Meet the Parents Who Won't Let Their Children Study Literature

Parents Forum
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This is the number-one best article I have ever read on this topic. It will take you about 7 minutes to read, and worth every minute.

Meet the Parents Who Won’t Let Their Children Study Literature
by Steven Pearlstein [Steven Pearlstein is a Post business and economics writer. He is also Robinson Professor of Public Affairs at George Mason University.]
Washington Post, September 2
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/09/02/meet-the-parents-who-wont-let-their-children-study-literature/?utm_term=.2e1e70403a9c

This is the key paragraph in the article:

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Have no choice but to call BS on this last sentence. It may only be true for graduates without verifiable quantitative/technical skills.

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I have to call BS on your call of BS. :wink:

Ever heard of graduates working as ski bums in Vail or Park City for a year or two?

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No, never heard of that. In my immigrant community this is not typical.

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I am one of those parents but it was not a hard sell to my kids. My oldest should have been an English major and her decision path went from librarian to information systems to computer science to computer engineering. Her thought process was go for the hardest because she could do many things with a CE degree but very few English majors can do the technical work. She is graduating this year and already has accepted a great offer. She has almost as many English credits as she has technical credits. In only one interview, did the interviewer appreciate the fact she had such a good background in English. All others thought it was an oddity, there was no appreciation for it even in the language based technical areas ie. Watson. I do believe in the long run it will be very helpful for her career.

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Professional degrees --engineering, pharmacy, medicine, nursing etc lead to jobs in a specific field that require extra schooling. Those types of degrees are job training. You not only have technical skills you have a degree and a license that is required to even work in the field. There is no real “other” path to the career. It won’t matter how much you learn on your own.

Or there may be training that so greatly enhances your marketability that it’s worth paying for.

A non-specific field like “biology, physics, chemistry” often lead no where unless followed into a medical/research field. Where you get jobs.
. Those political science, history, philosophy majors often continue their studies into law school which also requires exams to practice. Where you hopefully find a job. Or maybe you teach which also requires the schooling.

No, not many psychology majors become psychologists because it requires a lot more schooling beyond an initial degree. Same with many undergrad degrees.

To go to school at today’s prices with no real goal in mind is nuts.
No. I wouldn’t want my kids studying English lit as a major without a specific goal in mind.
“I like to read books” won’t cut it.
An elective? Go for it.

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“In only one interview, did the interviewer appreciate the fact she had such a good background in English.”

Then they were pretty short sighted.

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Not many psychology majors become psychologists, but many of them go into advertising, marketing, human resources, sales, etc.

What “real goal” do you want for your kids- have them become a third rate accountant because mom and dad insisted on a vocational degree, vs. a top flight media executive which actually takes advantage of their natural abilities and education???

What you call “non specific jobs” is what most of corporate America considers an education. I’ve hired thousands of new grads over the years for a wide range of corporate roles- the goal posts have moved since we all graduated from college. New grads need to demonstrate the ability to learn. None of them can possibly show up with what they need to know to perform because the work world has changed so dramatically.

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Interesting. We did the opposite. For my son, who is now a freshman, my wife and I strongly encouraged (basically forbade) him NOT to major in business in college although his school has a very good business school. He is currently undecided and will probably do either a double major in economics and history (or politics) or major in international relations. Since my wife and I are both in finance, he will likely end up either in banking, investment mgt or a corporate training program, although it is of course his decision. In our collective view, we all felt that one reason we are paying the extra money to have him go to the USA was to benefit from a liberal arts education. Furthermore, our son has been known to not do well in classes/teachers he finds boring. We figured that he might find the basic management classes in the business school less interesting than a literature, history, astronomy, etc class he can pick out himself for an elective. Funnily enough, he mentioned that he does not know any other boys who are in the College of Arts and Sciences, all the other boys are either in the business school or in engineering. Even the pre-med kids are majoring in biomedical engineering.

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Unless the goal is to become educated, erudite, skilled and capable at any number of jobs.

To some, what’s nuts is insisting an 18 year old decide absolutely what he wants to do for the rest of his life.

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“Unless the goal is to become educated, erudite, skilled and capable at any number of jobs.”

I maintain that you can do all those things and have a career goal in mind at the same time.

I also maintain that many majors leave you none of those things.

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You can do this while still pursuing a major that will help you get the first few jobs in your career. Your major isn’t your entire college experience.

My father-in-law majored in accounting in college, and his first few jobs were in accounting. Then he took his career and his life in an entirely different direction. His decision to major in accounting didn’t determine the rest of his life; it simply made him employable as soon as he graduated. If he had majored in English or philosophy, that also wouldn’t have determined the rest of his life, but he would have been a lot less employable right after graduation.

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To your first point, @gouf78 , no one is implying that career goals are bad.

To your second point: Which majors are you speaking of, specifically?

@Marian ,I respectfully suggest your quote above, especially the part in bold, supports a generalized approach to education as more valuable.

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Interesting. Even the more pre-professional side of my extended family many of whom have done hiring in tech and business corporate industries felt the same way though partially for different reasons.

In their view, an undergrad business major was so narrow that it will fail to fully broaden the intellectual horizons or fully cultivate the intellect of all but the most mediocre/anti-intellectually inclined. In short, they were of the mind the business major was for students who weren’t serious or interested in academic/intellectual matters.

Even for elite undergrad b-schools like Wharton or NYU-Stern, they’d rather a student with the intellectual chops to be admitted major in Arts & Science majors whether it’d be literature, philosophy, mathematics, physics, etc.

Incidentally, a few of those extended family members actually wondered why I DIDN’T major in literature or philosophy as they regarded it as one of the best majors to develop and cultivate one’s intellect alongside math and physics.

As of 1998, one can no longer officially work as an accountant with merely a bachelor’s degree in accounting. One must also take around an additional year worth of graduate accounting classes in order to be eligible to sit for the CPA exam.

On the flipside, one doesn’t necessarily need to have an undergrad major in accounting to enter the accounting profession.

One HS classmate who was majoring in Asian lit at Barnard was recruited right out of the blue in her junior year by one of the Big-4 firms to start work while they paid for her graduate accounting courses/CPA exam. She’s now been an successful accountant for more than a decade and now works for a boutique accounting firm after her big-4 stint.

Another post-college friend became an accountant after majoring in philosophy from a college somewhere in the top 50-100, working as a bookkeeper for a few years, and taking a year of graduate accounting classes and passing his CPA exam.

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Good God it is mystifying to me that there are so many people who still don’t understand this issue.

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If you have never met an SVP for a consumer products company with a degree in Renaissance Studies, it is easy to assume that the only people in the world with jobs are nurses, accountants, speech therapists, elementary school teachers and petroleum engineers.

So it isn’t mystifying to me at all.

The mystery is that young people- who have grown up with Google and other search engines, cannot find the career services page with a detailed recruiting calendar for any college they are interested in attending. If 50 large corporations are sending teams to recruit at universities which don’t even have an undergrad business program- a curious kid might ask, “who exactly is getting these jobs and what does it take to join them”.

The parents I get. The lack of curiosity on the part of the kids- this I don’t get.

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This is from the article just posted in another thread:
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/few-recent-grads-were-actually-forced-to-work-as-baristas-study-finds/114383

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For most, pre-professional considerations cannot be ignored in college, due to the high cost of college and the fact that many would not go to college if it did not upgrade their value in the labor market.

However, this does not necessarily mean that one has to choose a pre-professional major, unless one’s desired career path is one that requires (or almost requires) such (e.g. nursing or many types of engineering, though not most areas of business).

Some career paths are based on specific liberal arts majors (e.g. high school teaching tends to start with a major in the subject to be taught), but others are major-agnostic (but not necessarily skills/knowledge agnostic). Of course, people do change careers.

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“What you call “non specific jobs” is what most of corporate America considers an education. I’ve hired thousands of new grads over the years for a wide range of corporate roles- the goal posts have moved since we all graduated from college. New grads need to demonstrate the ability to learn. None of them can possibly show up with what they need to know to perform because the work world has changed so dramatically.”

This right here is SPOT ON, written by a poster with whom I sometimes strongly disagree on other items of discussion.

When these people realize that the guy/gal four levels up from their technically educated kid, who can’t articulate his/her thoughts and has a narrow understanding of the world in which they are operating, majored in Government, they’ll realize that they don’t have the American dream quite as wired as they once thought.

This country has been freaking out about not having enough engineers for years. And, yet, here we are.

Don’t get me wrong. Engineering is a great major, because like so many other areas, it’s hard and it teaches you to learn how to think, and think critically, and also how to handle rigor. All good stuff.

The issue with which so many are struggling is that it’s not the only way.

Note, each of my three kids have a math bent, so this is not bias talking.

And for my $$, if you want to be in business (which is a somewhat amorphous goal), then major in econ, not business. You’ll be glad.

As someone else said, if you want to be an accountant, you can always go back to school and take accounting classes. No real need to major in it. Go to school and learn many things. Learn to read well. Learn to write well. Learn to assimilate new and often foreign and sometimes offensive ideas and points of view. Learn to be a learner.

Let me give you a good example: I was GC at a company that is a REIT and has a current mkt. cap of over $23 B. Very complex tax and accounting issues presented there with nuclear level compliance responsibilities for the person running tax.

The VP of tax, then and now, is a good friend of mine. We went to law school together.

Undergrad: International Relations/Chinese from the University of Puget Sound.
On his own: Accounting classes at Portland State; sat for and passed CPA exam.
Law School: Penn (w/ me).
LLM in Taxation: Georgetown

Career: KPMG; Perkins Coie (Seattle Law Firm); AT&T Wireless (Director of Tax); Current Gig: VP of Tax at a $23 billion Real Estate Investment Trust. A technical guy with a broad liberal arts undergraduate education.

All of that started with an Int’l Relations degree from Puget Sound.

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" To some, what’s nuts is insisting an 18 year old decide absolutely what he wants to do for the rest of his life. "

Well put @Postmodern