“There are plenty of very well paid jobs in finance and investment management that aren’t in IB and don’t require an Ivy diploma.”. Indeed, I can happily bear testament to that fact.
In fact I’d argue further that the ivy diploma is just a first foot in the door - if you’re not good at what you do, you’re not going to get promoted and well-paid just because you went to an Ivy at some stage in the past.
@gwnorth I’m not @zoosermom, but one career involving both history and chemistry would be archive or art conservation:
https://www.archives.gov/about/info/whats-a-conservator.html
http://www.conservation-us.org/about-conservation/become-a-conservator
PS I see you’re in Canada so this link may be useful too: https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute.html
Barrons, you are describing a trading floor from the 1960’s. Even small specialty financial shops employ traders now. They don’t wave their arms and yell and scream and shred paper on the floor; they make a lot of money if they are good at it, and they can major in whatever they like from wherever they like as long as they’ve got the right stuff. They need the focus of an air traffic controller, the reflexes of a surgeon, and a very thick skin. None of these require ivy credentials.
Yes but high school through to A levels is 5 years rather than 4 (like it was in Ontario when I went to high school as we still had grade 13) so high school + bachelor degree is still 8 years. Admission to Law and Med school in Ontario only requires completion of a 3 year undergraduate degree.
I actually wish it was, just like many other professional programs (pharmacy, optometry, veterinary). As you noted engineering programs usually require even more credits than the typical 120 credit 4 year degree. As a result there is very little room for electives. Whatever “electives” there are are usually prescribed by the program to meet the professional practice requirement (e.g. economics, business ethics etc.). This is the main reason why DS19 is leaning towards doing a B.Sc. in Physics rather than a B.Eng. With a B.Sc. he will have far more room for electives like history. Having said that he has applied to 1 engineering program and if he decides to go that route will opt for Engineering Physics which is in essence a double degree. He’ll unfortunately only have 3 electives and they are needed to meet the school’s breadth requirements.
“Yes but high school through to A levels is 5 years rather than 4”.
Although you start elementary school in the UK a year earlier, so you graduate HS at 18 and college at 21.
The main difference is the degree of specialization in the UK system: there are no general ed courses in college, so you get through as much or more depth in your major in 3 years of college (and you may also be starting with a higher level of preparation after A levels).
However, doing that would substantially increase the monetary barrier to entry to engineering, like with those other professional programs, requiring engineers to start their careers in greater debt for professional school costs, if they do not come from wealthy families.
The rigor of an engineering program does effectively function as a barrier to entry, but at least in a way that many would consider more desirable (i.e. those who can learn the material and apply it properly pass the barrier) as opposed to the less desirable (in terms of producing engineers by competence) type of barrier based on family wealth. (Yes, university study in the US is currently heavily gated by family wealth, but if the goal is to educate the best engineers, increasing the importance of family wealth in getting to and graduating in engineering is detrimental to this goal.)
However, some require only the standard amount of credits (120-128 semester credit hours or equivalent) or only slightly more, including humanities and social studies general education requirements that can be up to a quarter of the curriculum at some universities (note: ABET accreditation does require general education, though it does not specify how much). That may be more the case at more selective universities, since their stronger students can learn the material in less time than those at less selective universities.
My college sophomore has really struggled with this issue this yr. When she was in high school, she loved languages, literature, and cultural studies. Since we homeschooled, her high school yrs were spent immersing herself in those subjects with concentrations in areas that she became extremely interested in. When she started thinking about college, she saw all of her older siblings and her friends having clear career objectives. She didn’t know exactly what she wanted to do. She just knew what she loved.
She started off as an international business major, but her heart just wasn’t in it. She had an internship this semester and has ruled out another path. She has finally gone back to where her heart is, language, literature and culture. She has decided to minor in information systems and business administration. She has spent hrs upon hrs researching different fields and talking to different professionals. She currently believes she wants to pursue special collections library science. She is also interested in language resortation and preservation.
At this point, we are encouraging her to follow her loves and just see how things unfold. But, honestly, for her, it is a much higher stress approach than thinking in terms of job X at the end of college. She had to be willing to let go of a defined path which was for her like trusting herself to step off cliff. It was a very hard decision for her and she really struggled with it.
@gwnorth - Optometry, veterinary, and pharmacy do not have to be 5-8 year programs. Neither does medicine. As the other commenter above stated in the UK medicine is a 6 year program for both the undergraduate and medical (bachelor) degrees. The United States as I said loves credential and title inflation, and to put superfluous, time consuming, and costly overhead into education. Pharmacy I believe was once a 4 year bachelor’s degree program. So, to inflate the title and their self-conferred status they changed it into a “doctorate” (which it really isn’t, since no original research is required). You do not need a “doctorate” to put pills in a bottle at a retail pharmacy or a hospital, seriously. Requiring a bachelor’s degree - most of the content of which is irrelevant to the intended vocation - is a waste of time and money to become a dentist, physician, chiropractor, optometrist, vet, lawyer, et al. Engineering which IMO is more complex and requires more original thinking and knowledge creation than those other fields can be done with quality and thoroughness in four years (albeit with five or 6 semester’s worth of credits in that time).
By the way, if your college student wants to be an engineer, I recommend against getting a physics degree and recommend getting an actual engineering degree. While of course there is much physics in engineering, a pure physics curriculum will not have the engineering-specific theoretical, applied, and design coursework. If his/her goal is to be an engineer in industry, many engineering employers require the applicant to hold an ABET-accredited engineering degree. If one is going into a field in which the professional license (PE) is required, the state engineering boards require an ABET-accredited engineering degree to sit for the exam, and most engineering positions in the federal and state governments require the same (note this is in the US, if you are not in the US that may vary of course).
An ABET-accredited engineering physics program still must include all of the engineering specific coursework required in any accredited program, in addition to the engineering physics-specific coursework.
@ucbalumnus - yes, the rigor and difficulty of engineering acts as a barrier to entry. Nationwide, 53% of students who start out as freshmen/women in engineering do not graduate in engineering.
I have cousins in Europe who went through their countries educational system. The pharmacist discovered how much he disliked pharmacy after two years in the field. The physician tells me constantly that he wished he’d gone to the US for undergrad because at 19 he was too young to be so vocationally focused. And the optometrist decorates fancy cakes for a living. No vets- sorry.
If you have a kid who knows exactly what they want to do- fantastic. If you have the typical 18 year old, the European system can be a double edged sword. Great that you’re in residency already without having to get a four year’s BS along the way. Terrible for someone who discovers that they got pushed into medicine because they had a moderate aptitude for science, it was socially acceptable, but they hate medicine. At least in the US there are numerous “jumping in/jumping off” points professionally. Nobody gets pushed into taking the MCAT’s- that’s an active choice. Nobody gets pushed into med school interviews- you opt in to the system.
Folks who don’t like the system here? Apply overseas.
@blossom we are in Canada and our system is more like the European one (it was modelled after Scotland’s system). I personally much prefer the American one.
Lots of people hate being lawyers even though they decided on that career at age 21plus. I know many unhappy doctors. Are there more unhappy doctors in Germany because they chose that career path earlier? I don’t think so.
The problem with UK-style medical degrees, and even normal bachelors which are more specialized than in the US, is that you get largely locked into a choice you make when you’re 17. Changing a major can add a year for a bachelors, for a medical degree it can add more. I know people who ended up finishing their medical degrees just because it seemed too much hassle to change to something else/start from scratch again after two or three years. Also people who hated the restrictiveness of such a focused degree… Having come up through that kind of system, I personally much prefer the US one where students generally get exposed to more and get more time to make up their minds if what they decided at 17 is what they actually want to major in.
Virtually all the unhappy doctors I know (and I know a lot) are unhappy due to the changing financial picture, the need to use technology for patient record keeping and billing and referrals, etc. I don’t know any of them who hate the fundamentals of patient care. They hate being told how to practice medicine by a 32 year old manager who has a degree in public health or hospital management and wants them to order MRI’s instead of Xrays, whether or not medically sound, because they reumburse at a higher rate.
However, the US system means that most physicians will start off with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt (unless they came from wealthy families who paid for their college and medical school), baking in financial stress to begin with, on which additional financial pressures in medical practice may be added to.
Hm, a few in particular I’m thinking of are the ones who did undergrad medicine - and all went into medicine because - in the uk/commonwealth system - that’s just what the smartest kids are supposed to do. Then they find they actually have no passion for the subject but have now committed two or three years to a degree that to any extent they can use credits to transfer to a different degree would be something in the sciences that still doesn’t really interest them. Trying to do social sciences or humanities etc means dropping out of the medical degree entirely and starting over right from first year again - a fact massively complicated by the student loan system and subsidized medical degrees. So some actually end up becoming doctors because it’s too complicated not to. Those type of kids in the US system, two years in realizing pre-med is not what they want to do, are much more easily able to change their major without sacrificing the years and funding used so far.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: The thread is drifting off-topic. Please try to stick to the original subject.
Amherst just revamped their history degree program, to allow concentration in themes rather than only geography.
https://www.amherst.edu/news/news_releases/2018/11-18/the-traditional-history-major-it-s-history.
If the concern on the part of potential history students is about not prepping for a specific career, this won’t help. But I throw it out here anyway as a re-direction to the original topic.
History major bachelor’s degree programs that offer thematic concentrations other than geography exist at other schools:
https://history.berkeley.edu/undergraduate/major/field-concentration
http://catalog.csueastbay.edu/preview_entity.php?catoid=19&ent_oid=1691&returnto=12552