Worst Paying College Degrees

BusinessGuy
Tue, 11 May 2010 02:54:56 +0000

How is a music major any less ‘trade-schoolish’ than an engineering major?



“Corporations and employers have frequently and publicly complained about the lack of
professional awareness and low levels of communication and teamwork skills in engineering
graduates…” (The future of engineering education. I. A vision for a new century, accessible at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.34.9908&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

I’ve seen this sentiment expressed in a number of places, and I also remember a study that showed in contrast to other majors, the writing skills of engineering students actually deteriorate from their pre-college level.

I think the real problem is the rigidity of engineering programs: they require far more credits than others, and as a result, the ability to have a “liberal” education is more limited. I would also wonder whether engineering classes place much of a focus on the quality of writing (spelling, grammar, etc.). My own experience with quantitative courses suggests that professors are far less likely to assign point values to such things (unless it’s unreadable) than to judge only the ideas. In contrast, my humanities professors care quite a bit about writing quality. If one combines this with the decreased ability of an engineering student to take many humanities classes compared to other quantitative majors with less stringent requirements (e.g., biology, mathematics, chemistry), then a lack of training in communication and writing skills would not surprise me.

Following this reasoning, engineering is more “trade-schoolish” than most other majors due to the focused and rigid nature of the coursework. Business, another vocational major, generally requires coursework in “communication” classes to solve some of the problem, but the lack of upper-division humanities requirements might contribute to the overall lack of writing ability among business majors.

To be clear, I think taking upper division humanities courses contributes to one’s writing ability partly because such courses require significant amounts of formal writing, but more importantly, because the professors pay attention to the writing itself apart from the content.