Should universities restrict degrees in professions with few job prospects?

Great Debates
61

In most states, he is obligated to tell you if there are any defects (and liable for any which he didn’t know but should have prior to offering for sale. Apart from the legalities of it, don’t you agree that ethically and* morally*, sellers have an obligation to make sure the buyers know what they’re getting? And shouldn’t educators, of all people, strive to be highly ethical and moral salesmen, always erring on the side of full honesty and disclosure? What do you make of the multiple people in this thread that say they enrolled in college with highly inaccurate assessments of the value of their degrees; are they all outliers?
But the larger point is what was pointed out upthread: in most cases, it’s not a simple buyer and seller relationship, but third-party financing on the part of the taxpayer. If you want to pay $50kfor a car that’s only worth $20k, that’s your right, but no bank is gonna give you a loan for it. Same story with trying to buy a house for more than the appraised value. Same story with pretty much any purchase paid for with third-party financing: the third party is going to exercise discretion before doing the financing.

Unless, that is, the purchase is college and the third-party is the federal government. In eyes of the Department of Ed, all students, all colleges, and all majors are equal: a 2.0 GPA student taking “General Studies” at a nonselective school that only graduates 10% of its students has the exact same creditworthiness as a valedictorian studying engineering at MIT. Everyone on the planet knows that’s not the truth, but we pretend otherwise because we don’t want to crush anyone’s hopes.

That’s a noble sentiment, but as the housing market collapse demonstrated, there’s a price to be paid by all of us when we allow large numbers of people to take on more debt than they can handle. The average student loan debt for a bachelor’s degree is now about $25,000; that’s $300 a month until your mid-30s. Workable if you’re that MIT engineer, ruinous if you’re trying to live on what that General Studies degree gets you. And of course, there’s the 25-30% of people with student loan debt who wind up never getting a degree at all.

And to state the obvious: the people most apt to be exploited by this are those who do not have parents with an understanding of how college financing works, what the professional job market is like, and the realities of budgeting. It’s the poor and minorities will get screwed the most.
Yeah, college has enormous value aside from it’s investment value: you learn a lot about the world and the meaning of life, you have important experiences, you meet cool people, you go to great parties; if nothing else, you’re fed and sheltered for four years. And when people are spending their own money, they are well advised to take all those things into consideration.

Taxpayers, however, generally think of their money going to higher education as intended to produce the next generation of productive citizens, not to financing the self-discovery years of the (comparatively rich) segment of society that chooses to go to college.

Thus, while universities aren’t trade schools and have a value aside from their ROI potential, the taxpayers who are doing the third-party financing aren’t going to care, any more than a mortgage broker is supposed to care about the fact that the house you want to buy at a price higher than its appraised value is just the right color and is perfect for your kids.

Either its a good use of other people’s money, or it’s not. And with default rates edging toward 10%, it’s fair to say that we’ve been writing some bad mortgages.

62

I think the problem with trying to treat a college education like a car, or even a house, is that it’s not a one time purchase, and most people end up with an entirely different product than what they originally paid for.

jtgain suggested above that his niece should “decide what she wants to do, and get the degree that works best in that career field.” That’s great advice for a kid who knows what they want to do, but pretty useless for most of us.

I can count on one hand the number of people I went to college with (or am now attending grad school with) who finished with the same major they started with.

63

What happens to people with advanced degrees in Philosophy or Classics? These fields have been shrinking for years-will they disappear one day?

64

I understand, but in the next year or two, she needs to really figure it out. Pissing around for 4 years and getting a general studies degree won’t help her at all.

Plus, taking a few classes in a subject really doesn’t give you an idea of what type of job you will hold in that field. I’ve always been fascinated by astronomy, for example, and I loved astronomy class.

Does that mean that my summer nights would be filled with beer and looking up at the stars? (Well, they are, but I don’t get paid for it. :wink: )

I’m not trying to pressure her, but the decision she makes in the next few years will determine if she has a career as a professional at a comfortable lifestyle, or if she will be a wage donkey barely scraping by. She can always go back to school (like I have) but that is a thousand times harder than doing it right the first time, and in some cases impossible.

65

Will they disappear? Hardly. There will be educational opportunities in philosophy until the robots take over. There will be educational opportunities in the classics forever.

I don’t know what Latin scholars do for work here, but Oxford and Cambridge used to send something like a third of their baccalaureates on their way with degrees in Greek and Latin. They mostly did fine in careers completely unrelated to the classics, because then, as now, most undergraduate degrees confer minimal benefit in terms of preparation for actual jobs.

No, but it won’t matter much if she pisses around for two years. That’s what Gen Ed is for. :slight_smile:

Meh. Not really. I think you and I view our back-to-school experiences differently, but I was immature and woefully unprepared for graduate school when I finished college. I would have been able to sleepwalk through most of my classes, but I wouldn’t actually have derived much benefit from them.

Sure, being in a grad program when you’re thirty is harder than doing it when you’re 23, but neither of us is ever going to bitch and moan about a 70-hour work week.

66

I’m not sure how many people gain a degree and then go on to work in that particular field anyway.

I would imagine most degrees are fairly transferable.

Ultimately who know what the job market will be like in a few years time?

People have to make their own choices about their future, not someone deciding numbers.

I expect young people are more aware than you give them credit for.

Guild Wars 2 Ranger

67

Trade and professional associations- though their assessments should always be taken with a grain of salt, because they have a vested interest in keeping the level of competition down.

68

Even the most practical college degree is going to involve some element of risk. A student twenty years ago might think she was on the cutting edge of global change with a degree in Information Systems Management, a handful of Microsoft credentials, and a minor in Japanese. A few laters, and those qualifications were not in high demand.

In the meantime, all kinds of new things popped up. Languages once considered niche, like Arabic, Farsi, Pashtun and Chinese are in demand, and Japanese is the realm of anime geeks rather than the language of high business. Computer Science rocketed up and for a short time kids were graduating into amazing jobs, and then it fell down with outsourcing. In the meantime, journalism died and the previously unknown “social media specialist” suddenly because a key part of any modern business.

Some of us will guess right. Some of us will guess wrong. Some us will make all the best choices, and still end up screwed. Others will make what seems like horrible choices and hit streak of good luck. There are a few skills that will always be in demand- good communication, solid writing, comfort with technology. But there is no guarantee out there that you can choose a major that will keep you comfortably employed for life.

69

Much ado about nothing. Many people end up in different fields than their college major. A motivated person can find a good career path regardless of their degree if they’re open to different opportunities. That’s not to say it’s easy or a given; it can be a painful learning experience, but experience it is, and it’s better to get it under your belt while you’re young and flexible. Having said that, some realistic counseling to help people understand the situation before they get their hopes up would be helpful.

70

The guidance counselors in my kids’ school were not only useless, they were worse then useless. They actively discouraged kids from applying to really good schools partially because they didn’t want them to face disappointment and partially because they went to mediocre schools and had no idea of how really good schools can open doors for you later. I feel for kids who depend on them.

My father couldn’t afford to go to my college and my mother went to one of the NY City colleges, and so neither had any idea of what universities you lived at were like. But they at least supported me in being willing to pay for the best school I could get into. Kids today have a lot more resources to research colleges than I did. Around here pre-application college road trips are common, something I could never afford.

71

Maybe so, but some paths are easier to traverse than others. At Berkeley, if you did not get admitted to the EE program there is no chance in hell you’d be able to switch to it later. And good luck going into engineering without an engineering or maybe physics background.

72

While schools should be legally required to disclose this information I think the problem is far deeper than that.

I do not have any objective data but from an anecdotal evidence, having interviewed job candidates for technical positions for almost two decades I have noticed a trend that concerns me. Note I am in the tech world so this may be extremely skewed.

Over the past decade I have noticed a larger portion of the college graduates seem to have put more weight in the actual degree than they did on learning the actual material. Meaning they crammed and dumped the data after they no longer needed it for tests.

IMHO the idea of hiring a college graduate is that they will have basic knowledge and reduce the cost and time required to train them.

I honestly don’t know people are selling it as a goal item to be checked or if that is how kids hear the message or if this is just my version of “get off the lawn”.

There is still value in an degree awarded unmarketable field, there are transferable skills but not if the process is treated as a means to an end.

73

It’s obviously preferable to get it right the first time, but it’s only crippling if she comes out of it with a significant debt load.

Being 25 with no marketable skills other than a degree in basketweaving is sub-optimal, but it’s not a lifewrecker; you can go back to school, learn a trade, go teach ESL in Japan, join the Peace Corps, etc. Or just live in a crappy apartment making $10 an hour at a McJob until you find yourself. My BA was functionally useless, but I eventually got a more useful graduate degree, and now I’m going back for an even-more-useful different graduate degree. Law, Business, Policy … lots of graduate programs are full of 29 year olds that took liberal arts as undergrads and only later realized their undergrad degree had no career path.

Being 25 with no marketable skills other than a degree in basketweaving and $25,000 in student loans – now *that *is a problem.

74

The purpose of schools of any type is to teach. Unless they have explicitly promised their students jobs post-graduation, then no, I don’t think they are olibated–ethically or otherwise–to give them a disclaimer about the marketability of their degree.

The comparison with full disclosure at the auto dealership doesn’t hold. The salesman isn’t selling you a hunk of disconnected pieces of machinary, but rather a functioning automobile. So it’s fair for a person purchasing a car to know just how “functioning” the car is. But even still, the salesman isn’t obligated to warn you about every defect in the car. They don’t have to tell you that the transmission’s only got another 200 miles on it before it craps out. If it lasts 30 days (or whatever the time limit is in your state) after you drive it off the lot, he or she is in the clear. If the transmission goes out after that, well, that’s on you.

It would be nice if universities cleared up any misconceptions from jump-street and told their students, “Hey, if you’re looking for us to hook you up with a career, go down the street to Devry or the Culinary Institute. All we can promise you here is an education.”

But I don’t think they should be obligated to warn their students about career options…because once you step down this path, you invite nightmarish levels of litigation. What if I decide to study engineering because of a well-intentioned warning against studying the classics, and I end up pouring coffee at Starbucks? The university didn’t warn me this was going to happen! What if a professor dissuades me from getting my basketweaving degree and the year before I am to graduate, basketweaving appears in Newsweek as the most hot degree on the market, with entry level basket-weavers bringing home six figure salaries? Bamboozled and led astray, I was.

Parents should have sober, non-sugar coated rap sessions with their kids about career and financial decisions, I agree. But universities shouldn’t be obligated to do this. Just like they shouldn’t be telling students when to go to bed at night. They are grown-ass people. Let them sink or swim as grown-ass people.

75

[quote=“Voyager, post:57, topic:625736”]

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 :slight_smile: ) and his practice is already ahead of what people told him to expect in terms of billings. "
The fact is that there is no way to tell how many members of his class are working as attorneys or not because such statistics are not usually available, but even if they are he went to a top 25% school. What about the bottom 75%? What about for profit law schools? What about unaccredited law schools? Who is footing the bill for all of them? Not everyone can afford to open a practice.

I once taught at a trade school where graduates had to pass a background check to obtain employment, those with felonies being automatically eliminated. The salespeople at this school would routinely sell the classes to anyone, including felons, who would show up for class. The school got the tuition from federal loan programs and the students got “free” Pell grants.

When the government is involved in the financing of an education, the value of that education should be something that everyone agrees on. I routinely pass a Community College on the way to one of my daily activities. On its announcemnt sign, next to the highway, it has posted the difference in financial earnings, over a lifetime, between those with and without a 2 year degree. It certainly sounds like a trade school to me.