Efficiency vs. Equality

Every time I talk to an engineer or a pre-med or something, they have the nerve to ask me, “So what are you going to do with that major?” Even English majors, who I thought would be sympathetic, have a wide variety of (mostly evil, corporate) career paths available to them. They, too, express contemptuous curiosity in regards to my Program II Global Marginalized Cultural Art Studies degree. But then I guess they wouldn’t understand, because putting English above all other languages is so ethnocentric of them. How can they still teach “English” when they got rid of the Wolof department? It’s racist. […]

Extremely funny, worth a read!

Over the past 25 years the total number of students in college has increased by about 50 percent. But the number of students graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) has remained more or less constant. Moreover, many of today’s STEM graduates are foreign born and are taking their knowledge and skills back to their native countries.

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In 2009 the U.S. graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual and performing arts graduates in 1985.

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Moreover, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don’t require college degrees and these graduates don’t get a big college bonus.

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College has been oversold. It has been oversold to students who end up dropping out or graduating with degrees that don’t help them very much in the job market. It also has been oversold to the taxpayers, who foot the bill for these subsidies.

One in four women who works as a lap dancer in Britain has a university degree and the majority of those involved in the industry enjoy their work, earning up to 48,000 pounds ($74,500) a year, academic research has found.

The college guide is part of Washington Monthly’s continuing effort to build better college rankings. The biggest flaw with the famous U.S. News & World Report ranking is that it largely rewards colleges that enroll highly qualified (and, typically, affluent) students, regardless of how much those students learn while on campus. Washington Monthly instead tries reward those colleges that do a good job educating students.