Education

The college class crisis

From Washington Monthly: “Even within the elevated reaches of four-year colleges and universities, there are really two systems operating in parallel. One prepares people for jobs in fields like health care, teaching, accounting, engineering, and computer systems. While many of these students go on to master’s degrees and continue to learn on the job, they share the experience of having majored in subjects that match their careers. We’ll call these ‘Actual Job Majors.’ Then there are the other people, the ones who take few if any courses that are designed to prepare them for a job, unless you define the job as ‘tenured professor in teaching this subject,’ which, if you’ve been paying any attention to the state of the academic labor market, is pretty much the same as preparing for no job at all. We’ll call these ‘Not a Job Majors.’ … The big four categories of Not a Job Majors are psychology, business, social science, and communications, which collectively grant more than 700,000 bachelor’s degrees per year.

View the full article from Washington Monthly.