Colleges don’t know what your odds are for getting a job in your field. Agree that they shouldn’t lie about past success rates of their graduates, but the odds of students getting a job in any particular field down the road is unknowable.
We actually do have that in this country, actually. Nothing preventing adults from continuing education.
Cite on the country that has such a “system”?
If I were a parent, I honestly wouldn’t know what to tell my kid so that I didn’t “sugarcoat” stuff. Don’t work hard? Don’t bother setting big goals for yourself? Don’t do whatever you want to do in life?
I don’t know what I would say if they wanted to study, say, English versus chemistry. On one hand, it’s a struggle getting a job as a writer. But it’s also hard to get a job in chemistry. What if they suck at math, but write beautifully? Why would I want to quash that?
I could tie my purse strings to them studying something marketable. But if they flunk out or absolutely hate it, then that’s a pretty poor investment. However, if I tell them they’ve got to foot the bill for their basketweaving degree and they struggle financially for the rest of their life because of it, that hasn’t benefited anyone either. I might even be accused of sugarcoating! So I don’t know what a parent is to do.
Thank you,
Some dude in the audience with absolutely no talent who really appreciated your talents.
Agreed, but like any investment you need some information or evidence to make as good of a prediction as you can about what the job market in your field will be like four years from now. Companies do it all of the time to make projections, and many times they are wrong, but they recognize that attempting to project is much better than shrugging your shoulders and hoping for the best.
I’m sure that all of us, at one time or another, have had lofty goals of being a professional writer, a musician, or a professional sports all-star, but we all realized that those goals were such an outside shot that we needed to find a career path as a back up that was more solid.
My niece starts college in the fall and she keeps wondering what she is going to “major” in. I keep telling her that she should decided what she wants to “do” in life, research the field, and then select a major based on the best path to get there. She thinks in terms of which classes she will like the best, looks up the professors online, etc.
There are plenty of slots for electives in undergrad to take courses in what you are interested in as a hobby or passionate about.
Some interesting responses here so far!
Like I said in the OP, I don’t for a moment think people should be stopped from studying purely academic things they want to pay for themselves, especially if they’re already aware that the job market for Manuscript Illumination more or less dried up around the time doubloons stopped being useful currency.
The thing is, universites are trade schools in many respects, at least here. You go to uni (so the theory goes), get a degree in Widgetry, then go and get a grad job at WidgetCo so you can become a professional Widgetologist and (maybe!) become the Executive in Charge Of Widgetry one day.
Obviously there’s the traditional academic and science stuff on offer too (and rightly so), but I believe the majority of undergrads are there to get a degree in something so they can get a job in that field, followed by a sizeable number who really have no idea what they want and are metaphorically killing time while they work it out.
Martini, if we’re going to say universities are things that they technically aren’t, then we can also say they are businesses, in the business of making money from students. Why should a university have a duty to inform customers about their potentially stupid buying decisions? We don’t have this expectation in other sectors.
You could argue they have a vest interested in seeing their students get jobs after graduation, because happy graduates make happy alumni. But let’s say you have 500 new basketweaving majors expected to enroll next year. You’ve got the faculty and staff to accommodate them. If you have a “straight talk” session with these students at the beginning of the year and half decide to bail out, do you turn to your faculty and staff and let half of them go? In the beginning of the school year? Won’t they want to kill you? How does this benefit the university? Especially if its reputation is based on its basketweaving program?
Thinking about it the value of a degree to society is subjective. What could perhaps be done however is to give a rating AAA, AA etc similar to Moodys. If you are borrowing money to study then you would get preferential rates for more ‘surefire’ degrees over the flakier ones, to reflect the borrowing agencies chances of being left holding the bag if the funds are not repaid.
FWIW: In the US, the Obama administration has enacted “gainful employment” requirements. Basically, colleges must show that their students are having some success in repaying student loans and/or getting jobs in their fields for the school to remain eligible for more federally-subsidized loans in the future. There are two big caveats, though:
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It only applies to “occupational training programs;” that is, degree or certificate programs explicitly targeted at job training. The unmarketable BA in Finnish Studies is not affected, as that is not occupational training. As a practical matter, this will only affect for-profit career colleges, not State U.
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The benchmarks are really low. Only the worst of the worst will be affected.
Still, it’s a first step. It will be very interesting to see if this principle gets expanded upon in years to come. I think it’s very likely that a second Obama administration will seek to tighten up #2; changing #1 will likely have to be done by a Republican administration.
Sure we do. I’m in the process of buying a house, and there are all sorts of disclosures that are required by law for such a major purchase. Similarly, many lemon laws require disclosure of any known problems.
In point of fact, colleges are already required to run through some disclosures; they are not, however required to do them in a way that makes sense to an 18-year-old. Especially if they’re coming from a family that has no higher education experience, a teenager wanting to go to college is about as vulnerable consumer as there is, making quite possibly the biggest and most important purchase of their life. If anyone on the planet deserves consumer protection, it’s them.
<— exhibit A.
I’m a first generation college student and I felt like I basically wasted my college years despite attending an Ivy. Even guidance counselors were useless (I presume because they want to limit legal liability or something) and largely offered tautological/obvious advice, which wasn’t what I wanted. Without any external guidance, you’re running blind and hoping for the best.
My main gripe is that I felt like I was lied to, in a way. College is such a monumentally huge purchase (and I had to do it on my own and take out lots of loans) but there’s this notion that it’s OK to take out shitloads of debt because “expected future income will compensate for it.”
Luckily, I majored in quantitative stuff so I was able to find a job, but I had plenty of rich friends who majored in fluffy things like Classics or English and were unemployed after graduation – but it didn’t matter because they were well-connected and could get employed whenever. That sort of caveat really does matter but almost nobody talks about it.
For people like me without a safety net – who grew up without external guidance – it’s dangerous to be surrounded by people whose advice is not in your best interests, and it’s so difficult to differentiate between good advice and bullshit. I feel like I took out a ton of loans for something I could have gotten for a fraction of the price, and I basically feel ripped off. Upset that nobody was looking out for me and that I couldn’t find the right information even when I tried my hardest for it.
Well, let’s see, which of my parents would have had useful advice about college choices: the man who nearly failed out of high school, did a stint in the Navy, and runs a general store in a 200-person town, or the woman who dropped out of college after a year because she hated her major (after HER dad told her she couldn’t go into anything but teaching, because that was the only place a woman college grad would get hired) and subsequently married my dad and managed a small-town general store?
Don’t get me wrong, they knew quite a bit about the world–and almost literally nothing about the world as it pertained to college graduates or the types of careers that required same.
I really wish my guidance counselor would have been halfway useful at least.
+1 to this.
Just a good, general rant in the direction of those “students” who merely want the degree without much effort:
STEM fields are not the magic answer to everything.
A BS in biology, for example, arms you with everything you need for a life of washing test tubes. If you do not plan to get a PhD, it is not a particularly smart career choice.
Then there is the simple fact that STEM jobs are so in demand because people with real quantitative talent are relatively rare. I promise you that you never want to drive across a bridge that I designed or take a drug that I researched- I’m so bad with numbers that I get tripped up with long division. If I had majored in a STEM field, it would be nothing more than a few months of agony and failure until I flunked out. That’s not good for anyone, either.
The truth is that the days when you get a skill, get a job, and put in your time until retirement are basically over in the US. Tomorrow’s workers will need to be mobile, globally competent, self-direct, and able to create opportunities for themselves be it through starting businesses, consulting, or finding ways to make themselves indispensable to their organization. The future of the American workforce is with jobs that play to the US’s competitive advantage in the global market place. And some of these jobs might not be in the US at all. Asia’s world class cities are ready to absorb a lot of skilled workers, and smart graduates will consider beginning their career abroad. After all, our own ancestors were not above moving towards economic opportunity.
I just wanted to point out that those of you who say kids who are bright enough to get into college should also be bright enough to know about real-world stuff are…off-base. There is a vast difference between booksmart and worldsmart, and not all of us were both at 18. And really the more time you spend in your books it correlates (not all the time, but still!) you will have less time to spend on street smarts.
So you may feel a certain career is good for you without really knowing what it will entail.
Another +1 to Zeriel’s comments. My aunts both got a degree in Hindi; spent her life being a PE teacher. My mom became a nurse in a desperate bid to emigrate to the States (it worked). My dad, only went as far as tenth standard in school (and probably bribed the officials even for that, as is done commonly in india).
Guidance counselors and their ilk just don’t go far enough. I had 400 people in my graduating class in high school. The smart kids don’t matter - I had straight As, so they figured I had my shit together. They worry about special ed or the problem children…rightfully so, but then that leaves us out in the cold.
So amusing to tell us to speak to an older adult for advice. I’m almost offended.
I believe there are a few from his class, but not that many and certainly not the 50% mentioned above. He started a practice because he is going to move when my daughter gets her PhD and finds a place to teach (in business - she’s not dumb 
) and his practice is already ahead of what people told him to expect in terms of billings.
I hire new PhDs, and I also hire interns from grad school, and they don’t seem very oppressed. However, they all work for professors I know who are good guys. My daughter is very happy. I was pretty happy in grad school also. Not that bad things happen - we have a friend whose advisor’s students tended to commit suicide.
But people who go for the degree and not because they enjoy doing research might well be making a mistake.
This happened to me! In the early 1980’s I went to a well respected private university in the US to study Architecture. In high school the field lookes as promising as engineering. I spoke to the recruiters who told me all sorts of tales how much their graduates were in demand. Shortly after my first year started the American Institute of Architects visited the school, concerned over how many architectes there were out in the marketplace without employment. What had been a 4-year program with a BA in Architecture at completion turned into a 4 year program with a BA in Fine Arts, concentration in Architecture and a new requirement for either two years of appenticeship or an extra year of college to complete the BA in Architecture and one year of apprenticeship. By the middle of my third year there was another change - requiring the fifth year of school and two years apprenticeship. People graaduating were having a very touch time finding work, most were not in their field. Those that were hired were making 1/3 what I was told they should be making by the recruiters. I left school to go elsewhere under a new major. Those who finished before me are typically no longer working as architects. Yes - the institution should ethically change the requirements to raise the bar, an wave off new people desiring admission into a floundering occupation.
Not sure about where you are, but we certainly do here. Contracts for the sale of cars, for example, come with a mandatory cooling-off period. Insurance contracts come with a complete Product Disclosure Statement which you are clearly advised to read and understand. As furt says, contracts for house sales are full of disclosures. There are other examples too.
And are you disagreeing with the premise that the majority of people studying an undergraduate degree in the Western world are doing it for some reason besides using said degree to obtain a job? Because if you aren’t, I really don’t see how that makes my statement that universities have become a form of trade school “Calling a university something it technically isn’t”.
Universities aren’t trade schools. Just because students have come to view them as such doesn’t mean that’s what they are.
High schools aren’t trade schools either, even though people attend them with the expectation that their diplomas will help them get a job.
And I disagree that informing students of the economic worthlessness of their degree is the same thing as signing a contract for a house sale. If I buy a house in a down-turning economy, in a bad neighborhood, the real estate agent isn’t going to ask me what the hell am I thinking. The bank isn’t going to tell me about my chances of turning out a profit. They have a vested interest in seeing how deep my pockets are, but they don’t have a vested interest in turning me away from their business. Same as if I buy a used car. The sales person is not obligated to tell me how fast my car will depreciate or how undependable it is. I know this because I just bought a used car.
If someone had told me, “Hey, monstro. You’re planning on studying ecology in grad school? Just what kind of job do you think you’re gonna get with that? An environmental scientist? Just like every other schmoe around here? You do realize that you don’t have a chance in hell of getting a job, right? You want to start your own consulting firm? You do know how much competition you’ll be dealing with, right? Do you really think you’re good enough? Do you really want to keep studying this? You don’t have to leave school. You can switch to engineering. You don’t like differential equations? Well, suck it up, hon. We gotta get you a job…”
I would have bailed from that school faster than a bat out of hell.