You can still study what you love, and get a job. But the practical part comes in choosing a school you can afford.
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Pre-professional means going to college is a means to an end for a “professional career”. There is usually focus and intent on internships and resume building during the college experience
Students that attend college primarily for intellectual curiosity and growth with no thought on how to apply that knowledge on a known career path are not Pre-professional. It does not mean they won’t have a successful career - they are just more interested in learning without a defined career goal during college.
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Maybe a better term is career- focused, and some colleges are much more oriented that way than others. Some include the career center on tours; others don’t. In one of my kid’s schools, establishing a linked in profile was required freshman year, and the school took the professional portraits for it. Internal campus jobs required a formal interview, with resume, dressed up, with feedback provided. If you want that, you can find it at some schools.
Perhaps it should say “ALL people ALSO need to be strategic and practical…” Like you said above, it should be both.
So, for example, that’s why a major like PPE (i.e, political science, philosophy, and econ) would be so appealing if that had been around when I was in college. It opens up your mind, and it opens up career possibilities in a wide variety of paths like law, business etc.
Or for that matter, medicine if you take the prereqs. To me, that’s the best of both worlds.
Again, I contrast the US system to the higher ed system in other places. Having flexibility when you’re young to change professions and still learn to think and be exposed to new things is, to me, the way to go. It would have been awful for me if I had gone to a UK school to major in a science and then realize I hated it. That’s actually what happened to me, but luckily I was in the US.
I started out wanting to go into medicine and realized I hated it (and associated horrid stuff like Organic Chem etc). As we say, I “pivoted” quite late in my college career, and it was the best academic decision I could have ever made.
I do think you need to love what you do to be personally happy. I have immense satisfaction as a lawyer, and I am certain that wouldn’t have happened if I had become a doctor. Yes, there are many many unhappy lawyers, but, for, me, it was a whim that worked for me.
I think we’re on the same page. I just am somewhat stumped by “pre-professional” as it is used in the context of an institution, but the posts here have helped a lot.
@roycroftmom: I just saw your post. I hadn’t realized colleges had moved to that level. But I think that’s a good thing. It would never have occurred to me to put together a resume in college “way back when.” Having a kid do that in college (resumes, online business profile etc) sure would prepare you for real life. Will keep that in mind.
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It is mostly in the context of changing into popular majors where the enrollment is as much as the department has capacity to teach. Changing between less popular majors like philosophy and physics is not too hard, as long as the student has been taking the prerequisite courses so far so that the student can actually graduate in the new major in a reasonable time.
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I agree with this.
When I think of preprofessional, I think of vibe. I’m sure I will have naysayers, but if I were attempting to define it…
- Many students are determined to be captains of industry/headed for big bucks careers in finance or management consulting/tons of engineering and cs majors…
- Creativity is an afterthought for many kids at schools known for a preprofessional vibe (Penn, Georgetown, etc…), and will have a dearth of “typical” liberal arts majors or fine arts majors.
- It appears students are not as interested in the “life of the mind” and instead are interested in hitting goals on the way to their intended careers.
- Students perhaps take themselves quite seriously overall and the academic environment might feel very competitive.
I am sure I am grossly generalizing, but these are qualities I would associate with “preprofessional.” There are probably others, and I am quite likely pigeonholing a lot of kids at such colleges.
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This is a very interesting comment.
I think we define “pre-professional” too broadly. Most students start their careers without ever going to graduate schools. They aren’t “pre-professional”. I’d reserve the term “pre-professional” only for those whose goals are to go on to “professional” schools (not necessarily immediately after graduation) to further their careers. If a school or a major is full of such students, then it also becomes “pre-professional”.
Another example: California State Universities have fairly voluminous general education requirements, but also have most of their students in overtly pre-professional majors.
Colleges where there is not a significant pre-professional vibe are probably relatively few in number, since most students are looking at college as a stepping stone to a better career than they would otherwise enter, even if that is not their only motivation for attending college.
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Doesn’t this apply to most every student, except perhaps for the children of really wealthy folks who might not financially need to worry about real life finances when older, athletes looking to turn professional, etc.
Besides this group, I would think that every other student (or at least the large majority of students) go to college with the desire to make their path in life somewhat easier. That would make nearly every school pre-professional. That’s not what you’re saying, is it?
I’m also getting a bit confused by “gen ed” requirements outside of majors. Don’t most of the T-200 schools have requirements to study things outside the major? Again, this is a distinguishing feature between US higher ed and other countries. If that still applies at apparent PPC schools like Penn, Georgetown etc., the students are getting the proverbial well-rounded education, aren’t they?
Yes (including the athletes who may be trying to use college sports as a stepping stone to pro sports).
Yes, there can be some students who need not worry about career preparation in college because family wealth and connections can get them into desirable career track jobs without having to pay too much attention to that while in college. (Of course, some other students want to choose colleges with high concentrations of such students, in hopes of making use of those connections within the “alumni network”.)
Yes, most colleges have some level of pre-professionalism. Most bachelor’s degrees in the US are granted in overtly pre-professional majors, and even many students in liberal arts majors chose them for pre-professional reasons (e.g. economics for business or finance jobs).
Except for a very small number of truly open curriculum colleges (Amherst?, Brown?, Evergreen State; any others?), colleges in the US generally require some course work in subjects outside the student’s major for a bachelor’s degree (even those without much in the way of specific general education requirements like Hamilton and Grinnell require some large portion of course work to be outside of the student’s major).
Of course, whether any specific college’s out-of-major or general education requirements are enough to be “well rounded” is an opinion that can vary.
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Part of the pre-professional focus comes from the change in corporate recruitment schedules. Next week most major investment banks will finish their recruiting for summer 2023, and those offers, many of which have already been made, will extend to full-time positions starting August 2024. Tech companies also follow an accelerated recruitment schedule, which seemed to become even more accelerated due to the pandemic. So some sophomores in college thus already know where they will likely work upon graduation in prestigious fields. Students need to be more career focused earlier than historically.
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Except that top UK institutions are not at all “pre-professional” in outlook. Other than the doctors and lawyers who are already set in their career (and even there the best students are encouraged to pursue an academic research path), students in other subjects are picked for their academic ability and interest in that subject. The attitude drummed into you by the professors is that the aspiration of the best students should be to do a PhD and become an academic, and those who go and get a job instead are the failures. Certainly for me and my fellow math students the competition was to see who was good enough to be offered a PhD place (the best was to stay in Cambridge, Oxford was second best, the guy who went to Caltech was a modest failure 
). Years later when you go to reunions the emphasis is on academic not business successes and even the jokes in the speeches are about the number of Nobel Prizes won this year.
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If this is how “pre-professional” is defined, then I think you’ll find this “vibe” at nearly all of the best research universities. The goal at these places is to be successful (especially now given high cost of tuition), and in order to do so, you need to be building your brand. This involves being creative and thinking independently. Part of the reason we have record numbers of student debtors seeking forgiveness is that they may not have done enough vitae/network/brand-building and focused too much on Plato and Aristotle? IMHO…
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Forgive me for my ignorance: but doesn’t “forcing” students to take all courses relating to their major automatically guarantee a professional-oriented outcome to those jobs related to the UK major? In other words, I went to Cambridge as an Econ major and realized I hated it after the first year, am I not required to continue in this major OR risk starting again.
With the greatest apologies, I really don’t know. If I’m wrong, please let me know…but, prima facie, it seems as pre-professional as you can get.
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That’s nothing to do with a professional job. If you take econ, your professor will tell you that if you are really good, you should do a PhD and become an academic.
And you pick your subject because you are interested in it from an academic perspective. You don’t take economics because you want to work in finance, you take it because you are fascinated by how markets work from a theoretical (and massively oversimplified) perspective. You don’t take geography because you want to be a professional “geographer” (whatever that even is). And that’s how it’s taught, just as CS tends to be more concerned with proving the properties of a Turing Machine, not teaching you how to program in Python.
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There is a vibe distinction between the professions of medicine and law (to use two examples) and their academic counterparts of academic science and history/public policy/poli sci. The topics overlap, but the approach taken in the profession is different from the approach taken by scholars (a doctor treats patients, a scientist makes discoveries, and yes a person can be both at the same time; a lawyer defends clients/corporations or prosecutes or judges, etc., her counterpart in academia writes and teaches about the very same legal issues at stake in those trials, and yes some attorneys have a foot in both spheres).
So if that’s the vibe difference at the career level, one could say a bit of that difference filters down to the students headed in those different directions, and when enough people see themselves in practice (of medicine, law, etc.) it bring a tone to their approach, whereas when enough students see themselves headed to a Ph.D., it brings a different tone. At most elite schools there is a mix: Williams has pre-academics alongside pre-Wall St; Brown sends tons of kids to med school yet many others to science Ph.D programs, and even at Penn there are folks who will continue on in academia.
So I’ll leave you with this silly story. I went to an Ivy (a long time ago). Shortly before the end of senior year, I cut my hair quite short. A friend was like “you look pre-professional!” He knew I was heading to a graduate program that very specifically combines a professional degree with a second academic one. It was the first time I’d heard the word “pre-professional”.
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I seriously doubt that the only students with debt are those who studied philosophy and English. And if they did, do they deserve to be saddled with student debt because they didn’t choose to study finance and become an investment banker? Because landing a job at Bain is the only worthy outcome of going to college? Because if a student graduates and doesn’t earn $100k right out of college, they are a failure?
I’m going to guess that there are substantial numbers of student debtors who chose to go into ANY type of career, including nursing, teaching, social work, and yes, medicine, or heaven forbid, a kid who studied engineering but wasn’t able to land a six figure job right out of college. It’s possible there are some poor people with engineering degrees😱
Great thinking skills have value, and not all highly paid jobs involve finance and engineering. Furthermore, someone’s annual salary is not an indicator of their ability to live a happy and successful life. Whatever someone chooses to study in college, they don’t deserve to be stuck with student loans until they are middle aged.
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I’m also in the camp that most schools are pre professional.
What my D looked for was slightly different, although it may be semantics. She wanted a career readiness focused program.
To her that meant:
Schools that stressed their career center, had well supported co ops, brought tons of companies to campus, had industry ties through partnership on/near campus, and that was very hands on in their courses vs theoretical, had students mostly going into the workforce from undergrad vs grad school, had freshman starting in design courses from the get go, industry leaders coming to give guest lectures, and courses specifically designed to solve the problems of the specific major (even in intro classes).
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