Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Scouting the Territory

In my previous post, I mentioned the breadth and diversity of degree programs and how colleges created all of those fields. What particularly interested me wasn’t the amount of programs, but instead what factors lead students to choose those degrees. I originally intended to research the history of college degrees and their fields, as well as the evolution of new fields of study. Instead of focusing on the evolution of the new fields and degree programs, I will instead focus my paper around the factors that influence undergraduates to choose those said career paths. In addition to the influences, I will also analyze the outcomes of those choices, particularly in the realm of employment potential.
Part of my reasoning to why I am switching my focus is the amount of research on undergraduate choices, as well as their careers after. On the flipside, there is less research done in regards to the history and origin of college degree programs. (Or that research has been difficult to find). My first course of action was to search for scholarly articles on Google Scholar, find an article, and read the entire article in one sitting. I lied. Instead what I did was open up Google, and type in ‘useless college degrees’. I then spent the next hour reading through dozens of non-academic articles and blog posts about how some recent graduate on the other side of the country was in a mountain of debt with no career due to her poor choice of study in college. One of which particularly interested me because it discussed the over qualifications of the said graduate.
After getting frustrated vicariously through those authors, I then searched Google for ‘useful college degrees’ and then spent the next hour reading through non-academic articles and blog posts written by Gen-Xers. Those authors, writing primarily for sources like Bloomberg, Forbes, and Business Insider spent the majority of their time arguing (and berating) that millennials like myself for being too lazy, and not astute enough to chose a more successful degree like engineering or computer science. There were a number of these, and they provided some insight as to the issues in what they called ‘the skills gap’ where although people were graduating college, they didn’t posses adequate enough skills to get employed. There are two articles that discuss that:

            After getting my fill of online noise regarding college degree choices, I went to Google Scholar to see what I could find regarding undergraduate’s choices in their degrees. I found one article: (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.606.4138&rep=rep1&type=pdf)
In the Economics of Education Review that attempts to use a formula to predict what an undergraduate will eventually choose. The formula, although complex and confusing, didn’t help directly; but the article discusses the various factors that influence degree choice, such as income, family income, gender, and race to name a few. In addition there was another article that was provided to me by professor Goeller: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/college-major-rich-families-liberal-arts/397439/
This article builds off of the material in the Economics of Education Review, but primarily focuses on the relevance that family income plays as a deciding factor in degree choice. I particularly like this article because it implies that there is a possibility that happiness is derived from factors other than post graduate income.
            I found another scholarly article from the Center on Education and the Workforce: (https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/559308/Unemployment.Final.update1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y)

That briefly discussed the fact that ‘not all college degrees are created equally.’ The authors include a multitude of statistics that will help my paper, as those statistics included very detailed values on unemployment and earnings based on college degrees. 

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