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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."
OH noes, I can't get my degree in Native American History anymore!
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
That will just shift unemployable people to other majors!
Psych is a default major for girls. If you effectively cancel it, you will just have a new default major.
(Default majors are the majors that undecided people go into.)
Of course, if you channeled default majors to fields we could really use people in, the average quality of that field's graduates would go down, but the quantity of available talent would go up.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Need Belly Rubberz
In college and cut the time to 3 years.
"downsizing or cutting those studies in which less than 60% of graduates fail for two consecutive years to find work"
So, the only courses they'll keep are the ones where at least 60% of graduates are unemployable?
What in the fuck is wrong with you? You think that posting links to bestiality is funny?
Do Not Click that link! It does contain a video of bestiality.
Historically, students and 'intellectuals' have been perceived(sometimes accurately, sometimes with paranoia verging on hysteria) as menaces to the social and political establishment...
I'd be interested to know how much of this is purely about resource allocation and how much of it is about ensuring that absolutely as many people as possible are doing something practical, chasing the brass ring, and generally staying out of idle theorizing and similar such trouble...
...cutting those studies in which less than 60% of graduates fail for two consecutive years to find work.
I guess the headline should be "China to Cancel College Majors That Do Pay
CS should be for the higher level theory based stuff.
But the other stuff like tech work, programing, web, it security, IT management needs to have less theory and more hands on work. As well class room with more of tech school based course load.
As there is a lot that can used in college that is lacking that you can learn at the tech / trade school level.
Now why can't doctors have a 2-3 year pre med school that cut's down the cost and time that they are in school do they really need a full 4-5 years before med school?
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.
Armies of "ants", where one happened to stumble into a computer programming job?
Sorry, but I'll worry when more than 10% of any population takes a REAL interest in computer programming and not just just as a job. If you are just looking at computer work as a source of a job you may have issues, but for those who find computer programming to be a calling I think they'll be able to make do just fine.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
According to the link in TFA, the US majors with the highest unemployment rates are
The first computer-related field is "computer administration management and security" at 9.5%. Whatever the heck that is - sounds like a wannabe-degree.
Anyhow, it's an interesting table, because you can sort by unemployment, earnings or popularity...
The whole premise here reeks of socialism - why is it up to the US government to fund, or not fund, higher education? In China it's understandable, but here?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Time look at the middle ages roots in today's colleges and think of how meany majors are left overs for the past, stuff that has been dragged out and bloated out to 4 years.
Intellectuals such as some in academia create progressive ideas that disrupt the cultural order of society. Therefore creating more of them will create more instability in society.
The view therefore is to only create a society of people who will not rock the boat and make society or in this case, the party, wealthy.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
At the end of the day, graduates will "be forced to be employed.", and data will be made up.
Only those that do real science will die, but there aren't any. So nothing really changes.
That's the Chinese solution.
Or at least letting people pick a major after doing all General Educations classes?
Makeing the k13 free like k12 and lower?
There has be some majors that can turned in to minors or at least be made of a few minors or you can take 2 majors and trun them into 1 major made up of 2 minors.
Of course, that might be considered a feature, not a bug.
Looking at this quote in the article: "an overflow of workers whose skillsets don’t match with the needs of the export-led, manufacturing-based economy", it really doesn't look like China is thinking long-term.
With how quickly more human-like robotics is coming along in recent years, it looks more and more like over half of those "manufacturing-based economy" jobs could be replaced by a robot that works better for those roles for less money than a human could.
So, what does China do when all of those people are now without jobs. The same problem could be said to apply to all countries around the world as technology moves forward, but China is the one that is currently looking to concentrate people into this area that has has 'long-term obsolescence' stamped all over it. What do they do with all the people that they've trained to be unemployable, then? Soylent Green?
Isn't there a fundamental difference in that China pays outright for the student to go to college, whereas the U.S. provides loans which the student repays with interest for years afterward? So in the U.S. there's anti-incentive to cut people off from going to college; it's yet another way to skim off the value of the working people's lifelong labor. China pays for the student, whereas the U.S. gets paid by the student.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I thought you went to college to get an education, not a job. You go to college to study subjects you enjoy and want to learn more about, as well as get some knowledge about more general subjects that are useful to any well-rounded person. The job should not be the ultimate goal of college, it should be a by-product of college. The pursuit of knowledge itself should create a job opportunity in the field you have chosen to study. If you simply want a job, you should not be going to college. You should be going to a vo-tech and learning a marketable trade skill, whether that be nursing, various mechanics (automotive, airplane, nautical, etc), haircutting, or basic IT maintenance/installation. You shouldn't be getting yourself into $75,000-100,000 worth of debt if all you want is a job. I know plenty of people that went the vo-tech route, because that's what they wanted to do. They realized they had no need to go to college. If you want to work on cars, you go to a vo-tech school and learn to be a mechanic. You don't go to a top engineering school and study mechanical engineering.
For the record, my undergraduate degree was in History. Did I expect to get a job out of it? No. I studied it because I enjoyed it, it came naturally to me and was very easy for me, and it was what I wanted to study. My Master's degree is in something a little more marketable and applicable (International Relations), but even now I approach it more as an application of history as opposed to the more descriptive efforts of some political scientists (and I do not consider it to be a real science). I enjoyed my undergraduate psychology classes, my lit classes, my Shakespeare and film class, and my German and Arabic classes. If I had had time, I would have taken science classes as well, but with my AP credits science classes were not necessary. I went to college for the classical reason you go to college. I enjoyed learning about subjects I knew little about, and I wanted to know how things (and people) work in the world, and how things got to where they are today.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
So, just because certain majors have a higher rate of unemployment, the Chinese government is going "cancel" those majors? What happened to choice? Oh, yeah, this is China.
The majors that might end up being canceled might still be needed, but the number of students might just be too high. Still, no government should be a part of the decision process for prospective students. This idea will simply cause some of the students of these majors to either not attend college at all, or attend college outside of China. I fail to see how that helps China.
The biggest problem is that there are so many students, and so few jobs. As more and more people attend college, or return after a long hiatus, the number of available jobs starts to reduce. I am not sure of the situation in China, but I know that that is the case in and around Atlanta.
So many people now have college "educations", which does not account for a lot, anymore. Even some people who barely obtained their GEDs are now college graduates, even if their grades were not the greatest. As such, the job pool shrinks, and those that would be the best for any particular job are passed over, either because the idiot that got the job knew someone at the company, or because Human Resources/Personnel failed to look at GPAs.
Some majors might make no sense, or are useless, but the choice of taking that major should rest with the student and his or her adviser/parents(either or both).
He did not like all the required class but he did drop in to other class and that helped him a lot more then the required classes.
Now can we rework the system around that idea so the drop ins don't go away and that people are not forced to waste time on use less required classes?
to going along with hands on lab based classes as there only so much that can be down in the lab and real work place has lot's software / setups and more that is all over the place.
For jobs like mail room or help desk level 1.
You think that posting links to bestiality is funny?
I like bestiality. Get off my lawn!!
Perhaps I'm trolling, perhaps I'm not.
the theory is what you get at school. the hands on is what you get starting at your first job. you have to have both...
I am d3matt
What if the U.S. government were to adopt China's approach?
You mean pay someone's tuition if their major is on a list? It is a little late but, I'll go back if it is free this time around.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Stifle it? That's one way to prevent it!
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Fortunately you don't even need a degree to be in the Tea Party.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
The US government doesn't need to tell colleges what majors to have, a market based solution would be much more efficient. Getting rid of student loans would not only would help stop people from majoring in useless degrees but it would lower the cost of tuition as students would no longer be easy sources of cash for the colleges, it would also stop the job requirement inflation. There's a lot of jobs that get posted with bachelor's required or at the very least bachelor's preferred, that do not need a bachelor's degree. It would probably take a number of years for the market to correct that, but eventually there would less people with bachelor degrees and companies would have to lower their requirements.
The way it is these days, the government does not care what major you are going into, or how you'll even pay you're loans back. They don't care either, as it's nearly impossible to discharge student loans, they can garnish your wages, and "private" lender Sallie Mae also owns the collection agency. Unless you are going to never work in the US again, they will get their money back one way or another. No other loans in the US have the kind of protections for the creditor that student loans have. As a result there's no risk assessment done, where their would be if private loans with only the typical protections for loans were the only loans available. The lender would tell the wanna be poetry major to pick a more useful major, or get lost and pay for college themselves.
Some schools cover the gamut; the university where I teach has Computer Engineering, Computer Science and Information Technology; we also have an undergraduate business program which is introducing substantial specializations in CS or IT. We have CE and CS through the PhD level and IT through a Master's Degree. BTW, I teach information technology and have for nine years now, and IT works very well in a university environment. Lately some employers hiring coders have been seeking out our graduates over CS grads because coders in our IT program emerge as application developers, while coders from CS are just programmers--they know all the underlying algorithms but don't know how to apply them to solving real business problems.
There's a Yo Dawg joke in there somewhere.
It must be nice to have a trust fund.
Thanks for the great resource at the WSJ. Interestingly, it separately lists "Computer Science" (median salary $77K) and "Mathematics and Computer Science" (median salary $91K). I wonder what the difference is. Is the latter a double-major in math and CS or a specialized type of CS? Do those guys go into computational finance or something?
As long as jobs are demanding CS qualifications for development work, developers are going to go for CS qualifications. It's just another case of degree inflation that's been going on for decades.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
That is what alot of the CS is missing also IT work is it's own and is differnt from programing.
Now the Tech schools are good with some theory and lot's of hands on specializations.
Fourth would perhaps be cutting funding for, as the op mentions, 'unproductive majors'.
Back in the 80s when I went to college, we were all gung ho about careers - everyone wanted to go to medical school, engineering school*, law school and B-school - in that order. Science degrees were just a stepping stone to med school - except for math. You see back then, Math degrees were pretty much for teaching or if you were really sharp - actuarial. And when folks asked about one's major and they said "Math" the very next question was "Actuarial" while wrinkling their nose.
Flash forward 20 years later with Google and what not and having a Math degree (other than actuarial) is actually worth something. My have times changed. Just imagine what would have happened if all those kids didn't get that worthless degree.
Russian Lit? Pictures of a Russian Literature major who did alright.
Then there are folks who actually study something to get a job - like nursing - only to graduate and find that there still aren't any jobs (According to the American Journal of Nursing, this is the worst job market for newly graduated nurses ever.). You never know what is going to happen or how things will change.
And then again, There are folks doing quite well with Philosophy degrees and Art History Many get into big company training programs (they still exist), fast track management programs or in marketing and sales - places where creative flexible thinking is involved. Thinking that the Humanities and Arts are only capable in teaching. St. Steve Jobs was quoted as saying that Engineers are too linear in their thinking.
*The exception is aerospace engineering. For the exception of the exceptionally bright guys with contacts, job prospects have always sucked. I think AE was the second most popular degree that programmers and admins I worked with had after CS.
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
happiness and quality of life, not number of dollars
I think you'd be genuinely surprised just how much happiness and QoL a reasonable amount of dollars can buy you - provided you apply them properly (and don't waste them on divorce lawyers - or any other kind of lawyers). Maybe the course that's missing is how to use your money effectively.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Tea Party favorite, Governor Rick Scott actually has a similar plan for Florida. http://www.gainesville.com/article/20111011/ARTICLES/111019928
CS should be for the higher level theory based stuff.
But the other stuff like tech work, programing, web, it security, IT management needs to have less theory and more hands on work. As well class room with more of tech school based course load.
Uh, they DO have "class room with more of tech school based course load". It's called professional training, and damn near every single major vendor in the world offers it, along with a ton of certifications, which in many cases offer as good(if not better) job placement numbers vs. an MIS/CS degree.
Programmers absolutely need CS to be effective, all the others might work as a tech school. On the other hand if you want to be IT management then management science classes and accounting classes would both be very useful and aren't likely to be found in a trade school (at least as they exist in the US today).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I did not read what he posted, after the title of his comment. It was stupid, but I was reading over many other things, too. That is the last time I do that.
Just a job.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Oh...wait...they haven't banned those degrees yet.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
"while those who will do the right thing (generally engineers and scientists) "
You have got to be kidding. Maybe scientists. Maybe. But engineers? They're smart but one dimensional. At most. I think you're as deluded as anyone else.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
. . . who endanger his department by being unemployed.
Prof.: "Now tomorrow is graduation . . . after that . . . you work . . . or you DIE!"
Tarantino could make an excellent flick based on that. The Prof. pushes former students into bizarre jobs, just to get them off the unemployed list . . . or he kills them . . . all to a modern 50's trash rock soundtrack . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I'm probably going to rot in obscurity down here, since I'm posting so late to the story. However, someone over here did a really basic analysis with the typical "unemployment by college major" data that the Wall Street Journal put up. They looked at variance in unemployment related to popularity of a major. While the data set was incomplete (they didn't have true sample size, so they used rank, and transformed rank), it showed clear indications that those with the lowest sample size had the highest variance in unemployment. Far from making some broad claims about the utility of a major, it suggests that the less popular majors have big issues with small sample size. A single individual's employment history has far more effect on the statistics of those rare 'terrible majors' than the more populous ones. The only way to make the data trustworthy is to look at it for a much longer slice in time than we typically examine it for.
Also, it's worth putting on your economics hat when you think of modifying incentives like this. The problem with the proposed structural change is it assumes that the government can react to changing incentives faster than an individual can. Where there is demand for labour is a shifting target from year to year, and decade to decade (Hell, it shifts from quarter to quarter in some cases!). By deciding where the incentives are, they government needs to be able to shift them to match need fast enough so when there's a shortage of Psychologists and a surplus of Biologists, people can react to it accordingly. I'm skeptical about a government's ability to react that quickly with policy. If you're going to include incentives, it's best to include incentives for education in general, and not for specific major, so such bias won't occur. If the incentives in the form of subsidization are equal across the board, demand signals should still be seen.
And taking off my stats and economics hats, and putting on my skeptic hat, I want to see percentage-wise how much these 'terrible' majors actually cost the system. My intuition based off of the variance in unemployment vs. rank-popularity is that it doesn't cost the system much at all, and this is much-ado about nothing while the real expenses (Military spending, Medical spending) is ignored. Of course, much of the current fury over debt ignores the fact that the government is not like household/private debt. The two are functionally different.
you are either a trustafarian or you live in a shack
of course there has to be an economic consideration for what major you choose, for everyone else in the world. somebody has to put food on the table and pay for the roof over your head. in your case, i guess you don't have to worry about that. nice to be you. but your thoughts have no value to the vast majority of us
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
For-profit colleges whose programs do not lead to student earnings adequate to repay student loans risk having their access to Federal funds cut off, according to a June 2, 2011 press release: Obama Administration Announces New Steps to Protect Students from Ineffective Career College Programs http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/gainful-employment-regulations
There is an inverse relationship between the number of times people say they are smart and how smart the actually are.
I nominate this as BS post of the day.
Just look at anything that breaks because it's wrongfully engineered (example - over-engineered in one area, under-engineered in another).
Or, to take software (since this is slashdot), most of what's produced today. And yesterday. And last year. And 10 years ago. And 20 years ago. Bloat, bloat bloat bloat ... hey - it's not a feature, it's a bug. The more lines of code, the more places for you to have errors. The most bug-free line of code is the line of code that isn't written.
Why do developers ignore this? Ask any psychologist.
Since most of those baggers are retired. and then they are clueless enough to whine about entitlements.
I thought you went to college to get an education, not a job. You go to college to study subjects you enjoy and want to learn more about, as well as get some knowledge about more general subjects that are useful to any well-rounded person.
That died the moment employers started asking for college/university degrees as qualifications.
The fact that you now need a degree for a position as sales clerk is just gravy.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
(US should dump a lot of filler classes)
In college and cut the time to 3 years.
The valuable programs in a lot of colleges now have four years worth of required courses, and cannot be cut to a three year program (and those that can probably aren't educating students adequately). For example, the last courses I needed for my BS were 4xxx level, full-year courses that had 3xxx level full-year courses as prerequisites. Those 3xxx level courses had 2xxx level full-year prereqs and those courses had full-year 1xxx level prereqs. Even if I took no "filler courses" as you see them, I still would not have been able to graduate in three years in this program, it simply wasn't possible. I even took summer courses on top of my usual semesters of course work (while working on average 30 hours per week at the same time).
The only way they could have changed that would be if every course was offered every semester - including the summer. That is a discussion that is worth having, for sure. However many of those courses just don't have the demand currently to justify offering them every semester.
However your subject line also implies that the US has somehow, as a nation, decided on this system. That is of course wholly incorrect. There is no legislation on the national level I have ever encountered that requires liberal education requirements (or "filler" as you call them) to be fulfilled in order for a student to complete a bachelor's degree. Just one case in point, I had no foreign language requirement for my BS (although BA students were required to take at least 1 year).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Here's somebody else who studied history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Kandel He didn't get a job out of it either.
It has been removed could you please repost.
With how quickly more human-like robotics is coming along in recent years, it looks more and more like over half of those "manufacturing-based economy" jobs could be replaced by a robot that works better for those roles for less money than a human could.
Besides, it seems to me that robotics engineering would "match the need of export-led, manufacturing-based economy" just fine.
Anyway, this sentiment about robots has existed, in this exact form, for half a century now, and in a more general form of "science is going to get us rid of unskilled labor altogether" since the beginning of 20th century or so (see also: Technocracy Movement). In practice, it doesn't seem to work out so well - oh, we can create robots alright, the problem is with "less money than a human". Humans are remarkably resilient and adaptable creatures, and, if you put them in sufficiently dire conditions, will work for literal scraps, yet manage to survive. There will not be a robotic industrial revolution until there are still countries with wage slavery where you can outsource manufacturing. China's potential hasn't yet been fully tapped in that regard, and when it will, there's still Africa to fall back onto.
China is the one that is currently looking to concentrate people into this area that has has 'long-term obsolescence' stamped all over it.
Keep in mind that the opposite of that type of economy is "import-led, services-based" - like where Western world is heading rapidly now. But the latter approach puts you in a dependent position - manufacturing still has to be done somewhere, robots or no robots.
Just look at anything that breaks because it's wrongfully engineered (example - over-engineered in one area, under-engineered in another)
Well in practice this is usually because some MBA type over/underfunded some effort. When not that it is usually just sheer incompetence, there really is no "bar exam" for engineers or scientists, some people have engineering degrees but are worth more on fire to heat siberian homes. All this has a reason, this isn't pure pessimism. One does not necessarily need to hire a team of superstars to do every project, and one does have a fixed budget to work within. MBAs are inexpertly attempting to juggle all this to maximize profits, by engineering a system of people. They frequently fail, but it's not understood why.
It's a BS post anyway. Engineers aren't "trained to eliminate inefficiency" at all, engineers are trained to solve problems by (ab)using science. Sometimes the problem is to eliminate inefficiency, although not as often as people think. Many of us had to take a semester or two of psychology or sociology to meet accreditation standards, but I haven't found that most of us have respect for it. We can't "use" it in the same way we can use physics or chemistry, and it doesn't help that the "proof" for many theories in soft science sounds bogus to us. (Worse, our HR departments frequently try to use their own half baked understandings of sociology or psychology to increase productivity. This always pisses everyone off.)
Although it is true that what goes up must come down, engineering is knowing exactly how fast it will come down based on how hard it was launched up, and what factors will contribute to errors as it comes down, and how we can mitigate those factors, etc.. I can't design a corporate org structure to have my engineers produce 10% faster, while maintaining my current budget using psychology or sociology. I can't design a commercial spot that will definitely compel 3 million consumers (+/- 5%, to control under/over supply) to buy my product. The MBA types have mechanisms to do this which are NOT based on social sciences at all, the results vary wildly but assuming the MBA in question was doing his job, should minimally accomplish his business objectives.
Once someone can do this sociology or psychology will be respected, and engineers will be using these skills to do their job. Until then, it is "useless" to the corporate world, and as such it is not going to be easy to get a job with these degrees. So the question is how much government funding should be given to kids who want to pursue degrees in fields that aren't likely to result in gainful employment. I think very little, the purpose of that money is to get people the skills they need to get good jobs. Subsidizing science/art for science/art's sake is noble but should be a very small % of our budget.
Removing such programs from school, chasing down people who study heresy...that's the kind of brain dead thinking that will handicap a nation. I encourage enemy governments to do this as much as possible.
Here's something I've always thought would be worth trying:
Study what you want. Generous loans will be provided, but your educational institution bills you for the true cost of the services they provide. That's important so that people can then know what education actually costs whether or not they ultimately pay for it themselves.
When you pay income tax, the government puts up an amount equal (or a percentage - that part is negotiable) and applies it to the student loan. Be a productive member of society and pay your taxes, and the student loan eventually vanishes on its own.
And if you get an expensive advanced degree like medicine and then work abroad, they're come after you for the full cost of your education.
I expect that you're wrong - it'll be at least partly because a sufficient number of people have a college degree, so it's a good way for a lazy HR department to cut their workload.
Your objection would hold water for technical jobs, but for secretarial positions?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I have a history degree and I make pretty good bank as a network architect.
Funny story, I worked for my university's computer science department while I was in school building out their network. My grades in compsci were poor so I switched to history, mainly to graduate since I'd already put in a few years. Stayed working for the department, had experience with almost every type of equipment you could imagine and most networking protocols circa 10 years ago.
As I'm nearing graduation time I start interviewing for permanent jobs. One interview is with, aw hell, it's been a long time, Proctor and Gamble. So I'm meeting with a first line interviewer about a entry level network engineer position. Guy's looking over my resume which is full of networking projects I've worked on, all kinds of fun stuff for 1999 or so, and he the first thing out of his mouth "So.. history major? How do you think you'll apply that to this job?" Wut. I came up with some bullshit answer and decided immediately that I had no desire to work for them. He asked me some random other things about networking and I was on my way.
I then interviewed with a number of start ups in California none of which even mentioned the history degree thing. The only thing that the place I ended up going to ever asked about school was "When are you done so you can start working?" Totally different cultures.
You don't study a degree to work in an assembly plant. They mean engineers, scientists, business administrators, financial types etc.
Being off by a factor of at least 50% is NOT "reproducible science." We're simply not there yet, and probably won't be for another 100 years..
I bet he's one of the 'well rounded' people who took absolutely no non-remedial math or science in college.
Having a job in your field means your field of study is 'just job training' by definition.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
As a roboticist, I can assure you we are nowhere near the point where humanoid robots will replace actual humans. For the foreseeable future, the domain for robots will be in factoriesand assembly lines.
I thought you went to college to get an education, not a job.
Obviously, this is what some of the rich entitled Americans tell their kids.
What is the rest of the World supposed to do? Follow the American model? Stop paying for higher education? In any case, you can't power a new emerging economy on Art History and Psychology alone, even if you could afford it.
As in, too many look for the big pay day instead of what a) they like and could enjoy or b) what fields are hiring.
Then there is that all not so significant number who spend money on a degree without any real purpose other than having it and then wondering why they aren't satisfied with the outcome.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
ok, i understand, you're not a trustafarian and you don't live in a shack. but maybe you should consider that not everyone can do what you did, and therefore your experience is an outlier, and not an instructive lesson on what everyone should do or depend on or expect
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
OK.. I get US History and Military Technology being available Majors, but in this militarized economy , how is it that military technology doesn't lead to the cash? Now, US *technology* being dropped, as it's on it's way to extinction, I can understand, , and Military *History* is clearly under appreciated in this "repeat the same mistakes' over and over again culture.. Just change the course names before dropping them ...
Great link to the table, and it explains some of the findings. As you point out, you can sort by any of the column headings. If we sort by unemployment percentage, we see the Law of Large numbers at work. Of the 10 majors with the lowest unemployment (0 - 2%, by the way), you can see that they are very unpopular majors. That means that very few of the people surveyed reported having majored in these things in college = small samples. When you reverse the sort for 10 highest unemployment rates, we see the same trend. With the exception of Architecture, these majors are very unpopular. Again, very small samples. Samples vary, but small samples vary more than big ones - that's the Law of Large Numbers.
Some of the majors don't make sense, either. The highest unemployment rate is for "Clinical Psychology." I can only imagine these majors are self-report data from the U.S. Census, but there is no college in the U.S. where you can major in "Clinical Psychology." You can major in Psychology, and you might get a concentration in Clinical, but you don't get a clinical psychology degree at the undergraduate level. No state in the U.S. will allow you to work as a clinical psychologist without graduate level training and many hours of supervised experience.
By the way, if you just look at people who responded "Psychology" you see an unemployment rate of 6.1% and it was the 5th most popular major (i.e., big sample, probably more accurate numbers). At a time (2010) when unemployment is arguably 10%, that sounds pretty good to me.
However, as other posters note, the data don't tell you if their jobs are mud wrestling, dog walking, or pimping, so it's rather difficult to use these numbers to judge how "useful" a particular major might be.
Oh lookie - someone all defensive because the truth hurts.
Not-so-fun fact - I was helping an engineering firm at a public works job site, and part of the work was connecting the drainage to an interceptor with the public system.
They had to dig 16 feet, and figured that they'd make a nice big wide hole, no chance of caving in. Me, I'm no engineer, but I told them "No - you need to make a trench box." They pooh-poohed the idea, but since it was a union site, when I mentioned it to the foreman, he agreed, and a trench box was built, even though "it wasn't needed."
And we all watched (and heard) as, while the plumber was at the bottom of the box, those "extra-wide sides" caved in. The trench box saved his life.
Normally, it wouldn't have been needed, but anyone SHOULD have noticed that this portion of the site was fill, it was lower than the rest of the site, and that the accumulation of ground water would render it extremely unstable. There were certainly enough engineers (including geo-engineers - there was a lot of pile-driving done based on the geo-engineering reports).
The soil engineers had never tested it, b/c it wasn't where the buildings themselves were going. But anyone who saw the total lack of mature trees in that portion could have figured it out in a few seconds.
So no, engineering is not a science - not when someone with ZERO engineering training gets it right, and the engineers totally miss it. Like too many experts, not only couldn't they see the forest for the trees - they couldn't see the lack of a forest for the lack of a tree. But to someone who likes nature, and likes the occasional walk in the woods ... it was obvious. No need for a study. No need for samples.
But of course, I wouldn't expect a mere engineer to understand that.
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!
If they take away the history or art degrees, what will I frame and hang over the french fry vat?
A friend of mine got degrees in English and art history and wound up working a series of dead-end jobs such as office receptionist, clerk at a drug store, clerk at a grocery store, dog-walker, and then professional volunteer for a while which is usually referred to as "unemployed" by most people.
I ended up hiring her for a computer-related job and trained her to do the work. It paid OK, not great. But it was a decent job. This was not good enough. She quit with no notice after 18 months because she REALLY wanted to get a job as an art museum curator for a travelling exhibit. The fact that there are only a few such jobs in the entire world and those jobs were probably occupied by people who didn't want to give up their jobs did not in the least dissuade this person from her goal.
In her mind, she had gone to college, studied what she'd wanted and graduated and therefore was somehow entitled to a job of her choice.
Never once occurred to her that a job might not exist.
Sig for hire.
Reduce the minimum wage and you'll have more people trying to take 2 and 3 jobs to make ends meet.
Plus the price of energy will never reduce drastically. Not ever. Which means that when the minimum wage is gone, food transportation costs will drive the price of food out of reach for millions. That means mass starvation and CIVIL WAR.
No, really, you will not ever show how energy will ever become 10 times cheaper. You will not even show how energy prices will drop even by 10%. Ever. Not happening.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
you do not understand it.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Its a very simple point: economic considerations trump love of wisdom for wisdom's sake for most of us. And not by choice
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
to the US where they can work as H1B slaves and displace worthless Americans. Corporate America (the only one that counts) wins! China wins!
The truth is that we have the technology now; replicators are not needed. The number of people involved in actually providing the food harvest is minimal and will only be reduced as technology improves. The key is for the general population to have an ownership stake in the very technology used to eliminate their jobs. An excellent (and extremely prescient) book from 1976, People's Capitalism, suggests that a National Mutual Fund be established to invest in beneficial technology. I highly suggest you read it as it goes in to far more detail than I can in a Slashdot comment. It is available online at www.peoplescapitalism.org
There will still be jobs that need to be done, particularly in the fields of health and construction. These jobs will provide a way to earn more income. Other ways of earning extra income will include artistic endeavors such as handcrafted household items, music and restaurant work. Prizes can be offered for creative solutions to pressing societal problems. The important thing is that without narrowing choices down to work full-time (or even overtime) for a living or die hungry in the streets, a great deal of make-work jobs that do nothing for society (and often even negatively impact society) will be eliminated. This is not science fiction. This can happen within our lifetimes. Read up and spread the word :)
harmonious design
we'd all chip in to give you the bare necessities of life
The poorest person in the USA gets much more than the bare necessities by digging in trash dumpsters. That is, if you define "bare necessities" as surviving.
When you get as much food as you need not to starve, as much clothes as you need not to freeze, you want more. It's human nature, no one is ever satisfied.
If it were defined by law that the government had to supply the bare necessities, very soon there would be pressure to include perfumes, because being socially acceptable is a necessity, and video games, you cannot live without entertainment.
Not really, no.
It makes sense to avoid having people educate themselves into something that won't get them employed.
The government shall primarily look after what educations that are needed, not what educations that people want. Learning useless stuff still makes you useless on the job market.
But you can of course still take side courses in what interests you - like painting even though you read an engineering major.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Government has absolutely no right to determine what is taught or who takes it. If the people of the US forget this then the America is dead.
It's bad because Liberty is an unalienable right, and the government has no business deciding what you should study.
In fact, government has no business deciding if we should study. As it is, providing public education (K-12) and making it mandatory crowds out private education and productive labor.
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).
Money (understood as the most widely accepted commodity for trade) was a great invention. States have co-opted the power of this tool through fiat money. Economists do not worship money but are rather the (paid for) high priests of TPTB who wish to maintain this control. The most insightful monetary scientist of our time, Antal Fekete, has been marginalized (yes, even by otherwise sound Austrian economists), while Keynesian charlatans get paid to defend the establishment lien (Krugman).
Unemployment is a good thing, a sign of economic progress, the result of higher productivity.
Barring the invention of the Replicator (products) and the Holodeck (services), there will always be demand for more products and services, as the desire of humans to satiate some kind of "unease" is virtually infinite. Unemployment means that there is some factor impeding demand and supply to find each other.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
My psych department has flat-out told every single student who is taking much above the 100-level that it's pretty much necessary to go on to either grad school or to get a professional degree. A bachelors in psychology is simply too general--and there's not much to be done about it.
This overall makes it a really lousy place to shuffle your undecideds--which is probably why the place I'm at doesn't do that. (I haven't that much of a clue where they end up, though I do know they don't end up where I am. I suspect US History...)
Though, it does raise some questions: To what extent is the problem is its unemployability as a bachelors caused by it being a default major? Would it perhaps be better to avoid there being any such thing as a 'default major'--to have a 'general studies' major for those people, or even outright encourage them to leave at, say, the end of their sophomore year (so you can give them an associates) & return when they are no longer undecided?
You didn't have majors in medieval universities. You had the seven liberal arts (the trivium and the quadrivium) which underlay a church-centred curriculum. Think of it as the ultimate gen-ed degree! By the sixteenth century, you had clearly defined professorships in specific fields such as mathematics (think of the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge held by Isaac Newton). To study engineering, say, you didn't go to universities in the eighteenth century - they simply didn't teach a curriculum that covered such topics. Nineteenth century universities is where real specialization took hold to create the idea of majoring in a specific study or another.
Of course, you'd only know this if you studied history. I mean really studied history to learn how to find information as well as usefully analyze that data. For this, you have to go beyond glib and flawed recall. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
The real problem is the fact that we are taught that going to college will automagically make us more employable, then corporate univeristies attempt to churn out as many of every type of major as they can and you become a dime a dozen career. The reason programmers cant find jobs is a direct result of training to many programmers. They saw there was a profit to be made so many universities started teaching it even though there was not so high a demand that they needed to. Then several hundred if not thousand of training schools opened doing the same thing for game programing etc so now we have so many people taking programming and convinced there will be jobs and there just arent that many jobs. Not to mention the fact that if you arent inately suited to programing or any of those other skills you wont be very sucessful anyway. We need to stop lying to our children and forcing them and thier parents to pay all this money on a dream that over 75% of the time ends in failure, debt, and a life of jumping from job to job.
the punchline "haha philosophy majors are unemployable" necessitates a news story. /Philosophy major /Employed /Making more than most engineers
It could put certain jobs on the map that in the past were hard to fill the jobs quota. Plus it could also get rid of the crap that goes no where, and you should not be putting your student loan moneys into in the first place. So it may turn out to be an enhancement for the job market. But it could also cause Colleges to increase prices on certain majors simply because the major itself is a huge money maker, or the job market is hiring.
I came out of high school knowing enough about networking and programming to run circles around my teachers, yet I was stuck as a pizza driver because I didn't have a degree. I finally caved in, and went to a "Technical College" to get my so-called "marketable trade skill" in networking with emphasis on software development to show a balanced understanding of computers. I skated through this degree because there was nothing they were teaching that I didn't already know (except perhaps a little of the stuff in my CCNA focused 2 year course). What did this get me? Debt, and still no career. I continued to work as a pizza driver, eventually as in-store, then as an assistant manager, then (after moving across the country to marry my online sweetheart), I moved into full time pizza management. It lasted 3 months... I ended up quitting out of severe depression, frustration, and disgust at the whole situation.
So, you're suggestion of Vo-Tech? Well, it got me to a point where I was flat broke while trying to marry my sweetheart and give her the wedding of her dreams. After a beautiful (but heavily underfunded and not quite up to what she had dreamed of having) wedding ceremony (to which she still to this day insists was perfect, but I know she wanted more), paid for by family and friends, I continued to search for work while she supported our needs with a secretary position. I finally gave in yet again, took a third shift backup tape operator position (barely an IT job) for a horrible salary, but it provided enough income that I could do an 18 month accelerated education weeknights course to get a 4 year Bachelors of Science in Business Administration without going more than about $15,000 in debt over the long haul. During that job, I was able to get a slightly better position, working as phone technical support (I will never do that again, but everyone in IT / Software should have to experience it so they have pity on the folks on the other end of the line). While this job was slightly less depressing and allowed more normal hours of sleep, the pay was still dismal compared to what my co-workers were making... the only difference between me and them? Not knowledge (I knew more about programming than most of the guys they were hiring fresh out of college)... the difference was they had 4 year degrees.
This is why I crammed for 18 months 3 nights a week to finish a 4 year degree in anything... because my 2 year associates degree meant squat to hiring managers. I had to practically beg to get the technical support position since I had no "real degree". So, I do 18 months to get a BS in BA with a minor in Networking, and suddenly I'm a much more qualified to be a Software Architect than I was before I got the BS in BA? Now that's what I call BS. Now I have tens of thousands in debt because there was no other way to get a real decent paying job in my field of expertise. I fought for 6 years to try and prove that you don't need a college degree to get into a technical job if you have good enough skills as a developer. What I got for it was a lesson that the world doesn't work as I think it should, and a 9 year delayed start at my career.
So get over yourself and your sanctimonious crap about "You go to college to study subjects you enjoy and want to learn more about" (No, I read books in my spare time to study subjects I enjoy and want to learn more about), and drop the crappy insult of "If you simply want a job, you should not be going to college."
This is not the way the job market works in the US, and you're naive as hell if you truly think it works any other way.
Before commenting on the Bible, please read it first
I think what happens is that in an office environment you are needed for your capability of interacting with an increasingly educated population. And everybody wants those nice and confortable office jobs. Blue collar is becoming the province of the non-anglosaxon and the non-educated, and who wants to be there?
It is true that one should prepare oneself for employment. One does, after all, have to support self and family. However, the study of the liberal arts is essential for success in a technical career. The very best course I ever took to prepare me to work with computers was in Formal Logic taught in the Philosophy Department by a professor who knew nothing about computers and never mentioned them. Computers are nothing more than boxes filled with on/off switches. Formal Logic is a means of thinking that is restricted to on/off, in/out, yes/no. It was invented in ancient Greece by Aristotle. Computers simply mechanize this manner of thinking. Once one has an understanding of the fundamental nature of computers, everything else is a detail. Even fuzzy logic comes down to a crisp decision that excludes all others. The second best course was in Boolean Algebra taught in the Math Department by a professor who also knew nothing about computers and never mentioned them. Boolean Algebra is a formal symbology and approach for manipulating Formal Logic statements. It gives structure that can be more readily mechanized. Besides becoming educated in the fundamentals that underlie their craft, technical people need to know how to communicate. They also need an understanding of the industrial and business world. Without such knowledge, a technical person has a glass ceiling over themselves that can not be breached. Even if one stays technical, one still needs to be in synergy with the surrounding environment. This is especially true as one becomes more senior.
A technical degree isn't a "higher education", it is very involved, very sophisticated job training.
Someone can have a doctorate in computer science, math or engineering and not be truly educated. That kind of education is what the University system was all about when it was created.
That system was created by the upper classes who had no concerns about needing to earn a living. The value of a liberal education was seen, however. People who had degrees earned more. The non-rich started seeking out college degrees.
However, over time, people weren't educated to the value of "higher education" - what it is -- and an "education became confused with taking classes in ANYTHING after highschool ( and paying a lot for it ).
This move by China, IMHO, is good in spirit, but ignorant in the application. They will produce a generation of highly trained tradespeople, but otherwise uneducated. Maybe that is what they want. Uneducated people are easier to control.
As far as the U.S. goes I think academia plays an expensive game that students get to foot the bill for in massive debt or lives of diminished prosperity.
Many new college students are not ready for college. They don't know how the world works and they are at a point in their lives where they are not going to listen to their parents. Many don't know who they are either.
Majors that pay out with good jobs are not sexy and liberal arts classes can be fun. Many people that young also aren't sure of where they would be happy doing.
Universities know these things, yet let students hang themselves by signing up for classes that will not lead to financially rewarding careers. Universities make money while these students spend their families money on classes that go nowhere and universities make money when these students borrow more money to come back and tack classes that will have those results.
Universities could do much to prevent that by requiring that freshmen go through career testing and career counseling during their first year. Believe it or not, there are good tests for helping people to figure out what field they would like and from there they can pick one that pays.
However, that would not bring in as much revenue to universities.
You need to dig up a history on money. Money was created almost entirely AS a religion... or at least as a tool to make religions more profitable... at least that's one of the more standard versions of the story.
Liberty is an unalienable right... but Merriam Webster has changed the definition periodically over the past few decades to cope with the issue that liberty was far to broad for things like some of the U.S. presidential administrations. The best part about liberty is that we all demand it, we all insist it is an underlying component of living in a civilized country and yet there are people who spend 12 years in a university studying what that one word actually means (well they did until it was deemed unprofitable).
And... just in case you don't know... the communist party which represents a total of approximately 4% of the Chinese population but rules with an iron fist has absolutely no requirement to guarantee civil rights to their people. You're confusing them with those other nations. On the brighter side... seeing that the legalists will almost certainly take over the Chinese government after the eminent collapse of the communist regime as only the legalists have the power to control the country afterwards, the communists look like happy happy smiley people in comparison. You thought America was the worst two party system... China has two parties and a third which is temporarily in control until the other two take over again and they've had that system for eons.
The beauty of the monstrous government which China has is that the government can't possibly be bothered with the gazillion people living under their regime and therefore most people don't even notice it's there... well until they want to live in a city. But there's probably no more than a hundred million or so that fall into that category.
Don't make the mistake of thinking China is anything like a western country... they don't bitch about shit not being done by the government... they just do it. It's the nanzy panzy cry babies who learned to be useless from westerners like us that sit there whining about how they got a degree and can't get a job.
You don't get that first job or internship without having the years of practical, on-the-job training first.
I strongly suspect "cutting studies in which less than 60% fail to find work" should be corrected to "more than 60% fail to find work".
Well, obviously you'd have to filter through the requests and find career fields that are actually short-changed, but I know they're out there. Excessive numbers of temporary foreign workers, higher pay than what you'd expect from the education/difficulty, etc...
So sure, I'd listen, but it'd only be one data point. One thing to remember when you get into these things is that everything affects everything else - and I wasn't writing a book. 'Yelling' - trying to get more workers so they can pay less. 'Screaming' - shortages are hurting their business.
I don't read AC A human right
A bit late to the party, but...
Your not the only one. I have a similar story with associates degree level experience. It's why I'm back in school now, though I took ten years between associates degree and bachelor's since I did get a IT job between the two. However this last time I got layed off getting a new job was useless with a associates degree. Due to my 10 years between the two I couldn't even get credit for most of my first degree, so I have another year and a half still before I'm finished.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise