Penn is an elite college and has business degrees. Many “elite” colleges have computer science, and other preprofessional degrees. Not sure why Engineering always gets a pass from the snobbish comments on CC that top schools don’t have preprofessional majors or concentrations, insinuating that those are a poor choice. Some students do know what they want to “be when they grow up”… Nothing wrong with that. And they can still go to top schools.
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This, in particular, really bugs me. Interesting that you think ** most ** ivy or top school grads go on to grad school, when that is simply NOT true.
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Because the quality of an accounting degree or nursing degree doesn’t matter, so it’s best to go to community college for that. Unreal.
The OP is looking at Princeton. Here’s a list of majors leading to an A.B. degree at Princeton:
African American Studies
Anthropology
Art and Archaeology
Astrophysical Sciences
Chemistry
Classics
Comparative Literature
Computer Science
East Asian Studies
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Economics
English
French and Italian
Geosciences
German
History
Mathematics
Molecular Biology
Music
Near Eastern Studies
Neuroscience
Philosophy
Physics
Politics
Psychology
Religion
Slavic Languages and Literatures
Sociology
Spanish & Portuguese
While the latter is a very valuable positive externality of people attending college, as long as there is a substantial cost to the student and parents, the job market implications of attending college will factor prominently in most people’s decisions to attend. Most people will have difficulty affording attending college or seeing its value for themselves if it did not upgrade their prospects in the job market.
Yes, it is true that elite colleges offer more majors that are not overtly pre-professional. But some of those colleges are pre-professional themselves, as fast tracks to Wall Street and management consulting jobs (which are less picky about major than some jobs that are less elitist with respect to college attended).
A liberal arts education ( which can mean a math or Econ major just as much as it can mean an English or philosophy major) doesn’t necessarily prepare you for a particular, narrowly defined career. Rather, it teaches you to learn, to think critically, to engage with new ideas and modes of thought and to challenge your assumptions and preconceptions. And, fortunately, it can lead to pretty much any career you might like. Here are just a few of the careers at which the graduates of one small liberal arts school have succeeded. http://www.wesleyan.edu/about/alumni.html
The notion that a student must choose between an education that educates broadly and liberally and an education that enhances one’s value in the market place is a false dichotomy. In fact, a quality liberal arts education may often enhance a person’s long term career prospects, especially in a world in which people can be expected to have several different careers over a lifetime. http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/09/05/employees-who-stand-out/#422e21734156
I agree with @NeoDymium. This conversation reminds me of the Rede Lecture, delivered by C P Snow in 1959:
“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.”
The lecture has left a strong impression on me, and my children’s education.
Another point: Some majors do a better job of inculcating critical thinking than others, and the delineation can not be drawn between liberal arts and pre-professionals.
@calmom, you were not talking about Princeton, you were generalizing about all top schools and how they feed grad schools not the job market, and how preprof students should shop elsewhere (community college and state college).
Still don’t get why Engineering and comp sci always get a pass. Guess those top school grads won’t be big thinkers in those subjects.
OP, again what your parents are saying but at creme de La Creme schools like that you will get a great job no matter what you major in. The normal practical advice doesn’t really appply.
If a person requires 4 years and up to $250K to become educated enough to sustain and feed a democratic society, I would question whether they are college ready in the first place.
I didn’t read all the comments, but I also wanted to throw out there that you might not necessarily learn direct skills about “writing” with certain kinds of writing majors. I was a writing and rhetoric major in college, and no one commented on my style unless I asked - I was essentially taught how to argue and how to organize my papers academically.
I’m not sure if creative writing is different. I only had one class in it, but even then, I found that the input was mostly on content.
Regardless, if you enjoy something enough, you’ll spend more time on it and will thus excel more at it, so why not go for it? I would definitely encourage you to consider double majoring or minoring, though, because what someone up thread said was right - we write about our experiences, so you want to get as many as you can.
Also, you should understand the reality of the situation. It’s always been hard for writers to “make it” so to speak, so it won’t be a walk in the park. But if you have enough passion and skill, you’ll likely be able to do something worthwhile.
It’s only been recently that the full price of college is so high. And very, very few college students pay $250k. If there’s nothing else to learn from reading CC, one learns that there are a lot of fee and low-cost options.
Could have fooled me. I don’t need all of my fingers to count my college friends (at an Ivy/top school) who didn’t get some sort of graduate degree on the way to their careers. And by far most of those either went into an established family business or became journalists, a career path that barely exists anymore. And any number of people who went into family businesses or journalists DID get graduate degrees along the way. When I look at my children and their friends at various Ivy and non-Ivy top schools, it’s even more pronounced.
I don’t, and they don’t, know that many engineers or computer science majors, so maybe those are exceptions. A friend’s child who planned to major in computer science dropped out of Harvard after one year seven years ago and has no plans to go back to school. One other computer science major I know has been working for a couple of years, but plans to start a PhD program (which she can do concurrently with her job). All two of my engineering friends from college got advanced degrees (one PhD and one MSE). But overall I have the impression that graduate degrees are less universal in those fields.
Other than that, I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that almost all elite college graduates go to some sort of graduate school within a few years of graduating from college.
I think some missed the intent in calmom’s comments.
Imo, if all you want is certification for a specific job you identified early, why spend the time and money on four years at a primo institution that expects a rounded academic experience? Wouldn’t it be because you do want more learning, expanding, growing than just the narrow “job” training?
Conversely, if all you want is that job, you do have other options.
Writers with an audience of one can get great pleasure. Fine. If you want more, you need to be able to do more than entertain only yourself.
@JHS aside from your anecdotal evidence please see below from Yale’s website-
Many students go to grad school after getting a job, get some work experience, and have their employers help pay. Does a degree in Classics help you prepare for that first job better than a degree in Finance?
@lookingforward at the vast majority of universities, even degrees in pre-professional subjects require a normal Core Curriculum giving breath to many topics and exposing students to a well-rounded education.
OP, good luck. you have wonderful options at Princeton
That’s a silly statistic to cite, @suzyQ7 . I didn’t say that practically all Yale graduates went directly to graduate school. They don’t. But that doesn’t mean that they are working in career jobs, either, when they graduate. And while some (dwindling) number of employers help pay for graduate school, that’s far from the norm. The norm is people work for a few years, get a better sense of how they fit into the world, and then go to graduate school with a focused plan.
If you think a Classics graduate from Princeton has trouble finding and keeping a first job, you don’t know what you are talking about. Some Princeton graduates may be underemployed, but that’s generally because they are following impossible dreams (like being a movie star), not because no one is willing to hire them. Princeton doesn’t offer a degree in Finance, so no one has that particular credential. It doesn’t keep Princeton graduates out of jobs in finance, either.
I would argue that it’s irrelevant. The type of person you are is what is most relevant to career success. Emotional intelligence, interpersonal skills, etc.
This is becoming one of those circular conversations on CC, and I will bow out. As mentioned in my posts, I was ** responding to posters who generalize that top colleges are not for the preprofessional leaning**, and students with specific interests should take their business elsewhere. This has nothing to do with Princeton, as I mentioned, you can major in basketweaving at Princeton, and the prestige will get you everywhere (YES, I know, there is no basketweaking at Princeton!)
I didn’t say Classics majors had a tough time finding a job out of Princeton, I said that students graduating from top schools (like Penn -which has Finance as “concentration”) are NOT better off with a Classics major than a Finance major if their intention is getting into the business world. Espeically since most universities have core requirements that give students a lot of liberal arts exposure. Graduates from top schools do well no matter what they choose. Majoring in Classics at a lower tier school and pounding the pavement for a job directly after college, ** which is what MOST students do, ** will be difficult.
My Yale grad school statistic (which BTW, is even lower at other schools) is silly, but the quote above, is extremely helpful.
Again, OP, you will have wonderful options at Princeton and your parents really should not worry what you major in. Those investment banking firms will be waiting for you at the end with the big bucks!
It is interesting how one side of this discussion, the one that seems to value the importance of STEM in a well-rounded education, seems to favor anecdotal evidence (“my experience has been this”) over data that shows the opposite is true. Analysis and interpretation of data is precisely the kind of thing you learn in a science curriculum, that seems to be missing here. Well-roundedness has to go both ways, meaning that a college-level education in the physical sciences is just as important as Shakespeare or grammar.
I’ve also known quite a few of those “pre-professionals” who took these anti-intellectual tendencies with them into law or med school. I find it hypocritical when people talk about a “liberal arts education” and think that that doesn’t have to include calculus and physics, two topics that are very central to a well-rounded understanding of the world. These are important topics, and not just for an engineer or a scientist. Lawyers and doctors would benefit very strongly from good physical science backgrounds as well.
To quote @suzyQ7: “Again, OP, you will have wonderful options at Princeton and your parents really should not worry what you major in. Those investment banking firms will be waiting for you at the end with the big bucks!”
If not the investment banks then many a graduate or professional school program. Nothing is closed off from you with any major and a baccalaureate degree from P’ton.
That said, if you want to use specific skills learned in college to get a quick job, then make sure you pick up some skills either in class or in your EC’s. You may even find that if you are a talented writer you will prove your value in the market by WRITING and PUBLISHING ANYTHING and building up a portfolio and possibly even some name recognition. But as the old expression goes, “It’s a dog eat dog world out there,” and there are thousands and thousands of others with degrees from the Ivy’s.
Also, if you want to work for those investment banking firms, then chances are you will want an MBA, and to get into the top MBA programs you should have 3 to 5 years of progressively more responsible work experience after your BS/BS degree.
ALTERNATIVELY you can cut a new path to financial and/or career success. Screw the investment banks, forget the MBA. PhD? Those take forever (first hand experience talking here). But be strategic in your job choices after college. Work hard. Don’t get stuck too long in a bad job. Be creative. Make a name for yourself. That worked for my son. And it works for many more young folks.
For those with high stats, or who live in states where the public schools give good financial aid. Among those from middle income families, a 4.0 student in California is likely to have many more affordable options than a 3.0 student in Pennsylvania, for example.
But also, many of the students and parents who most need to know about lower cost options are not on these forums, and otherwise do not find out about them before deadlines have passed.