Whee! It’s Education Life time. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. Highlight #1:
People want to major in “useful” subjects, defined narrowly. Some employers may see it differently:
“There’s evidence…that employers also don’t want students specializing too soon. The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently asked employers who hire at least 25 percent of their workforce from two- or four-year colleges what they want institutions to teach. The answers did not suggest a narrow focus. Instead, 89 percent said they wanted more emphasis on “the ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing,” 81 percent asked for better “critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills” and 70 percent were looking for “the ability to innovate and be creative.””
Maybe because I uselessly specialize in reading, writing, and what happened before now, I take a dim view of choosing majors based on what you think there will be a lot of jobs in four or five years from now. This seems like a bad strategy for a few reasons: 1) people get better grades and learn more in majors they enjoy (the passionate business student will inevitably trounce the unenthusiastic one), 2) job outlook is unpredictable (a decade ago, finance and education seemed blessed with unlimited growth and Arabic seemed useless and esoteric), 3) most students change majors/interests halfway through college, and 4) many professional careers now require graduate degrees. Thus, I am pretty sure that any major that teaches critical thinking and writing, and that you LIKE and will excel in, could be considered “useful.” Harvard Law School agrees with me:
“The Harvard Law School faculty prescribes no fixed requirements with respect to the content of pre-legal education. The nature of candidates’ college work, as well as the quality of academic performance, is taken into account in the selection process. As preparation for law school, a broad college education is usually preferable to one that is narrowly specialized. The Admissions Committee looks for a showing of thorough learning in a field of your choice, such as history, economics, government, philosophy, mathematics, science, literature or the classics (and many others), rather than a concentration in courses given primarily as vocational training. The Admissions Committee considers that those programs approaching their subjects on a more theoretical level, with attention to educational breadth, are better preparatory training for the legal profession than those emphasizing the practical.”
Incidentally, I’m not sure what constitutes a Times-worthy education trend, but the paper wrote pretty much the opposite in April 2008.
