Slashdot Mirror
China To Cancel College Majors That Don't Pay
theodp writes "The WSJ reports that China's Ministry of Education plans to phase out majors producing unemployable graduates. The government will soon start evaluating college majors by their employment rates, downsizing or cutting those studies in which more than 60% of graduates fail for two consecutive years to find work. What if the U.S. government were to adopt China's approach? According to the most recent U.S. census data, among the first majors to go: psychology, U.S. history and military technologies. Lest you computer programmers get too smug, consider this."
Actually, I think that the US needs to make high school worth something again.
Second would be encouraging technical schools, stuff where businesses are screaming they can't find employees.
Third would be reigning in the cost of an education. There shouldn't be any excuse for tuition to be skyrocketing like it has for as long as it has. It's a classic sign of a bubble.
Fourth would perhaps be cutting funding for, as the op mentions, 'unproductive majors'.
I don't read AC A human right
Yes. They do. They really really do. Because I've taught the pre-med kids and by god they are NOT scientists when they come in. It's not just that they don't know very much - that we can fix by forcing them to study like crazy. But they can't THINK logically, solve problems analytically and it takes at least 4-5 years for most of them to actually finally begin to understand statistics, hypothesis testing, selection bias etc that they need before med school.
I have little respect for many MDs as they appear to be inferior to databases, but at least they have some analytic skill. If you cut the premed you cut that. It makes me shudder to think of the kids only 2-3 years in being anywhere near making a treatment decision on someone with the flu, let alone diagnosing a complicated illness.
What is wrong with doing this? China isn't banning knowledge about useless majors, it's simply declining to pay people to study majors that don't train people to be contributing members to society.
The USA should absolutely do the same. We need more engineers and less psychology majors.
What happens when 60% of engineers are unemployable? This policy ignores the 40% of these majors that have jobs.
The most fundamental problem with this is that a university education is NOT vocational training. It's not meant to be nor should it ever be. The problem in the US is that we have devalued trade schools. Not enough people are going into trades like plumber, carpenter, mechanic, etc...
It's bad because Liberty is an unalienable right, and the government has no business deciding what you should study.
We are tool-builders, and we created money as a tool to help us. Instead we find economists treating money as a God to which we must sacrifice humans (not them, but other, poorer, humans).
Unemployment is a good thing, a sign of economic progress, the result of higher productivity. What we should do is provide a basic income to everyone who wants one, and hold challenges to stimulate innovation and the advance of knowledge. Because it is knowledge that confers the greatest survival benefit by enabling us to better predict and adapt to sudden catastrophic change.
Not paying for it != saying you can't do it. They just want state money going somewhere that will actually return something.
Productivity should measure happiness and quality of life, not number of dollars produced. Money is a tool to serve us, not the other way around.
The businesses complain, because they want cheap labour. Therefore they will complain until there is an excess of people for a given field and they lower salaries, etc. So listening to their complaints is questionable.
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne
Actually, I think that the US needs to make high school worth something again.
Far too much control has shifted to the Educational Institution in this country to allow that to ever happen. Just look at the financial numbers behind a recent firing of a football coach and his staff.
Second would be encouraging technical schools, stuff where businesses are screaming they can't find employees.
Hey you businesses! Any of you want to pay a decent wage for all those vocational/technical jobs you're screaming for?
(crickets)
(Hmmm...I wonder if there's a correlation there...)
Third would be reigning in the cost of an education. There shouldn't be any excuse for tuition to be skyrocketing like it has for as long as it has. It's a classic sign of a bubble.
When you realize that the same people who brought you the financial meltdown are a lot of the same people who sit on the boards of higher education, you'll see exactly what kind of "bubble" they expect. If it's anything like the financial "bubble", they can't bring on an impending educational and financial apocalypse (and subsequent bailout for them to pocket) fast enough.
Fourth would perhaps be cutting funding for, as the op mentions, 'unproductive majors'.
Which I happen to think is an absolute horrible idea. When the entire purpose of higher education becomes the relentless pursuit of small pieces of little green paper, don't expect the true value of education to shine through. The arts...music...philosophy...all will become a dying breed(as if Autotune didn't kill music enough). All of them will fall victim to the greed and corruption that has taken control of this world. And it sickens me. If that is what we want to define as an "education", then don't expect the rest of the world to consider our society worth a shit as a whole as we march around as an Army of Borg representing nothing but well-educated Greed.
Since HR departments everywhere started using "has a bachelor's degree" as a filter; you don't have the degree, you're unworthy of a job.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Besides, history is important. The people studying it don't expect to make money with it anyway. They study out of genuine interest, and they serve to keep history alive. Without the historians, the politicos will have complete control to rewrite it to say whatever it is they want.
That's a feature, not a bug, of cutting history majors. At least, as far as the Chinese government is concerned.
It's not that I think that I don't think that many of the light weight college degrees being handed out aren't a joke, because many of them are. I believe education should be rigorous, and to put it mildly, standards have dropped. However, I think it is a deep mistake to try to make all education the equivalent of job training. There is far more to life than making money. If we abolish, or significantly reduce the importance of the humanities in education, our entire society will become poorer in ways that are difficult to measure. I'm a physics guy, but I have found reading Homer, Gibbon, Plato and Aristotle immensely enriching. I don't read these things to make money. I read them because they are part of the shared history and culture of our society. They give me perspective on my own life and about our civilization. They inspire my curiously about the world. They help supply the "why" in regards to "what" I study.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Apparently there is no market for people who know history. Which means nobody's taking history as a major and in a few generations we'll have no historians.
That's a bug, not a feature.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!