Actually, the labor department predicts the number of journalism jobs to grow 10% from 2010 to 2020. Print papers may be declining, but online and broadcast media are booming.
And fwiw, there are tons of college majors (and courses) which don’t correspond to the job market.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is part of the Department of Labor, the jobs outlook for “Reporters, Correspondents, and Broadcast News Analysts” in the period 2010-2020 is a 6% decline.
How about Lysenkoist biology? Due to political factors, it was declared to be the official science of biology in the Soviet sphere for a period of several decades. So a generation of biologists being educated in the Soviet Union and places under Soviet control were educated in Lysenkoism.
How was a university like Oxford organized in 1530? Or 1730? If there were no degrees as we know them today, there still had to be a defined and structured system to define what was taught, right?
There were professors, and there were students who paid them fees for the privilege of learning from them. How did a student prove that he was worthy of sitting at the feet of a scholar? And how did the professor decide that the young man was a satisfactory student? I assume that the equivalent of modern tests was simply what we call today an oral exam, like a defence of a dissertation. But was it a formal process, in front of a jury of professors? And were there “grades” given?
When, say, Isaac Newton went to Cambridge, what was the admission process? And how long was a student expected to stay at the university?
Does UC Berkeley still grand degrees in “Magic”?
For a really short answer, when university classes began, they were much more like what we would consider to be “intensive tutoring.” There wasn’t really much in the way of standardization as far as required hours of classes or what had to be taught. Medieval times were when all that standardization started to happen.
Cambridge actually has a nice little history lesson section on their university website: A Brief History of the University starting with the earliest records of the teaching institution, going through the Medieval teaching period, on down to modern times.
Their information is pretty standard (although not particularly detailed) and matches what I know about universities in England. I don’t know anything about schools elsewhere.
(post #7 to this thread)
(post #11)
Haven’t you forgotten to give us some examples of what you consider to be
the article’s deficiencies?
I do not see anything glaringly wrong. A few items on the list, such as “Out of Asia”
may less decisively ruled out than other theories, such as Caloric.
That does not make the article inaccurate, misleading or dubious, though.
This is what came to mind when i read the thread title. I met a fellow once who was an economist, educated in the Soviet Union. He left the airplane in Goose Bay on the way back to Cuba and was working as a labourer in the mines here in Canada. His training was basically meaningless.
OTOH, there are probably still such courses at Havana U until Fidel and Raoul pass on. I assume China has given up… not sure if N. Korea really cares to educate economists.
Would phrenology count?
We can always count on you for an in-depth and sophisticated contribution to any discussion about academics.
The academic training in economics one received in a communist country wasn’t necessarily completely useless after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Some economists did make the transition to capitalism, like Leszek Balcerowicz (although he also studied in the United States).
I also recall that subjects like operations research and other fields with a lot of math were somewhat similar to economics as taught in the West.
Well, some medieval universities, famously the University of Bologna, were organized as corporations or societies of students, who hired professors to teach them. How exactly you joined the society of students, whether you had to prove yourself worthy to them or if they’d take anybody with money, I’m not sure.
I don’t think it’s really waning, but the field has been split up into various disciplines. Very few people call themselves “geographers”, but a lot of universities still offer it as a degree. People that work in any kind of land-use planning, large-scale land management, cartography, photogrammetry etc. usually have a degree or at least a minor in geography.
An acquaintance of mine took a geo. degree and set himself up as a consultant to state political parties; advising on redistricting plans, doing demographic surveys, laying out coverage plans for campaigns, etc.
Philology in the 1800s gave way to Linguistics in the 1900s.
As I understand it, philology is more of a taxonomic discipline. Categorizing languages, describing them, noting their differences, their associated cultures, etc.
Linguistics is much more of a science, with overarching theories about the nature of language in general, their histories, and their effect on human thought and behavior.
Both studies require learning a lot of languages, however.
There are certainly people trained in such law, at least in my own church (RC). Some Catholic universities grant the Doctor of Canon Law degree, holders of which may be judges on (or perhaps represent people or causes before) the Roman Rota or the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura.
Is herpetology obsolete in favor of studying reptiles and amphibians separately?
I’m not a geographer and couldn’t tell you how many people choose to do a degree in Geography or what the job market is like for these folks, but the field does include (at least) two areas of study that are pretty important today: the effects of climate change on the landscape, and geographic information systems. It’s not all just filling in the names of countries on maps.
According to this Wikipedia entry, Isaac Bonewits is the only person ever to receive a degree in magic from any accredited university:
Notice that there was no department of magic nor was there necessarily anyone teaching courses on magic. Magic is something that seriously needs to be studied as a topic in history or religion. There have been many people throughout history who claimed to be magicians. Writing a definitive study on what they thought they were doing, how they were influenced by previous practitioners of (what was claimed to be) magic, and how they were received by other people of their time would be quite a major work. What Bonewits probably did was to get professors of history, religion, sociology, psychology, etc. to allow him to study magic from all of those perspectives and to allow him to create his own major. Creating your own major isn’t unknown. A number of universities allow you to do it if you can persuade them that the subject is something that seriously needs to be studied from the viewpoint of various academic disciplines.
Indeed, I know hundreds of people currently employed working in GIS right now.
Someone’s a tich sensitive about their magic degree…