Exactly, but that doesn’t stop a very vocal section of the Canadian population championing STEM degrees, any STEM degree, over the humanities and social sciences anyway, despite the fact that new graduates even in the traditionally more lucrative employment sectors of Engineering and CS have been having a hard time landing employment too. As a result a significant proportion of top grads in those fields head to the US for work. It’s also much more exciting to ply your skills working on new and innovative products at Apple, Tesla, or Space X, than working for an insurance company or bank which is where they’d be likely to end up working in Canada. The only employment sectors where new grads are really in high demand and where they’re almost guaranteed to find employment at the moment is in health care and in the skilled trades. As a result a certain percentage of the population here think that those are the only fields worth pursuing. To them economics trumps all and nothing else matters.
Given the less than robust employment landscape here in Canada at the moment, this is what we have been saying to S21 who is in his final year of his Electrical Engineering degree. He was unfortunately not able to secure an internship but we wanted to give him the option of a year of exploration where he could try and develop his own projects and perhaps try his hand at establishing his own business venture. We told him that if he wanted to pursue that we would support him 100%. He declined the offer of taking the year off of school but is working at developing projects on the side that will hopefully improve his employment marketability. We fully expect that it’s going to take a fair bit of time for him to be able to land his first job, and we’re fine with continuing to support him.
To be honest I couldn’t ever imagine telling one of our kids that they could no longer count on us for support, whether that be emotional or financial. You never know what twists and turns you will face in life. You should at least be able to count on family.
Not sure if the “good old days” where “college was for education not job training” was completely true across all colleges. For example, the state universities have long had a greater emphasis on such fields like engineering and agriculture that high end private universities had less emphasis on.
I don’t know about in the US, but here in Canada, becoming a licensed skilled tradesperson still requires schooling. Not a university degree, but to get a skilled trade “ticket” or a “red seal” qualification requires attending an accredited (community) college program. Most apprenticeship programs alternate between in class components and work placements. You can’t become a plumber, electrician, or millwright etc. with just a high school education. There are very few lucrative “learn on the job” type careers.
And this in fact can be one of the more subtle, but still potentially very important, ways of passing along generational wealth.
Also a good pitch for–why not both?
There are inherently interdisciplinary majors, you can do a minor, you can (if it fits in your curriculum plan) do multiple majors, or you can just be very intentional with your electives. Point being you can often go beyond whatever “core” or “distribution” requirements your college might have and intentionally continue developing a wide variety of knowledge and skills through courses in both STEM and HASS.
But one important wrinkle in this is that some of the more “pre-professional” programs actually do take up so many credits there is not that much room left for other stuff. Which is fine if you really know that is what you want to do from the jump, but in other cases may really be limiting what you could otherwise be getting out of your college education.
That’s a really good question, and I don’t know the answer, and that is one of the reasons I have encouraged my S24 to keep thinking in terms of fundamental knowledge and skill development. I really don’t know what technical knowledge will still be useful in 10 years, or 30, or so on. But I am willing to bet that unless and until we are all just enslaved in The Matrix, it will be the people with good fundamentals and a flexible mindset who will stay working the longest.
Hooray for the lit majors who know what a Faustian bargain is! And hooray for core curricula that require STEM majors to learn that, too
Which reminds me of the time that I was teaching freshman reading and comp at Cal to a class full of Engineering and CS majors. I had assigned Master and Margarita and within the first few chapters everyone was completely lost about what was going on because they had never heard of Pontius Pilate. Obviously, you wouldn’t need to be a humanities major to know that, but I was really surprised by their lack of reference. I am quite sure “Faustian bargain” would have similarly befuddled them. (And of course the relationship between Faust and Master and Margarita completely escaped them.)
Shows you how out of touch with pop culture I am - I have never even heard of that movie. I just Googled and it says it’s from 1993, so I would bet many GenZ college students aren’t familiar, either. Or maybe it’s become a cult classic for them?
So have I, but sales people mislead their prospects in almost all fields from selling cars, to houses, to payroll services, etc., etc. Maybe it is just that the typical car salesman is not as polished or subtle as the rep from Boeing selling airplanes.
Horses for courses. I don’t think you could argue that STEM majors in the U.K. are egregiously uneducated because they don’t have these courses in college.
But as far as job readiness goes, I’ve interviewed new graduates for jobs on both sides of the Atlantic and in the US I found that the candidates are generally more plausible and know how to sell themselves in an interview but often lack depth (they’ve never encountered difficult non-standard problems). Whereas in the U.K., far fewer interview well, but those who do are much more likely to do ok on those hard questions.
Example interview question: how long would it take to evacuate San Francisco (make estimates and talk through the math to come up with an answer, you don’t get a calculator or pen and paper)?
I am curious about this. What makes you say this? Looking at my daughter (sample size of 1), I would say she’s far more savvy than I was at her age. I probably had a greater depth of knowledge in humanities-related subjects (specifically literature and history - she definitely has some large gaps in knowledge in these subjects, imo), but her overall engagement with knowledge, ability to find and vet information, and understand “how the world works” are better than mine were at her age. She has held internships and performed job duties that would have been far more challenging for me at her age than they have been for her.
Back when I was in high school, there was a cohort of students who were satisfied getting D grades that were needed to get credit to graduate. So the existence of high school graduates with barely more academic ability than middle school graduates is not a new thing.
Regarding college graduates, many have no more academic ability than high school graduates in areas outside their major and any required general education, for obvious reasons.
Or they are using a bachelor’s degree for something other than an indication of greater general or major-specific academic ability than a high school graduate.
However, it is worth noting that many jobs have become more complex over the past decades, so that higher degrees became required due to the increased learning required (some health care jobs like OT and PT are examples). Even the skilled trades have to know thicker code books than they used decades ago, so the actual ability to learn and remember threshold to do those jobs well has increased.
Both of my Gen Z sons have watched the movie, but I made sure they watched several movies from the past.
Doc Holliday was an educated man, I believe he was a dentist by trade. That seems like a useful major, but he pivoted to professional gambler. There were several scenes in the movie that highlighted his classical education.
In the US, people in the construction trades typically go through an apprenticeship program through their union or employer that includes several years of classroom and field work. This path differs from college in a couple important ways: 1. they are paid during their apprenticeship and a job is virtually guaranteed upon completion, and 2. they do not pay $100-$300k for their “education”. Community colleges in the US offer certification programs in fields ranging from CAD and Software engineering to auto repair and culinary arts.
My home county in Michigan runs a vocational school with it’s own campus that serves several school districts. Instead of construction trades, the program trains students to be mechtronics techs, programers, CNC operators, and machinists. Students split their time between their regular high school and the vocational campus, and graduate in five years with a high school degree and a certification in their field. Machinists from this program make $100k/yr within a year of graduation with no debt since the program is funded like public schools.
They do…many of them. And have lawyers and statisticians on speed dial when they are sued for illegal hiring practices. I worked for a company which developed its own screening tests. There was no scale. You either passed or failed. Candidates freaked out when they failed. The reading comprehension and composition portions were normed to “13 years of formal education” i.e. K-12 in the US .
