<p>Not surprisingly, communication skills are really important. But for many companies, that is not enough.</p>
<p>Why am I having a hard time believing anything this article is saying is true?</p>
<p>It just does not add up. The findings…The group surveyed…</p>
<p>I’m not buying it. </p>
<p>“actively recruiting” is not the same thing as “actively excluding”. Just because an employer may be advertising to hire a physicist, it doesn’t mean the employer won’t consider math majors. </p>
<p>Not particularly surprising as most of the companies which recruit at my school only accept applications from business and/or other STEM majors. I’ve seen only a handful of listings on my school’s career website which are fine with any major. By the way, many do only look at applicants with the specified courses of study. I tried applying for an environmental analyst position and was told that I couldn’t get it because I wasn’t a business or chem major despite meeting almost all of the other requirements and having experience in closely related areas. </p>
<p>Perhaps few of the respondents and the poll writers understood much about the definition of liberal arts in the first place. Are Econ majors from competitive schools really faring worse than the armies of students who graduate with a ‘lite’ degree such as Business from an academic factory where such degrees are ubiquitous? How many Business majors graduate from HYPS every year? </p>
<p>Silly poll. </p>
<p>“Actively recruiting” is not the same as hiring. From the article:
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<p>That’s how liberal arts majors find jobs. The look on company web sites for openings, they check job boards like indeed.com and apply for openings that are posted there, and they ask their friends who have jobs if there are openings at their companies. </p>
<p>Also they don’t always look for jobs with corporations. (Note that the article was a survey of corporate hiring managers). They get jobs with nonprofit jobs, with government agencies, and from small businesses in the community where they live. </p>
<p>So the takeaway for liberal arts majors? Don’t sit around on campus waiting for corporate recruiters to show up on your campus. Fire up your computer and send off a few resumes. </p>
<p>Wow what an incredibly misleading headline.</p>
<p>Don’t most HR staff have liberal arts degrees? </p>
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<p>Probably not, and HR probably does not write job requirements anyway.</p>
<p>Remember that about two thirds of bachelor’s degrees granted in the US are in pre-professional majors. The elite college bubble that is predominantly liberal arts majors is not reflective of the overall college scene in the US (and many students choose specific liberal arts majors for pre-professional reasons).</p>
<p>I agree with @xiggi here. I’m sure some portion of the poll takers didn’t realize mathematics is a liberal arts degree.</p>
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<p>Indeed. Before the category of STEM, physics and chemistry fell into that category as well, as did biology. </p>
<p>Am i missing part of the article? It says that 27% want engineers, and 18% want business. Even with no overlap, that’s only 45%. Add the 2% for liberal arts and I get to 47% specified. That leaves 53% unspecified, doesn’t it? Am I wrong to think that that group could include liberal arts? </p>
<p>For jobs wanting an unspecified bachelor’s degree, obviously any major can apply. Of course, it is entirely possible for the unspecified bachelor’s degree requirement to be a form of credential creep.</p>
<p>But also note that the 47% could also include jobs specifying other pre-professional majors like nursing, architecture, hotel administration, etc…</p>
<p>Computer science is a liberal arts major, first of all. So are physics and chemistry, and biology. STEM overlaps with liberal arts.</p>
<p>The actual statistics belie the words of the businesses. The unemployment rage for computer and mathematics majors (8.2%) is not that much lower than that of humanities and liberal arts majors (9.4%) or social science majors (8.9%). Business (7.4%) and engineering (7.5%) are lower, but not so much lower to suggest that business are completely passing over liberal arts majors altogether to only hire business and engineering majors.</p>
<p>Besides, this makes no sense. Business, computer science, and engineering majors make up a small fraction of college graduates. The majority are most likely social science and humanities majors. The business may say that they aren’t specifically seeking a psychology or English major, but that doesn’t mean that majors in those fields won’t get hired, especially if they have good internship experiences and have acquired useful skills.</p>
<p>I also find it very odd that more companies report finding candidates on Monster or Indeed than on their own websites.</p>
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<p>Well, that depends on what you define as a "pre-professional major:</p>
<p>According to the NCES, humanities majors make up 16.1% of bachelor’s degrees, social sciences 16.1% and natural sciences and mathematics make up 7.9%. If you add that up that’s 40.1% of degrees. That’s more than one-third, and that doesn’t include the non-professional majors that are subsumed into some of the other categories - for example, it doesn’t include computer science, which is under “computer sciences and engineering” but computer science is not a pre-professional major any more than economics is.</p>
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<p><a href=“Fast Facts: Most popular majors (37)”>Fast Facts: Most popular majors (37); indicates that business majors (365,000) outnumber social studies and psychology majors put together (177,000 + 101,000).</p>
<p><a href=“Bachelor's, master's, and doctor's degrees conferred by postsecondary institutions, by field of study: Selected years, 1970-71 through 2011-12”>http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.asp</a> indicates the following distribution of bachelor’s degrees: 20.5% business, 16.5% humanities, 16.1% social studies, 8.1% engineering and CS, 7.9% science and math, 5.9% education, 25.0% other (in the footnotes, this is a list of various other preprofessional majors). Total liberal arts (humanities, social studies, science, and math) is 40.5%.</p>
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<p>Ok, remembered incorrectly, but liberal arts majors are still the minority of graduates (and even if all 8.1% of “engineering and CS” majors are CS majors, that still won’t put liberal arts majors in the majority).</p>
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<p>Probably not too surprising – companies that are not that well known may not attract students to look for jobs on their web sites, as opposed to job listing aggregation web sites.</p>
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<p>I don’t think that is relevant to the survey results.
I would expect that when people talk about STEM and a liberal arts education, although there is a technical overlap, that people distinguish between the two. </p>
<p>The connotation of those terms is pretty clear - even for people who know the denotation.</p>
<p>I notice it didn’t mention anything about the number “actively recruiting” college graduates in Engineering or Business majors, only numbers for “seeking to recruit.” I don’t know the difference between these two because they didn’t explain the difference. If I had to guess, “actively recruit” sounds like they’re going to college campuses to get students interested in their company, “seeking to recruit” sounds like they’re hoping people from these majors will apply to their company but not actively going to college campuses to get them.</p>
<p>What percentage of businesses are hotels, restaurants, other companies which probably aren’t “actively recruiting” anybody? My guess is it’s a pretty big number. </p>
<p>Seems like a case of just plain bad journalism, perhaps with an equally bad or worse poll. Can’t say much about the poll because there’s no results linked. </p>
<p>I’d also take issue with the word “recruit” in general – because that tends to frame the question in terms of “what gaps are you looking to fill” rather than “what sort of positions at your company are easy to fill”. The liberal arts majors are probably seeking jobs related to areas such as administrative, communications or marketing functions – whereas the “recruit” question tends to elicit responses related more specifically to the function of the business itself.</p>
<p>In other words, Google hires administrative staff, marketing and sales, etc. — but if you asked Google’s HR director who they are recruiting, it’s more likely that the first thing that would come to mind is the technical end (programmers and software developers). Companies tend not to consider the ancillary functions as being central to their goals – but most companies couldn’t function without them. Where would Google be without a marketing staff? (Or, more precisely, where would their revenues come from?) See: <a href=“Build for Everyone - Google Careers”>Build for Everyone - Google Careers;
<p>A business major might be valuable in that role, but so would a communications major, or a plain vanilla English major – or probably just about any other liberal arts major if the candidate can demonstrate the good writing and interpersonal skills they are looking for. </p>
<p>But ask the HR people who they are recruiting? See: <a href=“Build for Everyone - Google Careers”>Build for Everyone - Google Careers; – they probably will think about the teams that “Build” instead of the teams that “Sell” or “Do”. </p>
<p>I forgot to edit out the “small fraction” part after I looked at the education statistics. They’re not a small fraction; they’re a significant fraction.</p>
<p>But so are people majoring in the traditional liberal arts and sciences. Technically humanities and social science majors do make up a minority of graduates, but they’re a large minority - at least 40%. Even if about half of the people in the engineering and CS group are considered liberal arts majors, that’s still nearly half of all college graduates.</p>
<p>It’s not like the traditional liberal arts and sciences are dying or anything. They’ve been around for thousands of years, and employment statistics show that their unemployment rates are quite similar to that of pre-professional majors.</p>
<p>I was also thinking the exact thing as calmom. First of all, I’ve looked at Google’s recruiting arms and they have them for marketing, HR and other non-technical positions. It depends on who you ask at the company. Second of all, though, even in some of their technical positions you don’t have to have a technical major if you have the skillset they’re looking for. I’m a psychology major with a significant statistical background, and several of their data scientist positions would hire someone with my skills and background. I know several people with social science backgrounds who have parlayed the statistical skills + communications and people skills we learn into positions doing data analysis.</p>
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<p>But that’s exactly my point - the overlap is not technical. People keep forgetting that the original term is “liberal arts and sciences.” The idea was that there was a body of knowledge necessary to produce a “virtuous, knowledgeable, and articulate person.” The liberal arts have included mathematics and science since medieval times. A degree in computer science, mathematics, or physics isn’t intended to prepare students for specific vocations; they’re intended to introduce students to beginning of theoretical and applied thought in those fields. In structure, they are actually pretty similar to humanities and social science majors in that regard.</p>
<p>My argument is that people are using the connotation incorrectly. What they are really trying to do is divide pre-professional majors and non-professional majors, which is fine. But mathematics, computer science and economics aren’t a pre-professional majors; they just happen to be quite useful skills in many fields that pay quite well. The distinction between the S and M parts of STEM and the liberal arts and sciences is a false one.</p>
<p>I’d also like to point out that pre-professional fields are largely based on the tenets of liberal arts and science fields, and those fields are thus necessary to the operation of the professional fields. Marketing and management, for example, are based upon the science of psychology, economics, and sociology. A good savvy psychology major with some corporate internships can be a great marketer.</p>
<p>Thanks to my LAS education, one thing I can conclude from looking at this article is that it is based on a study using very questionable methodology. I guess that’s something. 
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<p>H/SS is 32.6%; add sciences and math to get to 40.5%. CS is about 2.6%, according to <a href=“Bachelor's degrees conferred by postsecondary institutions, by field of study: Selected years, 1970-71 through 2011-12”>http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_322.10.asp</a> , so adding CS to this liberal arts grouping gives 43.1%.</p>
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<p>One can argue that the distinction between “liberal arts” and “pre-professional” majors is not always a clear bright line. CS arguably sits in both categories. Math and statistics can also, depending on one’s emphasis and in-major electives (a pure math major aiming for PhD study in math may choose a very different set of courses from an applied math major preparing for actuarial exams). At some schools, economics has a very “business” flavor in its course offerings, and many students choose the economics major as a substitute business major.</p>
<p>But, yes, “liberal arts” should not exclude science and math majors, although the term “liberal arts” is often incorrectly used to refer only to humanities and social studies.</p>