College Matters

Calling all English majors out there! What have you done, or what do you plan to do, with your degree? A student is considering the option and requests advice.

A high school student wrote that she’s confused about choosing classes for college. She’s very stressed out because she hasn’t figured out what courses to take for the following fall. In high school, you’ve solidified the following year’s course schedule by the end of the spring semester, so it’s no wonder the upcoming graduate is stressed. Allow me to emphasize, then, to all of my high school readers: course selection in college can sometimes involve changes up until the first week of classes. If you can avoid making changes following the first day of classes, you’re doing well. Feel free to take all or most of a summer to consider your options.

I’m currently in Houston, Texas, visiting my grandparents before I move to Maine to work with an AmeriCorps program. As many of you already know, I’m very excited. The particular program is called The Game Loft, and it’s a youth program that utilizes non-electronic gaming (from Risk to historical war games to Dungeons and Dragons and everything in between!). I’m actually a little envious; I would have been really grateful to have this kind of organized gaming community during my especially crazy teenage years - I’m telling you, most people should get a medal for simply surviving adolescence.

During this “grand finale family tour,” as I’m calling it, I’m reminded of the evolving nature of family influence. I’m independent, and have been for many years. Often broke, but not to the point of requiring financial support of family. I’m unwilling to do that, and have been since I turned 18 - which is why I used federal financial aid to get through college (a mistake, but hindsight is 20/20). I didn’t want anyone to tell me what to do. And now, in my twenties, my family certainly can’t give me orders, and they know it. If any of them said so much as “Don’t go to Maine” I’d tell them exactly where to put it. I’m exaggerating, I would be nice and reasonable, but pretty direct: “I’m going to Maine. Period. Love you, please come visit, see you soon!”

However, if I relied financially upon anybody, I would definitely have to answer to them. To repeat the above used euphemism, “Period.” End of story. And this is why, at 18, if you go to college with financial support from your parents, you are essentially taking the next step in high school. It doesn’t matter that you’re “legally” an adult. Financially, you’re not - just like this student. So they have a say (rightfully so, too) about where you live, what you spend “your” money on, and yes, even your chosen course of study. That’s not a terrible thing - you probably won’t make the mistake of getting a fine arts degree with an emphasis on the deeper meaning of play-doh while under economic parental supervision.

If you’ve been completely dependent on your parents through high school, especially to such an extent that you’ve received an allowance rather than working part-time, you’re not ready to make your own decisions at 18 anyway. Want to learn to make your own decisions so that you don’t have to adhere to your parents’ directions? Get a 40-hour a week job and move out for at least a year before making the trek to college. Otherwise, they get a say. And parents, listen up: yes, you have a right to tell your kids what to do, regardless of age, if you’re financing the operation.

The Bachelor’s of Business Administration and Master’s of Business Administration are perhaps the two most over-propagated, misunderstood degrees on any given college campus. When students are enticed into BBA degree programs, too often university administration leave out statistics regarding how many people graduate with a BBA every year. To combat such an over population, rather than discourage mass numbers of interested persons, they’ve come up with new names for the same degree. MIS, for example (Management and Information Systems). It’s a business degree with an emphasis on technology – which is what any business degree today should be focused on to begin with. So now there’s an overpopulation of MIS bachelor’s degree holders as well.

I know people who have been encouraged to pursue these because business degrees are “easy” (according to several friends that have them, that’s true on most campuses) or because they’re pertinent for an extensive spectrum of job opportunities. While there’s also some truth to the latter, it’s not as simple as business departments advertise.

Any business degree, whether at the bachelor’s or master’s level, is worthwhile in the job market only if accompanied by significant work experience. It has to be consistent work experience, too – whether you’re waiting tables, cashing checks at a bank, or working at the campus bookstore, your work experience should be at the same place and show evidence of ambition, like having moved up to head of waitstaff, or night or assistant manager. The particular work experience needs to be pertinent to your desired career path, as well. Waiting tables could lead to restaurant management and eventual corporate management of a chain of restaurants, for example.

Too many BBA students, like this one, go on to MBAs because they graduate with no work experience and are confused when they can’t immediately find jobs. And an MBA is only worthwhile if you pursue it while working a higher level job. I’ve heard business departments quote MBAs as demanding $200K annually “on average.” It’s as good as what comes out the rear end of a seagull – not even decent fertilizer.

If you pursue a BBA and/or MBA because you’d like to open your own business, consider this: all of the information in those classes is available, for free, elsewhere – you can start with the business textbooks at a university library (they’re all open to the public). The most successful business owners don’t often have business degrees.

Bottom line: taking the formal coursework of a business degree throws a lot of money down the higher ed drain if you don’t have work experience to go with it.

It’s that time of year again; we’re nearing graduation, and the number of letters I receive has suddenly increased. Half of the emails I’ve answered in the last week ask the same question: what should I do with my major? A classics major asked me this same question several months ago; I’ll publish some more recent questions/responses tomorrow morning, including a business major and an art history major. Amidst a job market recession, this question is especially difficult, because many degrees are far from “in-demand.” Graduate school applications have spiked in response; undergrads are completely wrapped up in the concept that living off of financial aid and going to graduate school is somehow superior to performing whatever job is available, whether waiting tables or sacking groceries.

We, as college graduates, are definitely caught up in image-based prestige and entitlement. But the truth is, a college degree entitles you to nothing. If you’ve eschewed full-time employment in favor of full-time school (as in, you, like me, felt unable to do both at once, and you chose full-time school) your degree doesn’t even really give you an advantage in the job market – much less this fairy-tale notion of guaranteed entitlement.

I’m working on a chart, gradually, as I research more and more specific majors, to display what career paths different majors potentially open up, and how to achieve these career paths within any given major. This is going to be an enormous chart, forever in the works, and I’m looking forward to all of your input on it. My goal is to put it up on a tab on this site within two weeks. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect to be able to explain the options for every single degree plan in two weeks. This is going to be a constantly evolving chart. But someone outside of higher ed. definitely needs to do this.

It’s a travesty that the most common “direction” offered by faculty members in each department is some vague assurance of job options. No specifics. Just, “Yes, this department is great, the subject is fantastic, and if nothing else you can go into teaching or academia.” What they don’t tell you is that the demand for professors and teachers alike is highly dependent upon the subject AND requires additional experience and education beyond mere degree.

Continued tomorrow, with more questions/answers…

A friend on twitter posed an interesting question in response to the discussion of minority scholarships. Read the original advice, to the white kid that thinks minority scholarships are racist, here. My twitter friend wonders what people like this student think of disability scholarships. That gave me food for some deep thought, and I went back to some writing I did six months ago, which is integrated into this entry.

Disability scholarships are designed with the same thought in mind as minority scholarships: they are all intended to assist some of the underprivileged yet deserving individuals in their quests for higher education. However, in the same way some admissions policies have made a mockery of these efforts by lowering the standards for ethnic minorities, the office of disability services (every campus has something of the sort) has succeeded in assisting with the dumbing-down of American campuses.

Gasp! Politically incorrect, you say? How can I be so calloused and insensitive? Where do I get off? Here’s where, people: I’m an epileptic. I have grand mal seizures if I don’t get enough sleep, don’t take my medication properly, or take any of a number of other substances, like over-the-counter decongestants, alcohol, or any kind of stimulant, legal or otherwise. When I have a seizure, I’m pretty much worthless for an entire day afterward. I can barely speak or move, and everything is really foggy.

So, as a college student, this certainly provided some difficulty not experienced by all students. For one thing, I didn’t know about the decongestant issue until I was about halfway through college, when a campus doctor finally thought it would be a good idea to explain that to me. I’ve never been a big drinker – wine was always allowed in my house growing up and as such alcohol never held any sort of magical allure – but I was the queen of caffeine, a staple for surviving all-night study sessions. And caffeine, my friends, is a stimulant – and my favorite of the caffeinated poison, espresso, is an especially potent stimulant.

Procrastination led to all-nighters; all-nighters led to caffeine; caffeine led to seizures; seizures led to absences. Most professors at my university had absence policies. So, what did I do? The smart thing, avoid procrastination, perhaps? No, of course not. A professor kindly suggested I seek accommodations from the office of disability services in order to get attendance policies waived altogether for me as a student. Wow.

In light of that, I suppose it’s amazing I graduated at all, and in particular with a “B” average. Attendance policies are indeed juvenile, but suddenly having absolutely no requirement to show up to classes was further incentive for procrastination. Truthfully, I learn better from reading and writing than from auditory instruction, anyway – but most people don’t.

My point is, I didn’t really need disability services. I simply needed to grow up and accommodate my own disability by doing a little adult planning. Instead, I received well-intentioned babying – great for students who need to learn responsibility! And now, beyond epilepsy, we have the ADHD and ADD phenomenon. Every parent who has a kid who wants to act like a kid rather than a miniature adult seems to think the “answer” to this “problem” is to drag the kid off to a psychiatrist and dope them up. So they go through school thinking they have an excuse to be idiotic, and they don’t get to have those crucial years of irresponsible kid-dom – involving, goodness, actual playing – so they get to college and don’t know what to do with themselves. They go to disability services, get everything handed to them on silver platters, and, even worse, they have this effect on the kids around them. Entitlement complexes, when fed, breed personal laziness as well as resentment from one’s peers. Resentment furthers poor performance in college.

A commenter who works in admissions on campus supports minority scholarships but doesn’t agree with providing lower standards for minority applicants. I agree, and I would be insulted if I belonged to an ethnic minority and had standards lowered for me. It would make me feel like someone thought I was inferior. And I don’t think disability services should be viewed any differently. It’s there to provide an even platform. EVEN, not greater than.

Maybe as an epileptic I deserved the disability scholarships I got. Certainly some truly physically disabled students deserve them, just as underprivileged minorities deserve special scholarships. But disability services have not worked out as intended. Thanks to pseudo-psychiatry and the American dream (of not having to take responsibility for individual actions!) these services are making a mockery of so-called “higher” education.

It’s springtime, and scholarship deadlines are in the air, which means that resentment and despair prosper as much as hope and idealism. Everyone’s a victim, and everyone thinks they’re more deserving of scholarship money than the next guy. Many students who fill out scholarship applications do so with a misplaced sense of entitlement. They forget that scholarship awards are gifts, and the giver and/or his or her chosen committee have the right to determine the characteristics of the recipient.

A student complained that the scholarship opportunities for minorities, in their abundance, constitute racism against white Americans. There aren’t any scholarships allocated for only white American students, and some white Americans express outrage at this discrepancy. This outrage is at best misguided and at worst willful ignorance.

Consider some statistics in regard to race and poverty in this country. Only 8% of whites live at or below the poverty level. Over 20% of African-Americans live in poverty, with approximately the same percentage of Hispanics. Look at the Native American community and the percentage surpasses 25%.

But, you say, since there is poverty in every ethnic group, shouldn’t scholarships evaluate candidates upon individual circumstances (along with GPA and other criteria)? Poverty, in numbers, can be easily manufactured on federal financial aid forms, especially by the educated. The truly impoverished in this country often lack the education necessary for such manipulation. Public schools in lower-income neighborhoods are underfunded and the teachers are overworked. Children grow up in fatherless homes. These children did not ask to be born into these circumstances and deserve a level playing field. Most of them are American minorities. Minority-specific scholarships offer the steps for gaining access to that playing field.

Okay, so this blog is not really about the drama of junior high and high school, so it’s misleading to use the title of a creepy song about high school by the Police as the entry’s title…but it’s related. While everyone in college is, for the most part, of legal age, romance between professors and students remains a gray area. Some universities actually have enacted policies against such relationships entirely, while others merely disapprove on an unofficial basis. I keep thinking of the line, “Loose talk in the classroom…”

Dark humor and 80’s music aside, this is a very real issue. Most people meet their romantic partners in either the workplace or at school. Student-professor relationships begin with a combination of the two! And is that really any worse than meeting some stranger in a bar?

Well, perhaps not, if the professor does not happen to be in charge of the particular student’s grades. Frankly, if professor and student met in a coffee shop or at a seminar but have absolutely no official academic contact, there’s absolutely no reason why they shouldn’t pursue whatever feels right, at least in my mind.

However, this isn’t usually the case. The connection often begins in the classroom, and herein lies the problem. It is nearly impossible to be completely fair when grading an individual with whom you share a personal connection– whether friend, relative, or worst of all, romantic interest. And even some sort of anomalous saint who does have that capability risks appearances to the contrary. It’s ammunition that can be used to bolster any other student’s claim of unfairness in grading.

Plus, what if the relationship ends on a sour note? Let’s face it, most do, and relationships that are “uneven” like a professor-student liaison are even more likely to end badly. So what happens then? The professor runs the risk of the student complaining to his or her parents as well as the administration, and thus the professor may risk losing his or her tenure (or opportunity to receive tenure).

This is why, when a student with a crush on her professor wrote to me, I told her that if I was advising the professor on the same situation, I would tell him to run, far, far away, as fast as he could go. My advice to her, in a nutshell, was to tread carefully. Check it out and let me know what you think.

How many people go to college with a concrete plan or career path in mind? How many more change that path numerous times, all while paying for classes?

Well-meaning guidance counselors and advisors often encourage incoming freshmen to experiment with various coursework and find a “passion” before choosing a major. However, students taking 12-18 hours of core curriculum college classes are hardly in a position to rationally analyze their “passions” and choose corresponding career paths. Instead, such a course load encourages students to find the easiest path - which is usually far from the best path - either in terms of finding a career to be passionate about or in terms of financial gain.

An enterprising and forward thinking high school senior wrote to me amidst choosing a university, trying to determine the most “efficient” degree plan with the greatest marketability. While I would never advise someone to pursue a mathematics degree if he or she is terrible at math, I think this student is on the right track by considering other criteria beyond what comes easy. So many people choose a degree plan in the second year of college, settling for the easiest and least stressful path - and then wonder why they end up in low-paying jobs with little or nothing to do with the chosen degrees.

If you’re still in the process of figuring out what you want to do with your life, I vote for taking classes on a part time basis and actually getting a job that doesn’t require a degree in the meantime. It gives you the time to learn about different types of careers in the world around you while also giving you the chance to learn responsible money management - something that eludes most college graduates.

Update: I’ve just received an article, from eCampusTours, that discusses this very subject, and it’s very helpful. Check it out!

As cold-hearted and uncultured as it may sound, I’ve often wondered why most universities offer fine arts degrees at all. I’m willing to accept the validity of fine arts degrees from specialty schools like Julliard, but what, realistically, is someone going to do with a fine arts degree from your run-of-the-mill state funded university? And yet, even smaller public universities, like the commuter school I went to, offer fine arts degrees. Generally, it’s an easier degree to get than either a B.A. or a B.S. - because you don’t have to take a certain number of language hours or hard science and math hours. Employers know this, and when they look for general, non-major specific employees (for intern jobs in general retail management positions, etc.), they’re going to gravitate to pretty much everyone else before the B.F.A.s.

And in the world of the fine arts, a degree means squat next to experience, skills, and talent. A formal college degree is completely unnecessary. So why have fine arts degrees at all? I have two theories: one, it’s a way to employ more people with Master’s degrees in the fine arts, with faculty positions in academia, and two, it helps those people feel justified in their choice of degree. I sound asinine, but I’ve noticed that fine arts majors are often the most arrogant - they feel like they have something to prove.

This particular fine arts student, though, is very nice and self-effacing; the student just wants to work in theatre, loves lighting design, and is about to finish a B.F.A. I think I gave out fairly decent advice; please read it and tell me what you think!