Should universities focus more on programs that lead to specific career goals?

Great Debates
1

THIS is an interesting article where The University of Wisconsin wants to drop several liberal arts majors like say english, history, and philosophy, and instead focus on areas with clear career paths. Paths either in demand by the students or in assessing the labor needs of the local business community.

What I’m seeing more and more are colleges having to justify and show proof that their graduates are #1. getting jobs in that field and #2. how much they are making.

HERE is an example of a tech school in Mitchell South Dakota which shows 100% employment for its grads along with average income after 6 months. They also show the complete cost of the 2 year program.

Here is a similar program at Washburn tech in Topeka KS. They are not as detailed about income and jobs.

Now yes I know, my examples are small 1 or 2 year tech schools as opposed to major universities. But I’d like to ask, are you all seeing more colleges doing this?

Should universities be required to show how many of their graduates are actually getting jobs in the field and their incomes?

Will more schools drop liberal arts programs?

2

I was an English major. I learnt 3 things:

  1. You don’t actually read much great literature. The bulk of your reading is comprised of fatuous, nonsensical essays written by literary critics that generally aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.

  2. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, on an English course that you can’t teach yourself at your local library. In fact, you’d probably enjoy yourself considerably more.

  3. While an English degree is better than no degree, a mediocre computer science degree is worth ten times as much as a first class English degree.

I absolutely believe universities should focus more on majors which lead to clear career paths. If such focus had been present 20 years ago, I might not be suffering such profound buyer’s remorse today.

3

Students interested in just getting employment are welcome to go to trade and vocational schools. That’s their focus.

Universities should be about education not jobs. How the student chooses to apply their education is on them. I know heaps of people with degrees who ended up in careers unrelated to their degrees, who still say their education had value for them.

(Oh, I also know someone with an English degree who now heads an large international publishing house, so your experience isn’t everyone’s.)

If someone spends their dollars and time getting a degree, any degree, thinking it’s def gonna get them the job they want, they haven’t been paying much attention, in my opinion. Very unrealistic expectation.

University students are adults and they alone are responsible for their choices. Universities offer education. Being able to translate that education into employment lies with the student, not the teacher or school. If interest in the courses drop off, they WILL drop them. But if people are still sufficiently interested to pay the fees and put in the time, then they should keep the courses.

We already have vocational schools and trade schools. There is no need to change universities to duplicate entirely job focused learning, in my opinion.

4

I thought the same with many courses offered in college. For example: History of Jazz. 100 students taking a 3 credit course which back 30 years ago was $300 (now probably $900). Most of the class was watching videos and taught by a grad students and what do they get? Not a damn thing they couldnt learn from reading a book.

But I woudnt totally diss your english degree. Just by reading your post I can tell your a much better writer than I am.

5

I will have to disagree with your statement that university students are adults.

Ok, they may be over 18 but are they really ready to take on a $100,000 responsibility? Thats the amount they often take out in students loans to get an education. Heck no bank would loan an 18 year old that amount of money, yet we let them do it with their education.

I also remember just a few years ago those “adult” students were being pushed to take out credit cards with $10,000 credit limits (which many quickly ran up) at enormous interest rates. They were totally not ready to handle that amount of financial responsibility.

I think that students should sit down with counselors and parents and told flat out what such and such degree field will 1. cost and 2. expected employment. Before being allowed to take out a student loan they should also get clear counseling about just how this will affect their financial future including how much they will be paying each month on this loan and how many years it will take them to pay it off.

Then go over the math. If say a loan will be $400 a month payment for 10 years and the expected income for that major will be $2,000 a month, they might want to think twice about it.

Plus they should get the hard facts about employment in that major. For example their might only be a 40% employment rate in that field and it might only be good in California.

6

When I was in college and was taking out loans, I had to go through a computer program before it got approved that explained all of this and did the math and showed me what payments would be and how long I’d be making them. Granted this was 20 years ago, but they already had this kind of thing back then.

7

English degrees don’t provide what I would call a decent English education. If you were to devote yourself to reading the Classics for a year in your spare time, you’d learn a lot more about English literature than you would on a 3 year English course.

At no point did I suggest that it was. Also, I would imagine such a job requires proficiency in a great many skills not touched upon in a typical English degree.

Thanks for the compliment, but everything I learned about writing I learned from reading great authors and essayists. Most of that I did on my own time after leaving university. The stuff I read during my course was mostly awful.

8

But would you still say the same if that History of Jazz class had been taught by someone who was both an experienced musician and a great teacher, in a class that was small enough that you could personally interact with that teacher? Just because something was done poorly doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing well.

9

The truth is there ARE councillors, at the uni, at the high school. Do you imagine pressure from parents and peers to select carefully is not already rampant?

They ARE adults. Because we’ve decided, as a society, that’s when they can make their own choice. Debt, marriage, go to war, etc. If they have to pay the debt then *they *should get to make their own choices, I think.

What you are referring to falls into parenting largely, in my opinion. But even without parenting a young adult would be foolish NOT to investigate such concerns. If they fail to get the parenting, access the available counseling, or do their own research, well, as unfortunate as that may be, it’s still their choices to make and live with, I’m afraid.

10

I would say: yes, we need to push in a more vocational direction.

That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with the traditional degrees. Nor do I think there’s anything wrong with arts degrees.
I know it’s something of a cliche (certainly it would have made me rolleyes when I was younger) but I think university isn’t about what you study in most cases. It’s more a test of being able to manage yourself and your time, push through topics you find boring, and solve other problems you will encounter. And these things are good predictors of how successful you’ll be in the workplace, even if the topic you studied was 17th century french poetry.

But:
I think it’s in society’s interest that students are studying something they are passionate about. I think there’s huge scope for converting some percentage of students who are just doing broad degrees because they don’t know what options are out there, to studying towards a specific career that they can be really enthusiastic about. Good for the student and good for society.

11

In answer the the OP, broadly no, I think there are already enough vocational degrees around, and there are many jobs which don’t neatly fit into a degree course.

Doing a more general degree might not train you for a particular role, but it does train you to think and give you options - there’s vanishingly few people who, at 18, know they want to work in PR, or as a copywriter, or as a business consultant for KPMG, or in HR for an international Bank, or in marketing, or journalism, or brand strategy, - heck, at 18, you won’t know half these jobs even exist - but an English degree from a respected course will open your future to all of these possibilities and many many more besides.

12

There was a time when part of going to college was taking the time “to find yourself”. Now, unfortunately, few can afford the cost of the “search”.

With the cost of education being what it is, one needs to already have in place a concrete purpose and plan before entering the hallowed halls of higher learning. Once there, one needs to take the courses that are going to directly benefit one’s educational goals. I, for one, wouldn’t want to pay hundreds of dollars per credit hour for a Humanities course when I’m working towards a career in IT. If I’m an art major, I don’t want to endure College Algebra.

13

Yes, and, if your education is focused on training you for a specific job, what happens if, thanks to technological advances, that job no longer exists (at least in the form you trained for)? Or if there are way more people who trained for that job than there are job openings? Or if you decide you hate that job and want a change? Or if you decide after a while you want to move up into a management role within that industry?

Ideally, a college/university education would accomplish four things:

  1. The process of becoming educated would be enjoyable and interesting.
  2. You would be equipped to find a job at which you can earn a decent living upon graduation.
  3. You would be equipped to have a fulfilling career (or series of careers) throughout your life.
  4. You would be equipped to lead a satisfying, fulfilling, “examined” life outside your job, and to be a thoughtful and intelligent member of your society.

A liberal arts education, or the liberal arts portion of an education, purports to be useful for #3 and #4, by teaching you things like how to learn, how to think, how to research, and how to express yourself.

ETA: #2 is important, and colleges should not neglect it. But students’ ability to find a decent job right after graduation is going to depend not only on the type and quality of their education, but also on the strength of the economy and job market when they graduate.

14

(Note, by the way, that the OP misrepresents the scope of this administrative proposal. It’s not the University of Wisconsin as a whole that is suggesting the dropping of 13 non-career-specific majors, but rather one of its 11 campuses, UW Stevens Point. As the article notes, this is in line with Republican politicians’ attempts to weaken liberal arts at UW, because they don’t like the progressive principles that frequently accompany liberal arts education.)

This in particular. Especially given the rapid pace of technological change and the volatility of careers in today’s developed societies, it seems very strange to me that anybody would be suggesting that young people should invest huge chunks of money and four years of their peak intellectual capacity in a set of specific career goals narrowly focused on the current state of the job market.

Now, there’s a lot to be said for increasing college students’ specific job qualifications along with their college education, and I would be glad to see more comprehensive internship programs and employment counseling as part of the college experience, for example. But trashing humanities, arts and social sciences in favor of short-term vocational training is not going to be good for universities or their students in the long run.

True, but then there’s also absolutely nothing in, say, a mathematics or physics or computer science major that you can’t teach yourself online. Same goes for the marketing and management and graphic design majors that the UWSP administration is pushing.

Certain types of lab science and engineering majors might be less feasible for autodidacts due to difficulty of access to the necessary equipment. But the majority of college majors, in all fields of knowledge, contain no information that can’t be self-taught by somebody sufficiently capable and dedicated.

15

I can see $140k of debt for a major that has a lot of jobs like STEM fields. I think that amount of debt makes very little sense for a field like English. I’ve read about people 60 years old and still paying off college loans.

there is an idea that student loans are what enables the schools to keep jacking up tuition beyond the rate of inflation. That makes sense to me. If they limited student loans it could help to reduce tuition.

16

Why wouldn’t a school that teaches, PR work, copywriting, business, HR, marketing, journalism, or brand strategy be better for the students than one that just teaches English?
As long as the students are in a college, why not have them learn something useful?

17

When I started working as a university professor, three years ago, I realized how university education, at least in North America, isn’t focused on fostering a culture of knowledge, but rather on gatekeeping. I’ll admit I teach in a small, primarily undergraduate, regional university, but it’s obvious that most students who take our courses are never going to be using the actual subject matter they learn. It’s just a hurdle they need to jump through to get the degree they need to do what they actually want to do, like work in a business, or study medicine. And then again, why is it that in most places in North America, medicine is a “professional” degree and you need a first degree to just be allowed to study it? It seems like a waste of resources to me. Of all the students I’ve had, it’s probably those who’ll teach my subject at the high school level that found my classes the most valuable, and even then the actual subject matter I taught probably wasn’t critical, since what they’ll precisely be teaching is different. Then again, I don’t think I needed a doctorate to do my current job properly.

I agree that for students who want a clear career path after their studies, technical colleges and trade schools exist. I feel that there is a certain bias against them in some quarters; indeed, I believe the reason why so many of our students want to study medicine is not because they actually want to work as medical doctors, but because of the prestige of being a doctor. But a technical or professional education should be considered as valuable as a university education. Right now, there are too many students in universities, which means the university system cannot be what it is supposed to be. But that’s a systemic problem, and there would be a lot of resistance to trying to change it. I mean, it’s almost certainly because there are too many students studying at the university level that I myself, as well as many other people, have a job.

But I do feel that education, even for those in the trades, should not only be focused on the needs of the job market. In my opinion, there is a certain basic culture that everyone should ideally be aware of. The world’s and your national history, for example, and how the political and economic systems work, some basic concepts of science, as well as of mathematics, and some understanding of philosophy and of how arguments are constructed. One might say it’s the job of high schools to transmit this basic culture, but some of it is not actually taught at the high school level. The University of Winnipeg recently introduced a requirement for all students to take one class discussing indigenous peoples. One might argue whether this was appropriate or not, but it makes sense that those living in Manitoba, a Canadian province with a large aboriginal population, should at least be aware that this population exists, and where it came from.

18

Why wouldn’t a degree training in something that (you expect) will be in demand also teach you to think? And it gives the option of working in your degree field, and ISTM you could equally well work at something else if you couldn’t find a job in that field.

I don’t see why an IT major would make you less qualified to be a business consultant or work in HR for a bank than an English degree. If the point is that you have demonstrated the motivation and effort to get a degree, then if you get an IT degree you have demonstrated that, and you also have a much greater chance of getting a job in IT.

Regards,
Shodan

19

I agree that is probably part of it but I see nothing wrong with the school trimming off some of the less popular and yes, less productive majors and then focus their resources on creating a school more trimmed down with the focus being on programs that lead directly to careers and employment.

Now its not like students wont learn english. They will. They just wont be able to major in that at that school. They can always choose another school.

I mean, does a college NEED a full history, philosophy, and english department? Remember every department means teachers, department heads, assistant department heads, buildings, support staff, and other general overhead. When all they really need is teachers to teach those subjects. They dont need to be doing research or writing papers and all. With such a new approach they wont need full professors. They will only need cheaper adjunct. When I was in college my english teachers had just masters degrees or were grad students.

BTW, what good are “progressive principles” when it leads to $100,000 of debt and no clear job skills? Does a college HAVE to fund such “progressive” departments like gender studies when such a program shows so little chance of career potential?

20

I feel like this conversation starts and ends here. The point of universities are to teach liberal arts educations and students who don’t want that shouldn’t enroll.