I know lots of engineers who can debate their work in French, Arabic, Russian, etc.
I don’t know any language majors who can discuss engineering.
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Why? The unemployment rate for recent college graduates in music (8.6%) is about the same or lower than accounting (8.8%), computer science (8.7%), mechanical engineering (8.1%) - and economics too (10.4%), btw. Art history is a bit more of a struggle, but the vast majority of art history majors are employed after college.
The myth that you have to go to graduate school in order to get a job after majoring in the social sciences and humanities is just that - a myth. Most people probably now many professionals who have humanities and social sciences BAs.
Furthermore, I wish we would do more to decouple salaries from success and teach undergraduates more about how much money is necessary to survive comfortably. The median household income in the U.S. is just $50K; most BA-holders can expect to make that alone with some years of experience. Psychology and sociology majors make around $60,000 on average at mid-career; that’s a middle-class salary. It won’t buy you a house in the Hamptons, but it will allow a comfortable middle-class lifestyle (particularly if you marry another college graduate). Philosophy majors actually average over $80K a year, and history majors average over $70K, by mid-career. No, they haven’t caught up to their engineering, CS, and math major friends - but they have surpassed or matched their friends in chemistry or biology.
And the other thing is…who cares? Sure you might make close to six figures mid-career as an engineer, but if you would be more happy making $75K mid-career as a marketing manager…why not do that instead?
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I know lots of engineers who can debate their work in French, Arabic, Russian, etc.
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It wasn’t an OR, it was an AND. There are some engineers who also can discuss Candide (and its relevance), some aspects of Baroque music, or know a Doric column from an Ionic. I know a couple, including my boss actually, but I know far more who, while competent engineers, lack depth. That’s sad, and leaves them wholly unprepared for appraising some of the harder questions of science (such as should we do a thing just because we can?).
Candidly, I think it’s a stellar idea to teach (and study) science at a LAC.
Since enrollment in colleges and universities is biased toward those from higher income families, it may mean that many undergraduates are used to a more expensive lifestyle than they can afford on typical new bachelor’s degree graduate pay levels. Someone who grew up in a “middle class” family that gets no financial aid anywhere (i.e. probably over $200,000 yearly income) may think that a $40,000 yearly starting pay at graduation to be poverty level, even though many entire families in the US live on that amount.
On the other hand, some of those who come from lower income families may have observed the financial stress that their families had while they were growing up, and have near-term financial security in mind when choosing educational and career paths.
Thanks for the stats on majors - but are these people actually working in their field? The discussion that many music and humanities majors later go on to work at consulting firms is a little disappointing… If kids are going to end up in IT or software consulting, why not take that path in college. If your passion is history, or music, or art - why take a job in consulting or finance, like the business and CS majors? Seems strange to me.
College isn’t vocational training. It’s an opportunity to develop oneself in a variety of different ways - including one of the only times that many students can study their passion for 4 uninterrupted years. If a student can major in music and study that intensively for 4 years, but do internships and take a lucrative position in consulting or banking that they like, why not? People also change their minds, either once they realize realities on the ground (the chances of them becoming a professional musician are small) or once their interests change (maybe an English major realizes their junior year that they want to be a software engineer). For me it was both - I went all the way to the PhD level in public health only to decide one year later that I wanted to change careers into marketing or tech research. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t love my studies or that I wasted time…I just changed my mind.
Besides, IT and software consulting are typically not things you can study in college…again, because college is not intended to be vocational training.
Yes, I figure - but for me, that’s even more reason that we need to do better financial education with students.
First, they need to know how uncommon it is for families to make over $200,000 a year. Second, they need to know about cost of living differences - your family might need their $350,000 salary to live comfortably in Westchester County, but if you choose instead to move to the Midwest or suburban Atlanta you can make a lot less and do well. They also need to be educated about quality and prices - for example, maybe you went to private school, but maybe there are middle-class or affluent areas where the public schools are very excellent and you don’t need to put your kids in private school. Maybe you’ve never lived life without a summer home so you don’t realize it’s fine not to have one.
I’m from the low-income range, and yes many of us do see the financial stress. Our goal is very often to avoid that - but it’s not necessarily to make $$$$. For me, avoiding the financial stress just meant a job where I could make $40-50K on average (not starting out). Even once I started working on my PhD, I expected that I would make $60-75K. I never dreamed of six-figure salaries and beach houses and yachts. Maybe some low-income kids do, but I think the majority of them just want to live a middle-class lifestyle.
College can be used for a variety of things. The individual using it has an opportunity to decide what uses to make of it.
However, as far as publicly-funded colleges are concerned, taxpayers may suspect there are BETTER uses of their money than funding other people to enjoy a passion for a few years before they transfer to remunerated work. The deployment of resources for educational tracks that are abandoned entails costs the justification of which is questionable, and it particularly is a matter of concern when strangers are required to bear them.
I agree with you here… but that seems to be a harder problem that it looks at first glance. Remember all of the discussions on the parents’ forum where people complain about how “$200,000 income in [some expensive area] really is not very much to live on” even though the median income in that area is far lower than that? If they are passing expensive tastes and money habits to their kids, their kids may find it difficult to live on a middle income level of pay.
Unfortunately, it seems that many people (regardless of SES background) have an idea of “middle class lifestyle” that would require a very high income or wealth level to pay for.
Most bachelor’s degrees granted in the US today are in explicitly pre-professional majors, and many liberal arts majors are chosen for pre-professional reasons. Of course, not all such choices are good ones (e.g. choosing a pre-professional major associated with a limited job market, or believing that specific majors are needed for certain career goals when that is not actually the case). I would imagine that at the community college and associates degree level, an even higher percentage of course work, degrees, and certificates is in pre-professional subjects.
a) a language major is a lot more than just knowing a different language so this is a false equivalence
b) I know plenty of classics, french, italian, and spanish majors who focus on art and architecture of those various cultures, both of which involve engineering
Clearly, you need to meet more language majors.
Engineers are great! They create useful stuff like atom bombs, poison gas, electric chairs, machine guns, tasers, and so much more! Could an art history major make any of those things?
That’s kind of my point. I wish college students had a better idea of what a middle-class lifestyle actually is and how much money it requires.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there were 1,791,046 bachelor’s degrees greated in 2011-2012 (most recent years for data). The greatest numbers of bachelor’s degrees were granted in business (367,000), social sciences and history (179,000), health professions and related programs (163,000), psychology (109,000), and education (106,000). Assuming that all of the business, health professions, and education majors are pre-professional, that’s about 36% of the total. But I realize that leaves out engineering. There were 145,924 awarded in 2011-2012 in computer sciences and engineering; let’s even assume that all of those were pre-professional (even though I don’t consider CS to be a pre-professional major). That means about 44% of all majors are pre-professional - a large percentage, to be sure, but not most.
The traditional four-year college degree was never intended to be vocational training; the proliferation of new pre-professional programs is changing that somewhat, but that’s still not the primary goal.
Perhaps, but I think that would be taking a narrow view of the meat of what I said and college training in general. For example, my undergraduate degree is in psychology. My current job uses psychological principles to improve the enjoyment of video games and other interactive media; I work for a very large video game publisher that makes lots of $$$ off our work. I couldn’t have foreseen this job being a thing when I was in college - I wanted to be a high school guidance counselor. Had I not majored in something more pre-professional like “counseling” or “guidance counseling” rather than the more general psychology, I would’ve never gotten to it. Also, am I working “in my field?” My job is filed under “engineering” at my company. My PhD is in public health. Did I “abandon” that educational track, and am I making up for those costs in my new field?
Taxpayers often have a very narrow, unnuanced, and uneducated position on certain things because they don’t have the knowledge by which to judge the value of things. One example is the brouhaha that Sarah Palin started over fruit fly research, only to find out that fruit flies are used as animal models for much important disease-related research. I know that psychology is a field that can prepare students for a variety of jobs (including in business, marketing, advertising, and other fields outside of the social services), and so do people hiring in those fields. But I see a lot of ‘taxpayers’ proclaiming that psychology is a useless major without fully understanding what it teaches or what research psychologists do all day (answer: LOTS of different things).
Not to mention that we actually DO need people to provide social services. A world with all engineers and mathematicians but no social workers, teachers, therapists, and historians - not to mention people who do HR work! - is a dismal world indeed.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.asp lists the following percentages for bachelor’s degrees conferred in 2011-2012:
16.5% humanities
16.1% social studies
7.9% natural science and math
8.1% computer science and engineering
5.9% education
20.5% business
25.0% other
The first three are obvious liberal arts categories totaling to 40.5%. The next three are obviously pre-professional, totaling to 34.5%. However, the other category is specified in a footnote with a list of majors generally considered to be pre-professional majors. So the total of pre-professional majors is 59.5%.
Also, would most college students (including liberal arts majors) attend college if it were not associated with improved job and career prospects after graduation?
It may be idealistic to think that “college is not job training”, but actual college choices indicate that ideals alone do not drive college attendance.
Ah, the dreaded “other” category.
(Also, I’d argue that not all majors in the “agriculture and natural resources”, “communications”, “family and consumer sciences”, and “parks, recreation, fitness, and leisure” studies are pre-professional. Examples include entomology, agricultural economics, and plant science; communications or media and culture; human development and family studies or biobehavioral health; and leisure studies or kinesiology - all real majors in those areas from the very large public research university I worked at. But even taking those majors out it’s still likely at least a slight majority are pre-professional.)
Also, would most college students (including liberal arts majors) attend college if it were not associated with improved job and career prospects after graduation?
Probably not. I wouldn’t have. That still doesn’t mean that college is intended as vocational training, though.
It may be idealistic to think that “college is not job training”, but actual college choices indicate that ideals alone do not drive college attendance.
What drives students to attend college is not necessarily relevant to what a college education is for. For example, if you ask the professors who are teaching the classes and designing the curricula, I bet you most of them would not say that they see the purpose of a college education is to help college graduates get jobs - even the engineering professors.
Vocational training has a specific meaning: training to enter a specific trade. College education is supposed to be wider that that. Students benefit much more from broad liberal arts training than they do from narrow vocational training. I think that’s actually more pragmatic than idealistic. A liberal arts & sciences major who has been trained to learn quickly and synthesize large amounts of information can change his or her career easily to the needs of the market and their own economic needs - the software developer of today can become the, I don’t know, Russian translator or data scientist or think tank CEO of tomorrow if that’s the hot new thing on the market. If we train students narrowly for one specific job/trade without giving them the tools to think broadly, it’s more difficult for our college-trained population to adapt to the needs of the market.
Moreover, I’d also argue that even narrow vocational jobs require skills learned in other areas. Engineers and software developers still need to learn to write and think critically, which are skills learned in the humanities. English teachers and writers still need to know basic math and scientific concepts. We’d all benefit from more statistical and sociopolitical education.