I read Paying for the Party and do get that the wealthier kids had a leg up with their interior design and fashion aspirations, in the form of parents to support them while they got going and family-friend potential clients and connections.
I am reacting more to this:
No, that’s not reality for everyone. Not at all. Perhaps many arts majors have trouble finding well paying jobs, especially right out of the gate, but the statement above is so absolute I had to comment.
Some years back a poster wrote about the world being a much different/ sadder place when only the wealthy had the opportunity to study art history (paraphrasing) and that was incredibly meaningful to me.
How we prepare our kids for the future seems an important discussion. Whether a particular college provides an income boost, short term or long term, is not how I would approach that question. fwiw
Most arts majors- at a rigorous program at a demanding university- are extremely difficult. It is narrow minded- and devoid of fact-based analysis- to claim that arts graduates are more doomed to work at a coffee shop than an accounting major or an international business major.
Fact- a mediocre accountant is going to have difficulty getting launched. The Big 4 don’t need to hire a kid with a C average from your local directional state U, they have their pick of the 3.8 grads at State Flagships. An international business major who isn’t fluent in another language and has no historical understanding of why China’s business climate is different from India’s (because he or she has never taken a history class) is going to have difficulty getting launched. There are loads of under-performers who majored in something “useful” who are going to struggle. Why? They hated accounting. Their grades reflect it. Their parents made them major in engineering- they barely squeaked by. They wanted a golden ticket so they focused on geology and the petroleum industry- good luck with that when the hiring targets at the major oil companies are all down for 2015 and down even more for 2016. Maybe oil prices will rebound in time for the 2017 grads… or maybe not. But I feel for the kids whose parents told them that oil and gas was a sure-fire thing.
I hire arts majors all the time for roles in a global corporation. We invest a lot in training and developing our people, and we need to hire new grads who work hard and have demonstrated the ability to focus, collaborate, and take feedback even when it’s negative. That’s pretty much the curriculum in most of the arts- focus, collaboration, and incorporate negative feedback into better performance.
Do you guys hire for a living? I do. Some of the comments on CC about the job market for new grads reflect reality circa 1978,
I do not hire for a living. And I really have no idea how my kids got jobs. But they have them.
adding: it is my understanding they had acquired (through course work) a set of skills for which employers were suddenly, and rather unexpectedly, looking. That course work was elective and just for “fun.” Maybe my kids were more thoughtful about it than I am imagining. I certainly wasn’t.
“I had always assumed smart college grads got decent jobs.”
Not smart, as in grades or school performance, that can be somewhat shetered. Kids graduate with usually about 16 years of practicing class learning, one way or another, setting goals based on a cycle of work, tests, grades.
So, no surprise that I would change the word to “savvy.” Or other words that reflect a sort of maturity or refining, flexibility, openness, etc. And as often comes up on some of the stem threads, some real world experience.
…the sort of thinking that doesn’t summarily dismiss an art major, thinking (I guess) that it’s about crayons and clay.
ohmomof2
plug it into a bell curve based on majors and get back to me. outliers do not make for proof of the contrary. some people drop out of high school and become millionaires or billionaires! do you recommend that course of action?
@zobroward, one problem with your line of reasoning is the idea that higher incomes are what everyone’s after. Given that the connection between income and happiness isn’t linear (study after study finds that happiness increases with income until you get to a particular—and surprisingly low, to me—income level, after which there is no further connection), what do you feel the purpose of college is? If it’s to allow a graduate to acquire as much capital as possible, then sure, your standard of measurement works. If it’s happiness and personal fulfillment, then it breaks down—and if it’s the betterment of society, I’d argue that income levels are a completely nonsensical measure.
I know couples where one parent goes to an office and the other stays home. Sometimes it is the father that does office work, sometimes it’s the mother.
In both types of cases, about 50% of those parents earn less than $25000 per year. Being able to divide the work that way is a perquisite of one parent being able to financially support 3-5 people.
I rate the story at two “meh” out of five.
Edit:spelled “work” as “wok”
Perhaps you should have clarified in your original post “you can not take basket weaving majors that are easy and have no value and expect to graduate and do anything more than work at a coffee shop. it is just reality.” that you really meant reality was your opinion and that there are exceptions to the rule.
if there is, in fact, such a rule. I haven’t seen any evidence that there is.
A massive number of people graduate with arts degrees and earn great incomes. You dispute this?
I am lucky. My employer is one of the "criticized on CC " companies which does the following:
1- We pick our source schools very carefully (some might say we are prestige %^&;s)
2- We pre-screen our new grad candidates even before an interview (yes, we ask for SAT scores and GPA and we have a couple of diagnostic tests to test critical thinking and writing and mathematical skills)
3-We do research ahead of time so that we know that a philosophy major at Princeton has taken a more rigorous curriculum than a business major at fill-in-the-blanks average school.
I’ve gotten a lot of flack on CC (there are people here who believe that because they were never asked their SAT scores when interviewing out of college, that their kids will never be asked- maybe true depending on the industry, but also maybe not.) but this is reality at a very large global corporation- and at every other global corporation I’ve worked for, and for my colleagues at other big companies.
Why is this relevant? because this means we don’t really care all that much about college major for non-technical roles. Yes- if you want to develop aircraft components at Boeing you need to be a mechanical engineer or an aerospace engineer. But if you want to work in market research at a big pharma company or do investor relations at a consumer products company or work in municipal bond origination at a big bank, you need to have good skills- reading, writing, 'rithmetic, people skills. But companies which are screening out low GPA’s and “can’t write a topic sentence” kids can afford to look beyond the college major.
how many of us here are working in the field we majored in? Very few I would guess. I majored in Classics; my boss majored in Renaissance Studies.
Sociology/women’s studies double major here, been working in a tech industry for the past 15 years that literally didn’t exist when I was in college. And has nothing to do with sociology or women’s studies but which did require that I be able to use logic, think critically and learn on my feet.
But art majors tend to have a high Gini coefficient, as compared to engineers.
That’s rather different than saying the reality is that they’re all destined to make pumpkin spice macchiatos all their lives, no?
Similar story, OHMom. Soc/Anthro, a bit of work in the field, then tech, which I loved and where there was high value placed on the skills in logic, critical thinking and the ability to learn fast…and more.
We shouldn’t always be comparing to engineers. It generally takes a particular mindset to succeed in engineering, itself. And then (as we’ve said so many times on CC) a whole lot of folks to work alongside them, form their vision and make it successful.
I confess that I did not read the article; is it possible that some of the lower average incomes measured well after graduation could be accounted for by parents dropping out of the workforce temporarily to raise children? This seems like it might be more of an option at the upper income family levels, but the stay-at-home parent’s income could drop to little or nothing, making his/her school look less impressive by this measurement.
Are these companies based in Asia? Seems like they share the characteristic of considering the applicant’s high school level of achievement (admission to a prestigious university, SAT scores) to be the primary screening criteria. If these types of hiring criteria become more common in the US (similar to the case in Asia where one’s university prestige is highly important), perhaps the “tiger parents” may be saying “I told you so” (although they need to realize that, in the US, top-end test scores and grades are necessary but not sufficient, so their kids need to compete at the state or national level in some impressive EC as well).
Most posters here probably do not want that to happen, but one should realize that if more employers follow that trend, it may end up creating that incentive.
What about a comparison between, for example, a philosophy major from Princeton and a philosophy major from some not-so-prestigious school like Rutgers, Pittsburgh, Arizona, Ohio State, etc.? (i.e. same major, and avoiding the whole issue about the mediocrity of non-elite business major programs)
This is a fantastic example given that Rutgers philosophy department is ranked ahead of the Princeton philosophy department. :))
Actually, in the latest Philosophical Gourmet ranking, Princeton and Rutgers are tied for #2 behind #1 NYU. Michigan is #4, Yale #5, and Harvard and Pitt tied for #6. Arizona is all the way down at #13, tied with MIT and UNC Chapel Hill, but ahead of, e.g. Cornell, Brown, Chicago, and Duke. Ohio State is a bit further down at #28, but ahead of schools like Northwestern, Penn, Georgetown, and Johns Hopkins.
These are all fine philosophy departments, mind you. It would take someone with a fair degree of experience and sophistication in the field to make meaningful judgments about which undergraduate programs are “better” or “more rigorous,” and even then if you put 10 experts in a room you’re likely to get at least 13 or 14 different and incompatible answers. What the experts would probably agree on, however, is that the strengths of the programs don’t correlate particularly well with the usual stereotypical perceived prestige pecking order of the overall universities. Quality has many homes, and they are not always in the expected places. I certainly wouldn’t trust the HR department of some big corporation to be able to sort all that out.
@Blossom I am fascinated by your post and that college grads are asked their SAT scores when interviewing for a job. I didn’t know that companies cared about that. Interesting that that score could follow one around post college graduation.
And what happens if an applicant, with 4-6+ years of further education, thinks it’s baloney to provide a high school SAT and ignores that line?