An interesting article about how college has turned towards pre-professionalism. It’s something that I’ve thought a lot about recently. Personally, I think it’s too bad.
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Pre professional focus is not new in colleges in general, although some colleges that these forums focus on may be seeing more of it than they saw in the past.
Higher cost of college and greater competitiveness in the labor market are likely reasons why there may be an increasing emphasis on pre professional aspects of college among students from backgrounds where that used to be less of a concern.
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Absolutely. Colleges, especially elite colleges, used to be for rich kids who could spend four years contemplating Thoreau and Thomas More and then go home and run Daddy’s business or go on to medical or law school. With such a large diverse group of kids attending school now, it’s no wonder that pre professionalism has moved into elite schools.
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The elite colleges used to train young men for the ministry. Not always rich- but almost always white.
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I went to one of these elite schools in the 80’s (in fact my college friend group had an extensive text exchange about this article), and yes, there were some trust fund babies that I knew, but for the most part my classmates came from middle class to upper middle class backgrounds. We studied Thoreau, Homer, Shakespeare, Kant and Camus and took classes on the history of architecture and music as well as China, Russia and Latin America because knowledge was something worth pursuing in of itself, and employers those days valued people who proved they knew how to think and not because they had a trained skill (other than engineers). So I don’t think it is the makeup of the schools that is driving this, but what a lot of companies now demand in their entry level hires.
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I agree with you on this even if my post may have made it seem otherwise.
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A recent topic of conversation at Yale as to the burgeoning percentage of the class coming in on day 1 with Yale Law on the brain. A tough issue that is difficult to completely unpack. Part of it is also that there is a very large “early mover” advantage to getting good grades early, starting EC’s early, positioning for the “next step” early, and as with everything, all that stuff has gotten more competitive.
For many college students, a shorter (in years), more occupationally driven education - especially one that can be guided by companies and employers who know what skills are most valuable - may be a road to more affordable and more economically efficient education as a whole. Also the topic of a fairly convincing Freakonomics podcast featuring thoughtful people working toward this type of educational strategy. No one channeling Trump U.
At Yale, I could see it getting in the way of the free flow of vodka, rum, Sally’s, Modern and snowball fights / streaking on Old Campus. And that would be a shame.
And yet- every year, kids with degrees in Classics get jobs at ad agencies; kids with degrees in political science get jobs as management consultants; kids with degrees in English get jobs in insurance companies, and I won’t bore you by going through the litany of “unemployable” degrees which turn out to be not so unemployable.
I hear a regular rant from the parents of the kid who went to a “specialized” program in Sports Management who discover that companies hire kids with degrees in Sports Management AND kids who majored in Spanish. And from the parents of the kid who has a degree in News Production who can’t get a foot in the door at CNN while the young woman across the street studied history and had TWO offers- one from CNN and another from one of the big 3 networks. And no, not a nepo baby.
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Yes, this happens – companies will still hire the best available athlete, but the pre-professionalism is real, even at elite institutions, which is a shame.
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I agree it’s real. I just don’t think it’s being driven by “corporate America” which still manages to hire a healthy combination of foreign language, history, regional studies majors, etc. !
For S22 it has been disconcerting to realize how career focused many of his classmates have been in college. Meanwhile he is still trying to figure it all out and dreaming big dreams (I can’t comment on how realistic they are) but feels like he is an outlier.
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I thought I was the only one in college who had no idea/plan/path until I took my first Classics class.
Compared to many of my classmates, I was the pre-professional one for even THINKING about life after college!
He will find his peeps.
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My understanding is that it’s not the degree, but the culture of striving for a job. To get that management consulting job meant getting into the management consulting club (competitive) and getting that management consulting internship. It means that you are probably thinking about how to get that high paid job much earlier in college. Whether you do it with a degree in classics seems less relevant.
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I definitely think there’s an element of putting together a coherent resume starting early on in college, rather than just doing summer jobs at sleepaway camps or in fast food as was typical when I was growing up. I was incredibly fortunate to have an engineering internship at a local company that looked far better on my resume than most other people I knew.
However, that can still involve a huge element of randomness, for example there’s no way my S18 could have predicted his post-college job in consulting. But the various things he did during (and even before) college could be packaged coherently to make him ideally suited for his current role (which he loves). And it turned out a random internship (with our county government) during high school was what put him on this path and led to subsequent opportunities that were all interconnected (so his internship in a think tank had connections to his current employer, etc.). But he didn’t need to be in the management consulting club to end up in consulting, in fact running for (and winning) elected office has proved to be far more useful (since much of his work depends on the decisions made by politicians). There are lots of potential opportunities that can contribute to a career if they are packaged correctly.
You just need to be thoughtful and pick up things as they arise. And then think about what fits together and what the next step is. My S23 worked as (essentially) a part-time parking attendant this summer. But he’s doing astrophysics and it was a job at the observatory working for professional astronomers in their public events program…so its a step forward that working in fast food wouldn’t have been.
And I wouldn’t describe a kid aspiring to do research in astronomy as “pre-professional” in the way that the original article describes (“a prevailing culture that convinces many of us that only careers in fields such as computer programming, finance and consulting, preferably at blue-chip firms like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey or big tech companies, can secure us worthwhile futures”). This is just being thoughtful and deliberate in career planning, which far too many people don’t do.
I mean, my D18 is a ballet dancer and everything she did in college was “pre-professional” in the sense of preparing to be a professional ballerina, but nothing whatsoever to do with “careers in fields such as computer programming, finance and consulting, preferably at blue-chip firms”.
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Unfortunately, one also sees Classics programs being downsized, merged into “World Languages” departments, or axed altogether. UNC Asheville has four humanities programs on the chopping block, for example, despite touting itself as a liberal arts college (ancient Mediterranean studies, drama, philosophy, and religion).
There is of course no reason a student with a Classics degree can’t find a decent job; the problem is that Classics departments have done a poor job of marketing themselves and demonstrating this. (How many keep track of student placement and make that information publicly available?)
Classics will survive at Harvard, Berkeley, Penn, etc., but I fear for many of the smaller and less well-funded programs.
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Most colleges do not show post graduation survey results by major on their public web sites. For those colleges that do not, College Scorecard is often the best available information on this topic, but it is limited to pay levels of graduates (as opposed to what graduates are doing), and does not show data when the number of graduates in the major is small.
I think students are best served if they have a flexible mindset - regardless of what their major is. There is no way to know what jobs are going to be out there in 10 or 20 years (especially with the impact of AI and other technologies) so, in my view, it is important to gain as many different kinds of skills as you can so you can pivot when necessary. As a former humanities major myself, I was able to parlay that into a successful corporate career before deciding to start my own business 10 years ago.
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Many, many students get jobs in management consulting without going NEAR a management consulting club. And many, many students get jobs in portfolio management without being in the finance club. These activities proliferate like mushrooms.
When a consulting firm says they are looking for evidence of leadership, that does NOT mean getting yourself elected to the “executive board” of the management consulting club. Running a region-wide voter registration drive; creating the first-ever comprehensive food insecurity plan to plug the holes in your college’s town between the food-pantries, homeless shelters, restaurant donation sites; getting local law enforcement to add a social worker to every shift to help cops deal with the mental health crises which results in a 911 call; these are not “pre-professional” but are the kinds of things that get a resume plucked out of the pile of thousands. And are evidence of being a successful change agent, which is the gold standard of personal qualities for consulting.
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Yes, and I believe it was still possible (to use the current example) to be a Classics major and pre-med at the same time. Or, take your shot at a T10 law school. Middle-class kids can still do those things, but not without a lot of financial aid on the front-end.
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I don’t think a lot of students stop and think about this. Instead they focus on what they perceive as the tried and true path to getting a consulting gig when, in reality, following the tried and true path may actually cause you NOT to stand out in any way.
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