This was discussed before on CC, and it is a valid study. The issue with the study for parents on CC is that the delineations of top, middle and bottom quality colleges is rather wide. People on CC generally want to know the differences between different schools in the Top category, and are not comparing the three classes of college as the study authors setup as follows:
The “critical thinking” humanities majors will not like that link.
Interesting read. What I find so amazing is the grad school indifference to undergrad school selectivity. I’ve hired a lot for finance / accounting / economics positions, and I find that selective school students are more focused and consistent than others. That doesn’t always translate into senior management roles, where the social skills of the average students can overcome the technical abilities of the elite students.
Did you read the entire article, @Zinhead? It’s hardly the ringing endorsement for “straight-edged” thinking you say it is. It interposes two different viewpoints, one is basically a screed against grade inflation and argues that STEM is immune from the phenomenon. The other looks at the same issues from the point of view of his own child who is stronger in the humanities and social sciences than in STEM. The author bemoans a system that penalizes students for incurring risks that would impair their gpa:
I graduated from a liberal arts college as a history major nearly forty years ago, never attended grad school, and have had a successful career in business.
If students truly love their major as often claimed, this type of behaviour should not be happening. One of the main reason why I am so big on standardized testing.
Another thought: If Ken Anderson’s theory that STEM majors have to compete against “global specialists”, those who survived the ordeal must by necessity be stronger than the rest of the student body. This graph seems to suggest exactly that:
Canuckguy’s Inside Higher Ed link is interesting. Here’s a snippet…
The author cautions that the data comes from only one institution, yielding a small sample size, but I do think the results warrant more investigation.
I also wonder if schools with distribution requirements yield better results. I know that when I was in college I felt my brain was challenged by having to shift gears from studying poetry to writing a history paper to doing a chemistry lab report.
The “corrections” to the raw data in studies like this can drive the conclusions. An example here is it says gains in CLA scores tend to follow entering ACT or SAT scores. Since entering ACT scores are also correlated with major, this would say “uncorrected” natural science majors may have the highest gains CLA gains. It is only when narrowly looking for “instructional” gains, the effect described happens.
But as an employer, who cares which part can be attributed to instructional gains? One might readily prefer the highest CLA score period, which is usually natural science majors.
Put differently, the most sensible thing to correlate with salaries is CLA score upon graduation (assuming any use of CLA score at all). Nowhere does this provide information to indicate that majors with higher CLA score don’t have higher average salaries.
IOW, those in the “below average” group have slightly higher SAT scores but perform less well on the College Learning Assessment at graduation.
Note that the below expected group contains a disproportionate number of students in the natural sciences and the above average group contains a disproportionate number in the social sciences.
You guys are assuming that Kalamazoo grads are evenly distributed across our trillion dollar economy (they are not) AND that the smarter you are the more money you will make (demonstrably false).
Kalamazoo is a fine college but is not a proxy for whatever it is they think they are measuring, and woefully ignores the ACTUAL labor market, not the fictitious one which CC folks are apparently in love with.
This study is just as flawed as all the ones which use self-reported salary data, unverified, with tiny sample sizes, where some participants use “total comp” (base, bonus, benefits), others use just cash comp, and still others include their stock options (which clearly skew the results towards tech).
I don’t know why folks on CC love these studies so much except that it clearly endorses some deep seated loathing of certain majors and highlights the value of others.
As far as I’m concerned it’s just another data point. As I said, and the study acknowledged itself, this is a small, limited study. It is not meant to measure employment success, happiness, or anything other than what they were trying to measure-gains in CLA scores by discipline.
To my mind this study resuscitates the question of what we want out of a college education. Is it learning for learning’s sake? If so, perhaps one would best become a French or sociology major. Is is greater earnings? Engineering, CS, or economics might be one’s best course. I would posit the best outcomes combine the two,
And the trade off is large numbers of students…especially those in the middle-bottom end academically who perfunctorily go through the motions while complaining about grades and what they may perceive as “irrelevant” classes/fields which really reveals more about their anti-intellectualism/lack of readiness to genuinely embrace what a good liberal arts education in HS/college and university education is all about and end up heavily in debt unless they come from comfortably full-pay families.
This has gotten to the point that some overseas pundits have made the phenomenon of US students enduring high levels of debt even from in-state public institutions* into the punchline of sardonic jokes about how we structure our higher-ed system.
In contrast, the idea of being heavily in debt due to one’s college/vocational education is utterly alien to many foreign countries. Especially considering college tuition tends to be much more nominal or in some cases even free(Germany, Mainland China up until the end of the '90s provided one meets the academic standards for admission.) and vocational/apprenticeship training is not only free, but comes with a stipend and is rigorous/credible enough that their graduates usually find a well-paying middle/UMC job waiting for them when they graduate.
I personally know several friends who ended up heavily in debt despite attending their in-state public colleges and even majoring in "superior" majors such as Business and MIS.
It came up at a friend’s party and it was a bit awkward to find that yours truly who graduated from an LAC as a near-full-ride FA/scholarship student was the only one there who had no educational debt as the last bit of debt(three figured loan) was paid off within 6 months of graduation years ago. It was mindboggling to hear how much in debt they all were despite “doing the right things”.
This thread is so timely for us. We just got back on a tour of three Ohio LACs and S19 loved two of the three. The more I research LACs, though, I feel like so many of them are PhD incubators. Our tour guides would give stats like 70 percent of the kids get masters degrees within five years. Maybe 50% go right into a masters program from undergrad. S19 doesn’t think he wants to do that. Doesn’t want to be an academic. He still wants to go to a LAC as the fit and attention are what he wants, but he wants to work after undergrad. Now, I feel like I need to spend some time questioning each school’s career development offices to make sure kids have the opportunity to job shadow, intern, and to find a job after graduation. I know it’s up to S19 to find a job but for $250,000, I want a school that helps.
I’m also now thinking about his major. He’s undecided, but doesn’t want comp sci. So…maybe he needs to think seriously about math or econ and then he can double major in whatever floats his boat (which would currently be environmental studies or poli sci).