<p>On the heels of the NY Times article last week, here is another story that should give college administrators, parents and students food for thoughts.</p>
<p>Here's the link:
Generation</a> Jobless: Students Pick Easier Majors Despite Less Pay - WSJ.com</p>
<p>article assumes pay is the only factor to picking a major (or that it should be)…</p>
<p>I’ll be the first parent to tell you that I want my kids to have a job and be financially self-sufficient, but I’ll be the first to also tell you that I would never encourage my child to major in something that they have no interest in majoring in because it pays better…</p>
<p>The first part of this article is not about a student who picks a job based on the pay. The first part is about a student who trys a harder major and can’t cut it so she falls back to an easier one and then afterwards justifies it by saying she will be happier in this easier field. Beyond that it complains that there is a great divide between the hard major and the easier major and there really should be something in the middle. Yes there really should be something in the middle, and maybe there is! Perhaps if the two people who wrote this article understood that Engineering Management is a hybrid engineering -business major they wouldn’t be trying to draw this big dividing line between the two. And that the young man getting a Masters in it isn’t leaving STEM but expanding his scope! It is still at the core of it Math. It is still STEM. And let me also point out that those who get promoted to Manager in an Engineering firm or become engineering consultants haven’t left STEM either. People who don’t understand the field and don’t understand numbers shouldn’t be telling the rest of us what the statiscs all mean. This article is poorly written because it is poorly focused. It bounces from the poor little girl who couldn’t do her vending machine lab to the rather impressive dude who got his engineering degree and is working on a hybrid masters. It is nothing more than a collection of sound bites. I don’t see a lot of difference between this one and the one that said Engineering is too hard. Mostly the same quotes. They didn’t even bother to pull data from the last big job slump and what that did to engineering enrollment. Just said we would have to wait and see. So sad :(</p>