Indeed. Students are now able to get a BA in English Lit from Yale without ever reading Shakespeare.
Itās interesting to me that many people start with an Either/Or assumption about degrees. At just about any college, you can double major in a STEM field and a HUM field. Sure, there are some engineering degrees that suck up all the credit hours. But for the most part, a student can major in one of each. So, itās not āgeez, should I tell my kid to go into debt to get an English degree?ā but rather āfor the money one is paying, why not encourage oneās kid to do both?ā Heck, you donāt even need to major in the Humanities. Get a STEM degree and pile up lots of HUM courses, without the major.
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If Iām an employer whoās looking over resumes of new college grads for a STEM-type position, and I see one resume with a list of 10 STEM classes, while I see another resume with a list of 15 STEM classes, which new grad do you think is going to have a greater chance of being interviewed? Yeah, itās a shame that employers donāt value the humanities, but thatās reality. Students need to show as many technical skills as possible to potential employers, and Shakespeare and poetry classes arenāt going to be seen as all that valuable.
This is silly, itās simply not the case that doing humanities will exclude you from top consulting, finance and tech jobs. Of course Iād advise any humanities student to make sure that they can demonstrate a level of numeracy and general business awareness. But my S and his best friend both graduated with a 4.0 in public affairs last summer. One is doing real estate consulting and being consistently headhunted by PE firms, the other cloud sales for a FAANG. Both are better at their jobs than colleagues who were finance and CS majors and should earn $100K+ this year.
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I think universities donāt focus on the basics of writing - sentence structure, punctuation, etc. - because students should have gained those skills in high school, or even junior high.
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Often the transcript doesnāt matter. The major and the GPA seem to matter more.
Itās the skills that you can demonstrate on your resume that matter.
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Our tour guide at Case Western was a MechE major with Econ minor. One of the reasons my son chose the school was that they facilitated and encouraged double majors and/or minors.
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Iām glad they were able to find work, but fancy titles aside, it sounds like the one doing real estate consulting is a trainee, and non-engineering jobs are typically among the first to go when tech companies do layoffs.
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Well, if Iām an employer, Iād choose the student who challenged herself in a diversity of ways educationally. One who displayed intellectual curiosity, open-mindedness, and determination. Iād also want one with some clue about the human, human history, writing ability, and so on. So, if I were an employer, Iād chose the applicant with the diversity of courses.
Moreover, and this is important - I donāt see the āROIā of colleges as a simple reductive enterprise in which literally everything is reduced to getting a job. Is that important? Sure. But there are lots of benefits to a broad education that look beyond employment (though I think they are still relevant there as well). So, again: do both. Thereās plenty of room in a 124 credit degree for both STEM and the Humanities.
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Which often has nothing whatsoever to do with your major. Why did my Sās friend get a FAANG job? Because she was the president of her sorority and the top recruiter in the country for Teach for America, and is the most natural salesperson of her age Iāve ever encountered. She was the top rated intern amongst the several hundred in her junior summer group, her manager said she was only the second person in multiple years to receive a consensus āmust hireā recommendation.
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Thatās great. MechE + Econ is an exposure to the social sciences on top of engineering. Econ is also a great training ground for theoretical and abstract thinking, as is philosophy.
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Except that they actually have jobs, unlike their multiple CS classmates who have already been laid off from their tech jobs since graduation (eg one was in Metaās new hire class last summer).
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I wouldnāt diss sales jobs. In my trainee class at GS many moons ago, we were cold calling for charity from the telephone book, during training, and one woman got $4k of donations from complete strangers. Those skills are invaluable. Not trainable. And I guess nothing to do with either a humanities or a stem education. The head of north american sales said you can teach finance to any monkey. Those closing skills are rare. He is right about it.
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Yes exactly. She is amazing. They even asked her to do a demonstration of cold calling to the rest of the intern class. Just such a people person that she still works as a hostess in a restaurant at weekends for fun because she loves the interpersonal stuff. Completely the opposite of the CS majors.
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I didnāt mean to diss sales, although I do think those types of jobs are less secure than tech jobs. I know lots of people who got into sales as a last-resort type of job.
I had an uncle who was able to retire in his early 40s because he was such a great salesman for the phone company in Southern California. But Iām pretty sure he was the exception when it came to sales.
There are some people that are good at sales. And they can sell anything. And they are self-aware. I am sure they are not insecure about their job. People who can sell, and also have a large breadth of other domain skills donāt have a ceiling as to what they can achieve. A lot of CEOs / startup founders fall into this bucket.
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Iām not sure why every single discussion comes down to who might be the more compelling candidate for jobs at MBB, FAANG, Goldman and the like ā itās just so parochial. Most students, regardless of school or major, arenāt going to be working at one of those companies. With respect to English majors, unless you are a current English major Iām not sure how you think you know what students are being taught and how relevant (or not) it might be in the workplace. Iām pretty sure copying a course description off a college web-site isnāt going to provide sufficient insight.
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Depends. The good salespeople can get jobs easily (since they are good at selling themselves) and can keep sales jobs unless the company or part of the company is closed (since they will be the top performers).
Of course, some good salespeople choose to go into jobs other than sales, but use their sales skills to sell themselves to employers.
But sales skills are not really dependent on the type of college major a college student chooses.
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When an industry is young, it is run and dominated by tech people. As it matures, it is often run by sales people. We are already seeing this tech. Andrew Jassy is a sales guy. Pichai is a product guy ā not tech. The head of google cloud is an ex-Oracle strategy guy. Many pharma companies are not run by chemists any more. They are run by sales people. Once the leadership changes at the top, the tone of the organization changes down below.
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