Edumacation

Kids want "practical" college majors; smart people collectively roll eyes.

Disclaimer: I'm coming at this from an elite Ivy League angle. In theory, I can see how more trade-school-type majors might actually be great for kids who aren't shooting for upper corporate management or presidential candidacy. In theory. In practice, I'm pretty sure "practical" majors at state universities will become the next decade's "Computer Science" (too broad, totally useless) or "Animal Husbandry" (too specialized, totally useless), and will just end up swindling and short-changing an underqualified, overeager, superfluous workforce.

I hear this kind of stuff coming from my students all the time -- they're all experts on the national rankings of every major and the star professors of every field, rattling off the pros and cons ("Econ will eat your soul, but you'll be rich," "nobody in their right mind majors in Art," "the only good thing about VES is free pizza") like talking heads on cable news networks. I figured this was just an Ivy thing, but I guess there's also a generational difference at work. When I went to college, I had absolutely no clue what rankings were. I was more interested in the New Orleans music scene, Mardi Gras, and, as a distant third, less-commonly taught languages. It also never entered into my head to plan a major that fed into a career. I took classes because I thought they were interesting, challenging, or both. Not to say this attitude toward higher learning was the norm or that it's actually ideal; it presupposes a certain personality type -- absent-minded professor, let's say -- that works for naturally grad-school-minded individuals, not ambitious go-getters who keep the world functioning. But it still dampens my spirits every time I hear a student with mind-blowing writing skills and an impeccable aesthetic eye express doubt in a Humanities major, because it's not highly ranked and won't set him/her on a career conveyor belt like neuro-bio-econo-whatever. In my darker moments, I wonder what's the point of teasing these kids with poetry or Russian novels, if it's all just a distraction from problem sets and lab reports?

The biggest problem with the "practical" undergrad major at a top-ten school, though, is that it doesn't actually teach anything. A class with 300 students, four TFs, and one dazzling star professor has all the heuristic sophistication of a feeding tube. Information goes in, and the same information, hastily chewed and poorly digested, churns right back out. But what use is information these days? Anyone can be a temporary expert in anything, and anyone can write (or assemble, or buy) a paper on any popular subject. On the surface, everyone wins: the star professor promotes his/her new book, and the students all get As (or, at the very least, B-, the "gentleman's F" of the Ivy Leagues). In reality, though, these kids increasingly think they're experts in their field and expect to be treated and paid accordingly, when they've just barely scraped the scummy surface of reality with one baby-pink toenail.

In a class with ten students on a subject that isn't "practical" and popular, the game totally changes. Instead of assembling a jigsaw puzzle of jargon, they're suddenly expected to think, rethink, and, in the process, generate the themes of the course on their own -- something that many students coming from conveyor-belt fields are totally incapable of doing. Not to rehash the somewhat tired arguments of this article by William Deresiewicz, but there's definitely a tendency toward groupthink, playing it safe, not rocking the boat at major universities, and given the radical, idealistic history of the American institution of higher learning, it's dispiriting to see the Polo-wearing contingent confidently taking over. I mean, they've been there all along, but at least they knew about Machiavelli, Marx, and Matisse along with marketing.