Not all college majors are created equalBy Michelle Singletary
Washington Post
I have this game I play when I meet college students.
“What’s your major?” I ask.
The student might say, “English,” “psychology,” “political science” or “engineering.”
And then, in my mind, after factoring in some other information, I say to myself “job” or “no job,” depending on the major.
An English major with no internships or any plan of what she might do with the major to earn a living? No job.
A political science major with no internships that could lead to a specific job opportunity? No job, I think.
Engineering major with three relevant internships in the engineering field? Ding. Ding. We have a winner. Job.
That's a nice little story--the "job, no job" story. Lots of sturm and drang, with the author "begging" students and parents to consider how "marketable" a particular major is.
ReplyDeleteBut it's a bunch of bullshit, as the much-trumpeted statistics tell a different story. It's not "job, no job." It's "If you're an engineering major, you have a 92.5% chance of gainful employment after graduation, and if you're a humanities major, you'll have a 90.6 chance of gainful employment after graduation."
But that sort of thing doesn't make for a good column.
Thanks for the voice of reason, Stella. I was going to count down to a round of discipline vs. discipline, with the white discipline stuffing a bomb in the pants of the black discipline and the black discipline hitting the white discipline over the head with a wrench, but you short-circuited my fun. I'll just go over here and continue to watch my dog die now.
ReplyDeleteEngineering major with no internships or plan? Also, no job.
ReplyDeleteApples to apples, please.
Engineering major who doesn't want to be one, and has no aptitude for it? Also no job, and rightfully so, since a person like this could be a source of public danger. I do see the point about having some idea about what to do with one's life before blowing $100K+ of one's parents' money trying to find out, but one can do on one's own, while working before college.
ReplyDeleteI'm in the "study what you have a passion and aptitude for" camp. Unless, that is, you know that you're headed for a medical or engineering profession, for which you need a specific sequence of undergraduate courses. How are you supposed to know what job you want to do for the rest of your life before you've even had a full-time job? And I don't mean internships, I mean a job with real responsibilities and frustrations; a job that you have to show up for day in and day out all year long, with co-workers you must interact with constantly. If it's not something that interests and challenges you, your work life will be an ill-fitting, soul-crushing misery. So why is it so verboten to advise college students to find what their interested in and pursue it diligently, no matter how "marketable" it may seem at face value? No college career office can list every single job out there, they can just point you to general industries. They can't tell you where to find work that will be personally meaningful to you. And Lord above, do we really need more business majors?
ReplyDeleteNo, we definitely do -not- need more business majors. If anyone has a passion and aptitude for business, they should be in a more challenging major. And the same goes especially for education.
DeleteI used to live in Detroit. I'm allowed to say that now that I've moved, no? Anyway. During auto-bailouts and layoffs being an engineer was a very very bad thing.
ReplyDeleteWhen I chose a Humanities-based major all my friends laughed at me and made fun of me for years. They pointed out every help wanted sign in crappy little stores' windows. They made burger flipping gestures at me.
And as they suffered through rounds of layoffs, being unemployed, and finding hiring freezes everywhere they tried to apply, often after they were interviewed?
Oh yeah, I returned the favor once or twice. I was employed the whole time with my "useless" degree.
I'm with Surly. We have these kids focus entirely too much on what the "experts" say will make you a ton of cash when picking majors or what they want to do in their lives. A Theater Major friend was likewise employed all through that crazy time here as a theater tech in a fancy theater downtown. Why? She was flexible and didn't just learn how to act in college, but how to run the operation too.
Study what you love, get job experience, and be flexible in its application and you'll probably be okay.
A friend of mine in college was an English major. His father was a physician and they had plenty of money. When his senior year rolled around, we had lots of fun taunting him, "Ha! You're an English major! When you graduate, you'll be unable to support the lifestyle to which you are accustomed!" (Yes, we were very nice friends.)
DeleteHe went to grad school at a famous school of journalism, and got a masters in advertising. He then became an adman, making "big, capitalistic bucks, educating the public," as he says.
But of course, big capitalistic bucks are only one desirable outcome of a college education. It's a shame the other objectives are becoming increasingly obscured by how college costs have become so out of control. We proffies aren't at fault for that, but we certainly do have to live with the consequences.
I've lived through two rounds of K-12 teaching being a "hot" career with tons of majors coming through. The end result has been the same: a glutted market with too many students thinking a guaranteed job was the end result. Right now teaching is still promising if a student can do a STEM field, bilingual/ELL, or coaching on top of a couple of other certifications, but otherwise it's not promising, at least in my state.
ReplyDeleteAt Large Urban Community College, I see the degree = job having the effect of creating even more snowflakes in the nursing field particularly. They all think they can do it even though it's one of our most challenging majors. They also know that if they don't earn a really high GPA pre-nursing, they are SOL for getting into the program, so that in turn generates even more entitlement and grade grubbing. I feel especially bad for my colleagues in the science and math departments because in their courses C = not a snowball's chance in hell of getting into nursing classes. Their retention and pass rates are lower than average already, and all these people with dollar signs in their pupils who have no aptitude whatsoever for STEM are making things worse.
I have to admit that I come to this with something of a positive bias toward Michelle Singletary, whose column I read regularly, and with whom I often agree, though I sometimes think her penny-pinching recommendations discount the value of the time spent on such activities, and, yes, I sometimes find her approach to education a bit instrumental. But I think she speaks with the authentic voice of a first-generation college graduate who needed to think about the monetary value of that degree, and who needed to support herself (and a disabled brother) immediately after graduating. Although I'm not certain, I also strongly suspect that she has an English, communications, or journalism degree (or at least a minor) herself, and built her specialty from there, through good old-fashioned journalistic research. And, with some support from the Washington Post (which has no doubt benefited, in turn, from her increasingly national prominence), she's made a name for herself.
ReplyDeleteReading the whole piece, I think her main points are the (ever-increasing) value of practical experience/internships as well as classroom education, and (her main point, I think) the need for caution in borrowing. Here are two more paragraphs from the end of the piece:
"A college education is not an investment in your future if you are taking out loans just for the college experience. It’s not an investment if you’re not coupling your education with training. It’s not an investment if you aren’t researching which fields are creating good-paying jobs now and 30 years from now.
I wouldn’t want to discourage people from pursuing a career they love, even if the pay isn’t very high. However, that choice should be made with the understanding of which job opportunities might be available and weighing what you can expect to earn annually against the cost of taking on debt to finance your education."
The only part of that I'd question is what others, including EnglishDoc immediately above, have already pointed out: that predictions of the next solid, well-paying, career path are notoriously inaccurate. But the idea that one shouldn't blindly go to college, and/or take out loans for it, because "it's an investment" seems sound to me.
Stories of some of the STEM people I've known:
ReplyDeleteGuy 1 went to local college to be a civil engineer, did work in the field for a job or two, went through the life of a civil engineer (hired, design the job, watch the job being built, fired when job is done), later became a self-employed math tutor.
Guy 2 was a professional mathematician, worked at a number of local colleges in research and teaching capacities, wrote a book on a certain mathematical process. Now runs his own gardening store.
I know this was a small anecdotal sample*, but my point is that people may be trained to be X, but the realities of X might not match what they thought X would be. Also, shit happens; I could not get into the true specifics of Guy 2 without possibly revealing who he is. I find it interesting that Singletary doesn't bring up the STEM "trap schools", schools that are well known within regional areas but have no cachet in the wider United States. I don't want to name names, but not every university is MIT.
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* I thought of bringing up my grandfather again, the WWII Navy vet who later became a shipyard engineer, but I don't think he fits because his engineer schooling was done through the Navy itself.
To speak for the defense for a moment, I think there is value in urging students to think carefully about why they are going to college and what they want to get out of the whole process before they enroll. The disappointment I have in this article is that it replaces "Go to college, and you'll get a good job" with "Go to college - in the right major - and you'll get a good job," which isn't much of an improvement.
ReplyDeleteI understand that her "Job/No-job" bit was just an opening hook. But it really invites her readers to take a simplistic message from her piece. And would it be reaching too far to suggest that if she needs such a simplistic hook to draw readers in to her article, then this implies a need for education to help develop citizens capable of following more nuanced reasoning?