It doesn’t seem obvious to me - is there any specific data you have underlying this opinion? Engineers may make more than humanities majors on average if the person in the humanities major did not go to a very highly ranked school, also if the humanities major only stops at undergrad, and only if you are comparing to starting salaries out of undergrad. But, then you start having a lot of ifs and also, a humanities major may start out making less than an engineer, but certainly they make more than one who never went to college on average. So I do not know what the case for the degree being “unmarketable” is based upon.
Specific advice that I would have given (and did) twenty-five years ago:
In your freshman and sophomore years, avoid as much as possible any class that’s popular with “pre-med” and/or “pre-law” students. Those tend to be large classes, huge actually, impersonal (so you’ll never get face time with the prof), and virtually everyone’s there only to get good marks but not to actually learn anything. It’s the opposite of what a college education should be.
Does this apply in 2015? I’d be interested to hear your opinion.
Because missing from the calculations of average salaries are the nonexistent salaries of a vast population of humanities graduates. I thought that it was common knowledge that there is a current crisis of graduating students with no job prospects. It’s one thing to talk about salary level, it’s another entirely different thing to speak of employment opportunities. 50% of engineering undergrads already have a job offer in hand before they graduate for example, and over 90% get one within one year of graduation, plus the overall unemployment rate is somewhere around 2%. I mean this is a pretty sweet deal. Don’t humanities departments owe this much to their own graduating students? And what’s the deal with your observation about the disparity between highly ranked school programs and others not highly ranked? Is there no accreditation authority ensuring a high quality education for all?
Well, the general unemployment rate for an undergrad degree is 4%, so I don’t think the idea that engineering is the only way to get a job holds true.
But more importantly, one of the reasons why engineers get paid so handsomely is that relatively few people are capable of doing it well. Telling people who would be terrible engineers to become engineers is not helpful.
You do NOT want me engineering anything of importance. Trust me. If I were I charge of a bridge, it would fall. If I designed a circuit, it would catch on fire. Of course this would never happen, because I wouldn’t last five minutes in engineering classes. I barely passed pre-calc in high school with a mercy C. I will never be good at it.
You can’t entirely ignore people’s capacities.
I asked you for specific data, as in a cite. You are giving me a long uncited diatribe. If you go to Harvad, Princeton, Yale or similar schools, the major is not as important. It’s not as if you go to one of these shoals and major in Literature you will have worse job prospects than one who goes to school for engineering at some average state school. Engineering may be a sweet deal, but that does not mean that humanities majors are “unmarketable”. Please just answer the question, and show me what data you are basing this “common knowledge” off of.
Then why did companies use to use IQ tests?
Because there used to be a lot less research on managing human resources. People were basically stabbing in the dark. We have learned a lot about hiring in the last 40 years.
It’s with noting in Griggs vs. Duke Power, the assessment was unrelated to the actual job and it was proven that those who passed were no better at their job than those who did not. The IQ test was added immediately after the civil rights act forced them to remove their company rules against promoting black employees.
The ruling does not ban IQ tests, but rather requires that any assessment be “reasonably related” to the job. A
So, are you saying this ruling does have bearing on the administration of IQ tests for employment? First you said “Thats not true in about 20 different ways. The main one being that companies can and do give whatever types of assessments they want.”
Are you now agreeing that his first statement you made is not accurate, and that their are indeed limitations to what an employer can do?
Okay, you cannot give an assessment unrelated to the job in an attempt to circumvent the Civil Rights Act.
Companies are not banned from using IQ tests. Many, many, many organizations-- including our own federal government-- make use of IQ-type assesments. Companies are not “scared” to use IQ tests, they don’t want to because they aren’t very useful for predicting job performance.
True.
Standardized tests that assess skills related to the job are okay, and quite common. The US military, the NFL, and most state and local governments use them.
Where are you getting that information from?
I started off at a local community college and then transferred to a larger state university. While at my community college, I took most of the generic classes that everyone needs to take and classes were limited to 30. After transferring, I heard that many of the classes I took at the community college would have been huge 100+ student classes at the large state university and mainly taught by graduate assistants. Also, at the community college, instructors were people that worked in the field they were teaching. Very few of the instructors/professors/grad students at the state college ever worked in the field outside of academia. It was great especially great for my major. I took several of those classes at the community college as well. Overall, I think the education I received at the community college was more beneficial to my career starting out. I eventually went to grad school and was promoted. My graduate education and new job go hand in hand.
Here is a case where an employer was sued for not using the results of a test for which there was a disparate impact: Ricci v. DeStefano - Wikipedia
A Google search on “IQ test” and “hiring”? This isn’t rocket science. The first result is from Harvard Business Review.
I know the narrative you are trying to make. “Smart guys like me used to be able to get plum jobs right out of college with IQ tests, until the blacks ruined it for everyone by getting them banned.”
But it’s not true. Smart white guys used to be able to get plum jobs out of college because women and minorities were systematically excluded from good jobs. That must have been really nice for a young white guy. Now people have to compete on a level-ish playing field, and yes, things got a LOT more competitive for everyone.
That is an extrapolation without basis. You are making a claim about IQ testing; you’ve made a couple claims actually. I’m newer to the board than you, but I thought it was a normal thing to ask for cites. Sure I could look it up, but I am not the one who has formed an opinion or made a claim, so asking you what you are basing your opinion on seems appropriate - I don’t think google could answer that for me very well.
But then again, this is the barbecue pit so perhaps efforts at having a serious discussion about a topic (one that I think is a topic worthy of serious discussion) are fruitless.
I’m sorry, I did take that too far and you are right that I had no basis for that. But what you are saying about IQ tests isn’t true, and it’s an argument that comes with a lot of baggage.
Hey, no harm no foul. But I am not actually saying a whole lot about IQ tests at all in this thread. I did dispute a statement about legal implications of IQ testing, and, as far as I can tell, we agree that legal implications do exist. Where we differ is you believe they are immaterial and do not factor into the decisions companies make in their hiring practices. I don’t believe that it is easy to assess the situation unless you had a way to compare the decisions within two different legal environments, one with no legal restrictions and the current one. Since we differ in this view, I am wondering how you came to the conclusion you did, or even how an accurate assessment would be possible. So our only point of difference is the materiality of the legal implications of IQ testing on a company’s decision to use them or not.
Other than that, I’m not sure what you feel is untrue about what I am saying, or what I am saying about IQ tests that could be described as either “true” or “untrue”.
Griggs did not say anything about the use of IQ testing per se. It stands for the proposition that any pre-employment testing with a disparate racial impact. For jobs which do not involve complex tasks, IQ tests are not a good predictor of job performance.
My understanding of the case is that IQ testing is not something that can be used unless it is related specifically to the job. The information I am going off of, and what has been said upthead is: *
So that certainly means to me that it is saying something about IQ tests. IQ tests must be non-discriminatory and applicable to the job. IQ test exists which test different types of intelligence, and it must be provable in a court of law that the IQ test used related to the specific functions of the job.
If, for example, a company wanted to use an IQ test for hiring applicants in anticipation of future changes in the workplace, and wanted to administer a test that they felt would give them the best workforce, it would probably not use an IQ test that measured for adaptability or measured for flexablilty of thought etc. This is because Griggs requires a company to be able to show a clear connection between the test administered and the duties of the job. Therefore, a company would have reason to opt for other, less legally complicated, means of assessment, even if they thought an IQ test of one sort or another would lead to more favorable long-term hiring results.
This is not to say that this is something that does happen frequently, or even at all - it is just an example of the implications of the Griggs decision on the use of various assessments for hiring practices.
I am not sure where, in all of this, you see that Griggs creates no legal implication for the use IQ testing in hiring. Do you have anything specific to add to your original comment?
** for the sake of brevity I will just use Wikipedia, although not the best source, I have heard nothing to the contrary so I will use it as a reference in this case.*
But, that article doesn’t support any of the points you have made in this thread.
The author says,
This contradicts your assertion that businesses eschew IQ tests because they are poor predictors of performance.
Then, the author says,
The author goes on to say that he has developed a test for “top talent” that would do better than a vanilla IQ test. But, he makes no assertion that anybody is using it. Nor does he discuss how widespread IQ testing is for other than “top talent”.
So I have no idea how common IQ tests are, much less whether they would be more common but for legal concerns. I’m open to any information you can provide, but it has to be something more than “Google IQ tests and hiring”.