The previous post reminded me of something I had marked as interesting: Technorati led me to ChemJerk, who pointed in turn to the Princton Review‘s list of Most Popular College Majors. In reverse order, with the top five below the fold, we have:
- 10) Political Science
- 9) Computer Science
- 8) Communications
- 7) English
- 6) Education
- 5) Nursing
- 4) Biology
- 3) Elementary Education
- 2) Psychology
- 1) Business Administration and Management
A lot of these aren’t terribly surprising. “Biology” is probably a proxy for “pre-med,” which usually isn’t an official major, and English and Political Science are the perennial catch-all liberal arts majors.
There are a few surprising elements here. For one, I’m surprised that “Education” and “elementary Education” are listed separately. I suppose there is a pretty dramatic difference between the two, but the idea that you could split the two and still land both in the Top Ten is surprising. Also a bit surprising is “Communications,” which I always thought was one of those made-up majors they have for scholarship athletes at Div. I schools (usually the especially inarticulate ones).
The biggest surprise to me, though, is the top choice. This probably says more about my biases than anything else, though: I’ve spent my entire life in fields where management is something that just happens to people. Even before I went to college, my parents worked in education, where principals and school superintendants are usually former teachers who moved into administration after several years in the classroom. Since leaving home, I’ve been in academia (where deans and presidents are usually former faculty), and research science (where ending up managing people rather than experiments is an unfortunate side effect of career success). The idea of people deliberately setting out to become managers is sort of baffling to me.
I also can’t help wondering how useful a generic degree in “Business” could really be, compared to, you know, actually knowing how to do some particular thing, and then learning management skills to complement the knowledge of an actual specific business. But then, I’m sort of hazy on the value of a non-specific “Education” degree, too (get a degree in a subject, and then learn to teach that subject).
Anyway, that’s the list. It’s worth clicking through to the original just to read the chirpy little summaries of the various majors, by the way:
Your friends are always coming to you for help when they experience computer problems, and you know it’s high time you got paid for your efforts. Solution: obtain a degree in computer science.
(That sound you hear is the CS faculty thumping their heads against their desks…)
My biases about BA/management are similar to yours. I think most business majors, especially MBAs, think that any good manager can manage any enterprise without knowing anything about the actual work being done; all that is necessary is to be a good manager. Some people also think that management is something that anyone who knows the business can do. I have first-hand experience that indicates that is not true. Many businesses, even some quite large ones, provide no management training, and it shows in how many bad managers there are.
Communications majors are people who want to be on television.
I wonder how many of those business majors are people returning to school for training because they’re being promoted to management? I’ve considered this because there is a dearth of management ability in my field (I’m an academic librarian with a subject specialty in the sciences). As Mark points out, one can be very good in one’s field but not be very good at management.
On the other hand, I also wonder if the preference for business isn’t an attempt at a guaranteed career, the way law, medicine, and engineering have all been perceived to be at various times. And I have to admit that the popularity of nursing and education pleases me, because of the lack of qualified people in those areas.
I’d like to see more sciences on that list, though.
My little brother was a business major. I studied philosophy (and will for the rest of my life.) Guess who has more money now? He envies my google rank, at least.
Communications is a generic term that covers journalism, public relations, and broadcasting. Usually there are concentrations in each of those fields that make the major more specific. Same really goes for Business/Management degrees. One of my majors was business, and my concentration was in marketing, which is a more narrow, specific field. Business administration/management doesn’t necesserily mean becoming a manager, it prepares you for a number of roles within the business environment, such as human resource mgmt, accounting, finance, marketing, etc.. Of course it depends on the schools in questions, I just know my school did it that way…
The methodology they used is a bit sketchy. These are the 10 majors that schools reported as “in the top 3 of enrollment,” so if something was #4 everywhere it won’t be in this list…
Most popular shirt for CS students here: “No I will not fix your computer”
*headdesk*
I’m kind of surprised at some of those because I don’t really think of them as UNDERgraduate fields. I think of Managment as something you go into AFTER your BA, so you get an MBA. Likewise I thought nursing was either an associates or an MS.
Elementary education, OTOH, IS a field in and of itself. There is no specific field because you’ve got to teach all of it. High/middle school education you’re right about. I think that you usually need a real major and often a real masters before you can teach at that level.
Things might be different in different locations, but where I live, the education degree is the required degree for all teaching at levels of public school, from 1st to 12th. The state started a program to encourage people with degrees in certain areas, like math or physics, to teach in public high schools without an education degree. However, they were required to go back to school to get an ed. degree in order to keep teaching. That meant that someone with a phd in physics couldn’t teach for any length of time at any level of public school, except college, without an education degree. Private schools are different. You can actually teach there with a degree in the field you teach.
As long as everyone else is defending their field, I’ll do it too. I was a high school physics and chemistry teacher for five years. My undergraduate degree was in Education (yeah, I made the list) – but actually physics and chemistry education. It was like getting a triple major, since I had to take all the physics and chemistry of the regular subject majors, and also all the methods and student teaching classes for Education. Sometimes titles are misleading, course lists are not.
I had a friend who was a CS major in college. She was lucky if she could turn her computer on, and had absolutely no idea how the damn thing worked. Saying a computer scientist can fix a computer is like saying an electrical engineer can wire a house.
Things might be different in different locations, but where I live, the education degree is the required degree for all teaching at levels of public school, from 1st to 12th.
There are degrees and degrees.
As I understand it, the rule in New York is that you need to have a Masters in Education in order to be a certified teacher (though there are some provisions that allow people to teach while working toward the M.A. in Education), but your undergraduate major (BA/BS degree) can be in anything at all. Union has a very well-regarded M.A.T. (graduate) program, that gets students with BA’s in regular majors the Education degree they need for certification.
I believe most states have similar requirements. I’d be a little surprised if they required a BA in Education, rather than an MA.
Management, like teaching, is a separate skill from any particular subject matter. But anyway, I suspect most of those undergrad degrees are more generic business school degrees, and not specifically management-related; and those might not be as directly job-useful as a specific skill set, but most jobs don’t require any school-learnable skill set. And if you’re going to get a job that doesn’t require specific skills, business classes will probably be more useful than psychology ones.
Don’t people get MBA to be managers and business administrators? Economics would be better than business admin to learn while in undergrad. Learn the fundamentals first and progress from there. There is a reason why MBA programs expect most students to have job experience first.
I agree about education, learn about something to teach and then learn how to teach it. Which is a strange thing about this survey. Most universities/colleges in California don’t offer majors in education because you first need to get a degree in something and then do an additional year to learn & train how to teach. If schools in California don’t give undergrad degrees in education, then there must be a lot of colleges in the US which are churning out a slew of education majors.
Having spent my past two years of school at a public university, this list makes sense to me. While English and Political Science may be the catch-all degrees of private liberal arts colleges, in public institutions waffling students tend towards business and education. As far as I can tell, the idea of a business/management major is preparation for things like hotel management. Both of these majors point towards careers that seem within reach to students who aren’t interested in academics per se, but who want the career/money benefits of a college degree.
Just to clairify, the MA in education is very common, however, in most states (at least when I was teaching, which was ~6 years ago) that is the route taken if you already have the BA/BS in your subject, and want to get certified to teach. If you know you want to teach right away (in many states, WI, MN included) you can get a certificate as part of your BA/BS in Education, but you still have to take all the coursework in your subject matter. Even in those state, almost all teachers that have the BA in Education go on later to get a MA since you get paid a lot more once you have it.
Chad, Greg seems to have it right, based on what I can figure out for Georgia. It appears that a BA is sufficient to meet the educational requirement, but there are also other certification requirements. It appears that there are multiple paths to certification.
Genevieve:
“And I have to admit that the popularity of nursing and education pleases me, because of the lack of qualified people in those areas.”
From what I’ve heard (having worked in a school of nursing), nursing burns out/drives out a large proportion of nurses, after a few years.
The MBA degree doesn’t seem to be much more than an easy filtering or “weed out” mechanism, especially in larger and/or older corporations. It’s a lot easier choosing a candidate out of a small pile of 12 to 20 resumes, than having to go through more than a hundred or thousand resumes.
At smaller or start-up type of firms, many don’t seem to be as interested in MBAs. In fact in some small firms, they actually consider an MBA or business degree to be a liability! (They think business schools teach everything all wrong). Many highly hypermotivated entrepreneur types seem to think MBAs are a joke.
Many folks I knew who went to high-ranking MBA business schools described it as 2 years of drinking and schmoozing for new “connections” (ie. for future business and/or political favors). Whether one actually learned anything in class, is largely secondary or irrelevent.
With respect to other degrees like political science, english, communictions, psychology, etc … I wouldn’t be surprised if they are also used largely as a filtering or “weed out” mechanism by many employers. In the past more than 30 years ago, the high school diploma served as a similar filtering or “weed out” mechanism for employers. Though over the years with many more folks going to college, the high school diploma seems to be largely worthless these days.
Many folks I knew who went to high-ranking MBA business schools described it as 2 years of drinking and schmoozing for new “connections” (ie. for future business and/or political favors). Whether one actually learned anything in class, is largely secondary or irrelevent.
Some programs are actually pretty hard, I gather, but others seem to be as you describe.
The whole thing was probably summed up by a friend, describing two other frieds who were in MBA programs:
“There are two types of I-bankers: one type says, ‘We see this company. It is weak. We must buy it, and make it strong.’ The other type says, ‘Hey! We know rich people! Let’s play golf.'”
I know a woman who just completed a BBA. Think of it as the equivalent of a lab tech degree, but in business. 1-3 courses each in econ, finance, accounting marketing, org behavior, corp strat, statistics, operations management. She’s got a job with a Fortune 500 company, and will probably go back for an MBA in five years, by which time she’ll have the experience to learn a lot more.
In VA, you can get an undergraduate degree in education if you can find a college or university that still offers it. Most require you to get a BA/BS in something, and then an MA/MS in education. The school systems far prefer teachers with an MA/S over a BA/S, which is why so many of the colleges and universities have long since abandonded Education as an undergraduate degree program.
Muh wif, da edumacator, she gots a MS in edumacation.
I was also surprised that business was #1 for undergrads, and I share most of the commenters belief that it’s a pretty weak degree. Unless you’ve got real world business experience its difficult to belive you can get a lot out of a undergrad business degree.
However, I must defend the MBA. I’ve got a Masters in Eng. Physics and spent my first four private sector years as a lab rat researcher in R&D. However, by about year 6 I had learned enough about management to realize that I was interested in it as a career. So I went to get an MBA at nights based on the ‘resume-requirment’ logic.
To my surprise I found that the MBA was my most useful academic experience to date. Managing people, projects, money, product development, is hard. Having high quality training from experienced professors and business leaders certainly can make a huge difference in your readiness and ability to do a good job. There is no question that I am far far better as a program manager because of my MBA training. I am also mcuh more aware of how businesses function, which makes my influence at my company much wider than it would otherwise be. My company paid for my MBA and I have no doubt at all they have gotten an excellent return on investment, and it has obviously been valuable for me.
There is also no question that probably about 50% of the other MBA students I went to school with got little out of the program other than a rubber stamp and networking. So the anecdotes are well-grounded. Just don’t fall into the trap of thinking that MBAs are always jokes. If you are an engineer or scientist and you have an interest in becoming a technical manager you may want to strongly consider it, it can be transformative.
[It’s also MUCH easier than technical graduate school, unless you really hate writing].
Barry:
I’m not surprised. Most nurses I know work insanely long hours (often because they’re short-staffed) and the field itself is changing dramatically. If you work in a nursing school (we have one at my university, and that’s another of my subject areas–it’s a small library so we all multitask) then you know that information technologies are having a huge impact and the field is becoming more and more research-oriented. Then there’s the whole EBM movement…