{"id":447,"date":"2006-08-01T13:44:02","date_gmt":"2006-08-01T13:44:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/01\/what-is-our-students-learning\/"},"modified":"2006-08-01T13:44:02","modified_gmt":"2006-08-01T13:44:02","slug":"what-is-our-students-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/01\/what-is-our-students-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is Our Students Learning?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The previous post reminded me of something I had marked as interesting: Technorati led me to <a href=\"http:\/\/chemjerk.blogs.com\/chemjerk\/2006\/07\/top_10_college_.html\">ChemJerk<\/a>, who pointed in turn to the <cite>Princton Review<\/cite>&#8216;s list of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.princetonreview.com\/college\/research\/articles\/majors\/popular.asp\">Most Popular College Majors<\/a>. In reverse order, with the top five below the fold, we have:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>10) Political Science<\/li>\n<li>9) Computer Science<\/li>\n<li>8) Communications<\/li>\n<li>7) English<\/li>\n<li>6) Education<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>5) Nursing<\/li>\n<li>4) Biology<\/li>\n<li>3) Elementary Education<\/li>\n<li>2) Psychology<\/li>\n<li>1) Business Administration and Management<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>A lot of these aren&#8217;t terribly surprising. &#8220;Biology&#8221; is probably a proxy for &#8220;pre-med,&#8221; which usually isn&#8217;t an official major, and  English and Political Science are the perennial catch-all liberal arts majors.<\/p>\n<p>There are a few surprising elements here. For one, I&#8217;m surprised that &#8220;Education&#8221; and &#8220;elementary Education&#8221; 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 &#8220;Communications,&#8221; 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).<\/p>\n<p>The biggest surprise to me, though, is the top choice. This probably says more about my biases than anything else, though: I&#8217;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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>I also can&#8217;t help wondering how useful a generic degree in &#8220;Business&#8221; 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&#8217;m sort of hazy on the value of a non-specific &#8220;Education&#8221; degree, too (get a degree in a subject, and then learn to teach that subject).<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, that&#8217;s the list. It&#8217;s worth clicking through to the original just to read the chirpy little summaries of the various majors, by the way:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Your friends are always coming to you for help when they experience computer problems, and you know it&#8217;s high time you got paid for your efforts. Solution: obtain a degree in computer science.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>(That sound you hear is the CS faculty thumping their heads against their desks&#8230;)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8216;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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}