They may provide those classes and expose students as part of their core, but that differs from it being the mission of a school like the liberal arts colleges to produce a well rounded holistic student with a broad education.
Isn’t the focus of the list those schools that are best preparing their students with “AI working competency”?
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Methodology here:
As far as I can tell, the AI questions were not part of the selection process, they just added that to the story.
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Then IMHO, the title of the article is a bit misleading! It says that “embracing AI”
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A cynical person might even suggest they tacked on an AI angle for extra clicks . . . .
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Or that the article was written by AI for AI….HAL Space Odyssey.
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Not sure why you tagged me with this post, but that said, it contains a very interesting link. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) shows that only 6% of all undergraduate (4 year) degrees are in engineering, and 19% in business (which includes “business, management, marketing, and related support services, as well as as culinary, entertainment and personal services”) yet engineering and business salaries is frequently the focus of a large majority of conversations on CC and, like your link, career outcomes. While those fields may be over-represented on cc, we should not sell the majority of college applicants perhaps reading CC short by over-focusing on areas that do not represent the majority of college applicants.
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Maybe students need to make that more of their decision process–unless they dont need money to live later.
Not everyone wants to be an engineer. There are plenty of ways to be financially successful.
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But in a world (the labor market we’re in today) where CS grads are taking jobs at the “Genius Bar” at the local mall to help them start paying down the loans which everyone told them “are totally worth it because CS is a bullet proof major” perhaps we can give HS students a more nuanced view of “how to make money as an adult”.
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The only issue with this is it is backwards looking. For the past decade or more CS/CE grads have been in high demand and well paid. My friends in software development (MIT grads) think that’s over. I don’t foresee engineering falling off this list, but who knows what the employment landscape will be in 10 years.
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Not a small issue, though. Lots of people chasing things based on recent past performance is how “bubble” cycles happen, and it can be rough if you end up riding the down part of the cycle.
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Yup. Think of the petroleum engineers graduating into one of the periodic bust cycles. And wishing they’d majored in ME or statistics which were their true interests AND would give them more fungibility….
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I’m old enough (and have been at least tangentially associated with academia enough) to remember the Econ bubble (the first time, back when a lot more people saw most undergrad business degrees as basically vocational) and Bio bubble as well.
I’m sympathetic because this is just hard. People are trying to predict decades into the future when thinking in terms of the period from deciding on a college major to their eventual career peaks. That’s basically trying to write accurate science fiction at such time scales, and notoriously no one gets it right. Even at time scales like the remaining length of your education, economic predictions start becoming highly error prone. You basically have to be prepared to be flexible, to pivot possibly multiple times, and possibly with the help of more education.
Which is scary if you are taking out big loans to fund a very expensive undergraduate degree. But there is another, more direct and certain way, to address that problem . . . .
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About 20 years ago, three hospitals in my area merged. Two were mergers of equals, one was pretty much a “desperate takeover” situation.
And then- nurse and other allied health layoffs. Folks in the area were shocked- the US government at the time was giving preferential visas to nurses who had trained overseas– that’s how bad the nursing shortage was in the US. And yet new and low tenured and experienced nurses in the region were being laid off and unable to find another job. How can this be?
Editorials in the local papers pointed out that if you were willing to move to Duluth or Cedar Rapids or Akron there were zillions of opportunities for nurses- new, low tenured, experienced. Surgical nursing? Write your own ticket.
And yet– few takers. I understand both sides. You pick a nursing school close to where you grew up because everyone told you “you will never be unemployed, we will always need nurses” which of course at a macro level is generally true. But it’s also true that any single metro area or state or region of the country can have a surplus of ANY profession while the national trends are the reverse.
So the predictability is both profession/training, AND certification AND regional. And usually wrong. Eventually the local hospital system started rehiring its own nurses, especially when it moved to a 3 day/12 hour day is full time model. But the time lag- a few years of nurses who couldn’t get a job unless they’d relocate, move down the food chain to school nurse or “managing a medical practice” which meant filing insurance claims, not bedside nursing, or join a travel nursing agency and have a fun months in Duluth before signing on for a few months in Palm Springs or another more popular posting.
Predicting is hard.
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Such a good point. It is a huge country with a huge economy. But . . . you can make it much smaller when you are very specific about where you want to be.
And as many have pointed out, even if the professional tracks exist, will there always be enough of a pay premium to compensate for higher living costs, particularly housing+transportation costs? Observably not, and it is basic economics–in some markets there is a persistent problem of not enough housing supply in locations close to jobs centers (often constrained by policy), and too much supply of young educated professionals looking for jobs.
I do think this helps fuel this sense in certain circles that you have to not only be a successful professional, but in fact unusually wealthy even for a successful professional, to really “get ahead”. That’s not remotely true in most parts of the US. But I understand why people who are really targeting just the highest COL areas might see things that way.
Staying tied to one city is just a very high risk strategy. Plus for generations large US firms expected you to move every few years to get that promotion. Not to mention the military. I moved 6 times to pursue my career. You have to be flexible and adaptable.
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Agree 100%. When Boston experienced a recession, Cincinnati and St. Louis and Wichita and Omaha were frantically trying to hire. And the reverse.
I am working now with some “failure to launch” young college grads and there are two common threads-
1- Either won’t relocate or it must be a to “cool” place- Seattle, SF, Austin or similar.
2- Totally unrealistic about the job content of entry level roles. “Entry level Strategy Associate” doesn’t mean telling the CEO of Estee Lauder about how teens and young folks in their 20’s are in love with Korean beauty products and why Clinique needs to shift its target market away from aging boomers. It WILL mean running spreadsheet after spreadsheet after spreadsheet tracking inventory levels of “top 5” moisturizers and doing regressions to figure out whether or not to discontinue the travel size of a hypo-allergenic bar soap. Replace Estee Lauder with Netflix, Apple, Hyatt Hotels, Disney Cruises, Whole Foods, Metropolitan Museum, SpaceX.
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