<p>Applications to Colleges Such as St. John's Are Dropping As the Downturn Leads Families to Weigh the Value, And Price, of a Liberal Arts Degree More Carefully </p>
<p>[“If you go to school and you learn to do one thing and then you change careers down the line, you know nothing that will help you,” said Tim McClennen, 19, a freshman from Cutler Ridge, Fla.]</p>
<p>Really drinking the cool-aid here.</p>
<p>BC: I see your point. And certainly that is “the party line.”</p>
<p>However, my dad had a very responsible corporate position. He said he never hired anyone but Humanities majors because they were the only ones who could write well enough for the rigors of the kind of business career he had. His favorite was English followed by philosophy. He said he tossed the business degrees in the round filing can because “those guys (sic – sexist I know) didn’t learn anything of any use.”</p>
<p>He himself had a math and statistics degree, but he wrote better than most anyone I’ve ever met.</p>
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Uh, as opposed to the “many things” learned at SJC? What?</p>
<p>The vast majority of SJC students go into are fields that can be entered with ANY liberal arts degree from ANY college. 74.3% are in education, communication/arts, business, law, and social services. That percentage goes up to 83.7% if you include the nebulous “other” (government work, Peace Corps, farming, homemaking, conservation).</p>
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That’s something to brag about?</p>
<p>The curriculum at SJC is insufficient for pre-med students. Pre-meds at SJC are encouraged to take the necessary courses at other schools or complete a post-bac program…either way, unnecessary tuition money.</p>
<p>(Disclosure: Despite majoring in Classics, I am not a fan of SJC.)</p>
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<p>I read a salary survey last week that showed that the top salaries currently go
to those with a math background. I think that most were in engineering with
Computer Science, Actuarial Science and something else math-related rounded
out the top 15.</p>
<p>I have to think that Mandarin would be useful in any degree too.</p>
<p>I know quite a few people who majored in math at LAC’s and sat for the series of actuarial exams and did just fine!</p>
<p>No need to be snide. Why the animosity? Of course math is a wonderful degree, but a liberal arts education is not worthless.</p>
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<p>Is it a true LAC if they have math majors?</p>
<p>Don’t all LACs have math majors?</p>
<p>BCEagle: I have no idea what you’re talking about … </p>
<p>Math is most definitely a major in all liberal arts colleges. A liberal arts college is simply a college that has smaller classes, is not significantly involved in graduate/post-graduate research, and does not have professional majors [ex. nursing, pharmacy, business, engineering]. Liberal arts includes everything from English and Philosophy to Astronomy and Math.</p>
<p>From the original article:</p>
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<p>I was responding to your comment about LACs in general, not SJC.</p>
<p>Sorry, thought that should be clear.</p>
<p>I had a discussion with a professor on LACs and we came to the conclusion that there are different types of LACs. His previous school was a state school that had a lot of GE requirements and considered itself a provider of a liberal arts education though he said that the requirements were often based on the political strength of individual departments providing service courses.</p>
<p>I went to BC and have a niece at Amherst so of course I do know that they have majors. BC even has vocational (business, law, nursing, education) majors. Is there a pecking order where those with no majors are at the top? Math seems to me to be a vocational major given the large number of practical things that you can do with it.</p>
<p>Math doesn’t strike me as a vocational major, now that I’ve seen a lot of textbooks for upper-division math courses, but math does tend to be quite a practical traditional liberal arts major. Universities that have both a College of Liberal Arts (also known as College of Arts and Sciences) and a College of Engineering almost always house math with the other liberal arts degrees, although I’m sure there are exceptions to all such generalizations. My alma mater offered a math degree in the College of Liberal Arts (where the Chinese major was to be found) and a slightly different math major sequence in the engineering school. </p>
<p>I’m all for pluralism in education at all levels. The St. John’s College curriculum is not to my taste, even though I grew up with a set of the Great Books of the Western World in my house, but to each their own. My oldest son shops for research universities with strong math majors and strong writing programs. I’m not sure how well our dare with his high school education will win over admission officers, but we’ll find out this year.</p>
<p>Computer Science majors are often lumped in with A&S but the typical CS major runs around 70% practical/engineering courses and 30% theory, give or take 10% either way. In other areas where you have A&S courses with engineering counterparts, you don’t see these proportions. There are concentrations or combinations of math courses that you can take in a math degree that map well into specific areas that are quite supportive of areas of computer engineering and research.</p>
<p>The contemporary liberal arts are art, literature, languages, philosophy, politics, history, mathematics, and science. Up until a few years ago, I didnt realize mathematics was included. What did I know; I was a science and math major in college. :)</p>
<p>I agree with my friend Catherine Johnson at KitchenTableMath blog when she writes this:</p>
<p>* . . . a solid grounding in the liberal arts disciplines turns you into a fast learner in the world of work. Siegfried Engelmann has a terrific new article out on the ways in which teaching to mastery increases the speed of learning. A central reason why disadvantaged children are slower learners when they begin school than advantaged children is that they lack the prior knowledge middle and upper-middle class parents take for granted.</p>
<p>It seems likely to me that, for adults, a liberal education is the equivalent of the “prior knowledge” advantaged children bring to Kindergarten. A student who graduates college with a “survey” knowledge of the liberal arts disciplines combined with a major in one discipline brings a vast store of prior knowledge to the world of work (and family & politics & religion — )* [kitchen</a> table math, the sequel: intellectual DNA](<a href=“http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2009/05/intellectual-dna.html]kitchen”>http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2009/05/intellectual-dna.html)</p>
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<p>Strong quantitative skills combined with strong writing skills strikes me as a killer combination that would be attractive to many employers. My son has the quant thing going for him, and were working on the writing.</p>
<p>Recent comment from someone I know: </p>
<p>“If your son is only going into the Army after graduation, you shouldn’t let him apply for the ROTC scholarship at an LAC.”</p>
<p>What in the world?!?! I bit my tongue til it bled. (well, almost :p)</p>
<p>tokenadult, S1 has found the math/writing combo quite attractive (so did most of his interviewers senrio year, who were all interested in a math major who was into journalism). Professionally, I worked at a major actuarial consulting firm earlier in my career, and the folks who could write were promoted faster than those who were quant – unless they learned to write. I spent lots of time working with math types on their communication skills. :)</p>
<p>BCEagle91 wrote:
well, until recently, computer science and engineering weren’t the only industries with a demand for math majors. The algorithms that supposedly underly the kinds of subprime mortgages that led to the fall of Lehman Brothers could only be understood by math and physics majors. Calling them pre-professional degrees is a little like saying, English (or, Mandarin or Arabic) is a pre-professional degree because you need it to read.</p>