Are these claims actually true? I wasn’t sure, so I looked at the 2013 Digest of Education Statistics (which has data through 2011—more recent stuff is available, but I’m posting from the back row of a meeting, and so don’t really have the chance to do a proper google for that), and I got the following for degrees awarded by sex:
[ul]
[]Engineering, yes, very male-dominated, at 17.5% (though fields of engineering differ, and I don’t have that level of granularity at hand)
[]Not in the original list, but comp sci is the only other heavily male-dominated field, with 18.2% awarded to women
[]The physical sciences, male-dominated but not overwhelmingly so, at 40.1% awarded to women
[]Math (combined with statistics), borderline male-dominated, at 43.1% awarded to women
[li]Business, near parity, with 48.2% awarded to women[/li][/ul]
TL;DR: Overwhelmingly? Engineering and comp sci, sure. The rest? Not so much.
@cobrat “I find the inclusion of business as a major which is better academically and “more marketable” to be amusing unless the undergrad business schools one is focused on are at the very elite tier like Wharton, NYU-Stern, UMich-Ross, UVA-McIntire. Berkeley-Haas, etc.”
How snobbish. The MAJORITY of entry level corporate jobs that interview college kids (and are not focused on only prestigious schools, but recruit from state schools and 'gasp!" directionals), specifically require business majors (or econ) as prereq. Yes, big time wall street firms go to Yale and such and take music majors and history majors, but most companies do not. The business majors are fine choices for college students and much more marketable for the AVERAGE student (who doesn’t want to go to grad school and spend another $100K) than humanities.
But this is off topic…apologies.
Majority?
That’s not what I’ve found IME or from HR practices who in practice treat most undergrad business majors with the exception of accounting* no differently and sometimes like a few firms I worked for…with more skepticism than the Arts & Sciences majors. Incidentally, if one firm I worked for had a choice of an Econ/Arts & Sciences major vs undergrad business except from the very elite tier of undergrad b-schools, they’d overwhelmingly choose the former as they were burned too many times by past hires from the latter group.
The lack of academic rigor in most undergrad b-schools/majors was also reported and discussed in the NYTimes article I linked above which was from 2011 so not too long ago.
- Usually only if the student has a CPA in hand or is well on his/her way to completing the 150 hour requirement to take the CPA exam.
And that’s not including the fact that one can become a CPA without an undergrad major in accounting. Have one friend who majored in Asian Lit at an Ivy and another friend who majored in Philosophy who managed to get their CPAs and are now successful accountants for several years. Asian-lit major friend was hired straight out of undergrad by one of the big-4 and sponsored to attend accounting grad courses so she could sit for her CPA exam and the other friend did it on his own while working an entry-level corporate office job in another area.
“The lack of academic rigor in most undergrad b-schools/majors was also reported and discussed in the NYTimes article I linked above which was from 2011 so not too long ago.”
That the point right- not that the major is inherently weak, but that the schools are not doing a good job. But are all History departments in all schools excellent? English Department? Do all the business department stink?
Is it better for a B student at a directional, that wants to work for the state or an insurance company to take History or Marketing? I’m not talking about Harvard here, you can major in basket weaving and get a good job out of Harvard. I’m talking about the other 1000 colleges in the US that educate a majority of students in the US. Most schools have a deep core curriculum, so you’d think students would be exposed to all this deep analytic and challenging work in their humanities courses they are required to take for core.
I guess business fall below humanities in the CC pecking order. Who knew? STEM looks down on Humanities, Humanities looks down on Business and Business looks down on what? Communications?
To bring this on topic, business seems to be a gender neutral major, so schools who include a business school bring in both sexes to that major, unlike Engineering, Comp Sci, or say Nursing.
gmt+7 Yup, our engineering major tour guide at RPI was a female.