No surprise: students at less selective colleges are more likely to choose pre-professional majors, while those at more selective colleges are more likely to choose liberal arts majors. (Engineering majors are unusual among pre-professional majors in that it is more commonly chosen at more selective colleges, while psychology is unusual among liberal arts majors in that it is slightly more commonly chosen at less selective colleges.)
This puts it very well though the vocational perspective has become more important for kids at selective schools too since they are becoming more socioeconomically diverse , and hard to afford for those who don’t get financial aid.
I think the focus on learning for learning’s sake was basically more typical of an aristocracy than a meritocracy. To the extent that selective colleges are still the former, liberal arts will survive.
That said, I think it is sad that college has become all about career for so many. It would be nice if everyone could afford to relax and learn what they are interested in, not what will make them money- like the old days of prep school feeders to elite schools. But loans need to be paid off and families need to be supported eventually.
Wasn’t it the case that, in the “old days” (pre-1950s), college was mainly attended by kids from high SES families, so it was not like “everyone could afford to relax and learn what they are interested in” back then?
I can show you dozens of kids with degrees in recreation management, sports management, event planning, pre-law, counseling, tourism management, etc. who are working in “barely minimum wage” jobs. These are squarely vocational degrees which attract first gen students who aren’t interested in nursing, comp sci or accounting, and they frequently leave the students grossly under-qualified (or completely unqualified) for the fields the kids and parents think they are being prepped for.
Law requires a law degree and bar passage. Counseling (in most states) requires at least a Master’s for a school-based job, and a Doctorate to become a therapist or a Master’s in Social Work for other types of counseling. You don’t need a college degree to sell memberships at LA Fitness.
This has nothing to do with “useless degrees” and everything to do with an anti-intellectual/anti-elitist bent in America which unfortunately leaves disadvantaged kids behind in the dust. There is nothing useless about studying math, political science, or history, and those degrees are ACTUALLY marketable- just as they are- without grad school.
The most selective colleges typically have great career services and strong social networks. Even if a student has a “useless” college major at a top school they can probably find a great job after graduating.
Still, the ones with the more useful majors do better. Except, perhaps, at the extreme tippy-top of the heap, a degree in computer science from college X is likely to lead to more job options than a degree in history from the same college.
I was just remembering my kids going through the online job listings for on-campus recruitment and seeing how many more jobs were available for some majors than others. It doesn’t have to be computer science. My kid who majored in economics did fine in the job market.
The STEM majors seem to garner the most on-campus interviews. However, graduate career services reports shows that non-STEM students have many opportunities for employment after graduating from a top school.
Your organization recruits and hires new graduates in math, political science, and history from less selective colleges like CSU Bakersfield or equivalent-selectivity colleges in areas where it has employees?
Liberal arts fields like political science and biology are often dominated by pre-law and pre-med students at top colleges. Wash U estimated that 75% of its biology majors are pre-med. How quickly would the numbers of biology, poli sci, and philosophy majors at top colleges drop if medicine and law became undergraduate degrees?
Given that the most selective schools have few pre-professional majors, that’s indeed not a surprise. Of the Ivies, only Cornell and Penn offer undergraduate business, and it’s only at Cornell that you’ll find majors like horticulture and hotel administration. One can hardly study dental hygiene at Swarthmore.
One wonders if there is any functional difference between someone majoring in business at NC State (“pre-professional”) and going to work at Goldman Sachs and someone majoring in econ at Harvard (“liberal arts”) and getting the same job, or if there is a difference between a student majoring in journalism at Mizzou and a student studying English at Columbia before getting a master’s in journalism.
It is common for students everywhere these days to view their major(s) as a stepping stone to a career. Students at Chicago are flooding into majors in econ, public policy, and math, not Medieval Studies or Near Eastern Languages. At Brown, the number of CS majors has more than quadrupled in the last decade as the number of art history majors has slumped to a mere 1/6 of a decade ago.
re #10:
“…it’s only at Cornell that you’ll find majors like horticulture and hotel administration”
May be true, but Cornell’s are not the only pre-professional bachelor’ degree majors
(aside from engineering, which many of them offer) offered at a well-reputed institution.
I would imagine that a higher proportion of graduates of this program go into their directly-associated industry than is the case at most of Cornell’s specialized colleges:
As @warblersrule notes, there’s been a rather large shift within many highly selective institutions toward STEM majors. In 2001, 36.5% of the undergraduate degrees conferred by Princeton were in social sciences and history, and only 11.6% in engineering. By 2016, social sciences and history were down to 26%, while engineering had more than doubled, to 25%. English fell by half, from 8.2% to 4%.
That doesn’t undercut the general claim that a higher percentage of students at highly elective schools are in non-vocational majors. As others have pointed out, it’s partly a function of what those schools offer. But it’s also partly a function of where their strengths lie, combined with self-selection by top students. Yale offers engineering, but its engineering program is not as highly regarded as some, and so only 7% of the undergrad degrees it awarded in 2016 were in engineering–as opposed to 25% at Princeton, 20% at Stanford, and 16% at Cornell, all schools with very highly regarded engineering programs. For that matter, many of the top engineering schools are at public universities like UC Berkeley, Michigan, and Illinois. Little reason for a top student in any of those states to go to Yale for engineering.
Yes, but Wharton itself is quick to point out that what it offers with that degree is a practical, vocationally oriented business education, and this differs from a BA in economics.
Like I have said in previous posts, engineering is a trade, you will go to a University but the engineering program takes up so much of your course load you hardly get an “education”, what you do get is a set of skills that can land you a decent job right out of college where of course you will “apprentice” under more senior engineers. While the University will make you take a few classes in the arts, you will hardly get the depth of a true education in the classics or philosophy. This is the trade off that students have to make for a career focused education (otherwise known as a “trade”). BTW, don’t take the word “trade” as a slight, we just need to call it what it is.
ABET-accredited engineering majors must include 25% in math and science and an unspecified amount of humanities and social studies for general education (in practice, tends to range from 15-25%). So an engineering major does have 40-50% of the curriculum in liberal arts (and may have more, depending on the specific program).
Relatively few of them specifically require depth (or any) classics or philosophy, but this also tends to be the case for liberal arts majors at most colleges (other than those majoring in classics or philosophy). Indeed, at many colleges, the general education requirements can be quite minimal (or none in the case of the few open curriculum colleges), so that a student may avoid taking any course work in fairly large realms of knowledge.
Of course, engineering is a pre-professional major. But that does not mean that an engineering graduate is less “educated” or “well rounded” than a graduate in some other major.
I majored in EECS, and even 20 years ago, I can tell you I got a great engineering education, but as far as a well rounded graduate - nope. Don’t fool yourself you have a very narrow track in which to graduate in engineering in four years and yes I took a couple of courses in English and maybe another couple humanities but I felt 90% of the time I was in a math/science or engineering course, hardly what I call a well rounded education. JMHO
The thing is that in the information age that we live in, learning for the love of learning isn’t restricted to those enrolled at universities, and it certainly isn’t restricted to 18-22 year-olds as a follow-up to HS graduation. It also doesn’t require spending $60-70K at an elite private school.