Why does UChicago lack Advanced Undergraduate degree programs?

unalove
Wed, 21 Aug 2013 00:32:52 +0000

Let me start just by identifying a few assumptions in your first post:


Engineers, business professionals, and nurses make a lot of money. (Let me include research scientists in this bunch, too.)


-- It really depends who, what, when, and where.

There are people who study biology and chemistry in undergrad, go on for a PhD, and then go for a postdoctorate position at a very well-respected institution, and this person may be making less money than a first-year schoolteacher in New York City, in other words, somebody who might not be in the sciences OR have a PhD. There are engineers who make a lot of money and those who make a solidly middle-class living. There are nurses who make a lot of money and those who don’t make “a lot of money” (or, a lot more money than somebody who isn’t a nurse.) Etc. etc. etc.


One needs to have a major with a career title in it to go into that field.


Probably the best way to refute this one is through some linkedin searches. My network is probably more robust than yours… but I can search for “business analysts” or other business-y sounding titles at businesses, and for those who list their undergraduate majors, you’ll see a whole bunch of things… music, Slavic Studies, political science, sociology, the list goes on and on. Students can apply to engineering graduate programs without an engineering undergraduate major.


UChicago probably lacks these programs because most highly selectives don’t have them, either.


You can call it historical snobbery if you want, but unless Stanford, Harvard, and Yale, Columbia, and Brown develop business and nursing undergrad majors, I wouldn’t expect to see it at Chicago.

Penn and Cornell strike me as highly selectives with some of these kinds of majors… for Penn, business and nursing, and for Cornell, accounting, textiles, and on and on. Cornell’s an interesting historical case, and I don’t think Chicago aims to replicate Cornell in the ways that Cornell’s unusual, just the way I don’t think Cornell is interesting in a Chicago esque common core program.

If you are looking for good schools with a variety of professional undergraduate programs, colleges like New York U, Boston U, George Washington U, and University of Southern California strike me as a little more full-service.