These are not “my methods”. I work for a global corporation and don’t get to determine recruiting methodology all by myself just because I was a classics major.
Keyword selection/rejection is a funny animal. It is far more common in technical roles (if you want Java or XML, you are screening out anyone who doesn’t list it) than for non-technical roles. I am not aware of any company algorithm which systematically screens out liberal arts majors for roles where a specific set of content skills (like programming in XML) are not required.
My D is an Intensive Literature major. Intensive means that she has to be fluent in at least two other languages so that she can read literature in its original form. As a junior she is now fluent in German and Korean (having started both languages in college) and is already being recruited by businesses who need Americans who are multi lingual. While she will probably end up in law school, I will say that I allowed her to major in whatever she wanted without a particular job in mind. As I talk to students now as a college admissions counselor, I tell them that the job they will have 20 years from now probably does not even exist now. Just think, when I was in school 35 years ago, no one aspired to work for Google or Apple or work in a forensics lab. In today’s changing world, pigeon holding students as 17 year olds into a specific box does them a great disservice.
And still you persist. You don’t think. What is valid beyond a sliver? The fact that the education has inherent value or that you can have a good career without studying accounting, pharmacy or engineering?
I don’t pretend to have the precise number down myself, but is it your impression that the vast majority of employed college educated adults are so employed because they have specialized educations?
Explain to me how the masses of Econ Poli Sci History and English majors are paying their bills. They didn’t all go to Middlebury, so you’ll have to come up with another theory.
Front my point of view as a principal in a private equity firm with investments in life science portfolios, there just are not a legion of undergraduate educated people making a living “doing science” - they’re all PhDs. Rank in file engineers and accountants are a dime a dozen and are not going to significantly out earn the HR and Admin people someone was scoffing at in this thread.
And, finally, your odds of coding at Google are probably higher if you were CS at an elite school rather than at our Eastern Illinois example. So your point about the sliver of students is more or less about how the world works across the board.
I’ve acknowledged several times now that the economics of college puts pressure on many people to place too much importance on that first job. That’s a failing of our system. And for those people, I guess they’re just not as fortunate as those who have a little more time than their18-year old counterparts to figure out what the ultimate career is going to be.
Most students aren’t in the position to choose whatever major they want. They commute to their local cc and/or 4-year college and don’t necessarily have the money to cover extra semesters. And they don’t have the type of safety net that allows them to hold out for a position that will enhance their career once they graduate. They have 6 months to get a job before their loans come due.
It’s not that the families don’t appreciate the humanities. Plenty of low income kids love the arts, but they can’t afford to pursue them as a career. Their majors tend to be more practical and directly related to a specific career. Fortunately, the required gen eds allow them to explore a broader range of subjects. It’s a luxury to not view college as career training, and it’s one most families can’t afford.
If I may, I think the point made by @MiddleburyDad2 and others is that ALL colleges majors are professional training, and ones that teach strong writing, communication and critical thinking skills can be equally as valuable professionally.
An analogy might be cardio and weight training for sports. It will make you better at most of them even though it is not in the discipline itself.
ANECDOTAL DATA WARNING: In my field (software/tech) the technology changes so rapidly that what you learn in college is often not very practical, and less so as time goes on. (I haven’t used that FORTRAN class in, well, ever). Yes a CS degree from MIT or CMU is very impressive and we will probably hire you because you have demonstrated excellence, but someone with a degree in liberal arts who has learned to code auto-didactically can be just as valuable (sometimes more so, particularly when dealing with clients). There is an art to software that, in my experience, gives some benefits to folks with that aptitude.
I will always prefer that candidate with a real love for it over someone who got a CS degree to have a clock to punch.
Also, I think it is always best to study something you love and will excel at, rather than go through the motions to have a job. If that subject is undergraduate accounting, great!
I was that poor working class student that went to a college way over my head and buckled down, did well and graduated. I was a psychology major. Loved criminal justice and went to grad school and got a Masters in it at SUNY Albany. Worked in corrections, criminal justice my whole life except for a couple of stints working for a politician. Never took a poli sci class but he appreciated the fact that I could write just about anything on any topic, a plus for a politician that has to react to a wide variety of issues. I know the world needs doctors, engineers, etc. But I also see so many kids being pushed by their parents into engineering, CS, pre-med and other pre-professional majors so that they can be marketable. I hate to say that in today’s job market, a BA does not get you too far. But most larger companies, and even the government (where I worked for 30+ years and just retired) look for workers who are versatile. They don’t want to hire and train a one trick pony. The process is just too costly and cumbersome. Also, please look up the work practices of millennials. Unlike us, their goal in life is not to get a job right out of college, stay in it for 30 years and retire. Since most companies don’t have defined retirement benefit packages anymore, that is to no one’s advantage anymore. Most will change jobs 5-6 times. They get a job, work 2-3 years, get experience, then move on. As I do college counseling, I have more problems with parents who want to rely on their own outdated experiences than listen to how things are really working now.
@blossom Can you explain “why China’s emerging middle class is behaving differently in some substantial ways from India’s emerging middle class”? How is China’s middle class behaving differently than India’s and what are the reasons behind the difference? I’m genuinely interested, and Googling didn’t lead me to an answer!
Hint- if a kid has never heard of Mao and doesn’t know what Communism is, or what the one-child policy was, he or she is going to have difficulty even approaching the question, let alone answering it. If that same kid doesn’t understand British Colonial History and the impact on India (the school system, government, even the English language fluency among the elites), then even more so. I’d give extra points for a kid who had a vague understanding of Pakistan/India and partition… but the core issues around the emergence of modern day China vs. modern day India are good enough to get a kid through round 1.
Again- this is an “international business” major from a well regarded university’s undergrad business program. Just one datapoint- but this happens frequently. Kid interested in “global” but never ever read an actual book written by an author with a foreign perspective. Kid interested in “international finance” who doesn’t understand why currencies fluctuate and why the Euro was created. Kid interested in organizational behavior but cannot read and understand a simple summary of a control vs. test group.
i am a big believer in a liberal arts education and that specialization is what graduate school is for. I don’t expect anyone to believe as I do and that’s fine.
My S was a Politics major and History minor who was accepted into a Fortune 200 company’s corporate training program (only 15 out of 3000 applicants were chosen.) He didn’t take one business course in undergrad as his college doesn’t even offer any.
His company puts a lot of effort and expense into training their employees in the methods and practices they employ - not what someone might have learned in an undergrad business program.
Since his first week on the job he has been contacted by other companies looking to hire him away. Apparently other companies who don’t have such great training programs love to hire away his companies employees.
He’ll likely go back at some point for an MBA - which company will pay for as one of the benefits is tuition reimbursement.
There’s definitely some truth to what you’re saying, but you have to remember the frame of reference of the average middle-class American. Only about 35% of young people will eventually get a bachelor’s degree. Not even 8% of people eventually get a postgraduate degree of any sort. The 8% who do are usually more talented than the average college graduate, so from an employability perspective a lot of this is gilding the lily so to speak.
For 92% of people, their high school or undergraduate degree is their last chance at formal schooling. Many college kids don’t have the personal or social capital to fly by the seat of their pants - they need to pick up some practical background while getting their bachelor’s degree. And 65% of people don’t even get that.
In some fields, such as engineering and accounting, it is expected that professional training will take place at the undergraduate level. It’s probably not impossible to start studying these subjects at the graduate level, but it would certainly be awkward.
’ How is China’s middle class behaving differently than India’s and what are the reasons behind the difference? I’m genuinely interested, and Googling didn’t lead me to an answer!’
Well, if you could google every question you have and come up with a quick answer, why even go to college? I’d say this response boosts blossom’s position for students actually learning about the world, maybe by majoring in history or Asian Studies, rather than international business.
I am encouraged by all the posters with backgrounds/jobs in business and tech who prefer liberal arts majors. D17 is headed for a LAC next Fall and has a love of learning and passion for the environment and doesn’t want to choose an exact profession right now.
In terms of parents pushing their kids into things like engineering and CS-it would be very difficult for a kid to get through those majors if it was only about what the parents wanted.
I didn’t get the impression from the article that parents don’t value a liberal arts education. The impression I got is that college is very expensive and that these parents understand that their middle-class paychecks mean their children will be saddled with loans after college. And these kids must eat, they must pay their utilities, they will most likely need a car (unless they live in NYC or such), they must pay rent, etc. and a degree in comparative literature just isn’t going to lead to a job that will allow someone to exist. Also, our kids won’t be able to count on Social Security and Medicare in their retirement, so they will need to save more than we ever did. If you are in that top 20% income bracket and can afford to send your kids to a top college so they are debt-free upon graduation, then let them major in whatever they want. But you really are doing a disservice to encourage a student to take out a six-figure loan to major in something that won’t even pay a living wage.
But I agree with @al2simon about middle-class (and lower-class) students who may not have ‘the personal or social capital’ to get by. They will also not have parents’ wealth as a safety net. If you major in nursing or education, you will likely know what your first job will be, you may be bound by your major, but you will have a job (and may have a lot of loans to pay off to boot).
I was a poor student- full Pell, food stamps, the works.
I majored in a degree called Arts & Humanities with another degree in anthropology. I’m now 25, own my own house, and am doing just fine. (I am getting a PhD because I hope to one day teach humanities at a college level.)
I’m glad no one ever told me that I couldn’t afford/wasn’t supposed to be a humanities major.
In CS, it is the foundational principles that matter through one’s career (if one chooses a CS-related career) in that they are the basis for continued self-education through one’s career. The foundational principles that you may have been taught decades ago in CS courses in college will be relevant long after the last time you see code written in FORTRAN or Pascal.
The same applies to any other college major and career – the foundational principles that form the basis for future education and self-education are the important things to get out of education. Note that, for all college majors and careers, foundational principles include thinking skills like high level reading, writing, math, and research skills, although some combinations of college majors and careers have additional things that fall under the foundational principles category.
Yes, self-education in CS, although significantly less common than going into CS-related careers after studying for a bachelor’s degree in CS, is common enough that no one should be surprised that someone with an unrelated college major, or who did not complete a college degree at all, is able to self-educate his/her way into the field.
The trend to raising needed educational credentials for entrance to or licensing for some professions indicates that some agree with you, although the motivation may be partially helped by the fact that adding additional barriers to entry protects the economic position of current practitioners, since some potential competitors are screened out simply because they cannot afford the extra years of formal education.
Due to recent changes, CPA licensing for accounting now requires 150 hours (five academic years) worth of college credit, an example of increasing educational credentials for professional licensing.
One point you are missing is the fact the amount of credits one earns in a bachelor’s degree…INCLUDING ACCOUNTING are no longer enough to fulfill the minimum prereqs to be eligible to sit for the CPA exam in most jurisdictions here in the US.
Since 1998, one is required to accumulate 150 credit hours…so even accounting majors with a Bachelor’s degree need to take additional credits to accumulate a minimum total of 150 credit hours in order to be allowed to take the CPA exam to be an accountant.
I should also add that in many fields…including pre-professional ones like engineering/tech…taking classes while working is sometimes expected if one desires to advance or not be part of the bottom 10% who are cut in some firms each year*.
Plenty of engineers I knew took a Masters in engineering/MBA in the evenings while balancing a full-time job in order to be eligible for advancement or at least…not be left behind by the peers who were hired along with them.
One younger CS major friend found himself one of the few in his hired cohort who wasn't promoted after 2+ years because he was one of only a handful of employees at a household tech firm who didn't complete a CS/engineering masters 3+years after he was hired or had one in hand. He partially left the company because if he didn't, there was a high probability he'd be cut along with others who were part of the bottom 10% for that very reason in the next performance review.