One of my racketball friends has a masters in Engineering and is an IT mainframe guru at Ford. He is waiting to lose his job in the next round of layoffs. He has 25 years of time in Ford and he expects to be on the street soon. Will he be marketable. ?
Engineers in India and China work for a fraction of American wages, Is a new American grad marketable. ?
When the admin says we need to graduate more and better engineers because India and China are graduating millions ,it is illogical and an insult. We can not compete internationally unless we want to drop wages by 3/4. We graduate very high quality engineers. To tell a new grad his knowledge is inferior to those in India is an insult.
What degree is a cinch for good job? Is college just an apprenticeship? Or. is there enough in just improving yourself to justify any college program?
Forbes just recently published their annual list of the 20 most lucrative college majors. Note that three of the top ten are liberal arts subjects (econ at #2, math at #7, and political science at #9). Perhaps marketability is not quite the issue that many people think it is.
Is maths considered a liberal art subject? I guess I don’t fully grasp the term. What would chemistry or biology be labelled as?
The liberal arts traditionally encompass the humanities (history, literature, the study of the arts), the social sciences (economics, sociology, political science, etc.) and the natural sciences (physics, biology, geology, etc.). Math is generally included as well.
ETA: Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of academic disciplines. The liberal arts are generally taken to be sections 2-4 and 5.2. IMO, computer science should be separated from software engineering and computer engineering and considered a liberal art, but that’s an entirely separate debate.
I think that a very good argument can be made that math isn’t a science.
Considering that what we call the sciences, now, are pretty much applied subjects, compared to the classical fields of knowledge from the medieval schools, it’s hard to argue that math should be considered a science. It’s a foundation of science, but math isn’t subject to the same sorts of tests that the sciences are. If, for example, someone comes up with an elegant mathematics that not only has no obvious correlation to physical reality, but actively contradicts known physical relationships, it’s still a valid mathematics, provided it is internally consistent. The theory can be everything with math, which is not the case with any science.
I am not saying that math isn’t vital to the sciences, nor that math cannot point directions for science to investigate, but the hallmark of science, that it be provable in the real world, is irrelevant to mathematics.
ETA: Of course if one does derive such a conter-to-reality mathematics, there will be scads of physicists running off eagerly to prove or disprove it, just to make sure.
Ironically, that’s just the sort of thing I look for when I interview college grads to work for me. Without fail the best Engineers we’ve ever had were the ones who worked full time while in school, even if they had a sub-3 GPA. The reason being that it takes a damn lot of maturity, discipline, work ethic, effort, and both a “get shit done and stop fucking around” and overall American-dreamism attitude to work full time while in Engineering school - one of the hardest degree programs there is, don’t let anyone pretend otherwise - and graduate with near a B average.
I’ll pick a 2.8 that worked full time and/or raised kids over a 4.0 any day for working on my team.
Without fail the worst Engineers we’ve had were the ones who took a year off to “find themselves” or backpack across Europe, etc. When we see that on a resume, it’s like the kiss of death; no one will even interview them.
Political science is the 9th most ‘lucrative’ degree?
Can’t say I’ve seen ANY jobs for “political scientist” advertised, EVER
Mostly, its a hangover from the old days, back when there was a ruling class in America, not the total meritocracy of today. A college degree meant, primarily, that your parents could afford to send you to college, that you were the “right sort”, and probably had useful “connections”. Hence, a college degree of any sort as a qualification for managerial or higher status employment provided a fig leaf for white, wealthy elitism, one could more easily pretend, with a straight face, that there was some sort of actual qualification involved.
That was why parents of my generation were so intent on getting a college education for their children, working class people who wanted their children not to be working class, but move on up, to the big time, deluxe apartment in the sky…
You really only think that obtaining a political science degree qualifies you to be a “political scientist”? Really? Are you even familiar with higher education? Your statements here indicate a huge ignorance of the basics of both the liberal arts as well as the job market.
You don’t read The Economist, do you?
Often 4.0 s are so competitive that they do not often work well with others. Group projects can become a battleground for moving themselves and their ideas to the front.
As the post above suggests, I wouldn’t be badmouthing the Liberal Arts peeps. They may have the last laugh.
I have the math/science degree(s)…and they’ve done me good. However at my current company we outsourse to India quite a bit. I think 80%+ of our ‘employees’ are Indian living in India.
4 years ago, I was told that, for my position, they don’t ever see themselves as hiring an American ever again. My position is essentially as a Statistician. That’s pretty math/sciencey…and is extremely vulnerable to outsourcing.
Now, I’m relatively safe…I hope…because I add value that India can’t as of yet. I have enough experience and social skills to be able to talk with clients…to help sell things…to give an appearance that our company is competent in these matters etc. I spend maybe a third of my time ‘doing’ and the rest ‘talking’ or ‘writing’. I certainly struggle with this but my competition is struggling even moreso…so relatively I come across as good with clients. I also write quite a bit…and the same thing (I’m not that good but the competition is not fierce)…except the company actually assigned me someone to ‘fix’ what I write 
She has a liberal arts background.
Would more liberal arts background help me with this? Most certainly.
What about the future? India at this time cannot compete with me on this client contact and writing. However, they are not stupid. They will get better over time as they get more experience and within a generation will be as good. I’ll be old/dead…but who come after me? They aren’t hiring more Americans so a ‘young me’ couldn’t get the experience.
So…engineers, statisticians, accountants etc…may be a few opportunity, low paying career option within 30 years and liberal arts students in demand. Who knows. Like I said…the last laugh.
In the generalist vs specific struggle…the specific trained people do better than the generalists overall…until the environment changes. Then the specifics die off and the generalists survive.
My suspicion is that more people go for a University degree than otherwise would, because it is seen as socially desireable.
The fear is that this leads to “degree inflation”: that obtaining a degree has become a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a whole host of occupations for which a degree is not really necessary. (“Fear” because this leads to a lot of people taking courses for which they have little interest, simply for the sake of having a university degree; which has costs).
On the one hand, a few years writing papers, doing research and learning stuff perhaps wholly unrelated to what you end up doing isn’t a bad thing; on the other, is that really more of a learning experience than (say) the afore-mentioned backpacking across Europe?
I do admit that writing papers is a very useful skill, and one that requires much repetition for most to learn.
To my mind, many taking university courses would be better-served by learning a skilled trade; but the class attractions of a university degree ensure that people uninterested in the topics continue to earn unremarkable BAs in middle of the road topics.
Well, duh! back atcha. There’s a limited pool of criminals. Lawyers don’t get paid while their clients are in prison. It’s in a lawyer’s financial interest to keep that door revolving. 
My goal was not to make the most money in the world, but to study something of interest to me. A college degree, regardless of major, signifies to many employers that the applicant has the ability to apply him- or herself and self-manage. Nobody but graduate schools has ever asked what I majored in. Graduate programs, even those in many specialized, applied disciplines, suggest additional post-baccalaureate courses or a master’s to good students with the “wrong” degree.
scrambledeggs, if you join you’ll be able to search for many previous threads on this topic.
Heh…just so you know I realize you smilied that. But I’m having an XKCD “Someone is WRONG on the Internet” moment…
Unless lawyers file appeals pro bono as a matter of course, they do indeed get paid while their clients are in prison…
As a quality auditor I get to sit down with scores of business owners and senior execs every year. When this sort of subject comes up, every one of them says exactly what you’re saying.
I’ve yet to read a training/qualification matrix or talk to a person who gave a damn what someone’s GPA was. I have seen hundreds and hundreds of job descriptions; while I have seen many that required a certain level of education, not once, ever, have I read one that said a job required a minimum GPA. Having the diploma matters, but beyond that they don’t seem to care.
But they are very, very wary of people who haven’t been working. That’s a big red flag. It would certainly make me suspicious. Volunteer, do charity work, mow lawns, work at Burger King, whatever; do SOMETHING. What the hell else are you doing all summer?
Actually, my liberal arts degree got me a job working in engineering. Because engineering documents need to be proofread and archived, too. Potential clients don’t like it when the concept designs for a contract are written shoddily and not up to blueprint specs and standards. And you’d be surprised how often engineers forgot their export control labels :smack:
I was making within 10k of fresh out of school designing engineers, and that was on my AA. If I had stuck around instead of going back to finish my BA I’d have moved into a comfy position in configuration management.
Of course now that I have my BA (Classics) I am going to be a lawyer, because I want to help people (I’m sure the heads of some people just asploded). For the present however I am working in publishing. So much for my hoity-toity and thoroughly useless liberal arts degree.
Because they couldn’t hack it in Engineering.
I taught English for a year in China, and IMHO, the university system I saw it was centered around providing students only with the “practical” knowledge of preparing for the workplace, if you will. If you want to learn how to design a circuit board or master the math needed for economics and business, those schools would drill it right into you.
OTOH, if you want to learn about questioning assumptions, applying critical thinking, and those sorts of things generally emphasized in the liberal arts, then you’re SOL.
Does that mean that if our colleges only taught engineering, sciences, and accounting, would our universities collapse to the level of the Chinese system? No. I think having a liberal arts side to a college helps invigorate the curriculum of the whole academic body, to say nothing of what the students get out of it.
And so far as I can tell, 6 of our last 7 presidents were liberal arts majors. Is there no market for world leaders?