I’m serious, about the stroke. I just can’t function in a world where quality journalism is so important and yet so hard to find. Here’s Tovia Smith, of NPR, making the same argument that Columnist Boyardee made the other day— that our recent colleges graduates are struggling because they didn’t take “practical” majors. I promise, I’m looking at this less as a matter of defending the liberal arts and more as a matter of asking for absolutely elementary journalistic quality. If you are writing a story that suggests that our recent graduates are struggling because they didn’t take practical majors, you have to perform at least two minimal functions.
Number one, you have to demonstrate that in fact many people are taking these majors.
Number two, you have to demonstrate that there are in fact actual bad economic consequences for these majors.
Not only does Tovia Smith fail to demonstrate those things, she seems not to understand that these are basic requirements for such a story. Since the well-remunerated professional can’t bother to check the facts, I’ll do it for her. Again: in vast numbers, American college students do take supposedly practical majors. Business, for example, is the most popular major by a broad margin. See for yourself:
Check the link for all the specifics.
There are similar no facts within the piece whatsoever to justify the idea that supposedly impractical majors have worse economic outcomes than supposedly practical ones. And while the NCES doesn’t track those outcomes, the best evidence available to me suggests that the liberal arts don’t have worse economic outcomes than supposedly practical, “career” oriented majors. If Smith bothered to make an argument with any kind of reference to evidence, I might be able to rebut it, and the burden is of course on her to make that argument. But she didn’t, so I can’t. As I said in the post on Frank Bruni, a far, far more persuasive case can be made that recent graduates are suffering across fields and skillsets, thanks to inadequate aggregate demand. (Maybe somebody should do something about that.)
If you know Tovia Smith, you might ask her why she failed in such a comprehensive way. If you follow her on Twitter, you might tweet her this post. If you know editors or administrators at NPR, you might ask them if they have any standards of evidence, or if they employ ombudsmen, or who exactly let this piece out without evidence in the first place. Absent that, there’s essentially no way to get accountability for journalism that is inadequate in the most elementary terms. The American media is a comprehensive failure.
gaz
Freddie, Business Majors are a part of the problem.
We need more engineers, not more MBAs.
Aside from that, I agree with your post.
debg
Bravo, Freddy! I’m on your side not only because I’m a history professor trying to recruit students into my major, but because I try to teach basic logic skills. My students are constantly amazed when their glib-sounding arguments don’t get high grades, while their analyses based on facts and sound logic fare much better.
jdrs0819
Aerospace engineering, I only just found a job 1 year after graduation. And it’s not even a sure thing. I need to pass my federal background check still.
I have another interview with Hamilton Sundstrand, too, and I’d rather work for them. But I took the first job because the money was fantastic and it’s a job for now lol.
patrick II
Blaming young people for having the wrong type of education is part of the larger idea that it is the workers fault that they don’t have jobs. Mis-educated people dont’ have jobs goes hand in hand with workers are lazy so the don’t have jobs, immigrants steal jobs, and people won’t work because they love being on food stamps too much.
They are all different arguments with the same underlying motive, to remove blame from the financial thieves who have sucked all of the money out of the economy, paid themselves handsomely and left the rest of the economy without enough consumer power or real investment to prosper and create jobs.
Punchy
Im afraid youve given her all she really wanted — pub for her article. Nobody gives a shit anymore about truth and accuracy. Page hits, baby! Retweets! Positive or negative……dunt matter! Look! 28 new likes on Facebook! Promotion!
matryoshka
Unfortunately, no one has to substantiate any of their bullshit any more. It’s enough to simply assert it, because all beliefs and opinions are “equal.”
Anya
I think liberals should let the wingnuts defund NPR.
Bob2
Of course, taking those “practical” majors usually runs into a gigantic flaw if they don’t have basic communication skills.
English majors, for instance, do quite well in a large number of fields provided they know how to sell it. Basic reasoning and writing skills in most fields matter quite a bit more than bad journalists suspect.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
The most practical major of all is obviously journalism, or if you prefer “communications”. In what other field can you be all three of: (1) stupid, (2) ignorant, and (3) lazy, and still be gainfully employed after gradution?
__
We could call this The Tovia Smith 3-Strikes and You’re In Principle.
rlrr
@Bob2:
Good writers are always in demand.
Persia
@gaz: Seriously, is there a more ‘impractical’ degree than “Business?” What does it even mean?
rlrr
I’m surprised “queer studies” isn’t on that graph. According to a certain troll, majoring in “queer studies” is the reason college grads can’t find jobs.
pseudonymous in nc
Tovia Smith “is a graduate of Tufts University, with a degree in international relations.”
But that’s a side-issue. I’d suggest that the bloating of “business” departments in American universities — not just for people doing their Master of Bugger All, but BBAs and other quals at the undergraduate level — is part of the problem, for a bunch of reasons, not least that a lot of the management theory stuff makes Jacques Lacan look empirical. I’ve seen the people doing those courses, and I wouldn’t trust them to manage a lemonade stand.
(They do, however, seem set up to produce a lot of Republican assholes.)
gaz
@Persia: It means you came from a family with means, and can properly network. That’s all an MBA is.
Notice that the explosion of MBA degrees corresponds with the rise in financial instruments – vapor products from wall-street. We need to produce real shit instead.
Most of these people would have served America better designing high tech gadgets (even if they ended up being built in china) rather than selling smoke to each other on Wall Street.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@Anya:
I personally defunded NPR during the Gore campaign.
I have an MA in Geography. I make far more than a guy 2 years older than me who has a Chem E degree. I graduated during the Reagan Recession, I know how hard it is to get a job.
Much of the problem is how we’ve made student fucking loans so integral to funding higher edumacation. Because of that, kids who want to major in English have a harder time justifying it because of the percieved “oh that’s not a marketable skill” crap. I did just fine with Geography.
And I work in an office full of civil engineers and you won’t find a duller, narrow-viewed crowd of people in your life. I can tell you why projects like Boston’s Big Dig went horribly awry.
Fucking NPR, same ole, same ole. Never give them a dime, never give your local public radio station that buys programing from them a dime.
gaz
@pseudonymous in nc: hear hear!
cosigned.
PeakVT
This chart is based upon PayScale Salary Survey data for full-time employees in the United States who possess a Bachelor’s degree and no higher degrees and have majored in the subjects listed above. These results may not represent all graduates with these degrees.
I think we need better data. The Payscale survey clearly states that it might not give a complete picture of all graduates, and there’s plenty of anecdata that more liberal arts majors are unemployed in the first years after college. Of course, the number of stories could be caused by liberal arts majors having better communication skills rather than a significant difference in outcomes.
Aside from that, though, if a lot of college students are making bad choices about majors, it might be better to look for economic incentives that encourage bad choices, rather than just calling the students stupid.
gaz
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: One of the best investments I believe we could make for our nation is subsidizing higher education. Anybody who desires a higher education and can maintain a graduating level GPA should have access to it, and I’d happily cough up the tax-dollars to make sure even the most broke and disenfranchised person could go to ANY college that would accept them. Ivy league, state level, or community I don’t care. I’d pay. I’d get my money back in spades, because it would keep us competitive on the global stage.
ericblair
@patrick II:
Correct. QUEER STUDIES! is just the way to ensure that conservative policy can’t be faulted for any employment problem: it’s just the stupid/lazy/unrealistic libbrul damn kids that are the problem.
As jdrs0819 says, it’s not all sweetness and light for engineers either, since the supposed shortage is played up by companies who want to oursource everything or raise the quotas on semi-indentured servants on H1B visas to keep the salaries down. (Before anyone hollers, I think we should remove the H1B classification and let qualified people in on green cards, so they can change jobs within the US if they get treated like crap.) Otherwise your best option is the defense sector, where they can’t be outsourced and can’t be done by non-US citizens and that’s where all the funding is anyway. I’d love to see a lot of this money redirected to space and civil projects, which will have to wait until a decent fucking Congress gets elected.
Ohio Mom
A couple of weeks ago David Brooks et al were complaining that colleges weren’t teaching critical thinking skills. Freddie deBoer tore that to bits, and righfully do. But I can’t help but look at all the business majors on this chart and wonder if it isn’t true that lots of college students are missing their big opportunity to learn how to think. As far as I can tell, business school is mainly indoctrination.
FlipYrWhig
All college students considering a major have heard someone else, or a small voice within their own head, say “What are you going to do with that?” in the event they choose something that doesn’t track neatly with a job. We don’t need to remind them of it. They’re obsessed with it already and practically shake when they try to decide if they should parlay a few fun courses in Anthropology into a major in it, or if that means the only job they’ll ever be able to get is “anthropologist.” They all worry about figuring out how to resolve “I want to be X” and “How do I get a job in X if there isn’t such a thing as X-ology for me to major in?”
Felinious Wench
@pseudonymous in nc:
Bravo. There is a real gap in good software architects and engineers, and a glut of business department graduates. This graph just reinforces why that is. More geeks, please!
pseudonymous in nc
@PeakVT:
Well, you can look for starters at certain industries and companies that draw heavily on arts/humanities graduates but expect them to work as unpaid interns in expensive cities. (NPR offers a “stipend”. Whoopee.) Not much opportunity to work off the cost of tuition during the vacation months if you’re expected to put in 40 hours for free.
And that includes “liberal” media: Steve Gilliard (RIP) was consistently unimpressed with how left-wing outlets had intern policies that excluded the kind of young people that they were supposedly concerned with.
gaz
@ericblair:
FTR, I wasn’t so much attempting to imply that as I was attempting to say we produce far too many business majors and far too few useful ones. I included engineers because it was broad. I could have said medical, or any of the sciences. Hell, English, and History are great too. If * nothing else * we need more passionate and gifted teachers.
What we DO NOT NEED, is the continuing glut of degrees that lead to careers in finance and investment banking, etc, for the most part. We have more than enough. Our economy has been perilously balanced on the financial sector, until it came crashing down like the house-of-cards it was, back in 2k8.
FlipYrWhig
@Ohio Mom: One thing for sure about going to college is that you learn how to detect, and to create, bullshit. As a nation we could do with a drastic improvement in skepticism and independent judgment. College is damn good for that. Or at least ought to be.
dww44
@patrick II: This. Just another subterfuge employed by our lazy and mostly superficially honest journalists.
gaz
@Felinious Wench: cosigned
Gypsy howell
I always thought “business major” was just shorthand for “I have no intellectual curiosity about anything except getting a paycheck.”
Seriously, does an undergraduate business major learn anything useful?
gaz
@Gypsy howell: They learn how to bullshit.
Martin
Unfortunately, ‘Business’ is treated as a wash-out major at many schools. It’s where the engineering students go when they get Cs in math and science.
And graduates of STEM programs, many of which have never really fallen in demand, exist almost entirely above the median for new college graduates. For students in the humanities and social sciences, they’re starting almost entirely below the median. Now, that’s not necessarily so horrible, except that it used to be that jobs below the median still paid well enough to ensure that the college loans could get paid off and you could embark on a proper life – get married, buy a house, etc. That’s the part that’s changing. If those students are walking out with $100K in loans at interest rates higher than a mortgage, pulling down a $30K job because they went for the history degree rather than the electrical engineering one, then the prospect of buying a home is very far off, as they’re barely going to be able to keep up with the loan payments. We’re reaching a tipping point on the affordability of non-professional degrees – at least relative to market demand.
It’s worth keeping in mind that the market demand for BAs in History are pretty close to zero. With a teaching credential added on, that’s a different matter. But that history degree won’t permit the individual to compete for any of the professional jobs. The engineer, however can compete for almost any job as the history major *and* has a protected market for electrical engineering jobs *and* a preferred market in engineering broadly (the aero major above could likely take some mechanical engineering jobs, etc.) *and* with a teaching credential even have a better shot at some of the teaching positions as the history major.
Toss in advanced degrees, and this is a whole other discussion, but that’s atypical in this country still. I see our employment surveys and for the non-STEM students they’re pretty bleak. There’s a LOT of baristas in that survey. Bank tellers. Retail workers. Administrative assistants. Those jobs do not pay well enough to justify carrying a large debt.
My rule has always been: only borrow against appreciating assets. That’s the only situation where the loan can be justified. In the current market, non-STEM majors are iffy as to whether they will deliver enough salary in return for the cost of the degree. Yes, they will help ensure that a job can be found, and that’s valuable, but there’s other paths to the same outcome such as trades – which cost far less and gain you an additional 3-4 years of employment and income. I still encourage students to do it, but it’s not the slam dunk decision that it used to be. I’ve always told students that went into such disciplines to have a fall-back, and still do, but these days I encourage them to have a skill vs a separate non-STEM degree.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Anya: I’ve been in agreement with this sentiment since 2003, when they decided to jump on board the war wagon. The last thing we need in this country is government-funded conservative news, which is what NPR is these days, with a few entertaining sideshow programs to keep the liberal rubes writing the checks.
Martin
@Ohio Mom: The real problem isn’t that colleges don’t teach it – they do. The real problem is that we’ve got a generation of students now that have done nothing but be taught to the test and they show up completely unprepared for critical thinking. There’s only so much you can fix in 4 years. The situation isn’t helped by parents that refuse to let go. You can’t teach a young person critical thinking if mom is still making all of the decisions when they’re 22.
gaz
@Martin: I agree with basically everything you said here, and I think you make a valid point about the large debt.
This though, is not quite so simple as picking the right major:
If you graduate into a slow growth, or contracting economy there’s no such guarantee you’ll be employed in your sector in any case. So it’s a huge gamble. We’re in one hell of a recession right now, despite the “recovery” we haven’t reached level ground yet, and growth is pretty meager at the moment, as it has been for the past 3 years or so, IIRC. =)
pseudonymous in nc
I’m absolutely comfortable with the Australian approach, where the government assesses the broad economic value and individual earnings that come from particular degrees, then reclaims the cost of its support through the tax system. Take a law degree and you pay back more, take a nursing degree and you pay back less.
What it doesn’t do is put a fucking anvil around the neck of graduates.
Roger Moore
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Except that she didn’t actually major in Journalism; she majored in International Relations. It’s almost as if people don’t always wind up with jobs directly related to their major and need to have some kind of general education to fall back on.
Walker
@Persia:
Business actually makes sense as a graduate degree, once you have already started with a business. For an undergraduate with no existing business experience, not so much. You just cannot put anything in context.
Now there is a separate problem that modern MBA culture cannot correctly distinguish a profit center from a cost center in a modern business. So they teach their students to cut departments that make them money. But that says nothing about business education in general.
Jado
That so cute. You think she needs to provide evidence? This is JOURNALISM. Evidence actually works against you nowadays. Controversy sells papers, or attracts eyeballs, or whatever. But evidence just provides…facts.
You are not familiar with the game being played, my friend.
rb
Business: the only major for which the weekend starts on Tuesday.
PeakVT
@pseudonymous in nc: I think that would tend to push people out of liberal arts majors, while the conventional wisdom is that there are too many people in them. What I had in mind was more along the lines of major-specific scholarships, the availability of technical degrees at less expensive universities, extra fees for technical classes, a limitation on the number of students enrolled in particular majors, etc. It could be there are no up-front incentives that skew major selection, but I don’t think so.
Roger Moore
@Persia:
I think it’s the polite term for those people who majored in casual sex, alcohol consumption, and doing the absolute minimum required to graduate.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Martin: In general, the kind of person who majors in history would not and cannot be an EE. They don’t have that mind. What do you do with that person? You can’t beat them into a STEM degree no matter what you do.
And thank God we have. A lot of people cannot and should not go to college. Putting themselves in 200k of debt for a process that we know that only 20% finish is an deranged waste of money.
Now, the problem: People want to be successful. Where are the jobs that don’t require a college education but still pay a GOOD living wage?
If they’re not out there, we gotta start making them. The idea that everyone can and should go to college is literally insane.
gaz
@Roger Moore: lol
Scott de B.
But this is a little like saying that unemployment is low in North Dakota. We’re talking about a relatively small overall number of jobs. If the universities started pumping out 500,000 additional mathematics BS graduates each year, there wouldn’t be jobs for all of them.
BigSouthern
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
Oh, man, yes to everything here, but especially:
Jado
@gaz:
SOSHALISM!!
Walker
Since this is a “pile on business thread”, one of the things that irritates me most about these students is how much they want something for nothing. Given one of my hats in our CS department, I regularly get business students coming to me saying “Hey, I have a great idea. Can you find me some undergraduates to make it for me for free, so that I can make money.”
Yes, they often offer the CS students a “cut”, but unless they are playing venture-capitalist-in-training, why should they get anything at all? Ideas are (often) worthless; execution is everything.
My policy with these students is that if you aren’t building it (which can include the less engineering, more HCI side of things), you better be paying for it.
Yutsano
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
Quite a few of the skilled trades (plumbing, electrician, etc) pay very well and require less education than a four year degree. But for whatever reason we don’t value those as much as an MBA holder.
gaz
@Forum Transmitted Disease: Despite finding it rather repellent to read, I think you speak a hard truth, friend.
And despite that, I’d happily pay more taxes to make higher education affordable to any that wanted it.
Still, with our manufacturing base gone, and union jobs at a historic low we just don’t have those anymore. I think this is partially a reflection of globalization, but it’s egregiously compounded* by horrible trade policy.
In a funny way, at least in my area, IT has become the new vocational trade. At least when the economy is good, and the sector is growing, you can get in on no college. I have a GED, but demonstrable skill in software development. A plurality of my friends have an AA or lower and make a living wage in IT. It’s an odd thing to be sure, and I’m not saying this applies everywhere – I’ve done no research on this, so this is entirely anecdotal.
ETA: * fuck my spell checker. arg
ericblair
@Martin:
Depends how you construe “professional”: if you need a P.Eng to stamp drawings, yes, otherwise we have bio and English majors doing highly technical IT work. However, it’s a hell of a high hurdle nowadays, since everyone wants applicants with exactly the right qualifications and will let reqs sit idle for months when they could have been internally training up a perfectly smart, motivated candidate from a different background.
However, there was one highly technical position where the English major was absolutely the best qualified for it on paper: he had a PhD in computational linguistics. Not a lot of those around, though :-).
The whole “unpaid intern” thing for humanities grads is bullshit to ensure that only rich kids can move forward, since, you know, the normal middle class grad has to eat every once in a while. Very useful for keeping the riffraff out, and I wish the DOL would consider “zero” to be less than minimum wage and therefore illegal.
kerFuFFler
I had no idea that so many kids got undergraduate business degrees! I don’t understand why it’s even an option for undergraduates. A minor, sure, but a major? What a narrow exposure to history, thought, culture and science they must get from their programs. I did read not too long ago that business undergraduates spend less time preparing for class than any other category; education, social science and arts students all beat them hands down not to mention science and engineering students.
gaz
Frankly, I think IT is maybe an outlier in terms of what they want as far as qualifications, but certainly holding ANY degree makes you more marketable, even in IT. I touched on this in #48
gaz
@Yutsano: You make an excellent point. Cable installation pays fairly well in our area, and you don’t need fuck all to get into it – other than maybe a voc test, and a good driving record.
Another Halocene Human
Since when is a business degree liberal arts? No wonder so many college graduates (no graduate school) are morally bankrupt. The entire business education is morally bankrupt. Sure, maybe that is my middle class privilege talking b/c morality can be a luxury but even a poor person can make the moral choice not to screw the powerless to better themselves. (The poor often make the choice to take a tiny chunk out of those they perceive as rich, when they can. This is not necessarily immoral but our power structure defines it as such.)
gaz
@Jado:
And proud of it, friend!
ETA: I blame Jesus
Bmaccnm
@FlipYrWhig: My son’s degree will be in anthropology. He’s interested in archeology and will do graduate work in that- he’s worked for the past five summers excavating a Mayan city in Belize. He’s taking classes in mandolin, guitar, welding, business management and writing. He’s on the 8 year BA plan, paying cash by working his way through school as a bartender. I have no idea what JOB he’ll get, but I know his LIFE will be very interesting.
I worked my way through university based nursing and midwifery programs- have a MS degree with maybe 3 elective classes. I’ve always felt inadequately educated and spend a lot of time in the library. I’ve worked as a midwife on 3 continents. I don’t know how my salary compares with others, but I don’t want for anything.
What defines a professional job? Why is a professional job more desirable than a welding certificate and a Eurail pass?
Kilkee
@ericblair: My recollection is that DOL was recently cracking down on the “unpaid intern” scam. Essentially the law is, I believe, that such jobs should entail only tasks the employer would not otherwise hire anyone to perform. Thus, it’s legit to hire a college kid to fetch you your coffee and let him watch you go about your business. It is not supposed to be ok to “hire” an (unpaid) intern to do research for you that you would have otehrwise had to farm out to someone or hire additional paid labor to perform. But you are right: the rich kids can afford the “unpaid intern” summer gig, so no howls are heard from their daddys.
gaz
@Kilkee: Work study is a good program, IMO – since you essentially get paid and get credits at the same time. I think it’s a healthier thing in general, and my guess is that it fosters more of an apprenticeship dynamic, as opposed to say, “fetching coffee” which has little value to the company, and no value to the intern.
Martin
@gaz: Well, generally it’s true. There’s no guarantee your house will appreciate either (as many well know) but with some thought given to the matter, you should be able to make it extremely likely to be true. Same with choice of major.
Engineering has come up by a few people here – but engineering disciplines are always cyclical. They ebb and flow as salaries climb due to a lack of graduates or increase in retirements, students rush in, and about 5-10 years later create a glut, and salaries ease off. The hitch with engineering is you have to be mobile. If you’re not willing to be mobile, finding jobs can be damn hard. The exception is Civil. Every shit kicker town needs civil engineers. But Biomedical only exists in certain pockets. Same with Chemical. Same with Aero. And those are somewhat subject to outsourcing and H1B cramming. And defense is the safe haven, as noted.
So even if there are down cycles, eventually it should work out and make that loan worthwhile. Even if the engineering graduate can’t find an engineering job, they’re qualified for a zillion other things, and many disciplines have self-employment paths. It’s a fairly safe bet. But that anthropology degree might sound interesting, but that’s a less safe bet. If we’re talking public university, then sure, go for it – just having the degree will probably cover you. But private? I wouldn’t take on that kind of debt with an iffy job prospect. And the public is increasingly iffy.
In the loan debate, there’s a big difference between a 3.5% rate and a 6.5% one. In the former case, the loan is outstripping inflation generally, and barely outstripping salary growth for college graduates. That’s fine as the higher starting salary and higher job prospects make up for it. But at 6.5%, the loan is WAY higher than the salary increases you’re likely to see. If you walk out with $100K in loans, you’re making $200K in payments. Are you sure you’re going to earn that $200K back – particularly factoring in the 4 years of lost salary simply due to being in college and the low salary inflation rate?
Another Halocene Human
@BigSouthern:
They’re terrible. Anyone who’s smart enough should try for a science major instead. It’s not like you can’t switch to engineering later. There are probably a few schools with engineers with wit and imagination (MIT, perhaps Cornell?) although in both cases it can be argued there are just so many scientists there. :D
I found that CEs were more entertaining with a few beers in them, so graduate school >> undergraduate.
I’m guessing CEs are the way they are b/c they’re too unimaginative for sciences (and can’t pass any test they haven’t cribbed last year’s version for), too witless to do ME or EE or any respectable engineering major, too artless and dumb for a liberal arts major (literature is st00pid!), not enough of self-starters for a math major (wait, people do this for FUN?), completely incapable of any sort of performance for a performance degree… i/o/w, drones.
Oh, and they heard you can make money with a CE. Lolzworthy, really. (Psst, the real grift is in polysci, but good luck with that with your “winning” personality. Well, there’s always Wingnut Welfare.)
CE gives the mediocre a means to feel superior than others. I never saw so much rampant cheating in any class as in engineering classes. Unfrickingbelievable.
Another Halocene Human
@Walker:
Repeat after me: All that matters is next quarter’s earnings report, all that matters is next quarter’s earnings report, all that matters is next quarter’s earnings report.
Walker
@Another Halocene Human:
We try. The new NYC campus should be interesting in that regard.
priscianusjr
This post barely scratches the surface of what’s wrong with that article. What’s really wrong is the concept of “practical majors”. It’s undefined. Everybody seems to have an idea of what was intended by that term, but if you actually define it and follow out the implications of that definition, the issue becomes more, not less, debatable.
I suppose it’s supposed to mean, a major that will get you a job where you will make (at a minimum) a comfortable amount of money.
I have always been told that the epitome of that sort of major is medicine, or law. But we all know that the debts incurred can remain a burden for decades. So we really mean very highly-paid doctors and lawyers. More andmore, we have very highly indebted doctors and lawyers.
Everybody is talking about the practicality of the liberal arts — and some point out that the liberal arts really are practical after all. Well, what about the sciences? How much money do you think you’re going to make after doing your doctoral research on the vascular systems of bryophyta, or even ecology? A huge percentage of the sciences are not very practical to major in. What about theoretical mathematics, ancient philosophy, or Sanskrit?
The real problem is that what is “practical” is entirely relative to the system of economic incentives now in place. And if the structure of university education merely mirrors that, it becomes nothing but a reinforcing mechanism, in just about every way.
The fundamental purpose of the university is to produce well-educated, thoughtful leaders in all fields, and further, to expand the fields of knowledge for the general benefit. The university cannot do everything, cannot solve all our problems, but for God’s sake give it the resources to do what it can and should do. For lack of that, American society and its universities are being led, to a growing extent, by uneducated idiots like Rick Perry and “educated” idiots like this guy:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/magazine/romneys-former-bain-partner-makes-a-case-for-inequality.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all
DFH no.6
@Persia:
Funny you should ask.
My nephew recently graduated (2010) from a stupidly-expensive private (Catholic) college with a baccalaureate business degree.
He worked summers for me during college as an entry-level electrician (I manage an engineering and construction business that does projects in the commercial, government, and industrial building sectors – no residential, thank Bieber).
He did quite well at his construction summer job, and asked for a possible regular position back in 2010 when job prospects out of college looked pretty dim for him.
My supervisor of construction was happy to hire him full-time, and he has continued to excel.
After working in the field for another year and a half, my nephew desired a shot at sales (my boss’s call, not mine) and here’s the point of my little story:
Not once, in 4 years of college with a business major, was my nephew required to take any sort of public-speaking or communications course. A business degree – which cost my brother-in-law (who has more money than sense) a cool 25 fucking thousand dollars a year! – that did not require any course-work whatsoever on the most basic business function: how to effectively speak with others in a business setting.
And, as it happens, that is my nephew’s weakest on-the-job skillset. I told him to join Toastmasters, and that seems to be helping some. Time will tell if the sales-thing is in the cards or not.
I was gobsmacked, though. A 4-year business degree that cost an absurd $100,000, and not one class on speech or communications. Practically fucking criminal.
Sorry if I offend anyone here who has a business degree, but I have done a lot of hiring, promoting, and a little firing, too, over the past 30 years, and I’ve found business degrees wherever acquired to be fairly useless. In fact, from my perspective they’ve gotten worse as they’ve proliferated.
Felinious Wench
@gaz: @gaz:
Bingo.
I’m an enterprise architect, heavily involved in hiring developers. I could give a rat’s ass about somebody’s major/degree or lack thereof, I care about someone’s ability to write clean, reliable, elegant code in an agile dev environment, who can get along with the rest of the team and cares about not hacking crap together. That’s it.
Best dev lead I ever worked with was a drama major, English minor. He just instinctively GOT how to write good code. And was fun to work with too.
Another Halocene Human
@Martin:
It’s a marginal return thing. Parents making all decisions for child (even doing their damn homework) gives their kid a marginal advantage against others of their economic class. So they will keep doing it, especially in an environment such as ours. As you know, fewer and fewer of the rich actually feel rich and a few winners accrue an increasing share of the winnings while more and more are left out. It’s that greed/fear notion again.
Does it emotionally stunt the child? Of course! Maybe your kid will break under the pressure. Then again, maybe not.
gaz
@Martin: So basically, on the engineering thing, you and I are on the same page. As you expounded that much became clear. The cross-employment factor is critical, and that’s where many STEM degrees come in handy, including engineering.
The economy sucks, we’ve privatized the college loan industry, eaten their losses with tax payer money, stripped college subsidies, and have left the middle class bailing water. College in general is much less affordable, while loan rates and tuition have gone up, and subsidies have gone down. I think it’s fair to say that you have to be VERY careful selecting your major in this environment (if you choose college at all), and if I read you right it sounds like that is essentially what you are arguing.
I can’t disagree.
However, I see this very dynamic as a problem for our country. One which desperately needs fixing. We’re racing to the bottom. And it shows.
Roger Moore
@Scott de B.:
And the jobs that still existed would pay crap because there would be too many people competing for too few jobs. Of course a lot of those graduates would have a good enough general education that they’d be able to go into other fields and do fine, so it wouldn’t be a complete waste, but that’s basically the same argument being made in favor of the Liberal Arts. Give somebody a good general education- and I tend to think STEM has dethroned Liberal Arts as the best general education major- and they’ll be trainable for whatever jobs are out there.
Another Halocene Human
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
But my dear, they have already accomplished this. The government funding is a rump, while the majority of funds and direction are coming from industry. Did you not note the day when NPR was suddenly “sponsored” by ADM?
The rubes are the ones who pay to have that crap shoveled onto their local airways. It seems better than fire and brimstone autopreacher stations… it always seems better at first.
Walker
@Martin:
Speaking of, here is some advice for BJ’ers who have kids applying to college soon.
There is a marked increase in mental health issues among college students. As in fully-documented. Because of this, colleges such as mine now take mental-health concerns into account as part of the application process. We will reject people that we think are emotionally unsuited for college. And this, in addition to basic writing skills, is what we are looking for in the college essay.
If we see evidence of what Martin said in the essay (and no evidence that the student tried to break out of this), that is an immediate denial.
Suffern ACE
Frankly, having gone through a bunch of new college hire resumes recently, both here and from India, I skip the business major altogether and look at what was minored in. General business majors are a pain to interview. At the very least force yourself to concentrate in a business function or minor in something interesting. Otherwise, business is not a discipline.
I ask my interviewee to discuss what they studied, and I’m talking to brick walls. “What interests you about XX.” Not being able to answer that question makes me think the person lacks passion about anything, which doesn’t make me exactly want to hire someone. Maybe most people do lack that.
Another Halocene Human
All this STEM bullshit is just that, pushed by the same employers who’ve been engaging in global wage arbitrage and pushed the pay way, way down for American science graduates. They’ve exhausted the better part of the H1B pool and the outsourcing that can be done at an advantageous price. Yes, so many jumped in that they exhausted the pool of qualified scientists and engineers “over there” and many companies lost money outsourcing to bs artists and incompetents.
Now they want to ramp up “STEM” graduation rates with no increase in good jobs available. They intend to hire domestically now, I suppose, at much more disadvantageous terms. One of the beauty parts of H1B is that if you got in a labor dispute or made a strategic mistake and needed to shift quickly, you could just pull the visas and deport everyone. American workers demand to be treated fairly, and that sucks. However, if they experience high unemployment, their attitude changes (see EA).
I hate these goons. In flagrant violation of the law they refused to hire Americans for years even though there were plenty of candidates begging to take the jobs they offered even at vastly lowered wages because they had the skills and it was better than working at McD’s. Now they have come scrabbling back, hoping to fool some naive kids into thinking it’s the 1960s all over again and “The Job Is Out There.” It’s so fucking not.
gaz
@Felinious Wench:
The all day interviews at MS are like my favorite thing in the whole of my career. It’s probably subconsciously why I kept going back, and never worked there permanently (even when offered). LOL.
Roger Moore
@ericblair:
They’re supposed to in the majority of cases. Internships are normally supposed to be paid; unpaid ones nominally have to pass a set of tests to prove that they’re primarily educational and not just an excuse to squeeze out some free labor and/or give wealthy kids an unfair leg up in the business. The problem is that the regulations are hard to enforce, both because there isn’t enough money for enforcement and because there’s a (probably correct) assumption that anyone who makes waves by trying to bring an enforcement action will be dooming their job prospects.
Another Halocene Human
@Roger Moore: Engineering is not a good general education.
Psychology might be, physics might be (though few brave it). Math has been for some people, also chemistry. I don’t know about bio but it’s a premed these days and hence has massive class sizes and I suspect there’s a lot of survey course stuff going on. Survey course makes you a sophist.
A physics education teaches you how to think. The complete opposite of an engineering education. (CE: I caught you THINKING. DANGER! DANGER! STOP, and RETURN TO THE MANUAL.)
I think most liberal arts courses do more to make well-rounded citizens than engineering courses. Sure, there’s crap in every field, but it’s amazing how it opens someone’s mind to become a quasi-expert in something so far from their prior experience.
Bob2
Will we ever see a headline saying “Mitt Romney flat out lied in taking credit for the Auto Bailout?”
priscianusjr
@Another Halocene Human:
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
Linnaeus
I say this tongue-in-cheek, but it seems to me there’s a simple solution to the “impractical majors” problem: eliminate those departments, or at least the degree programs. People can’t major in a degree that’s not available.
chopper
@Bmaccnm:
which is great. my issue is less with kids getting degrees that don’t necessarily translate into jobs as much as it is kids graduating with unreasonable loans.
walking out of college with a degree that won’t find you a job in the field is one thing, but add 100k of debt to the equation and it ruins you.
Suffern ACE
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: Just so you know, I have asked specifically for geography majors from HR when looking for hires. Geography majors are teh awesome. That and librarians are the coolest things to have around.
Another Halocene Human
My main problem with liberal arts is the refusal to be informed by any science later than the 17th century, the elevation of letters uber alles (ie, some dude’s opinion is worthy of more thought and study than, say, reality–very upper class attitude, really), and the continued over-promotion of muddled and confused thinkers.
The constant drumbeat of Plato and Kant is understandable in one sense given the need for Christian churches to perpetuate themselves, but why they are so elevated in supposedly “free” universities is beyond me. (Add “Aquinas” to round out the three stooges in Catholic colleges–but at least almost everyone acknowledges that he was an idiot.)
Plato is absolutely wrong about everything but STILL treated like an authority, while Kant is so confused he’s not even wrong. Undergrads love Nietzsche basically for savaging Kant, but it’s sad that that nonsense even needs savaging. He’s the frigging Tom Friedman of philosophy and Nietzsche is his Matt Taibbi, but why was anyone fooled to begin with? Why do only physicists and the skeptical community ever spend quality time with Hume (whom Kant misread!!! I’m told because his English was poor! And this idiot is the God of Western Philosophy), Hume who was right about just about everything and still has something to teach us today? Hume said, look, you can’t prove that shit, but maybe it doesn’t matter. Kant was all, the voices in my head say I can, I damn well can, and I will beat you with this stick if you say otherwise. Give. It. Up.
It’s all an upperclass game… publications like The Atlantic publish essays by upperclass twits who spend hours pondering Kant and Plato and Burke and Rousseau and who get paid to frame contemporary politics in terms of 18th century philosophical disputes, as if life is just a game.
pseudonymous in nc
@PeakVT:
If you look at the specifics of the Australian model, I think it has the right approach: it recognises that there are important jobs which require tertiary education but will never pay big lawyer/surgeon-level money, and gently puts its finger on the scale.
@Felinious Wench:
There’s actually a lot of dovetailing between humanities education and code work: a good chunk of the people who turned “building websites” into an industry in the mid-90s came from the “liberal arts” side of things. Working out the structure of a codebase or doing forensics on an underperforming server requires a similar intellectual toolkit as critical analysis of literary or historical texts. Code is communication.
Martin
@Scott de B.:
It doesn’t work that way though. We know that some of our offshoring is due not because of low wages overseas, but because of better structured labor forces. In the US, 4% of degrees earned are engineering. In China, it’s 55%.
Now, we’re big proponents of investing in infrastructure and whatnot, but you can’t do that with just 4% of your labor force. And that assumes the 4% are properly distributed, which they aren’t. China spends more on R&D than the US does. In certain industries if you want engineering talent, China is where you go because it just doesn’t exist in the US. This isn’t low-wage menial job crap – this is generally low- to mid-range engineering. It pays decently – at least as well as that anthropology major is likely to earn, though not as well as the typical engineering BS will earn. When you see engineering starting salaries in the $50K range, you have to recognize that there’s a whole pile of $30K-$40K engineering jobs that ought to exist to support those higher paying ones, that simply don’t in this country. And if they don’t exist, then the support for the higher paying ones doesn’t exist either.
The US, with 300 million citizens produced about 75,000 BS engineering degrees annually in 2005. China, with 1.3 billion citizens produced about 225,000 BS engineering degrees. Japan with 127 million citizens produced over 100,000 BS engineering degrees. The US number hasn’t climbed significantly, but China’s has. About half of all the BS STEM degrees earned worldwide is earned in Asia. Europe beats North America by 25%.
I don’t want to build a supply-side argument here, but the fact that salaries for STEM majors is so much higher than for non-STEM suggests that there’s a demand for those degrees that’s being unmet here. Making matters worse, the ability of the US to expand the number of STEM degrees is largely dependent on state funding, which has gone completely to shit the last 4 years. Schools are actually cutting back on domestic enrollments because domestic students lose money for public institutions. By comparison, China can’t build universities fast enough. We can’t seem to defund ours fast enough.
chopper
@pseudonymous in nc:
certainly. building websites or working in certain areas of coding doesn’t require the deep knowledge you get with a CS degree. lots of other areas do tho.
pseudonymous in nc
@Another Halocene Human:
I’m not sure that’s true in general, though I’ll admit that I have limited exposure to American liberal arts departments — and that I was probably the only person in my university’s English faculty reading Ernst Mach’s Analysis of Sensations as part of my research…
Roger Moore
@Bmaccnm:
At least he has marketable job skills to fall back on if his major doesn’t help him in the job market.
Suffern ACE
@Martin: Looking at the figures, it looks like the US is gratduating it’s fair global share based on its population size relative to China. Perhaps China needs to build universities because all it has is engineering schools. If all you have is engineering schools, all you will get is engineers.
BigSouthern
@Another Halocene Human:
And you want to talk about a group of people that live by the curve and die by the curve. I took the FE two weeks ago and all anyone was saying was, “You only need to get a 50 to pass…just a 50, that’s all,” as though that was an acceptable approach! I mean, I admit my weaknesses (my fluids class was poorly taught and I did not delve too far beneath the surface), but still! At least pretend to try to do your best. Gah!
In retrospect, I sometimes wish I’d gone hard physics, but this is part of a career switch (former journalist, poly sci minor) and transportation engineering caught my eye. And it was always fun when we would get our tests back to hear the chorus of, “Oh man, I got a 70! Oh well, still better than what some comm major could get,” as I tucked my 98 into my backpack.
And none of that is to brag – I’m far from the most special, brilliant guy ever – just to reinforce what’s been said.
Martin
@Another Halocene Human:
But that’s not entirely the fault of engineering. Rather it’s the fault of universities designing their general education standards to be utter shit – for everyone. It’s a year of complete tosser courses with no context or relevance to the student. Nothing against poetry, but it’s not the kind of communication or aesthetics that builds a bridge to engineering. Students simply compartmentalize away anything that they might learn there. Same goes for the math and science courses for the humanities students.
The problem engineering tends to introduce to itself is an excess of content. Yeah, engineers need to know a lot, but it’s actually more than you can put in 4 years. So stop trying to. They’ll never actually learn it all, and they’ll selectively not learn as much of the really important stuff as the irrelevant stuff. You can’t expect the students to know what’s critical and what’s not, and treating everything as critical is obviously dishonest and undermines the effort. Less content would produce better engineers.
Bmaccnm
@Roger Moore: I don’t think he expects his major to help him in the job market so much as help him in life. I think he’ll have a very interesting path. I know that we’ve discussed the need to graduate completely debt free- he won’t be free to work on a site for minimum wage if he owes 50 or 100,000 dollars. He’s got a great work ethic, which will probably help him more than anything else as he makes his way in the world. It has been a challenge to advise him- I finally learned to shut up and let him figure it out.
I’m disconcerted when I read about people who are fretting that they get out of college and make $30,000, and therefore they can’t buy a house, or whatever, as if the only action of value is purchasing things. I spend a lot of time feeling disconcerted, and I don’t have a lot to say to a lot of people. But I cringe when I think of living a consumption-based life.
pseudonymous in nc
@Martin:
That ‘better’ is carrying a lot of weight. China is compressing 200+ years of industrialisation into the space of a couple of generations, covering everything from mechanised agriculture in the distant rural areas (1700s) to heavy industry (1800s) to consumer manufacturing (1900s) to high-tech (2000s).
Does the US need investment in public infrastructure that was (over)built a century ago and is now showing its age? Absolutely. But I think it’s problematic to make direct comparisons to a country that is pushing to have more than half of its agriculture mechanised.
Bob2
Just pointing out that’s it really bad to compare Chinese education to the US’s if you’re not familiar in the slightest with China’s education issues.
Martin
@Suffern ACE: Look at the numbers I stated before. 4% of our degrees are engineering. 60% of our engineering PhDs are to non-citizens. That’s exacerbated by the problem of too few domestic engineering BS degrees and quite attractive salaries for BS degrees – so much so that a domestic PhD engineering student generally doesn’t have to pay a cent for their degree. That’s how desperate we are to award domestic PhDs – we basically give them out for free.
You absolutely cannot build industries, infrastructure, economies, with populations of engineers that resemble a 3rd world country. There’s just no getting around that. We should be turning out at least twice as many domestic BS degrees and 5x as many advanced degrees as we do.
If you want to know why China is eating our manufacturing base, it’s not just the cheap labor – it’s also the fact that they turn out more industrial engineering degrees each year than the US turns out engineering degrees in all disciplines every single year. Japan and Germany each took the Chinese trajectory after WWII – cheap labor but huge investments in engineering – and they now dominate many industries that used to be US strongholds. The two leading nations for robotics is Japan and Germany. Not much going on here in the US. It only took 2 generations for two smaller defeated nations to leap ahead of us on infrastructure and challenge us on top-end engineering.
China has 4x our population. They don’t need to execute as well as Japan and Germany did to start taking our top-end jobs.
D0n Camillo
What Fran Bruni and Tovia Smith and others seem to be arguing is that if you make what they consider to be the wrong decision at age 18, you should be condenmed to a life of grinding debt and underemployment. I’m glad that I was able to get my Poli Sci degree with a minor in German back in 1993 when it was still possible to pay for it just using the GI bill and working 30 hours a week. Nowadays, I couldn’t have done that without accumulating tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
For what it’s worth, I wound up in a career in IT, but I never regret the path I took to get there.
Martin
@Bob2: I’m familiar with them. I didn’t put them on even ground with the US on a student-by-student basis, though. I put our students ahead by quite a sizable margin, but let’s look at the equivalent of 2 year engineering degrees. The number the US turns out is trivial. What about trades? Machinists? Etc. There’s almost nothing here whereas there’s buildout in China at each of those levels.
So lets say you take a US engineer and they design something. Then what? Who is going to set up manufacturing? Who is going to design that equipment? Who is going to keep production running? Who is going to do the fabrication? There’s just nothing here to work with in terms of new entrants to the labor force. China is investing in those skills. We’re doing nothing at all. Why isn’t the US building out 2 year degree programs to do those kinds of things?
RalfW
Clearly the 125 or more journalists who’ve been laid off at the Star Tribune, and 1,000s like them at papers and TV newsrooms around the country all chose the wrong damn majors 5 or 10 or 25 years ago.
Idiots.
I mean really, why study what you love or are passionate about? It’s not like you’re investing $40-100K and 4 or more years of your life into anything you should expect would satisfy your dreams. Silly effete liberal.
No, go into hock to do a job you marginally tolerate or even loathe, but that pays and has security.
Good luck figuring out what the heck that is.
Martin
@D0n Camillo:
That’s part of what no wage growth get us.
The US suffers from very poor labor mobility, which also doesn’t help. That’s the downside to high home ownership – there’s a massive disincentive to moving to new labor markets, which is pretty badly stunting the ability of the economy to grow. People are much more likely to try and stay put and make something work than absorb the cost to move to a market where labor growth might be much stronger.
rb
@BigSouthern: Congrats on finishing up. Likely you’ll end up doing what I have (I’m not an engineer, but some of the same criticisms apply); for the most part my work and social lives are in two separate spheres, and I find I like it that way.
D0n Camillo
@Martin:
Considering there is no guarantee that labor growth will stay strong in any given market, it is only rational not to want to take a massive financial hit with so little potential financial reward. The effed-up housing market has really done a number on labor mobility in the US.
RalfW
@Ohio Mom:
As a biz school grad may I say yes, a lot of students are missing a big opportunity to be challenged to think critically. But I’m not sure they’re being ‘indoctrinated’ as much as they’re getting a sterile, technical experience.
A caller to MN Pub Radio today said something like “Business degrees teach you how to answer questions, liberal arts teach you what questions matter.” I’d agree.
If I had kids, I’d strongly urge them to major in liberal arts (well, I’d want them to pick what they think would make them happy, but I’m a liberal softie). They can get certificates in hard skills later like full-charge bookkeeping or C++ programming if that makes their heart sing (or pays the rent).
But train the mind first, and get to know the heart. At 18 or even 20, it’s a tough thing to know yourself. A Biz degree helps very little in that.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
All I’m saying is that more people get killed by Bad Philosophy than Bad Engineering, so we should be giving our philosophy majors more scratch.
RalfW
@FlipYrWhig:
Yep. I took a studio art class each of my first three semesters and was being recruited heavily by the sculpture prof to major in art. I’d dropped my C.S. major sometime around February of my freshman year and he knew that. I simply count not imagine an art degree, much less telling my dad my choice.
I waffled till fall of junior year, seriously considering majoring in Urban Studies.
My “pre-major” adviser (undecided was too negative, the administration said) taught Econ, I took his class, got an A and maybe had a bit more vigor than this average enrolee and with his push and with the “how will I get a job?” worry ever in mind, I went to Finance.
I ended up being the only radical campus organizer opposed to Apartheid and nuclear weapons who also wore Topsiders, oxford button-downs and had a degree plan to study things like Management By Objective and the ever-popular Systems of International Finance.
Roger Moore
@pseudonymous in nc:
I wonder if Liberal Arts types might be better as coders because they’re used to having their writings read and critiqued. One of the things I’ve constantly heard about programming is that code is as much a communication with future programmers as it is instructions to the computer. It shouldn’t be a surprise if somebody with a background in writing is good at that part of the job.
RalfW
Sent a facebook message saying
Heard back. Form letter from a stipended intern, no doubt. But someone at least had to look up and see there was a squawk.
Additionally, NPR has an Office of the Ombudsman. The Ombudsman…
BigSouthern
@rb:
Thanks for the congrats! Yeah, I’m already carving out my social niche in the city I’ll be working in.
schrodinger's cat
BTW what is this Tovia person’s degree in, I am betting it is not in the hard sciences or engineering. The hypocrisy, it burns.
Interrobang
@Another Halocene Human: I threw all that stuff out because I could tell it was bullshit. When it comes to literary theory and criticism — and I’ve studied a lot of it — the only credible writer on the subject I have ever read is Stephen King (On Writing, it’s a good book, look it up) because dude has the intestinal fortitude to buck tradition (And the Individual Talent) and say “Fuck no, I don’t know how every writer does it, because every writer’s different, but here’s how it works for me.”
On the other hand, two or three of those analytical frameworks (Marxism, feminist analysis, postmodernism, etc.) applied to the same set of data will give you a really good idea of what’s bullshit and what’s not — whatever reliably survives two or three opposing analyses is probably as close to the truth as you’re going to get outside of hard science. It’s a shame more fields don’t do this; they might learn something.
My undergrad was at the Harvard of Canada, so at least having had a really deep, traditional, dare I say conservative education, I know exactly what I’m rejecting when I reach my foot up and kick the guy standing athwart History yelling “Stop” square in the nuts…
Herbal Infusion Bagger
“Engineering is not a good general education”
But no knowledge of engineering and science is also a deep deficiency in education, and one you see very often in humanities/arts grads.
Is there anyone here who didn’t have their perception of the world radically changed by learning Newton’s laws and conservation of energy? Or what about quantum mechanics? If you’re not shocked by e.g. the wavefunction of a particle going imaginary when tunneling through a barrier, you haven’t fully grasped it. And then getting more weirded out when you realise that something as counterintuitive s quantum tunneling, rather than being something exotic, happens *all the time*. Like, your headphones wouldn’t work unless the electrons can tunnel through the thin oxide layer on the headphone jack.
If there’s an equivalent fundamentally-change-the-way-you-experience-the-world concept in the humanities, I don’t know of it. Maybe a some economics courses, but not many. History can inform you about current events (like, you can’t understand U.S. politics without a knowledge of the civil war and reconstruction), but that’s not quite the every-minute-of-the-day-while-I-see-and-breathe change in perspective Newton’s Laws of Motion and Quantum Mechanics give you.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
“I can tell you why projects like Boston’s Big Dig went horribly awry.”
Projects like the Big Dig go awry because change orders aren’t competitively bid. Civil Engineering firms make their margin on the change orders.
If the budget for a project was based on Heroically Optimistic Assumptions and a ridiculously narrow scope to get it through approvals, then when it goes out to bid the marketing guys at the CE firms snicker, ‘cos what isn’t in the scope of the contract that’s competitively bid will have to be dealt with by change orders.
Walker
@Herbal Infusion Bagger:
Hume. And possibly Quine.
RSA
@Walker: I was thinking something similar; I’d also had Putnam in my list.
Also, a good introduction to philosophy of mind can change the way students think about themselves.
BenA
@Felinious Wench:
I’ll offer up a corollary… the people that have made my life the most difficult on development teams or in projects I’m brought in to clean up are the mechanical or electrical engineers that think they can develop software. They get their hands on MS Access, Oracle, or Visual Studio and think… “It’s just like engineering..” Which it isn’t… I’ve had similar issues with math and physics majors who got into programing… but the mechanical engineers stand out… mainly because there’s been so many of them that I’ve dealt with.
I guess I shouldn’t complain to much… I’ve made a cottage industry out of replacing their “work.”
I will add though that I think college level CS courses are important. I mean I was a Philosophy and Cognitive Science major… but had minors in Computer Science (and Anthropology.) and I think the level of discipline I learned in CS courses helped me tremendously over the course of my career.
benintn
@gaz: I agree completely with the first commenter. The first thing I noticed was, “There are far too many business majors here – kids who manage but don’t know how to create or innovate. Unless we’re getting business majors who know how to create or innovate, the only thing we’re getting is people who come out of college thinking they’re entitled to a corner office.”