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Majors Matter
By RICHARD K. VEDDER
Bankrate.com has just published its latest assessment of the financial attractiveness of 162 college majors. After talking to Bankrate's Adrian Garcia, I like how they do their analysis. It appropriately puts top emphasis on postgraduate earnings of students-70% weight in its rankings. But its also recognizes that job availability varies by major, so it puts a 20% weight on the average unemployment rate of graduates by major, using a Census Bureau definition of unemployment, albeit slightly different from that of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The last 10% of the rankings is based on the proportion of students going on to get further degrees. The more education it takes to acquire earnings, the costlier it is, so rankings are adjusted downward when a large proportion of majors go on for further education.
What were the top majors? A majority of the top 10 had the word "engineering" in the description, topped by "naval architecture and marine engineering." All were so-called STEM disciplines. Likewise, a majority of the bottom ten majors had the word "arts," culminating, in last place, "drama and theater arts." Most were humanities or fine arts disciplines, such as music, linguistics and comparative literature.
However, to conclude that "If you want to be successful in life, you need to major in a STEM discipline and avoid the classical liberal arts disciplines" could be a serious mistake. Political science and government majors ranked slightly above such STEM majors as mathematics, botany or plant science. History majors ranked 81, about the median of all majors. Economics and accounting were rated above physics, arguably the purest of the scientific disciplines. Psychology was the subject with the second greatest numbers of majors, but ranked a mediocre 140th. The most majors? "Business management and administration," ranked 67th, below such mainstream arts and science disciplines as economics, history and political science.
The median earnings for top ranked majors tend to be in the $80,000 to $100,000 range, while there are some majors where the median is under $40,000. That gap is larger than the average gap between the earnings of high school and college graduates. Education matters, but the type of education also matters, maybe even more. Moreover, although the Bankrate data do not show this, roughly equally as important as what students study is the question of where they study. According to the College Scorecard of the U.S. Department of Education, the average "salary after attending" is $89,700 at Harvard University, but well under one-third as much ($26,100) at Central State University, a Ohio state school. Part of the reason is that nearly everyone attending Harvard graduates (97%), while at Central State only 23% graduate within six years of entering.
People respond to incentives. The numbers above help explain some trends in higher education. The proportion of students majoring in the fine arts and humanities has generally declined over time as students become aware that, whatever their passion is for, say, theater or music, those majoring in these areas are, figuratively if not literally often starving artists. Meanwhile, engineering, despite its reputation as requiring lots of smarts and hard work, is prospering as a field. Similarly, increasing awareness of the differential outcomes by types of schools has led to an extraordinary flight to quality in higher education-applications are soaring for the top ranked schools, while lower quality institutions are often facing enrollment declines and even threatened financial ruin.
As a product of a liberal arts education with a heavy dose of the humanities as well as social sciences, I agree with those that say "money is not everything." My own daughter was one of those theater majors which ranked last on the Bankrate list, but she is very happy as a teacher, first of theater than of English at the high school level, not making tons of money but satisfied knowing her work is helping young people get ahead. There are many others like that. But resources are scarce, and public subsidies of higher education ultimately are increasingly scrutinized using cost-benefit criteria. Generally consumers should become more aware of the enormous differences in outcomes that occur within higher education itself. Therefore I hope prospective college students consider the Bankrate study as they choose colleges and majors.
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The Latest College Lunacy: Correct English Grammar Is `Racist'
Just when we thought colleges could not spout loonier ideas, we have a new one from American University.
They hired a professor to teach other professors to grade students based on their "labor" rather than their writing ability.
The professor that American University hired to teach that nonsense is Asao B. Inoue, who is a professor at the University of Washington in Tacoma in interdisciplinary arts and sciences. He is also the director of the university's writing center.
Inoue believes that a person's writing ability should not be assessed, in order to promote "anti-racist" objectives. Inoue taught American University's faculty members that their previous practices of grading writing promoted white language supremacy.
Inoue thinks that students should be graded on the effort they put into a project.
The idea to bring such a professor to American University, where parents and students fork over $48,459 a year in tuition charges, could not have been something thought up by saner members of its academic community.
Instead, it was probably the result of deep thinking by the university's diversity and campus life officials.
Inoue's views are not simply extreme but possibly hostile to the academic mission of most universities. Forgiving and ignoring a students' writing ability would mostly affect black students. White students' speaking and writing would be judged against the King's English, defined as standard, pure, or correct English grammar.
Professor Noam Chomsky, called the father of modern linguistics, formulated the generative theory of language.
According to his theory, the most basic form of language is a set of syntactic rules that is universal for all humans and that underlies the grammar of all human languages. We analyze and interpret our environment with words and sentences in a structured language.
Oral and written language provides a set of rules that enables us to organize thoughts and construct logical meaning with our thoughts.
Not holding students accountable to proper grammar does a disservice to those students who overall show poor writing abilities.
When or if these students graduate from college, they are not going to be evaluated in their careers by Inoue's tailored standards. They will be judged according to their objective abilities, and it probably follows that if they fail to meet those objective standards, the standards themselves will be labeled as racist.
There's another very dangerous bit of academic nonsense happening, this time at the K-12 level of education.
A One America News Network anchor interviewed Mary Clare Amselem, education specialist at The Heritage Foundation, about the California Department of Education's proposed ethnic studies curriculum. The proposed ethnic studies curriculum would teach children that capitalism and father figures are racist.
The Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum also includes gross anti-Israel bias and teaches about a Palestinian-led anti-Israel initiative called Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions. The curriculum also has students study issues of police brutality and asks teachers to find incidents of bias by police in their own communities.
According to an article by Shelby Talcott in The Stream, California's proposed curriculum called for students to study lawmakers such as Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and Democratic Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, both of whom have supported the BDS movement and have been accused of anti-Semitic rhetoric.
The proposed ethnic studies proposal has been removed from the California Department of Education website.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said, "While I am relieved that California made the obvious decision to revisit this wholly misguided proposal, we need to know why and how a blatantly anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, factually inaccurate curriculum made its way through the ranks of California's Department of Education."
He added, "This was not simply an oversight-the California Department of Education's attempt to institutionalize anti-Semitism is not only discriminatory and intolerant, it's dangerous."
Brainwashing our youngsters is a serious matter. The people responsible for the California Department of Education's proposal ought to be summarily fired.
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Australia: Muslim student slams `Islamophobic' lecture content
There ARE millions of Muslim extremists. They are murdering one another all the time.
A Melbourne TAFE student says she was shocked to see a "sickening" quote from a prominent anti-Islam activist suggesting up to 300 million Muslims are "radicals who want to destroy and murder" included in online lecture materials.
Tayeba Quddus, 26, told the ABC she was left feeling "disempowered" to discover the quote from Lebanese-born American conservative Brigitte Gabriel in a lecture slide for a unit at the Holmesglen Institute focused on "managing diversity in a culturally competent environment".
The unit was part of the TAFE's Certificate IV in Youth Work and Certificate IV in Alcohol and Other Drugs.
"Given what happened in Christchurch, and a huge movement we have of far-right extremism and political campaigns that seek to vilify most Muslims, within that climate it's not very helpful to be discussing these things in a way that seems like it supports these ideas," Ms Quddus told the ABC.
"This isn't about free speech or trying to police what people are saying. I think it's more a matter of the teacher publishing overtly fearmongering material online that has no evidence, and the fact that that's completely inappropriate for (the lecturer) to have done."
The slide, titled "Most Muslims are peaceful", referred to a YouTube video of Ms Gabriel on a panel at The Heritage Foundation in 2017 where she was "asked a question that related to the peaceful Muslim majority".
"And her response could not have been any more perfect," the slide said. "It is true - not all Muslims are bad. Most are not. But the fact is 180 million to 300 million people are radicals who want to destroy and murder. You can't ignore those numbers."
Ms Quddus told the ABC she had already been disturbed by a classroom discussion earlier in the year where students shared false cliches about Muslims. She complained to her teachers but they initially left the material online.
She then took her complaint to the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission. Shortly afterwards, Holmesglen Institute pulled down the material and apologised to Ms Quddus.
The TAFE, which has eight campuses across Melbourne, said in a statement the "inappropriate" content had been uploaded to the student portal but had not yet been delivered in lectures.
"We have called the complainant to acknowledge their concerns and issued an unreserved apology for the offence caused," the statement said. "The teachers involved are being suspended until the investigation concludes."
Holmesglen Institute says it is now conducting a "more thorough analysis of the context of the lesson itself within the unit is being carried out to ensure all content is appropriate".
"While we greatly regret the offence caused to our student, we have taken steps to rectify that offence," Holmesglen Institute chief executive Mary Faraone said.
"Furthermore, Holmesglen is using this incident as a catalyst to further review its professional development in diversity, cultural safety, and competency with the Institute's educators."
Ms Faraone added, "We welcome the opportunity to receive feedback, to assess it, and to act upon it in order to improve processes. This is an ongoing undertaking and we want to ensure that all students, staff and broader stakeholders of the Holmesglen community experience learning, in an inclusive way, and in a place that is committed to positive action."
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