I was reading another thread. It got me thinking about something. I have friends who choose various majors and it either turned out they couldn’t get a job in that field or the job (only jobs available to them) in that field made the price of their education seem inflated. So, my question to The Dope is do you think certain majors shouldn’t be offered. Why or why not? If so, which majors?
I’ll post my opinion after others have replied.
The problem isn’t whether or not majors should be offered or not, the problem is with guidance counselors.
The employment market is very fickle now. For many many years if you had a degree as a medical doctor, or a lawyer or certain types of engineering it was essentially your ticket to a life of high income employment. Then the modern world happened. Traditionally guidance counselors sorted the kids into no need for college and need for college. There was no shame in being blue collar. You could work an assembly line and be assured of a decent income and steady work. The kids who got sorted out for more education went on to become accountants and engineers, doctors, lawyers and teachers. You started in the mail room and worked your way up the employment ladder unless you got lucky and your father ran the company or you married the owners daughter.
The world changed, it got faster. Companies started being driven into moving out of the northern states into the southern states, then finally offshore. Jobs started changing, computers reduced the need for massive banks of typists in the secretarial pool, large numbers of file clerks. Mechanization eliminated manual line jobs. Shopping changed from ‘bankers hours’ to people wanting to shop at insane times like 2 am. Fast food stores bloomed because the 1 hour lunches were a thing of the past, people stopped bringing their lunches for a number of reasons, so at least there were mcjobs - but the comparative income dropped - it became harder and harder for one income to provide for a family. Electronic toys bloomed - everybody seems to have more than 1 tv, several ipods, game platforms, computers, household goods … closets full of shoes and clothes, new furniture and decorating because now you have to be stylish, everybody needs to live in an owned property as renting a flat for your entire life is evil, cars …
So you end up with all new educational needs. Get a job? Need at least a bachelors degree to just start. So they started pushing computer degrees, legal degrees, degrees in just about everything. Ask yourself - exactly how many lawyers do we actually need? How many computer game programmers and CGI techs do we really need? I will grant that we could use doctors and nurses … and medical techs of assorted types for staffing hospitals and labs. Hell we need plumbers and cable repair techs too, but what we don’t need is kids picking liberal arts and getting degrees in comparative flytying and the english sonnet of the 1700s. We need people with degrees in subjects for teaching our kids, not yet another football scholarship. We need people to get degrees in nonsexxy subjects to actually work nonsexy jobs. We need kids to not want to lay around smoking dope and drinking in college just to avoid going to work for another 4 years of enforced adolescence.
Well, of course, if someone wants to offer a certain course of study, and others want to take it, they should be allowed to have at it. My only concern is with ensuring that no one steps into it with misguided ideas about where it will take them. Don’t toss out courses of study if people want to take them, but do work to ensure people have all the best information available (about career path statistics or whatever else they might find relevant) when making their decisions about what to take, and then sit back and watch whatever change, if any, this has on the popularity of various majors.
Though, honestly, I think the tightness of the connection between one’s college major and one’s ensuing career arc is rather oversold anyway.
It seems like American culture is very caught up in the idea that more education is always better, even if you have to go into a significant debt for it. High school students need to hear
stories like these about people who went into huge amount of debt for degrees that really did not pay off before they make the decision to go for that psychology degree at an expensive private school.
Going to an expensive private school might be worth it in some situations (like if you can afford it without going to debt or you’re going into a career where the name of the school you went to or the connections you made in school will make a big difference in your career track) but for most people it doesn’t make any sense really, especially with the degrees that are “useless”.
Sadly, the reality is that many of the things that a lot of people find fun to study (like art, psychology, etc.) aren’t going to help you find a job and therefore probably are not good majors unless you have a massive trust fund. Yet pointing that out makes many people offended and defensive.
I feel like student loans have become kind of a scam.
I really see this at the higher levels among people who have already completed a bachelor degree. There has been a lot of coverage over the last few years of how jobs for lawyers are stagnating and going to law school is probably not a good investment for a large number of the people who do it. Yet there are so many people who have not been able to find decent work with their bachelor degree and decide to take on law school because “Everyone knows that lawyers are all rich”. Then they graduate with massive loans they can’t pay off.
Since you can’t get rid of student loans in bankruptcy, there is no reason for lenders to care about your job prospects after graduation. Tuition costs keep rising at schools because they know there is an ample supply of loan money and plenty of people who will jump at the chance for more and more schooling. After all, if you can just get enough schooling, surely there will be a pot of gold at the end!
I don’t know if you can really force people not to major in things, but I do think that many students would be better off if availability of student loans were more tied into the actual likelihood of being able to get a job that you could actually pay the loans off with.
The most important things to get out of college are a good GPA and internships. If you have those, the details of your major are largely unimportant unless you’re looking at a job that requires specific technical knowledge.
This is the absolute truth. Unless your degree is largely vocational (engineering, nursing, architecture, etc.), you will very likely not be working in a field related to what you studied.
The tricky thing about tying loans into the ability to get a job or eliminating majors that seem to have bad prospects is that finding a job depends on so many other factors than a student’s major. As ultrafilter noted, most people work in jobs that aren’t related to their area of study unless they studied something technical. Someone who studies the job market, picks a realistic career path, gets a solid GPA, and does relevant internships is going to find a job whether his or her major is computer sciences or Latin. Someone who doesn’t do anything to distinguish themselves from the competition, doesn’t think realistically about the job market, and isn’t willing to do what they need to get an entry-level job is going to have a much harder time whether he or she majored in business or philosophy. People who have “useless” majors just get to have an excuse later.
Well, it’s not just the grades and the connections. It’s learning how to think critically and engage in complex discourse in creative ways. If you can demonstrate this ability, many employers aren’t going to quibble about what your specific major was.
How are we to define “related,” though? If you major in chemistry, for example, but end up working for an environmental projection group, is that not related?
Who gives a shit?
Yes, exactly. A major is not a career, and except in a handful of vocational fields like the ones mentioned above, it’s not supposed to be a career. Likewise, not every career maps onto a specific undergraduate major; despite the current proliferation of undergraduate degree programs in things like Office Management and Paralegal Studies, most of the people in generic white-collar office jobs studied subjects that are all over the map. This doesn’t mean their undergraduate degrees were useless in getting those jobs, just that there isn’t normally a direct one-on-one correspondence between major and work. The idea that there is supposed to be such a correspondence is relatively new. (And I’d guess that even among students who do major in a field with a clear relationship to a specific career, there are plenty who wind up doing something else, whether because the labor market has changed, or because they simply didn’t like what they started off doing.)
That’s not the question. The point is that they can in fact be seen as “related,” depending on how you define your terms. That’s all.
We have had variations of this discussion before. Statistically, the numbers tend to bear out that the better educated you are, the better the school you go to, the better your GPA and the more technical your major, the more likely you are to find work, receive higher pay and find new work in the event you are laid off.
And yet, there are always some people who think that because some college graduates have some difficulty finding jobs (especially in a down economy), that education is a waste of time and that those students would have been better off being plumbers or carpenters or something.
We call them “professional” degrees. Engineering, architecture, medicine, accounting, law, etc are consider professions. Plumbing, refridgeration repair and electrician are “vocations”.
I think one of the problems is also that a lot of people really have no idea what people at companies actually “do”. “Work in an office” is not a job description.
There’s no such thing as an undergraduate degree in fly-tying or eighteenth-century sonnets. There are degrees in studio arts and English. Both are majors that make perfectly good sense for students whose talents and interests lie in that field, especially if they double-major in secondary ed. (Note, for example, that average mid-career salary for English majors is about on par with nursing and health sciences, and higher than public relations, human resources, web design, organizational management, criminal justice, and any number of other “practical-sounding” majors. History and philosophy majors are still higher on the mid-career payscale – above business. Fine arts majors tend to earn less, but then, those are the people who have usually made a conscious choice to prioritize other things over money.)
If you’re not going to be an engineer – and frankly, most people don’t have the aptitude or inclination to be an engineer – you could do a LOT worse than most humanities majors.
I think better careers guidance is key. Many eighteen-year olds are not mature or knowledgeable enough to make such a huge decision on their own.
Both my parents are illiterate and I was immature for my age; I picked something that was “interesting” and effectively useless. After hundreds upon hundreds of rejection letters, I started a professional masters degree, but that is expensive and everyday I regret the stupid decision I made when I was eighteen.
How are you going to get people to use the guidance that is there? Having worked in career services, I spend an ironic amount of time trying to persuade students to do something else if they’re looking at a liberal arts major because it’s easy or because they want to stay at a particular school rather than transfer to a university where they do the major they want, which is usually something like business or architecture.
A lot of good points were raised. For example, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink. 18 year olds aren’t usually all that good at making life choices. That’s why I think majors should be limited. I’ve heard over and over and over and over and over and over about the lawyer situation (on and offline). So, law schools should only accept the amount necessary to keep the field going. Another thing I think a lot of schools should do is only offer majors that will lead to a profession. If you to take classes in say sonnets that can only be your minor.
I think, though, that a lot of colleges need to weed students out better or make their requirements harder. Someone who is college to do the bare minium or chooses a major solely because they think it’s easy shouldn’t be in college. That causes part of the inflation of a degree.
No school offers a major in sonnets. If you’re going to make arguments, make sure your targets aren’t strawmen.
It was an example and there are majors that are equally as useless as that. I brought it up because others did as an example.
You know, even if this hypothetical major in sonnets existed, I’d dispute the assumption that it would be useless. Four years of intense, focused study of the nuances of language? Sounds like pretty awesome training for almost any career involving writing – and there are plenty of such careers, and a chronic shortage of graduates who can use language effectively and gracefully.
Now, I will say that majoring in a language-intensive field doesn’t guarantee that you’ll learn to write well, and there are students – and I’m thinking of one of my advisees in particular – who really are wasting their time majoring in English. But honestly, I suspect these people would be wasting their time no matter what they majored in. Most of the time, skills and character count more than the specific course of study.
That’s especially true here in the UK, we have to choose our major before we start school.
@Fionn
The careers guidance at my [special] school was a pile of university prospectuses in a corner.
Do you really want to live in a world where adults are not allowed to purchase a good or service because “they” (who is they?) have decided they don’t have the wisdom to make a sound choice? I mean, of all the tragically stupid financial decisions people make, I’m not sure that picking a less-applicable major even comes in the top ten.
Now, I agree that you shouldn’t major in a subject just because it was your favorite class in high school, or because you hate it slightly less than anything else. But there are plenty of people who have a degree in English or what have you and do just fine. Many of us are teachers, but there’s plenty of other professions out there where the ability to think and write clearly is a huge asset.
Furthermore, I wouldn’t regret my English degree even if it never played a direct role in my professional career again. The skills I learned as a humanities major have strengthened my marriage, my professional career, and I have high hopes that they will strengthen my skills as a parent. It’s how I learned how the world really works–not just how to do something. It’s enriched my whole life. I can’t imagine living without an aesthetic sense: it’s where joy comes from, and I learned that as a humanities major.
Now, I had peers who didn’t get any of that. They went to school for four years and read a bunch of books, and probably would have been better off majoring in nursing or engineering. But the idea that I should have been denied the chance to have the single most transformative experience of my life because they didn’t have the intelligence or the work ethic to take advantage of it is just silly.
That said, I’d advise any kid pursing a humanities major to have some sort of post-graduation plan: a teaching certificate, good internships, or plans for professional school. But I’d never say “You are not allowed to do this.”