# How do some people graduate from college without understanding the fundamentals of their major? **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [May 27, 2024, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119 "2024-05-27T03:16:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 8
**Author:** ![Chingon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chingon/32/17645_2.png) [@Chingon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chingon)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2024, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119/141 "2024-06-01T23:09:38Z")
It’s remarkable how the last group of capable students always seems to coincide with whatever class the complainer graduated with. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2024, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119/142 "2024-06-01T23:47:43Z")
> [@DPRK](#): > > That is why I was half-joking about working it out on a slide rule: you cannot trivially generate false precision, plus it forces you to keep track of orders of magnitude ([try it!](https://www.antiquark.com/sliderule/sim/n3t/virtual-n3-t.html)) That’s one of the reasons why I still teach high schoolers to use a slide rule. ---
**Author:** ![Dr\_Paprika](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr_paprika/32/3042_2.png) [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2024, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119/143 "2024-06-02T01:01:06Z")
That’s very true. How odd! ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2024, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119/144 "2024-06-02T18:06:20Z")
This does not remotely apply to me. There was a _long_ gap between me getting degrees the really lousy students I last taught. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2024, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119/145 "2024-06-05T23:12:10Z")
Oh, there were idiot students when I was in college in the 1980s. I saw one new professor’s heart break when a student asked, at the end of one of the lectures on Electro-Magnetic fields, why the professor hadn’t “cancelled the twos” in the equations. The **δ** s in Maxwell’s equations (and other closely related equations) are not 2s. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [June 7, 2024, 4:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119/146 "2024-06-07T04:07:32Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > As for the person they wanted to replace, I can assure you that firing someone in a big company (outside of a RIF) is a big pain in the ass and takes lots of paperwork. Maybe that person was being offensive in some way. One of the hardest things about being a a manager is dealing with performance problems, and dealing with stuff you can’t tell your reports. I think the hardest part of management is trying to navigate the ambiguity and political vaguery of the corporate structure to figure out what exactly entails a “performance problem”. Not to mention figuring out how not to become someone else’s “performance problem”. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [June 8, 2024, 7:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119/147 "2024-06-08T19:31:37Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > I think the hardest part of management is trying to navigate the ambiguity and political vaguery of the corporate structure to figure out what exactly entails a “performance problem”. Not to mention figuring out how not to become someone else’s “performance problem”. The only time I saw an unjustified performance problem in years and years of performance reviews was in one place where a person (who didn’t report to me) became the sacrificial unsatisfactory performer because he had a carpool and left at a reasonable time and didn’t stay until 9 pm after the “voluntary” dinner. I got out of that place a few months later. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2024, 1:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119/148 "2024-06-09T13:44:58Z")
Really? I feel like I see a lot of that pretty much everywhere. A lot of times its clients demanding a consultant be removed for no reason because they couldn’t solve years worth of problems instantaneously. Sometimes it’s not being able to deliver on some project that was ill conceived from the beginning or not responding to emails at 10pm. Or it might be because someone isn’t “visible” because they are quietly doing actual work rather than attending useless meetings or sending useless emails that make them appear busy. Maybe it’s because my job has always mostly been about trying to design and build better business and technology processes at big companies. From where I sit, it seems like people at all level - from college grads to C-level executives - often don’t understand the fundamentals of how their job works. My team is at a giant bank right now and were trying to figure out what WE are supposed to do over the next however many months, which seems mostly helping our client - a senior executive over a dozen people part of an organization of 100 people in a company of a quarter of a million people figure out what to do. Broadly speaking in in the context of data compliance, but like come on. Are you a PMO? Are you an audit team? Are you writing policy? Did you someone get missed as useless dead wood in the last round of layoffs? It makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills because in my mind, I tend to evaluate performance on how well you do what you were told to do - make your sales numbers, complete entering requirements into Jira tickets at a reasonable pace, send you status updates on time so they can be entered into the TPS report. Otherwise everything is just based on politics and the whims of capricious managers. And I find that stressful even when it works in my favor because it’s ultimately arbitrary and can turn at any time. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [June 9, 2024, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119/149 "2024-06-09T19:57:27Z")
I mostly dealt with internal customers, but if one of them unjustifiably dissed one of my people, I wouldn’t consider it a performance problem at all. It would be a customer relationship problem. I learned while working with customers at trade shows, when we were selling stuff on the outside, that the answer to all unreasonable requests and stupid ideas (and you get a lot of them) is “interesting. We need to look at that.” And then laugh like hell about it at dinner. So I might add as an area of improvement jollying up customers, but it wouldn’t be a performance problem, justified or unjustified. What good company lets customers do performance reviews? ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2024, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119/150 "2024-06-20T00:05:06Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > … the students fill them out. Then one of the students collects them and takes them to the academic office. I was a great teacher, according to the students… especially the students who hated filling out those forms. …but the Academic Office did NOT understand my field (or how to reach students in it). In an attempt to justify their existence, they’d “visualize” all that feedback in 3D pie charts and bar graphs. They’d hound me for days _(while I was trying to get students to hand in their final projects and compile my final grades)._ They seemed desperate, “encouraging” me over and over to stop in and go over the evaluations with them, which they’d only present one-on-one, as PowerPoints: “We’ve color coded your _Paradigms To Improve_ for you!”. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [June 23, 2024, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119/151 "2024-06-23T22:15:26Z")
In some cases I think the thread might need to be retitled to “How do some people graduate from college without understanding some esoteric minutiae of their field of study?” I think interviewers often forget that recent college grads are not coming into entry level jobs as “experts” in their field. In many cases, they may not have touched a particular aspect of their industry-relevant studies for several years. They certainly won’t know how to apply most of it in the real world. Also, with the way the corporate system actually works, many, if not most students are not studying their major with the intent of actually doing “work” in it. These days, graduating students seem to want to work for certain companies to quickly get placed in “management” tracks based off of certain “competency signals” (like 18 month stints at Google or Mckinsey & Company) rather than experience or actual accomplishments. I call it “The Devil Wears Prada effect”. Recall how in that film Anne Hathaway takes a job with a prestigious fashion magazine run by a psychotic but well respected and well connected editor-in-chief (Meryl Streep). She wasn’t doing anything that would help her learn to be a better in her actual career as a writer. Her job was basically a glorified admin and personal valet. It was explicitly described that her “career path” would be to work there for a few years where she could parley the company name on her resume and maybe some references into a better position at some other magazine. ---
**Author:** ![Mighty\_Mouse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mighty_mouse/32/7776_2.png) [@Mighty\_Mouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mighty_Mouse)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2024, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119/152 "2024-06-24T00:15:11Z")
This applies to a small minority of university graduates in business in my experience, I’m both hiring recent college graduates and have many, many family members and friends who have kids graduating college and starting their careers. The majority of Accounting majors are going into public accounting or staff accountant roles, the majority of Finance majors are going into Financial Planning & Analysis jobs, the Actuarial Science majors are going to Insurance companies and pension fund administrators, food science grads going into Nutritionists jobs, etc. The ones going into the track you’re describing are a subset of the graduates from “elite” schools. They represent I am certain less than 10% of all university graduates. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2024, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119/153 "2024-06-29T22:20:32Z")
That may be true. But I believe there has been a broader trend over the years in students at all levels using the internet (now with AI) as a substitute for deep learning about topics, thinking they can simply Google whatever details they need. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [June 29, 2024, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119/154 "2024-06-29T23:12:27Z")
Ugh. I may be ignorant of the science of extracting knowledge from student votes on teacher effectiveness, but I can’t help thinking that one “This teacher seems to talk only to the students on the right side of the room and never even looks at the left side” or “I never understood what space-time interval really meant until this professor explained it” are worth 10,000 bar charts from #2 pencil box-filling survey forms of the form “In the category of student engagement, was this professor superb, excellent, good, fair, poor or abysmal?” ---
**Author:** ![mnemosyne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c4cdca/32.png) [@mnemosyne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mnemosyne)\ **Post date:** [June 30, 2024, 1:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119/155 "2024-06-30T13:46:18Z")
I’ve noticed this with a few newer grads. Some are great at taking information and really digging deep into stuff, but I deal with a few who assume that if certain guidance documents don’t explicitly say something, then there’s just nothing that can be done about it. There’s a lack of creativity and critical thinking that’s hard to pin down with a couple of these engineering grads, and the approach you describe might be part of the cause. I can’t gauge how much of a trend this is in terms of overall impact. There may be different cultural expectations/experiences at play too, at least with one individual I’m thinking about. ---
**Author:** ![Jacksdad1](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jacksdad1/32/17249_2.png) [@Jacksdad1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jacksdad1)\ **Post date:** [July 23, 2024, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119/156 "2024-07-23T03:28:56Z")
Do you mean folks like AOC who has a BA degree in Economics from Boston University? She clearly does not comprehend the most basic principles of economics. Perhaps it’s just that in her position politically she must advocate for ideas that are cross grain with traditional economic thought. ---
**Author:** ![beowulff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beowulff/32/542_2.png) [@beowulff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/beowulff)\ **Post date:** [July 23, 2024, 3:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119/157 "2024-07-23T03:44:06Z")
Cite? ---
**Author:** ![Jacksdad1](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jacksdad1/32/17249_2.png) [@Jacksdad1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jacksdad1)\ **Post date:** [July 23, 2024, 3:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119/158 "2024-07-23T03:51:42Z")
> **[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez)** > > Progressive Era > Repression and persecution > Anti-war and civil rights movements ---
**Author:** ![needscoffee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/needscoffee/32/1076_2.png) [@needscoffee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/needscoffee)\ **Post date:** [July 23, 2024, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119/159 "2024-07-23T03:55:38Z")
> [@Jacksdad1](#): > > [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez) Haven’t quite mastered the whole cite thing yet, have you? ---
**Author:** ![Jacksdad1](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jacksdad1/32/17249_2.png) [@Jacksdad1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jacksdad1)\ **Post date:** [July 23, 2024, 4:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119/160 "2024-07-23T04:51:41Z")
No, my 1st post, first day. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119.md?page=7) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-some-people-graduate-from-college-without-understanding-the-fundamentals-of-their-major/1002119.md?page=9)