So I have narrowed my choices to one of these. My career goal is to teach and I have heard that teaching is pretty flexible so your major does not really matter.
If anyone has majored in these please list the PROS and CONS. Also, I would like to go on to grad school, so please give insights if any of these majors would decrease my chances of going into grad school.
Thanks…
Uh…that’s not true at all. Teaching at the K-12 level requires majoring in specific subjects at places that lead to licensure for teaching. Usually, if you want to teach at the K-5 level, you major in early childhood education and get certified for elementary education. If you want to teach at the 6-12 level, you major in a subject that is offered at that level + the school’s education program (so math education, English education, science education, social studies education, history + education, etc.) and get certified to teach middle grades (usually something like 4-8) or high school/secondary school (7-12).
So if you want to teach K-12, you need to decide what you want to teach, and major in that.
If you want to teach on the college level, that requires a PhD, but you also have to select what you want to teach. If you want to teach developmental psychology/child development then that would be a good major; if you want to teach linguistics, that would be a good major. But you should know that the job market for professors is quite bad, and most people who begin PhDs don’t make it to a professor job.
The liberal studies major…well, that really depends on the college. But generally speaking, the point of a college major is to help you build both breadth and depth in some specific field. At many colleges, a liberal studies major is really for people who don’t know what they want to major in, and therefore just take a bunch of humanities and social sciences classes that count towards a major. I am generally not opposed to any majors, but this one I don’t think is a good idea unless you have a clear plan for specialization.
I know, I always get a bad rap about liberal studies majors, does any one know why they are frowned upon?
But I have also heard that people major in sociology, business or even engineering but still become teachers; how does that work?
It depends on what you want to do and where you’re going to school, actually.
For elementary education (i.e., grades K-5), the usual procedure is to get a bachelor’s in elementary education.
For secondary education (e.g., grades 7-12), it’s a bit more variable. In some states (and this is usually a state-by-state thing, but it isn’t quite as cleanly divisible as that) the normal procedure is for an aspiring K-12 teacher to get an undergraduate degree in teaching, and take other courses (essentially, the equivalent of a minor or maybe a minor+a couple more courses) in the subject(s) they plan to be certified in. In other states, the normal path is to get an undergraduate degree in the field of study you’ll be certified in (e.g., English, history, math), and then get a master’s in secondary teaching. (That second option is available most everywhere, as well.)
Either way, linguistics and liberal studies aren’t going to get you into K-12 education, unless you take linguistics with an eye toward getting a master’s in teaching English to speakers of other languages, but you’d still need a master’s in TESOL with teacher certification to do that. (Well, or you could take linguistics and get hired to teach English in certain countries outside of the US—but that isn’t at all what you’re after, it sounds like.)
^ My school offers a linguistics minor specifically for people intending to teach foreign languages. If OP is interested in being a foreign language teacher, s/he could look into schools with that. However, I wouldn’t make it a must-have while searching even if you do want to do that. If you do find a school with that kind of specific minor, you could major in whatever foreign language you want to teach, minor in linguistics for language teachers, and go through whatever the state’s specific process is for credentialing teachers.
Small edit: I just looked at the linguistics for language teachers minor at my school. It’s intended for people either planning on teaching English, or teaching a foreign language. Either way, OP, you wouldn’t necessarily be majoring in linguistics to do either of those.
I just want to clarify something on linguistics. I apologize if you already know this and I’m beating a dead horse, but so many people have this misconception that I think it’s worth clarifying.
Linguistics is not about learning languages. Linguistics is about studying languages: Phrase structure (syntax), how speech sounds are made (phonetics), how speech sounds go together in a given language (phonology), meaning (semantics), and word structure (morphology). There are many other specific fields pertaining to linguistics, but those are some of the “core” subfields. If you’re looking for a major that would teach you a lot of different languages, don’t bother with linguistics. If you’re interested in language in and of itself beyond learning it and think the subfields I listed above sound cool (or well, at least a couple of them), then linguistics might be for you.
That said, most programs that I’ve seen do require you that you study at least one foreign language up to a certain level (the exact level will vary). At mine, you need to complete 4 quarters of the chosen language – through the first intermediate class. The main reason for this is to give you a good idea of how some language other than English “works”, to help you understand how languages can vary. Alternatively, if you’re interested in studying some specific linguistic aspects of a language, taking classes in that language will ultimately help you. Either way, the point isn’t to ensure that you’re fluent in some other language, as I’ve seen many people assume.
Beyond that, you’ll take classes in each of the “core” subfields listed above, plus additional classes in other subfields, or going more in depth on the classes you’re required to take. Those additional classes could be electives, or you could have a few required ones. My school only requires two linguistic analysis classes (one focusing on phonetics and phonology, the other focusing on syntax and semantics, both touching on morphology for different purposes), a syntax theory class, and a phonology theory class. From there we have 7 electives to play around with, with restrictions on how many from certain course numbers we can take. Two of those electives can be approved courses from outside linguistics; I took linguistic anthropology and philosophy of language, for example.
Anyway, my post is already getting long, so I’ll stop here. I’m happy to answer any questions you have specific to linguistics. Good luck with your decision!
@dfbdfb I would appreciate more insights or recommended webpages on CA teacher credentialing because that is where I would like to teach.
@PhantomVirgo Wow, very thorough explanation; it seems that you know the linguistics major very well. My school’s catalog also blends some linguistic courses with anthropology course, is it because these fields/majors are almost identical? Also, how far does the analysis of language go in linguistics; in other words, is there a lot of ancient history and classics involved?
California, AFAICT, does the undergrad degree in teaching thing—but I didn’t click through to the attached pages (you’d want the first, I’d suppose) from this California-government site to make sure: http://www.ctc.ca.gov/credentials/teach-secondary.html
…I don’t know, it depends on the state, but most likely they took additional coursework, got a master’s, or took enough coursework in undergrad to get certified in that area. Business education is a certifiable area in some states, so that might be how that happened. My physics and calculus teacher in high school was a mechanical engineering major in college, but he had a master’s degree in math education that allowed him to get licensed. I don’t know how someone could major in sociology and still teach - maybe they got an M.Ed in social studies education.
Information about teaching credentials in CA is available on the web: [url=http://www.ctc.ca.gov/credentials/CREDS/secondary-teaching.html]here[/url] for single subject teaching (usually in the middle and high school grade levels) and [url=http://www.ctc.ca.gov/credentials/CREDS/elementary.html]here[/url] for elementary teaching. The guide has a list of what subjects you can get a single subject teaching credential in.
Both types of credentials require that you complete a teaching licensure eligible program order to get the credential, either in CA or through reciprocity somewhere else. That program is going to be in the subject you want to teach or in elementary education. There’s also special education.
Surely, if you want to teach, you have thought about what subject(s) you might like to teach? Thus it would be most prudent if you would select one of those areas as your major.
No, it’s because linguistics and anthropology have some overlap. Since anthropology is the study of humans, and language is a huge part of the human experience, there’s understandably some need for anthropologists to understand some basic linguistics to do their work and some need for linguistics scholars to understand basic anthropology to do their work (just like I, a social psychologist, know a little basic biology to understand how the brain and hormone systems work).
Sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology are the two fields in which linguistics and anthropology meet the most. Very broadly speaking, sociolinguistics is the study of how social life affects language, and linguistic anthropology is the study of how language affects social life. But the linguist in the room knows way more than I do and can answer this more fully!
@ScholarsInnovate wrote: “But I have also heard that people major in sociology, business or even engineering but still become teachers; how does that work?”
There are links to documents explaining that on the page I posted to this thread yesterday.
@juillet, you did pretty good describing the overall relationship between linguistics and anthropology, actually, but here’s a bit more detail:
Anthropology has (in the US) four traditional fields; one of these is linguistic anthropology, which deals with the interrelationship between language and culture—so you get stuff discussing, for example, the uses of ritual language in contexts like greetings, prayers, thanking, and so on.
There is also anthropological linguistics, which is variously treated as a part of linguistic anthropology or linguistics; it’s where you get things like discussions of directional systems embedded in the grammar of various cultural groups. In actual practice, this group gets lumped in with the linguistic anthropologists.
Sociolinguistics, which is very much a part of linguistics rather than anthropology—but see below—has (to make an overbroad generalization) two strands: micro and macro. The macro-level deals with things like language policy and planning, discourse structures and power relations, and the like; the micro-level deals with things like variation in phonetic or syntactic or whatever structures (e.g., you don’t pronounce things the same when you’re in a job interview and when you’re talking with your friends over pizza and beer). (There are other complications, of course—the macro-level is usually qualitative and the micro-level is usually quantitative, but not always. So it goes)
The complication: Sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology and anthropological linguistics deal with a lot of the same fundamental issues, as @juillet said—therefore, it’s not uncommon for sociolinguists the end up in anthropology programs, or for linguistic anthropologists to end up in linguistics programs. This means there is a lot of cross-fertilization between the disciplines.
That depends on what you specialize in. There’s little to no ancient history in and of itself involved, beyond discussing how certain events may have played a role in a language’s evolution. That falls under historical linguistics. Classics is really only involved insofar as languages like Greek and Latin are studied. You may choose to study an ancient language to supplement your linguistics program, but it’s certainly not required. I personally don’t know much about ancient languages, or historical linguistics for that matter. Unless you want to count one small Latin phonology problem I did in class, and one lecture on how modern English evolved 
Do you currently live in California? I go to UC Davis, myself. I can’t say I have personal experience with credentialing here to help much though, sorry. I do agree that it’s in your best interest to major in what you hope to teach, regardless.
OP, if you decide to major in child development or linguistics (or, do a double major or major/minor combination in these fields), it could provide a good background for graduate study in speech pathology or in certain areas of special education. As you may know, many speech pathologists work in school settings and in certain areas of special education (e.g., teaching students with autism), teaching language and communication skills is a key emphasis of the curriculum.