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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