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Actually that’s not true. You can major in just about anything and qualify for admission, given that you’ve take the handful os psych classes required for the undergrad major
I’d wager most top schools, in fact most schools in general, will consider candidates without an undergrad Psych degree.</p>
<p>Mikemc is right, and further means that college isn’t even necessary. I had a friend who simply got a thrill out of fixing automobiles. He’s now opened his successful car mechanic startup - and it’s taking off because he has no problem putting extra time and effort - because it’s fun.</p>
<p>He’s making more than the majority of college degree holders out there too.</p>
<p>BIGeastBeast I want to commend you on your efforts. I know a lot of people are givin you crap but I feel your telling the world what it needs to hear. Is it blunt? Damn right it is. Does the truth hurt? Judging from the hate directed at BIGeastBEAST… yup! AND I agree with your tax credit idea. So I guess I’m a ■■■■■ too. :P</p>
<p>Points I want to make sure I hit on though.</p>
<p>-Engineering/science/medical careers, whether yall like it or not, ARE better and MORE important than the vast majority of liberal arts majors. BIGeastBeast is exactly right in comparing the neuroscience person to whatever he did. Fact is that engineers build and produce things to lift human life to a new level. Fact is that doctors save people. Fact is scientists are the foundation for EVERY new technology/medicine/phenomenon. What is a history major going to do? He’ll write down what happened today and give his opinion on it. You tell me what society needs more of. Do we need newer technologies or more opinions on what happened today? The answer is undoubtedly the technical fields.
As much as society has criticized any form of a caste system the fact remains that there is. It’s nice to think that everyone/everything is equal but reality is we aren’t. Technical fields are far more important than liberal arts in order to advance society.</p>
<p>-I tried driving home the point that technical majors are better than liberal arts for society but let me try and correct any stereotyping/judgments you have in your head about me right now. I DO believe that liberal arts majors are still important… Just not as important as technical one. There still needs to be people who major in liberal arts. I slammed history majors in my previous point but I still think we need them. The problem is that most of our students are choosing these majors over technical fields. We live in the technology age for Christ sake and our youth is abandoning it! If it were up to me it would be like 60% technical majors and 40% liberal arts. Liberal arts has its own special place in life but it in NO way should out due the rest.
And this also touches on my thought about “taking the humanity out of life if we were all techies”. I think that thought process is correct. We can’t all be techies or earth would be all jacked up. Liberal arts are what define our culture, our language, and our lives as a race. Thats what they are needed/important for. But as I said, it shouldn’t out do techies. I’m sure that sounds like a conflict of interests but its really not. Just pay attention to that 60/40% idea I got. 40% can hold onto our culture while the other 60% can improve it. Pretty simple. Both are important but techies have the edge.</p>
<p>-I’m an engineering major but I LOVE history. I can pick up damn near any reference some big wig boss may make about a past event. Point I’m making is that yes engineering majors typically are “robotic” in nature compared to liberal art majors but still possess the “soft skills” that liberal art majors are supposed to be strong in. Which means that we (speaking for technical majors) still have potential to grab liberal art jobs. Now let’s try the other way around. Will a liberal art major be able to bust through some thermodynamics of a mechanical engineering major? Nah, not at all. In the end, technical majors have more flexibility than a liberal art major.<br>
Whoever made that point about engineers working in groups and gaining social skills deserves a pat on the back. “soft skills” are learned through life no matter what you major in so us technical people may not be Shakespeare and wow you but we WILL make our point.
That also means techies have the ability to climb management levels just fine.</p>
<p>-I don’t think anybody has tried to refute that we need more technical majors but I want to make it clear: TECHNOLOGY AGE. Life as we know it depends on technology and America’s survival does too. I was watching 60 minutes once and they were talking about the cyber warfare that is going on. Forgive me for not knowing exact numbers but in 2007 there was something like 20 terabytes (actually I think it was 200…) of data stolen. They said it was “the pearl harbor of the cyber war”. Imagine what china could do with X terabytes of weapon data, military records, financial systems, infrastructure plans, and emergency measures. Not kilobytes, not megabytes, not gigabytes, but TERABYTES. That is a butt load of info! If we continue to lag behind other countries in technology then we WILL fall. I mean even I could tear something as small as a company apart if I had the ability to process and comprehend 20 terabytes of secret data. So imagine what a country, who has hundreds if not thousands, of brains to analyze that data could do to another country.
One of the things 60 minutes tested was whether someone could hack into a private station. Sure enough, some private energy company hired a hacker to hack their system and find loopholes so they could fortify their system. The hacker demonstrated how they could manually control a valve that would cause a generator to explode and cause massive damage. Imagine if some crazy hacker from kazakistan got their hands on a loophole in a nuclear plant? As the Russian bad guy from Ironman 2 said, “american software, $hht”. We need techies to prevent the world from saying that to ANY of our technologies. </p>
<p>-post #124 by mikemac deserves some credit. When majoring you should consider the financial security/future it will provide. Responsible people make sure that whatever they major in is financially “OK” for their wants/needs but $ should not be the PRIMARY factor. You still need to love your job, just make sure it can get the bills paid for.</p>
<p>…Sry for the long post. I’ll try and leave that as my only reply so you don’t get tired of my posts.</p>
<p>A technical degree may make MUCH easier to find a job after undergrad, but if you were to go to graduate school in ANY field for your Masters or Phd (Even in technical fields), I would think a liberal arts degree would serve you better.</p>
<p>Assuming you met the techincal requirements for your graduate program.</p>
<p>Oh, did you know that most research scientists come from liberal arts backgrounds? Not necessarily English (lol), but from places like Columbia, Williams College, etc etc. IMHO, liberal arts undergrad (even if its a science major…expand your horizons) and w/e you want graduate school will get you where you want to go.</p>
<p>^What do you have to back that up?</p>
<p>exactly. ***. any moron can be a secretary. wth do you need a degree to be a secretary?</p>
<p>lol ya don’t, HR just puts that as a requirement so instead of an application from every unemployed high school graduate they only get an application from every college graduate… HR = lazy 
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<p>You engineers sure are impressive. Studying from dawn to dusk, you still manage to take the time to type out multi-paragraph screeds against the impracticality, the stupidity, the utter uselessness of the liberal arts. </p>
<p>I think we get the point. You have better job prospects. You will make more money. You can buy a nice sedan with leather seats and a navigation system. A big screen television. You’ll be able to put your kids through college, where they can learn to be engineers just like their dad. The American dream.</p>
<p>What’s lost here? What do defenders of the Liberal Arts mean when they claim it “teaches you how to think,” that it allows you to become a “well-rounded human being.” Here’s where the eyes of the engineers glaze over. For it’s true, literature and history and philosophy provide no technical skills. They’re not “marketable.” To hark back to an earlier post, what fool would consider reading Shakespeare more important than calculus?</p>
<p>Meanwhile, all across America, hundreds of millions sit down on the couch, push a button, and sit mute as scantily dressed women try to sell them cheeseburgers. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions starve in Africa. Meanwhile, oil pours into the Gulf and the forests of the earth disappear. Meanwhile, our colossally corrupt, incompetent, dysfunctional political system tries to suck the last dollars from the American experiment. </p>
<p>So why worry about philosophy, history, literature, art? Because these societal (which is to say, human) flaws can’t be fixed by designing a better computer or building a new suspension bridge. But maybe if we had a population that was educated, informed, and equipped with the tools to take an inquisitive, expansive view of the world around them, we could try to change this. Or at the very least avoid being hoodwinked quite so easily. The engineers, the so-called hard-headed realists, argue for specialization, for a narrow-minded (and spiritually empty) concentration on practical problems. Yet taking stock as we step closer to the abyss, don’t we really need people who can at least see the chasm in front of them?</p>
<p>And as this idealistic little diatribe will be quickly rejected by the very busy and very driven people of CC, I’ll also note the liberal arts get out of jail free card: lawyers. Who do you think really runs thing, anyway?</p>
<p>At least we don’t take every conversation about humanities degrees as an invitation to jump in and explain why humanities are stupid and engineers are the only truly useful people in society.</p>
<p>Can someone explain how studying liberal arts make you more “human”. So a person who studies liberal arts is more human than who doesn’t?</p>
<p>Gee, some of you engineering fanatics are making liberal arts majors really depressed. Just because we don’t have your type of math skills doesn’t mean we’re screwed for life!</p>
<p>JanofLeidon: Currently and for most of history, most of the Western world’s leadership (at least for the US), consists of people who studied liberal arts. And yet, all the problems that you mentioned are still here despite all these humanities majors in positions of power. So why haven’t you liberal arts majors fixed these societal problems yet?</p>
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<p>Why? That’s kind of like a chicken or the egg argument- what is more important- the castle or the people who live inside it?</p>
<p>I’m not sure why people are making this a strict Engineer V. Liberal Arts debate.</p>
<p>It’s really about any technical field (Science, Medicine, Engineering). In any earlier post someone stated how problems like starvation and other world ills can’t be solved by computers and engineering stituations (even though that isn’t true, advancing engineering in poor countries for clean water is one of the tops ways of improving human conditions), and then rallied for Liberal Arts majors.</p>
<p>Well, liberal arts sure don’t solve those problems either. So people need to stop living with their head in the sand and starting excepting the truth, Liberal Arts just aren’t relevant to society anymore.</p>
<p>By the way, if you want to look solving problems like starvation and other major world issues, take a look at what the Bill/Melinda Gates Foundations is doing. They are solving major issues, and liberal arts don’t have a damn thing to do with it!</p>
<p>Why? That’s kind of like a chicken or the egg argument- what is more important- the castle or the people who live inside it? ~ Schaden</p>
<p>Earlier I used the example of neuroscience v. sports marketing. You gonna tell me its more important to have sports marketers in society than Neuroscience researchers or surgeons?</p>
<p>Get real. That’s no chicken or the egg argument, that’s just common sense.</p>
<p>I don’t understand the common sense you’re attempting to imply- The world needs hamburger flippers just as much as it needs bridge builders, janitors just as much it needs electricians, marketers just as much as it needs software programmers. It’s not one or the other.</p>
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<p>amen. I get the feeling that many engineers here are just money-grubbing scumbags, and not the type of engineer who wants to better society or has respect for/knowledge of his fellow human beings. That’s why we need liberal arts as a foundation for every engineer - to give them that spark. Scientists/mathematicians/Engineers without a foundation in liberal arts makes them just tools - they lose what makes them human, and are just plugged into a machine that makes them go till one day they age and drop dead, having lived a life in the dark - namely a true limitation and waste of human life and potential.</p>
<p>Scientists/mathematicians/Engineers without a foundation in liberal arts makes them just tools ~ Monkeyking</p>
<p>And Liberal Arts snobs are just that - tools.</p>
<p>If Liberal Arts education is so great solving world problems, then how come world problems are just getting more severe?</p>
<p>The truth is that world problems are solved by the advancement of science, engineering and medicine. Which are all things Liberal Arts majors aren’t educated to do.</p>
<p>It’s possible that politics could solve some serious issues but we all know that’s the cause of most of them. I haven’t seen to many art history majors making these major impacts on society, not like Stephen Hawking or Bill gates. So shove it.</p>
<p>And technical majors are? the majority don’t go on to be scientists or researchers.</p>