@simba9, here’s a reference about humanities and stanford MBA. I sent a specific Stanford link about psych major and mba to my daughter about two weeks ago when I found it rummaging around the Stanford site. I told her, based on that, she should consider psych major. I will try and find it as I clear out messages on my phone. But it 100% was noted up there. And they were talking about it as a jump into MBA, not a career. They noted written communication skills and quantitative reasoning as why it was a good fit. Meanwhile you can see the humanities stats for Stanford and MBA:
Why do you think I have a disdain for humanities? Saying the job prospects for humanities majors isn’t as bright as it is for other majors, which is common knowledge, is not disdain. It’s reality,
@simba9, Ok, I didn’t find the page I sent, but here is a big PDF that has the same wording currently on the stanford psych page at the top. Go to page 12. Read it and weep.
“Preparation for a Career in Business
Psychology is a highly relevant field of study that is often recommended as a major for students planning to pursue an M.B.A. degree. Graduate schools of business such as Stanford’s are primarily looking for students with a strong liberal arts background that focuses on both writing and quantitative skills.”
For schools which offer the great books curriculums, eg St. John’s, TAC, etc, how effectively can students incorporate more modern theories or critiques of the ideas of the writers they study? I know that many of my older professors admit how hard it is to reject essentially disproven theories from their mental framework, and these are the same people who have spent their whole lives studying one subject. Do Johnnies and the ilk run into the same conundrum when faced with say modern physics or different methods of textual criticism?
Simba9, I did read what you said. In addition to Psychology and History not having good job prospects, you said this:
“As much as it might disgust some, I do think most students attend college for job training. They want a piece of paper at the end of (hopefully) four years that says they’re qualified to enter the job market.”
That comes off as categorical, reductive and inaccurate for many students. Particularly so for those who go on for graduate training. Even if you are defending STEM degrees in the marketplace, that’s not much of an argument. This is a thread about the validity of general studies, not merely job training programs. I’m not convinced there’s much relevance to this subject in quoting a couple of self-reporting salary rankings from popular sites. It’s also now pretty clear the most rigorous general studies programs discussed in the thread aren’t clearly defined in their nomenclature.
The most talented psychology majors – whether refining into developmental, clinical, biological, private practice, or on to completely different fields, such as an MBA, advertising, etc. – learn pretty early on in undergrad that they will need likely need graduate training to continue their pursuits, rather than just taking the degree and hoping somebody will hire them.
For history, those who look for admission to some of the most popular undergrad schools on cc will learn early on that to pursue history at the highest level, they will likely be looking to PhD programs. History is also a traditional feeder into law programs, and probably a decent portion go into MBA programs as well. And just the undergrad degrees should have pretty good prospects measured over time.
I would suggest you digest my original comment responding to yours, particularly re: use-value, worthiness, and relationship to society. It wasn’t intended to bash your comment. Rather, I wanted to point out that these are a complex set of variables over the duration of a career, and summarily dismissing certain humanities degrees isn’t helpful.
lindyk8, thanks for making the effort to provide a link. I was hoping for something from the Stanford GSB (or any GSB) that said psychology was an advantageous or preferred degree, rather than something from Stanford’s Psychology Department in which they’re trying to sell their program to prospective students. While it claims that psychology is often recommended for an MBA, you’ll also find people who would recommend philosophy, history, or computer science for an MBA. There’s nothing unique about psychology when it comes to entering an MBA program. From what I can tell, business schools are open to any major except an undergraduate business major. Not that I’m expecting you to provide it, but I’d love to see an actual breakdown of majors that were accepted into MBA programs.
anhydrite, you’re doing what people so often do when they find themselves on the losing side of a discussion, which is to put words into the mouths of others, and change the focus of the discussion. My comments were always in the context of finding a job with a four-year degree. I even said, “four years” in the line you quoted. I never said anything about the value of humanities degrees to society. You’ve taken a few short sentences that I wrote, and blown those up into something they weren’t. I actually love classes in the humanities, but it’s just reality that in general, people have an easier time finding a job with STEM degrees than humanities or social science degrees. Do you disagree with that?
And yes, I still do believe the primary reason people go to college to prepare themselves for the job market. Not everyone, but most. Discovering themselves or expanding their horizons are secondary.
Just to help demonstrate that I don’t have a disdain for humanities, here’s a quick, little blurb I wrote a few months ago on a thread about whether Stanford’s humanities programs were deteriorating -
This thread isn’t about “whether people find jobs better with a STEM degree.” It is about the worthiness of general studies. And I don’t appreciate your false equivalence of agreeing / disagreeing on the utility of STEM degrees vs. the utility of humanities and social science degrees. On your behalf, I have already elaborated much more than should be necessary to stay on-topic in this thread.
Maybe you should re-read the parts where I addressed the majors you cherry-picked, and noted that to pursue them fully – as in being an employed psychologist, for example – normally demands graduate study. How does this reconcile with your post-grad job insistence? For that matter, even a chemistry degree will often prove more useful with graduate work; engineering and computer science degrees are more likely to have higher utility in the job market after the bachelor’s. Again: not the topic of this thread.
Why don’t you simply start your own thread about how STEM degrees are simply a better choice than other types of degrees? If you have useful commentary to apply to the notion of general studies programs, with some actual data, experience, and the like, then please avail us of it. Otherwise, I would conjecture that you have changed the focus of the discussion.
Re general studies, by accident, I chanced upon this article today on MacArthur Fellowships. The headline deals with prestige of college but the whole article is really about the value of a liberal arts/interdisciplinary approach to learning in terms of the award winners. It’s a long article, and granted, I skimmed it, but the points made play into this general studies debate.
@anhydrite, I said a general studies degree was no worse than a history or psychology degree. For whatever reason, you and linkdyk8 took that one, simple sentence, incorrectly characterized it as disdain for the humanities, and unfairly attacked me for something I never said. That’s like me saying, “I don’t like Pepper Jack cheese,” and you going on a rant that I’m anti-dairy farmer.
You need to be more careful about interpreting what others say and write before you go off on them.
Simba, I agree with your first paragraph. For so done who claimed to go to top school with the best humanities degree but I think the poster showed lack of reading comprehension and most likely jumped to conclusion. I would have to sum it up, it ain’t there baby. Stanford never made such claim.
Mount Sinai School of Medicine revamps requirements to bring in more liberal arts undergads - a trend that’s been growing for for several years now (backed by tons of other data):
The worst paid majors are generally in the fine arts (Studio Arts, Drama) or are pre-professional degrees in lower-compensated fields (Social Work, Early Childhood Education). Social sciences and humanities do better than these.
Note that the arts tend to result in a high-Gini pay distribution of graduates (i.e. the top paid graduates do quite well, but things are not so rosy for others), while some other majors like physician assistant and nursing tend to result in a low-Gini pay distribution of graduates (the lower paid ones do reasonably, but the top paid graduates do not do as well as in many other fields). However, the top paid graduates in just about all majors make a good living. See http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-Degrees_that_Pay_you_Back-sort.html .
Salary.com did not do any scientific analysis to come up with this. What Salary.com did was pick out the top three careers for each major that they thought were most closely related to the field; then they used the median salary on those fields to try to calibrate ROI. This is faulty, however, because it is not a reflection of the work actual psychology majors are doing - it’s only a reflection of people’s stereotypes of the kinds of jobs that social science majors get. For psychology, they happened to pick out “human services worker,” “career counselor,” and “bereavement coordinator.” What even is a “human services worker”? The closest thing that the BLS has for that is “social and human service assistants,” which are jobs that require a HS diploma. I looked at several other of the majors and they make the same poor assumptions and errors elsewhere (a sociology degree does not qualify one to become a social worker, nor does a religion major qualify one to become a chaplain).
I would argue that there is, since the science of management and organization is built on psychological principles. At Columbia Business School, for example, many of the professors are psychologists with psychology PhDs doing psychological research. That’s true of many business schools across the country.
The unemployment rate of psychology majors (9.2%), English (9.8%), and history (9.5%) < 5 years out of college (9.2%) actually isn’t all that much higher than that of mechanical engineers (8.1%) or computer science (8.7%) at the same stage; it’s actually lower than information systems majors (14.7%) and economics majors (10.4%)
Actually the majors with the lowest unemployment rates are nursing (4.8%), elementary education (5%) physical fitness & parks and recreation (5.2%), and chemistry (5.8%). Not your traditional business/finance/engineering.
As for the question at hand, in a theoretical sense I think a general studies major can be good - I also see it like the “Great Books” curriculum at St. John’s or Shimer, or an extension of the traditional standard education at colleges and universities in the 18th and 19th centuries in the U.S. Some students don’t have a strong idea what they want to major in, and other students just want to explore a variety of things and get a good, well-rounded education that teaches them about a lot of things. But I do think those students will be at a disadvantage on the job market - but because the degree in and of itself is worthless, but because some employers have come to expect college students to have specialized in a specific area in college.
Here is an interesting approach that I am taking that I thought I would share. I am taking all of my general studies/general education courses through Sophia; check out sophia.org, and once I have all of those done I am enrolling in a degree program to earn my degree and focus on my major (business administration). I don’t think I would want to have a degree in general studies I would rather just get these courses taken care of then focus on my major or area of interest.
If you haven’t been to Sophia yet, check it out I have taken 6 courses and they are great! They are $329 a piece for 3 or 4 semester credits and there are no textbooks!
