I did a series of practical degrees at university, but took several elective liberal arts courses in topics of interest to me.
Although this turned out okay, the reality is I had very little idea about university or necessary real world skills before going. I never met with a guidance counsellor nor were my family and friends worldly enough to make informed choices.
Universities should offer a broad range of degrees, as they currently do. It wouldn’t hurt to have employment and income statistics, but when you’re young enough I’m not sure how much these would sway decisions — maybe students are more focused these days. They could offer much more guidance before university.
Nothing wrong with any specific degree. And something to be said for mixing practical courses with humanizing ones. If any change, make any degree a little more flexible. Even in my day, it was clear computers were going to be important. Of course, they taught us Fortran 77 instead of the C++ that would have been useful.
Well if you are so darn curious and obviously cant think of nothing else, 1. it was 32 years ago 2. I knocked out comp 1 and comp 2 in an 8 week summer session 3. I tend to be in a hurry when i write.
This is all I’m asking. for the colleges to design programs to help students get started into careers plus give accurate information about jobs and income Both locally and nationwide.
I think the youth of today, and their parents, are looking at this pretty close. They both look long and hard at whos hiring and potential costs.
Oh, btw, lets not forget parental support. For example, I know a young man who went to college and got a degree in theater. He lives in Chicago now and is able to support himself fulltime in the theater world BUT, big difference is 1. his parents paid for college so he has no debt 2. his parents initially paid his bills like rent 3. it took him about 3 years working part time jobs and getting established in acting before he is now to the point where he can fully support himself.
And I know another young man who recently completed his degree in journalism. Now he knew he had little chance of actually getting a good job in journalism but he did know his parents could get him a job working at the USDA here in Kansas City where they both worked.
We have people whose college days were a lot longer ago than your’s. (Along with those who never went in the first place). And yet, I’ve never seen such poor writing skills from them.
And why is it I “cant think of nothing else”? I find it really disturbing that someone who claims to be a school teacher, would have such attrocious writing skills, or complain about the state of education today. Pot, kettle, etc.
I was fortunate enough to attend a private college where the tuition for each term (semester) was a fixed amount. I was able to take any number of courses (within reason) each term that I felt competent to handle. Some terms I took seven classes. Charging tuition on a per class basis certainly places a lot of pressure on students to take the minimum number (and type) of classes to earn a degree or gain admittance to a graduate school. I think that’s a bit of a shame and society’s loss.
There are several professions (e.g., attorney, CPA, and others) where I feel pretty confident that a qualified high school graduate should be able to go on and take a three-year specialized curriculum to become licensed or certified to practice. I’m not trying to demean these professions, but they are a lot more similar to the “trades” than many people care to admit. Teaching or doing research in these areas should require further study and advanced degrees, but practicing them doesn’t require undergraduate art or history courses.
I think that’s pretty common (for full-time as opposed to part-time students) to charge tuition by the semester rather than by the class or credit-hour. Although that way, there may be some pressure on students to finish in the minimum time possible.
I’d want to hear the perspective of people within those professions. But I (perhaps naively) thought that attorney was one profession where there was an advantage to having some familiarity with as many different subjects as possible. For example, having studied art might come in handy if you had a case or client involved in the art world.
This is one of the weirder comparisons I have read lately. The author is comparing the non-typical with the typical, finding that the non-typical still under-earns, and wants to use that to argue that English is just as good as business.
Not to mention all those english majors should now be asking “where’s my million dollar check?” because professor GotMyMoney said I would make a million bucks more than if I had just stayed in high school.
I don’t think you read the linked article correctly (or as you might put it, you obviously didn’t major in English). The author is not trying to argue that “English is just as good as business” in terms of average overall earnings for its graduates.
What the excerpted section is getting at is what the therein-quoted economics professor described as “Students and parents have a pretty good idea of what majors pay the most, but they have a poor sense of the magnitude of the differences within the major”.
In other words, the article is debunking the common stereotype that all business majors, say, end up driving BMWs while all English majors end up scraping by on waitressing and welfare.
The reality, as the author explains, is that 60th-percentile lifetime earnings for English majors are nearly as large as 50th-percentile lifetime earnings for business majors. That is not in any way claiming that the two fields are equal in their average earnings potential. The point being made here is just that the differences between them are much less drastic than is popularly supposed.
The small liberal arts school my daughter has chosen has no foreign language requirement and your math requirement is “logical thinking” - which means you can get by with logic or computer science or even econ. You need eight “general ed” requirements - that’s one a semester. And you can meet some of them within your major.
And on the topic of preparing you for a specific career goal…I was recently in a conversation about how wonderful “The Good Place” is. The writers on that show obviously have well rounded liberal arts educations - you can’t write accurate and funny jokes about Kant without knowing about Kant. Now, there aren’t a ton of jobs for TV writers, but when I went to college a lot of my female classmates from high school went to secretarial school to pick up the skills needed for a specific job. Several became travel agents. They are still 20 years from retirement and have functionally useless educational backgrounds at this point in time. My Art History degree didn’t get me a job as an Art Historian (I never even pursued such a job), but I still did ok, and the skills I got in being able to analyze, critique, and communicate developed into a nice career.
Most states have ways to keep your debt burden down. Many states have some sort of dual enrollment program - where high school kids earn college credit for free through community colleges (or even private four year schools in some states). AP Coursework - and a good grade on the AP test - will get you college credit. It isn’t uncommon for high school graduates to have two years of college under their belt at high school graduation - without spending anything more than transportation costs. (One of my good friend’s daughter will graduate in May with her AA and she’ll graduate in June with her High School diploma. My own daughter has 17 college semester classes (between 3 and 4 semester credits a class) between dual enrollment, college in the schools and AP coursework and could enter a Minnesota State school as a Junior. My son, who graduated in the bottom half of his class, had college credit at high school graduation
From there, most states have reasonable public schools with reasonable in state tuition. There isn’t any reason why someone needs to have $100,000 in debt as an undergrad (and unless you take out private loans, you can’t GET $100k in debt as an undergrad - the government won’t give you that much money). Will you have debt - probably. You might also need to go to school part time and work a full time job and take more years to graduate than if you were able to go to school full time. The system favors students who can live with parents or someone else for free near a state school. And it favors students who understand and work the system.
One of the things that happens is that students decide they need to go to a private school - that probably means a tuition burden bigger than a state school. And private schools often don’t take all that credit from high school (state schools usually do - maybe not your state flagship). But those are choices we need to make sure seventeen year old kids and their parents understand. And its something they need to start working on long before their Senior year in high school - we started assembling those college credits when she was 13 years old - and if you are planning on your kid making it through the AP Calculus course, you start them on that path in sixth grade.
More on the burden of debt. One of the huge problem is the default rate from for profit schools - many of these schools offer those “useful” degrees in truck driving or graphic design or business. Yeah, NYU at $70k a year (and lots of theatre majors) has high default rates, but so does DeVry - which has STEM programs. Or University of Phoenix - which specializes in business degrees. The default rates at those schools are a lot higher than they are at Sarah Lawrence (which is a good school, but about as Liberal Artsy-Fartsy as they come).
Someone upthread suggested making lenders responsible. And they should be. If you want to save students from themselves - keep the English majors, but don’t offer them loans to go the the University of Phoenix or Bob’s Fly By Night Truck Driving School. And certainly don’t protect the corporations that are stupid enough to loan an eighteen year old kid $20k to go to DeVry to become an A+ certified PC technician.
You’re hitting the trade school issue now. I’m all for trade schools, but suggesting that a trade school is going to confer a legit 4 year degree is nonsense. The objective isn’t the same.
The idea behind a 4 year degree has more to do with learning how to learn, along with at least some amount of breadth showing that you know how to apply the skill of learning.
Lets remember that NO consumer product today gets created without the help of artists and others who have humanities degrees. And, the project teams creating new high tech products are certainly not limited to engineers.
In today’s fast changing job market it seems almost certain that someone with a solid 4 year liberal arts degree is at least as well and quite likely better prepared for the long haul than someone who managed to get a Computer Science degree.
I recognize that - but not all of these for profit high default schools are trade schools - University of Phoenix is a four year school - offers grad school programs even. The point I’m making is that a practical education is not necessarily a path to being able to pay off your loans - and that a bigger culprit than a liberal arts degree is a for-profit education.
Sounds like you didn’t enjoy your courses very much. Perhaps settling on English literature as a major was not the right path for you.
Bullshit. I wasn’t an English major myself – my undergraduate curriculum started with engineering and later switched to science – but universities’ requirements for a broad education forced me to take various liberal arts courses, including philosophy and English literature. I loved them both, and both left me with a lifetime of learnings, skills, and the ability to appreciate literature that I could not have hoped to achieve on my own. One English course I particularly remember was a first-year course dedicated to Shakespeare. Of course we’d had Shakespeare in high school, and I treated it just like all the other kids – dull monotonous drivel that we had to read, had to endure listening to boring recordings of, and had to write book reports about.
But the Shakespeare I was introduced to in university was a Shakespeare that I had never known before. The professor was no droning high school generalist: he was a Shakespeare scholar in his own right, boundlessly enthusiastic about the subject, and he turned me into a lifelong convert and fan, an appreciative attendee of Stratford festivals and avid reader. It never helped me earn an extra dime in my chosen career, but it enriched my life.
“Worth it” to who? “Worth it” in what terms? Money? Happiness? Most of the actual, tangible stuff you take away with a computer science degree becomes obsolete within a few years and in many cases close to useless after a few more. What stays with you for life are broad principles, ideas, and the power of critical thinking – in a word, education. People who have become successful based on CS degrees have generally just used it as a stepping-stone and entry pass to their careers, and have become successful by staying on a path of continuous learning. The same applies to just about any degree.
Universities are institutions of education, not vocational schools. Unfortunately certain specialized degrees that do generally lead directly to predetermined careers – for instance, advanced degrees like the MD or JD – have tended to foster the misconception that once you graduate with the appropriate degree, you’ve somehow magically been trained for a job for life. This isn’t true for any degree, and especially not for undergraduate ones. A university degree is, in logical terms, a (usually) necessary but not sufficient condition for a fulfilling career.
ETA: I’m not trying to argue with you specifically – many others have expressed similar sentiments, and I’m just responding with the thoughts that your comments prompted.
My husband is in IT - I am too, although I’ve moved on from an IT role. He works for one of the hardest companies to get a job at. He speaks at conferences. People request him specifically. He’s really well paid. His degree - Anthropology.
Somehow, his liberal arts degree hasn’t kept him from a successful career.
I know IT people who majored in Political Science, History, English. Art History, Economics, Sociology, Psychology. I know at least two with MLSs - they are really really good at databases, which really isn’t shocking when you understand what they’ve trained for. My experience in large corporations in IT over the past 30 years is that people with liberal arts degrees tend to get promoted more often, get more responsibility over the long term, and end up in positions of leadership over people who have CSci degrees. They also seem to be relatively flexible - moving from MCSE Systems Engineers to ITIL certified Service Now consultants - with more ease than their “job based educated” peers.
It does, however, seem to take them longer to find their first job - and they generally don’t work as developers.