General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIs our college students learning?
Liberal Arts Majors Didn't Kill the Economy
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/liberal-arts-majors-didnt-kill-the-economy/272940/
There are two, well, schools of thought about why freshly-minted grads have had such a tough time recently. You can blame the smarty-pants majors or blame the economy. In other words, students can't get good jobs either because they aren't learning (at least not the right things) in college, or because there aren't enough good jobs, period.
This is far from an academic debate. If recent grads can't find good work because they didn't learn any marketable skills, there's little the government can do to help, besides "nudging" current students to be more practical. And that's exactly what conservative governors in Florida and North Carolina are considering with proposals to charge humanities majors higher tuition than, say, science majors at state schools.
But there's an obvious question. If liberal arts majors "didn't learn much in school," as Jane Shaw put it in the Wall Street Journal, why haven't they always had trouble finding work? Are there just more of them now, or is this lack of learning just a recent phenomenon? ............
Drale
(7,932 posts)The title should be "Are our college students learning?" Is our college students learning sounds like something W would say.
ScreamingMeemie
(68,918 posts)Coyotl
(15,262 posts)but, yes, the sarcastic arrow strikes George W as aimed, and i liked it enough to place it in the title here.
Gotta follow those URLs before jumping in!
riverbenddem
(13 posts)n/t
oldhippie
(3,249 posts)"Let are children walk!"
liberal_at_heart
(12,081 posts)A workforce that has skills but no critical thinking means you have a workforce that can be controlled, kept under check with no chance of upward mobility, with no chance of questioning and rebelling.
PasadenaTrudy
(3,998 posts)Coyotl
(15,262 posts)I see this also as dependency vs. independence, learning centered on one capability instead of educating oneself for all aspects of life.