 1&2, there’s various electromagnetics courses, certain harder math courses - there’s a whole subset of the courses at a major university that use this style. They are all GPA destroyers. And it’s not just a matter of “be a better student”, the way these exams are structured, you’re gonna have a bad dice roll sometimes no matter how well prepared you are.
Contrast this to other departments that give three 100 question multiple choice exams which come from the actual lecture slides you can just memorize. Easy peasy. And if you miss a question or 5, you still get an A, much less variance on the dice rolls if you have 100 total questions to choose from.
I have a friend from high school who went to Caltech. He was objectively the smartest kid in my senior class. He had about a 3.1 GPA and had a real tough time getting into medical school…
I will agree with you about some of the hard science/STEM degrees, but that has nothing to do with the claim that if you want to go to grad school, a history degree is a poor choice because it’s a hard subject to get a strong GPA in. And your claim works against your argument that you should always study STEM because it’s the most fail safe degree–it sounds like a STEM degree is the one you are least likely to be able to finish at all, which is the worst possible outcome.
Oh. All I meant was there’s probably an easier choice than even History. Business or whatever all the fratboys major in. The way the game is set up, if you have a 4.0 GPA, even in an easy major, and you did well on whichever standardized exam the grad school requires, you will have an easy time getting in. The flaw you’re exploiting is that grad schools generally don’t apply numerical correction factors for harder majors, since no data exists on that, so they just go by the overall GPA. Some of them do give bonus points to people from ‘more rigorous’ schools, though.
This is one of the ways that Harvard helps, other than simply the name. The average grade they give is an A-. They don’t go by the rule that state schools do that the average student gets a C. And for some grad school types, they convert A minuses to As for comparison to other schools…
Harvard now has a cap on number of As in a course, which causes a lot of stress for the pre-med types. The cap is there because there were so many people having hissy fits about the A-, which is dumb.
Two, grad school admissions are vastly more complex than that, and, again, if you major in something you really don’t care about and focus only on getting good grades, you learn less. You network less. You develop little or no vision of yourself as a professional and an expert. I got so much out of my English degree because I brought passion and interest to pretty much every assignment. I’m smarter because I studies really, really hard for 4 years. If I’d spent those years in a major that I only chose because I could find a least-work path through it, what would I have done with the extra time? Worked more hours at a McJob? Drank more? Played more Everquest? I really don’t see any of that preparing me to go to grad school and being a stand-out student.
Three, I think getting As in English and History was a lot easier for many kids than Business or marketing. For one thing, those require at least some calculus and they certainly require more group projects and the like.
I’ve personally gotten to see the forms on the other side of the grad school admissions process. They are not as complex as you think. At least for this grad school. It was a simple scoring system. It was weighted 33/33/33. 33% was the standardized exam score. You got points based on a table and your score on that exam. The next third was GPA. You got a multiplier based on the name of your school, and then it was just overall GPA. Finally, interviews. You got 2 interviews, and they each gave you a score from 1 to 10. If the 2 interviewers gave vastly different scores, you got a third interview. Scores got averaged.
From this there’s a number. They rank everyone from highest to lowest and start sending out acceptance letters.
There are a lot of types of grad schools–and a lot of types of professional schools (med school, law school, MBA). What makes sense for undergrad is going to be based on what you hope to do with the degree. My point was and continues to be that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution and picking some option because it’s the most probable path to success for a generic person is foolish.
No, but just signing up for any old college degree you like is a plan to fail. Even people with a plan for failure sometimes luck out and succeed - but it’s not good advice.
Just like hopping in my car without enough money for gas and a near empty tank is a plan to fail. I might get helped out by a supermodel who later becomes my wife but the probability of that happening is very low.
The majority of Americans with college degrees picked the wrong major. Some do well, some do ok, most do mediocre.
Who said anything about just picking a major you vaguely like? You have to have a plan, but you can have a plan that starts with a history or communications degree. The major is a component of the plan, not the plan itself.
There are a lot of people who obviously didn’t plan well. And you must see how getting a 4 year degree with no real increase in earnings potential (like History undergrad) with the plan to go to grad school is pretty risky. Is all I’m saying.
Also it just feels inefficient. Yes, you can do stupid things in our economy and they work. But seriously. What does knowing about a bunch of past facts and trends really prepare you for? What value do you bring to a company? Obviously, that law or medical or MBA degree brings a lot of value, if you get to that point, of course.
At least with STEM, you’ve had lots of practice gathering data, estimating numerically whether something is going to work, how to isolate a problem. Maybe a psychology degree helps you manipulate/motivate people better if you make it to management.
This is entirely anecdotal, with a relatively small sample size, so take it for what it is worth.
I hire people fairly frequently. I work for a company everyone here has heard of. All of the positions I hire require some combination of math, statistics, data analysis, and writing code (very low level coding). We have people in markets that aren’t all that expensive, such as Phoenix, Charlotte, and Wilmington DE (I am sure by this point some of you know what I do and in what industry).
The lowest paid person on my team makes about $85K, the highest paid who isn’t me makes about $150K. Most of them are in their early to mid thirties. So you aren’t going to be rich working in this job, but it is a good, solid job (and they rarely work more than 40 hours a week).
While a large part of these jobs is STEM-related, they are marketing jobs, and so they also require very strong written and verbal communication skills, both one on one and presentations. A native English speaker has a definite advantage in this area.
Typically, when I hire, I would guess that the applicant population that I would consider “well-qualified” runs about 80% foreign born, 20% US born. The foreign born portion is overwhelmingly Chinese and Indian, unsurprisingly. I also talk to a good number of my peers who have the same experience.
So this is obviously not scientific, and covers an extremely narrow slice of the STEM opportunities, but I don’t feel that STEM is over-valued.
So is this some form of data analysis to decide how to spend ad money and the effectiveness of it?
The reality is that a “generic college degree” isn’t worth very much today. In the past that wasn’t the case for two reasons:
Back before 1990 or so, you could go to college to “discover yourself” and not end up going into lifelong debt. I paid for college myself through financial aid, grants, and loans and graduated owing about $10000. That was only a $90/mo payment. At that cost, you could get a history degree because it’s fun and go on with your life. That is no longer the case. The student’s ability to pay off college is much more important now.
Going $150,000+ into debt for a degree is crazy, but at least the pay in STEM jobs will enable the graduate to make the loan payments. It’s much harder to see how it works out with something like a history degree. It will be harder to find a relevant job, and those jobs typically are relatively low paying. So the student earning a soft degree should be much more cost-conscious and enterprising in how they go about getting their degree.
We do some of that, but includes development of marketing campaigns in general, measurement of those campaigns’ effectiveness, understanding of customer behaviors (products they want, how they use them), etc.
Interesting question. My coding speed was really good, from having coded pretty much everything at least once, which let me work in chunks of code not lines of code.
In any case coding speed is not dependent on how many lines you write per day, but how many lines that work you write per day. My project (which I designed and architected myself, as well as writing most of the code) involved a parser for the output of equipment with a not well specified language and for which comments were semantically significant. I used my computer architecture and microprogramming experience to structure it like instruction set decode for an emulator - and the first version worked reasonably well at least until I retired and left. Getting it right the first time is what keeps you on schedule.
My problem was with stuff that did not exist when I was in school. My office mate in grad school was working on early database work, so I never had a class in it, and never used databases until this project. I was able to get experts for that part of the job. I’ve been writing in Perl lately. While I did a seminar on the design of an object oriented language in 1976, long before C++ when Simula 67 was the prime example of an object oriented language. My dissertation even used these principles, I understand the theory just fine but I’m not comfortable in the way someone learning Python in college is.
The secret, however, is to make yourself unique in skill sets, so that if they fire you it hurts them more than it hurts you. That worked so well for me that my last three months I was working one day a week and getting paid for five.
But a history degree does increase your earnings potential. At the very least, you can go teach history: starting teachers in the DFW area make $50/yr, and while that’s not fuck you money, it’s not bad for a new grad. And while teacher salaries are pretty stagnant, there are career paths, such as administration, that can pay very well. It’s certainly a better option than half a STEM degree.
In terms of fundamental, broadly applicable skills, I don’t know that psych really teaches people how to manipulate. What does transfer is the ability to write–to organize and present complex information. If you get a history degree and work really really hard at it, you will come out a much better writer.
I think that if you are getting a “soft degree”, you need a plan beyond “get a degree and then worry about a job”. Instead, from day one you need to be actively looking around for a job with growth potential–you need to work with career services to develop a plan. You need internships with companies that hire people for in-house training programs with broad degree requirements. Or you need to get a teaching certificate.
I don’t think you all are seeing the other side of this. I had a former student visit me the other day. She is studying chemical engineering at an international campus of a prestigious university. She really doesn’t like ChemE and would like to switch her major to just Chem, but is convinced that if she does that she will be unemployable. Never mind that she’ll have a pretty technical degree, experience in the Middle East, bi- and maybe tri-lingual, a degree from a very well known college–she’s seen the average starting salary for the two degrees, and she’s sure it’s a near-criminal indulgence to study the marginally less obviously marketable degree. This isn’t any more wise than spending 4 years studying Interpretive Dance and expecting a generic office job to fall into your lap at the end.
Define wrong major. Do you mean one which isn’t going to maximize your income, or one that you hate?
I’ve done plenty of performance reviews in my day, and other things being roughly equal the person who loves her job is going to do better than the person who hates his. Slacking off as much as possible and making sure you are the first out the door is pretty obvious, trust me. You can be in a great STEM job and still never get raises and be the first laid off.
The H1B visa reform will probably make STEM more attractive. OTOH, I think we ought to be stapling a greencard to every foreign student’s STEM degree.
I think were’ saying the same thing.
“Business” is a fairly broad subject and I don’t consider it separate from STEM. After all, business consists of the buying and selling of products and you generally need engineers to design those products. Many aspects of advanced finance also require highly advanced mathematical concepts.
Liberal arts majors always take a while to catch up in the working world. You don’t graduate with a B.A. in Anthropology and walk into a $70k a year job like you can with a CSci degree. - But then you don’t graduate with a Biology degree into a $70k a year job either - all STEM fields are not equal.
But historically, people who major in liberal arts are often pretty financially successful. Sometimes because they go on and get J.Ds or MBAs, but often because they end up falling into professions that they didn’t think of - in some cases that didn’t exist - when they graduated from college. Who wouldn’t have thought that “knowledge management” would be an IT specialization that would pay well fifteen years ago? Most people who majored in History (I minored) don’t end up teaching History or writing or researching History - they end up in training departments, or in public relations, or in product management … They are frequently the people that you actually want for developing jobs.
I had an Art History major. I have been a tax specialist, a systems administrator, a systems engineer, a Six Sigma Blackbelt, an IT Asset Manager, a Project Manager, a Program manager, a procurement and vendor specialist over the 30 years of my career. Some of those jobs didn’t exist when I got out of school in the late 1980s.
One of the challenging things about a STEM field (from a former systems engineer) is that it takes a lot of effort as you get older to stay on top of the technology. Picking up new things is easy when you are young - and learning your 19th operating system when you are 50 can be a challenge (that’s why I got out of it). Getting laid off at 50 from any profession is difficult, but for engineers and software developers, it can be particularly hard.