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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
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.
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
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
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...
Why on earth would they want to make college cheaper? It's a business like anything else. Everyone knows a fair amount of the courses in most degree programs are required solely for the purposes of generating income.
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.
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"
Partly for spelling and grammar. No, I kid.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Why?! Free votes, who wouldn't vote for someone offering something like free education, or massive loans to anybody. Then the schools know how much you're getting, and guess what, prices shoot up to match the max the government gives you.
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
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.
You think that posting links to bestiality is funny?
I like bestiality. Get off my lawn!!
Perhaps I'm trolling, perhaps I'm not.
Instead of redefining productivity, how about you just use "happiness" and "quality of life"?
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.
Educational costs have been rising for the same reason housing price rose.... easy access to credit. Get rid of educational loans and tuition will drop.
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
Fortunately you don't even need a degree to be in the Tea Party.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Because otherwise education is only available to rich people. It means you filter people to get a high education based on the money their parent have instead of the natural ability of the kid. It is first extremely unfair (but you would classify that as a socialist problem) but it also mean that you prevent very smart people to get a reasonnable education and contribute positively to the society. Instead they are going to work for walmart.
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.
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.
Oh please. Like most graduates with MDs have the slightest clue about statistics, hypothesis testing, selection bias, etc.
What's even worse is that most of them do believe they've got a clue and believe themselves to be more competent than they really are.
Most of the rest of the world does fine with 6-7 year combined medical programs. One could make the argument that as a whole, they do better as measured by health outcomes of the general population.
The real issue in the US is this absurd notion that the MD is the equivalent of academic doctorate.
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
Tea Party favorite, Governor Rick Scott actually has a similar plan for Florida. http://www.gainesville.com/article/20111011/ARTICLES/111019928
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.
Just a job.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
In Britain and many other countries, physicians complete a five-year Bachelor of Medicine/Bachelor of Surgery degree and are awarded the title--but not the degree--of Doctor. This is because the general education portion of an American undergraduate degree is not a part of these degrees under the British system. There seems to be some assumption that they get more "general education" in secondary school, but in my experience this is not the case as I get students all the time out of British-style education who enter our graduate program with a Bachelor of Engineering, who have NEVER written a research paper, either in secondary school or in college. This hinges on your opinion of the value of general education; I happen to be a believer, which I guess makes me a believer in the American-style eight-year medical school path.
. . . 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!
"socialism" is always bandied about as a dirty word. i think mainly because people don't understand the opposite word: "classism," which is worse: you go as far in life as how much money your parents have
the truth is that no society can be a great society if it doesn't provide some sort of social safety nets. and no society is a meritocracy if it is willing to deny opportunity to people who are gifted, but aren't financially gifted
for those of you who have this knee jerk automatic reaction to the word "socialism": why aren't you worried about classism? don't you see the evils in that? don't you see that a truly great society DOES have social safety nets and why they are needed? where do these automatic trigger reactions in your brain come from without an appreciation of simple facts and obvious history?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
There is an inverse relationship between the number of times people say they are smart and how smart the actually are.
two comments on that:
There is a difference between "socially valuable" and "in demand". I think it is a good thing to have many history major or art major. I love talking with them and I think they contribute positively to society. But somehow they are not "in demand".
By having education pushed by loans, you do not remove the segregation problem. Many people drop out of college or somewhere in their graduate study because they need the money to pay for their loan. They end up needing to pay back unrealistically high amount of money. If your parents have money, the problem is not so big. The segregation is still there.
I believe having universities be publicly funded allows to level the field of who can reach higher level of education based on their natural abilities and desire. Public fund are not unlimited as well, you can then filter student based on abilities and motivations.
I have been told there is a public grant funding opportunities in the USA. But I never really saw it work properly. (Note that I haven't looked to much into it as well.)
Yep, kids can handle a tougher HS. I went to one that rendered my first two years at college useless. Sadly, I was only allowed to test out of so much content before they stopped being willing to give me that much credit. But we could clearly shift the learning forward by a couple of years for most people, and get those top people through the (typically most challenging) first year of the phd before they get legal access to alcohol.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
It has been removed could you please repost.
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...)
Seriously.
If there's a shortage of qualified people in a field, the answer isn't to "encourage" (read: throw money at) the schools teaching in the field. The answer is for employers to man up, quit whining to the government, and pay the clearing wage.
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
Because a educated population in is the best interest of society?
I don't have a sig.
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!
It's hard to reconcile how it's a good thing that people look to govt. to solve their problems but it's a bad thing that businesses then naturally do the same.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
The discrepancy is probably due to the confusion amongst the general populace of what "Computer Science" actually is and the bewildering assortment of "computer" degrees offered by the various US institutions. To say that one "double majors" in CS and math is actually somewhat of a misnomer because CS, being an abstract field of inquiry, is essentially a specialized branch of mathematics with some practical tool use and experimentation thrown in by way of programming and use of computers to explore practical applications of theoretical aspects of computation. Actually, the mathematical basis for modern CS predates the invention of the electronic digital or even mechanical computation by several centuries. However, it was mostly impractical to explore this field without the benefit of modern technological assistance, so it received little interest among mathematicians until the technology advanced enough to make serious study practical. I will grant you that this is a simplified overview, but hopefully you get the point.