<p>ucbalumnus, it certainly would make sense that they would, but do you know whether any data exists that supports the assumption? Has anyone studied it and found a correlation between family income and choice of major?</p>
<p>" . How about applying to jobs at publishing companies or other industries that use her skills?"</p>
<p>Of course this is not about my D, and not me saying her English degree is bad. I was mostly repeating what she said. And she has applied for MANY of the jobs she REALLY wants without success (although she is doing stories for a local magazine for no pay), and she canât afford to live those place that have more of those jobs without some reliable income. I have been following threads about the work English majors would have skills for, and HRS comes up a lot.</p>
<p>^^ Yes, love google</p>
<p>Family Socioeconomic Status, Parental Involvement, and College Major ChoicesâGender, Race/Ethnic, and Nativity Patterns
BY Yingyi Ma
Sociological Perspectives
Vol. 52, No. 2 (Summer 2009)</p>
<p>Abstract:
College major choice is a much-neglected yet highly significant topic in sociological research. This article focuses on family socioeconomic status (SES) and parental involvement to examine potential family influences on patterned college major choice by gender, race/ethnicity, and nativity. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study 1988â1994 (NELS: 88â94), this study confirms old gender patterns and finds new racial/ethnic patterns in college major choice. Lower SES children are found to favor more lucrative college majors. Family SES is found to have differential effects on men and women and for racial/ethnic minorities and whites. Parental involvement in childrenâs domain-specific education exerts significant effects on childrenâs college major choice. These together suggest important theoretical and policy implications.</p>
<p>And a finding of a 2008 Pell Insititute Report (3 large data sets examined)</p>
<p>âLow-income, first-generation students attending four-year institutions were slightly less likely than their peers to be undeclared majors. They were also somewhat less likely to major in the humanities. They were slightly more likely to major in the social sciences, business, health, as well as vocational, technical, and professional fields (hereafter referred to as vocational). They were as likely as their peers to major in education, mathematics and science, and computer science/ engineering.â</p>
<p>Shrinkrapâevery major city and most other cities/towns have a newspaper, there are publishing houses all over the country, several in Michigan which is dirt cheep to live in now. She doesnât have to live in LA or NYC to get experience, which is a trap many kids fall into. Apply for jobs off the beaten path, get a few years of experience THEN look to moving to NYC or wherever her dream lies.</p>
<p>I just did a random search for âwriterâ in Kansas City, MOâ20 jobs popped up across several industries, several were contract jobs but most were full time jobs. </p>
<p>Iâm just using your DD as an example but this is a common theme Iâve noticed here, too many new grads think they have to have it all and can only work in 5 cities in the country and arenât willing to explore other options. There are a LOT of jobs out there, just not in sexy cities like NYC.</p>
<p>@Consolation:
No, my argument is that when we discuss career earnings and employability, it is not helpful to argue against data colected from large samples with his/her own personal experience.</p>
<p>In this thread alone people posted multiple links to studies and datasets.</p>
<p>I am not trying to put down the Liberal Arts. In fact, I am at a LAC. What I repeatedly stated is that one needs to make a âwell informed decisionâ about their choice of major.</p>
<p>I also posted that it is great to choose majors that advance your education and also porvide good chances of employability and career earnings. On this regard, I do think that Humanities/Arts are at a disadvantage versus more Quantitative and Technical majors.</p>
<p>Posts on this thread defending some Humanity/Arts majors say that the student can take some additional Marketing/Business/Communication classes and/or go for internships to improve their employability . I think that this only proves that the major alone provide relatively weaker career opportunities upon graduation than other more sought-after majors do.</p>
<p>"Shrinkrapâevery major city and most other cities/towns have a newspaper, there are publishing houses all over the country, several in Michigan which is dirt cheep to live in now. "</p>
<p>We have lived in both LA and NYC! </p>
<p>FWIW, our local newspaper, NOT a major city, comes out twice a week now, I think, and itâs almost all AP, except for the local sports. I am not sure because even when I paid for a subscription, it did not come regularly. I have seen some of the staff professionally. We live in the lowest cost of living county in the (bay) area. If you have any specifics, we would love to hear about it. I think she would be okay relocating to Michigan if she could afford it. I have no expertise in this area. </p>
<p>BTW, she did get offered another writing gig today, but again, for no money.</p>
<p>Inpersonal, as I posted upthread, these days virtually ALL majors require that a kid do internships while in college in order to get some semblance of a career-track job upon graduation. As people have observed in earlier threads, many of the old âentry-levelâ jobs no longer exist, or have been turned into (often unpaid) internships.</p>
<p>I think we would all agree that it is likely to require more imagination, more flexibility, and often more time for a person with a non-vocational major to find this sort of job armed only with a bachelorâs degree. (MANY fields require at least a masterâs to find meaningful work, and many of them are vocational.)</p>
<p>Iâm not arguing that the typical CS grad does not have a higher starting salary than the typical anthropology or history major (or the bio major, for that matter). Iâm simply saying that there are ways for the latter to build a satisfying career using what they learned as an undergrad, and that they are not doomed, as has been stated here, to live in a van, work retail for the rest of their lives, or be supported by their parents.</p>
<p>Shrinkrap:</p>
<p><a href=âhttp://webconnect3.sendouts.com/CN_Frame.aspx?ID=softwarepundits&SiteID=webconnect&Group=webconnect&Key=CN&CNTrackID=7&MTTrackID=7&PostId=3e2b8067-fdb7-4c84-9458-47590d23b353&CnId=&applynewcan=0[/url]â>http://webconnect3.sendouts.com/CN_Frame.aspx?ID=softwarepundits&SiteID=webconnect&Group=webconnect&Key=CN&CNTrackID=7&MTTrackID=7&PostId=3e2b8067-fdb7-4c84-9458-47590d23b353&CnId=&applynewcan=0</a></p>
<p>Iâm not saying this specific job, but it might give her an idea of what she would have to bring to the table. A CC course or two in specific technical areas while working the proverbial retail job could make a big difference.</p>
<p>^Sent her the link, and thanks! The cc course would be something in IT?</p>
<p>She got another lead for an online spot today, food stuff, but of course, for no pay. She has quite a few credits, if that is the right word, for that kind of stuff. She wrote for her school newspaper and her school magazine, as well as for some stuff in New York, on Broadway and off. Her âpassionâ is /was musical theatre. All unpaid, except for her school mag, which was work study. One of her friends is writing for Huffington Post, but not sure if itâs for pay.</p>
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<p>The tragedy of our youth. As long as recent graduates are clamoring for the chance to work for free to âprove themselves,â what incentive does business have to actually have to pay them and train them? A vicious cycle.</p>
<p>I donât hear about too many unpaid internships for engineers or CS majors, however. That seems to imply greater market demand for those fields, even if a graduate may need to take a job in a remote location or accept below-average pay.</p>
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<p>Yes. If she doesnât already have the skills, some software courses related to web design, page makeup, and content management would be a really useful place to start, preferably courses that teach the packages that are currently in wide use. The thing to do is look at ads like the one I linked to and see what they are asking for: WordPress, Jive, and good old HTML in this particular case. She needs to look at a lot of ads and talk to recruiters. Web development skills combined with excellent writing can take her in many directions. </p>
<p>If she has any interest in working for software companiesâsomething that I found to be a lot of fun and intellectually stimulating, sort of like endless grad school, but with a salary 
--she could delve into some systems stuff. Proving that she has an interest in and can handle technical information is important. </p>
<p>Being able to put those package names and buzzwords on her resume is key. I donât know what they look like now, but in the dark ages technical resumes typically came with a section at the end where people listed all the hardware/operating systems they had worked with, and all of the software.</p>
<p>I am a strong advocate of connecting with recruiters who specialize in your desired field, rather than relying on answering ads. Recruiters know who is hiring, and what they like in a candidate. Itâs been a long time since I was out there, but there used to be a few recruiters in the NYC area who specialized in technical communications. There was one person who specialized in mostly corporate PR people. (PR is another good field for English majors. ) There were recruiters who specialized in advertising. (Another good field for English majors. ) And so forth.</p>
<p>Shrinkrap, good golly, it will take your D all of three days to master the payroll software which this company apparently required. Maybe three hours if sheâs quick.</p>
<p>I hear this lament all the time from my neighbors kids- HR departments are so lazy they just look for any reason to screen people out, I canât believe I didnât get this job because they said I needed to know XYZ software and I donât, I met all the requirements except for one, etc.</p>
<p>I run a large recruiting department. Yes, we screen people out. We often get 1,000 resumes for a particular opening- our shareholders would be mighty irritated to learn that we interview all 1,000 of those people instead of winnowing it down to 5-6. If a job posting requires a software package, why is it HR thatâs lazy in rejecting the kids who donât list that on their resume, and why isnât it the kids who are lazy for not getting off the their duffs, finding a friend who knows the software or logging on for an online tutorial?</p>
<p>This isnât rocket science. Nothing warms the heart more than interviewing a candidate and asking, âhow did you learn Photoshopâ and hearing, âAll the jobs I was interested in in journalism and social media required it, so I signed up at my community college over the summer and took the class.â Or asking, âwow, itâs unusual for an anthropology major to know Matlabâ and hearing, âI knew that having a strong foundation in statistics would serve me well professionally regardless of where I ended up so I took two semesters of applied math in college.â</p>
<p>We hire new BAâs of all disciplines for a variety of roles and most of the time, expect them to know nothing of value for the jobs theyâll be filling. But we need evidence that these kids can actually get out there and learn what they need to learn (which used to be a fair assumption if a kid had a Bachelorâs degree in the humanities) and unfortunately, thatâs no longer the case. Kids canât learn independently; we canât afford to spoon feed. We spend millions of dollars on training- and we can pretty much teach a smart kid what he or she needs to become effective-- but we donât know how to train someone to be curious, to figure out how to learn something new, or how to read a job posting.</p>
<p>Writing jobs are the hardest to fill- ask any corporate hiring leader. We need writers for our investor relations team, technical writing for R&D, very quick and terse writers for our media relations department, deep and turgid writers for our government relations office in DC, and essay/long form type writers for executive communications (speech writing although they donât write many speeches.) And those are just the âformalâ writing jobs- we hire marketing folks who need to know how to write well, proposal folks, internal communications people who work as part of the HR team, etc. And a huge department of people who take material and figure out how to turn it into web copy.</p>
<p>If your D only wants to write for a newspaper or magazine she is staring at a declining market, but good writers can be found in all of the Fortune 1000.</p>
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<p>Isnât that supposed to be the baseline assumption for any reasonable bachelorâs degree? In other words, the graduate is supposed to have proven his/her ability to study and learn about something in significant depth (i.e. major).</p>
<p>If a bachelorâs degree no longer signifies that (regardless of whether the major subject is directly applicable to something the employer wants), then what is it supposed to mean? If a bachelorâs degree means nothing beyond the learning of the specific major subject, then it is no surprise that employers are becoming more picky about specific skills, rather than counting on oneâs ability to learn what is needed in the course of the job (which is still really important once on the job, since jobs change over time) when making hiring decisions.</p>
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<p>Hereâs the definition of âturgidâ from Merriam-Webster: âExcessively embellished in style or language : bombastic, pompous.â Surely, even in Washington, DC, employers arenât looking to hire âturgidâ writers? And, yes, I was an English major. I guess I always will be.</p>
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<p>I was wondering when you would show up. :D</p>
<p>Re post #212, when I was hiring, most of my people were fairly recent grads. I found that generally speaking the candidates from elite LACs and prestigious universities were brighter, and more eager, willing, and able to learn. I know that that is not a popular view here, but it was a fact. I did hire people from a broad range of schools, but the baseline of ability and habit of mind was always there with graduates of the better schools but very spotty with others.</p>
<p>âShrinkrap, good golly, it will take your D all of three days to master the payroll software which this company apparently required. Maybe three hours if sheâs quick.â</p>
<p>I figured that, but they didnât actually name any particular software. The ad read that among the duties were âto learn how to utilize an applicant tracking system, and a countywide personnel and payroll systemâ, and then on a supplemental questionnaire it asked you to âlist personnel duties, assignments and transaction at clerical and technical levelsâ,including where and when, and âidentify any experience using applicant tracking and/or payroll systemsâ. This was described as âentry levelâ. This job listing was open for 12 days, she saw it with four days left, including a three day weekend, but she managed to get a typing certificate in time. and was followed by a written exam, and an âoral panel screeningâ. Iâm not sure three hours would have worked, but I guess she can start practicing some in case that job comes around again. I noticed they posted the same job six months ago, but WITHOUT the supplemental application. </p>
<p>In her internships and through getting her certificates, she did learn to use a lot of software and other âstuffâ I canât name, but not personnel and payroll systems or applicant tracking. </p>
<p>But thanks. Those are good ideas. It definitely looks like technical writing is where the demand is.</p>
<p>Had to pick my moment, Consolation. ;)</p>
<p>Blossom: I love reading your posts. When I graduated there were lots of companies that hired smart people and trained them. Thatâs how I got hired. I sure hope that still happens.</p>
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<p>I have no problem believing that. If you were to match candidates on the basis of their SAT/ACT scores, would there still be a difference? Since we know that the prestigious schools are not really meritocracies, why not hire based on the students major instead? Is there a political reason for not doing so?</p>
<p>Non-career specific undergrad majors are now seen as equal to the high school diploma requirement of yesteryear. </p>
<p>College is the new high school, and has been for some time.</p>
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<p>Quite possibly not. But, since I am a person who does very well on standardized tests, whose kid does very well on standardized tests, naturally I like them. :)</p>
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<p>We do? I disagree. I think that prestigious schools ARE in large part meritocracies. Not 100% of course, but in large part. Otherwise they would not have the SAT averages that they have.</p>
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<p>It depends what you mean. If you are suggesting that chem majors are necessarily smarter than English majors, for example, you would be wrong. The fact is that in my field, I hired for certain skills and characteristics. People could demonstrate those things in a variety of ways.It is wrong to assume that the English major cannot master technical material as it is wrong to assume that the bio major cannot write well. Artificially limiting my hiring to certain majors would have been stupid, as it would have artificially limited my applicant pool. I donât see how politics enters into it.</p>