What major at CAL is most successful at its respective purpose?

ucbalumnus · June 28, 2011, 2:13am

Do you know this from personal experience of taking significant numbers of the courses for these majors?

sakky · June 28, 2011, 4:08am

Let me put it to you this way: which majors are where the ‘money’ athletes - that is, the football and men’s basketball players - known to congregate? It certainly wasn’t Cognitive Sciences, last time I checked.

Which gets down to my definition of what is the true ‘goal’ of the major. Recall that the original question of this thread is: ‘What major at CAL is most successful at its respective purpose?’, which then means that we must deduce what that purpose actually is. Certain majors, such as Linguistics, are fully fledged academic disciplines, with actual intellectual aspirations. The goal of that department may well be to provide undergrads with the best possible academic training in linguistics. {Whether they actually accomplish this goal is not the issue, the issue is what their goal happens to be.}

However, as you correctly pointed out, American Studies & Mass Comm/Media-Studies aren’t even true academic ‘departments’ per se, but rather a mishmash of different courses, often times with little underlying theme amongst them. It’s hard to escape the notion that the true, albeit unstated, purpose of those majors is to provide its students with an easy pathway to a degree.

But they’ll still get a degree and still be eligible for a job that prefers somebody with a degree. And apparently, according to the salary figures, that job will actually pay respectably.

The nation’s labor market is increasingly becoming one where, if you want a decent job, you will need a degree. It doesn’t matter what the degree is in, it won’t matter whether you really learned anything or put in much effort towards that degree, and it will matter only relatively marginally what your grades were. What will truly matter is that you have a degree. Those majors I mentioned provide an easy pathway towards obtaining that degree.

I can certainly think of one guy who majored in one of them (which shall remain unnamed) while working fulltime, and hence never showed up to class except for the first day and during exam days, for which he would take time off from work. Nor did he bother to do much of the reading. He nevertheless not only passed the classes, but got quite strong grades to boot.

ucbalumnus · June 28, 2011, 10:59am

Do you have a full list?

Those in the [football</a> Pac-10 All-Academic team](<a href=“http://www.pac-10.org/News/tabid/863/Article/216028/marecic-mohamed-highlight-pac-10-all-academic-football-team.aspx]football”>http://www.pac-10.org/News/tabid/863/Article/216028/marecic-mohamed-highlight-pac-10-all-academic-football-team.aspx) include two Political Economy majors, and one each Business Administration, Media Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies. [Men’s</a> basketball](<a href=“http://www.pac-10.org/News/tabid/863/Article/223391/pac-10-names-mens-basketball-all-academic-teams.aspx]Men’s”>http://www.pac-10.org/News/tabid/863/Article/223391/pac-10-names-mens-basketball-all-academic-teams.aspx) had one each in American Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies. Women’s basketball had none. We also know that at least [one</a> football player is in civil engineering](<a href=“http://innovations.coe.berkeley.edu/vol4-issue10-dec10/athletes]one”>http://innovations.coe.berkeley.edu/vol4-issue10-dec10/athletes). But this information is only a small subset of the total.

Would you say the same thing for the following majors, which are not offered from standalone departments or include collections of courses from other departments as major requirements?

Applied Mathematics
Asian Studies
Chemical Biology
Cognitive Science
Computational Engineering Science (may be discontinued)
Development Studies
Engineering Mathematics
Engineering Physics
Environmental Engineering Science
Environmental Science
Latin American Studies
Middle Eastern Studies
Operations Research and Management Science
Peace and Conflict Studies
Physical Science field major (being discontinued, probably due to unpopularity)
Political Economy
Social Welfare

Guess it depends on what you consider “pay respectably”, especially in the context of cost to attend university. Full in-state price for four years is about $116,000; full out-of-state price for four years is about $204,000. Of course, non-loan financial aid, or using the community college transfer route can reduce these costs. But if someone had to take up a lot of student loans, could they be paid off on the typical pay levels reported in the career survey for the majors in question?

One anecdotal example for one semester’s worth of courses (it is certainly possible that a student repeating already completed AP or other transfer credit could float through a semester doing minimal work)? Did the student do that every semester? Did all or most students in that major that you won’t name do that most of the time, more so than students in other majors?

sakky · July 3, 2011, 4:25pm

Exactly - these are the Pac-10 All-Academic Team members - that is, the most academically oriented of the players. What about the vast majority of the players who aren’t academically oriented? Surely we can agree that they probably aren’t all engineers.

Consider the entire Cal football roster. Notice that, of the ones who have declared a major or who are considering doing so, how an inordinately disproportionate percentage of them nominated American Studies as a major. Keep in mind that American Studies, overall, is not exactly the largest major on campus. Yet it seems to be unusually popular amongst the football team.

<a href=“http://www.calbears.com/sports/m-footbl/mtt/cal-m-footbl-mtt.html[/url]”>http://www.calbears.com/sports/m-footbl/mtt/cal-m-footbl-mtt.html</a>

What you continue to neglect, I suspect intentionally, is that the metric in question is multivariable in nature. A major both has to be a well-known creampuff major that also has little academic standing as a distinct discipline, and offer relatively high-paying starting salaries to boot. For example, I think it’s safe to say that nobody takes ORMS, Chemical Biology, and certainly not Engineering Math/Physics because they are looking to skate by in a creampuff major with little work. PACS and Middle Eastern Studies don’t pay that well. Social Welfare is a true discipline that is the only major offered by the Social Welfare School.

But, to your point, if you want to add to the list of ‘highly efficient’ majors, then by all means, please do so.

That’s not the question at hand, for what you have brought up is whether somebody should even be going to college at all. I entirely agree that some people probably should not be.

But that’s a fundamentally different question. The question at hand is, given that somebody is going to college - and at Berkeley - what is the most ‘efficient’ major he could choose? An ancillary question is what is the true purpose of the major? In the case of American Studies and akin majors, it is hard to ignore the possibility that those majors exist primarily to offer students an easy pathway towards a degree.

This was not a course that he was repeating, either through AP or transfer work.

Furthermore, while he didn’t undertake this behavior in every semester, he certainly did so in more than one…indeed, in at least 4 semesters as I can recall. Basically, the guy was working throughout his time at Berkeley and simply wanted a degree for minimal effort. His major provided that opportunity.

I suspect that other students were trying harder, because they were trying to achieve top grades. But that’s not the issue. The guy I know was not really trying to achieve top grades, he was satisfied with simply graduating. There are a number of majors that are trivially easy to complete if you simply want to graduate.

crowslayer91 · July 3, 2011, 8:52pm

so… after the large wall of text that is the latter half of this thread, have ya’ll come up with a conclusion yet? (am not about to read all the above posts…)

sakky · July 3, 2011, 11:20pm

I continue to believe that American Studies, Legal Studies, and to some extent Mass Comm are the most successful majors at Cal at achieving their intended purpose, which - at least for those majors - seems to be to primarily provide a pathway to a degree and relatively strong post-graduation prospects while demanding little effort from the students. Other majors may be just as easy, but provide weaker post-grad prospects, while still other majors, engineering in particular, provide far stronger prospects, but in return for far more work. Still other majors actually seem to aim to teach you a particular discipline (although whether they actually demand the work ethic from the students necessary to truly learn much about the discipline is debatable).

ucbalumnus · July 4, 2011, 1:46am

16/91 were in or “considering” American Studies. Yes, that makes it the largest major on the football team. But your other favorite “fluff” majors, Legal Studies and Media Studies *, have only 2 each. Majors with better representation on the football team include:

5 African American Studies
7 Business *
3 Integrative Biology
3 Interdisciplinary Studies
4 Political Economy
4 Political Science
6 Social Welfare
10 Sociology

<ul>
<li>1 was intending to double in Business and Media Studies, not counted in the 2 Media Studies and 7 Business above.</li>
</ul>

Of course, if any major taken by a football player is a “fluff” major, how does that explain:

1 Mechanical Engineering
1 Molecular Environmental Biology
1 Operations Research and Management Science

Strong post-graduation prospects? American Studies appears to have about a 1:2 ratio of employed : seeking employment in the latest career survey. Legal Studies and Media Studies are better, with about a 2:1 ratio. But none has a particularly good pay level (yes, better than MCB, but that is not saying much). A student not getting substantial non-loan financial aid might not find the upgrade in pay levels for these majors versus some alternative post-secondary activity to be worth the cost of attendance.

Note that American Studies has a senior thesis requirement. If the major is indeed a “fluff” major, that means that you are claiming that the grading standards for such a senior thesis are lax.

Would you have chosen one of these majors if you had to do it all over again? Why or why not?

Low work majors with significantly better job and career prospects:

Business Administration
Cognitive Science
Economics
Environmental Economics and Policy
Applied Math
Statistics

lonesoul · July 4, 2011, 1:55am

As much as I hate to admit it, a cal baseball team member was taking a summer course with me, all he talked about was how little work he put into his classes. He got a C in almost everyone. He was american studies major, and has a job lined up at Haas. He told me about Marshawn Lynch (who’s a complete idiot) and how he would show up on exam days and didn’t even know they were having exams and the professor let him cheat off of the guy next to him. Anecdoctal evidence, but funny enough to believe hahah

sakky · July 4, 2011, 2:20am

Nobody ever said that every major taken by a football player is a fluff major. The question is, where do they tend to congregate, and you confirmed yourself that the answer is indeed American Studies. So we seem to agree that that is indeed a fluff major. {Would anybody care to argue otherwise?}

And like I explained before, these majors need to be scaled for the size of the major.

Please carefully read what I actually wrote: I said relatively strong post-graduation outcomes. As I explained before repeatedly, the notion at play is efficiency, which can be measured as the post-graduation outcomes relative to the workload involved, and I think nobody would seriously argue that majors such as American Studies, Legal Studies, or Mass Comm are particularly demanding. Obviously engineering/CS majors are the highest paying majors, but they are not particularly efficient after accounting for the workload involved.

And again, you’ve attempted to change the subject. The question on the table, as stated within the thread title, is what major at Cal is most successful at its respective purpose? The question is not whether you should not even go to Cal (or any other college) at all, as the boundaries of the question necessarily entail that you must pick one of the majors.

Otherwise, you are arguing that the entire point of the thread is moot. You are certainly welcome to argue that point and discuss a tangent but you should then clearly declare that you are no longer subjecting your discussion to the boundaries of the thread. We could then (implicitly) branch off an entirely different subthread to handle the new topic that you eagerly wish to discuss.

And besides, whatever you want to say about the starting pay of American Studies majors, they still made an average of $45k of starting salary in 2010, a whopping figure compared to the average liberal arts graduate from the average school in the nation who made only $33k in 2010. So if you want to argue that the American Studies students might have been better off not even having attended college at all, then you must agree that the vast majority of liberal arts graduates across the country should also not have attended college. So why single out the Berkeley American Studies students?

<a href=“http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/08/news/economy/college_graduates_starting_salary/[/url]”>http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/08/news/economy/college_graduates_starting_salary/</a>

Indeed I am. Would anybody care to argue that the American Studies senior thesis is difficult to pass? {Note, I’m not talking about obtaining a top grade, I am talking about simply passing.}

I rather doubt that many people would agree that any of these majors - especially Applied Math or Statistics - are “low-work” majors on par with the ‘Studies’ majors. Business Administration is particularly deceptive in that you must account for the risk involved in not being admitted to the major at all - along with the high prereq GPA required (and consequent high work load) necessary to obtain an admittable GPA. What happens to all of the students who took all of the prereqs, applied to Haas but weren’t admitted to the major? Heck, what happens to those students who didn’t even apply to Haas at all because they knew that they wouldn’t get in? {Let’s face it, if you have a 2.5 GPA in your Haas prereqs, you know that you won’t be admitted, so why even apply?}

You’ve argued before that Applied Math (and presumably Statistics or even Economics) are fluff majors to students who are unusually talented in those fields. But by that notion, every major - even the engineering majors - could be considered fluff majors if you restrict the discussion only to those who have the unique talent to excel in them. EECS child prodigies such as Steve Wozniak would and did consider the EECS major to be a fluff major. But how many people have the talent of Woz? Similarly, how many Berkeley students have the quantitative talent that Applied Math or Stats would be a fluff major to them?

What matters is whether a major would be ‘fluffy’ to the great bulk of Berkeley students. Many - almost certainly most - Berkeley students, and especially most football players, would struggle to graduate if forced to take the Applied Math or Stats major. However, surely far fewer would struggle to graduate from American Studies. Again, they might not get top grades, but they would surely pass.

And that’s what I mean by a highly ‘efficient’ major: one that allows you to obtain a degree with relatively little work or major-specific talent yet still provides a post-graduation salary that is substantially higher than that of the average liberal arts graduate across the nation. {In contrast, certain of Berkeley’s engineering majors, notably chemical engineering, earn lower salaries than do their chemical engineering counterparts across the nation. That’s right -lower}

<a href=“http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/08/news/economy/graduate_salary_pay/index.htm[/url]”>http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/08/news/economy/graduate_salary_pay/index.htm</a>

<a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/ChemEngr.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/ChemEngr.stm</a>

sakky · July 4, 2011, 2:40am

And that is entirely rational behavior for those players. Let’s face it - for the football, men’s basketball, and even to some extent the baseball players - their primary goal at Cal is not to study and obtain an education, but rather merely to remain academically eligible to play in order to turn pro at the best possible draft slot. Marshawn Lynch may be an idiot, but he made more money in his NFL rookie year than many of us will ever make in our entire lifetimes, and he is far more famous than any of us will ever be. Majors such as American Studies therefore effectively serve as ‘academic eligibility’ majors for the athletes.

ucbalumnus · July 4, 2011, 2:46am

That’s of those who managed to be employed, which was only 17% for in the 2010 survey (versus 33% still seeking employment – this is a rather poor success rate even in the realm of social studies majors). If you count the still seeking as earning $0, then the average pay is only $15k for those not in graduate school or “other”.

If you had to do it all over again, would you have majored in American Studies?

caltanner · July 4, 2011, 2:46am

Sakky – I’d love to obtain your intense arguing skills. Might I ask what you studied in college?

What if we correct for the higher cost of living around the Bay / CA? The difference might not be so large, especially considering these are graduates from the #1 public university in the US.

sakky · July 4, 2011, 3:00am

Frankly speaking, if I had to do it all over again, I might have chosen American Studies. The Cal student experience would have been far more enjoyable, and I would surely earned far higher grades, with which I would have likely been admitted to a top law school. Heck, I probably could have graduated in 3, or perhaps even 2 years, incurring a substantial financial savings not only in terms of tuition but more importantly in terms of the opportunity cost of not working. If the issue is that the major would not provide marketable skills, I could have taken 6 months of the time that I had saved by graduating early and used that to train myself on IT skills to the CCIE, SAS Certified Base Programmer, or Oracle Certified Professional/Master level. {Heck, I might have taken Stat 133 on a P/NP or even an audit basis, as that course presumes no prior quantitative knowledge, yet teaches you a bevy of actual practical skills such as CGI, XML and especially R to build database-driven web applications which makes you instantly employable by a host of firms. Furthermore, once you know R, then learning any other statistical software package such as SAS, Stata, or SPSS is elementary.}

sakky · July 4, 2011, 3:10am

Then by that same logic, plenty of other majors surely pay even less than American Studies does.

And besides, I rather doubt that we should count those who are seeking employment as having earned literally $0. After all, if nothing else, they still have a degree from Berkeley, which ought to mean that they are better off than the vast majority of people in the country who either never graduated from college at all, or if they did, graduated with an unmarketable liberal arts degree from a no-name school. {Now if you want to argue the opposite: that a Berkeley degree - even in American Studies - is actually worse than having no degree at all or having an unmarketable liberal arts degree from a no-name school, I welcome you to try.} Yet those people presumably usually obtain jobs - not particularly desirable ones to be sure, but jobs nonetheless. Surely the Berkeley American Studies graduate could obtain the same jobs that those people are obtaining.

{Now, again, if you want to argue that not only those American Studies students, but the vast majority of liberal arts students across the country, should not even be going to college at all, I welcome you to do so, and in fact, I’ve made that very same point myself on other threads. But that is a fundamentally different topic than the one at hand.}

sakky · July 4, 2011, 3:12am

So correct for it. But we should then also ‘correct’ for the fact that California in general - and the Bay Area in particular - is one of the most desirable places to live in the entire country. The Bay Area is expensive because it is a pleasant place to live with numerous job opportunities. Cal graduates could surely find work elsewhere in a cheaper place to live, but how many actually do? {In contrast, there are plenty of schools such as the University of Rochester, SUNY-Buffalo, Syracuse University, or to some extent even Carnegie-Mellon, where graduates are eager to move away due to a lack of local opportunities.}

That is why I’ve found cost-of-living ‘correction’ analyses to be deeply misleading. There are reasons why certain places to live are more expensive than others. Even within the Bay Area, there are certain locales that are significantly cheaper than others, but also clear reasons for why that is so, ranging from high crime to transportation inaccessibility to relative lack of interesting activities.

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