BAD NUMBERS
Why do US students study all the wrong stuff?
The worst fact of the week? That the biggest undergraduate major by far in the US today is: Business. 22 percent of B.A.s are awarded in business, compared with a paltry 8% in education, 5% in health professions, less than 4% in English and a tragic 2% in history. No wonder, as a nation, we’re stupid, sick, inarticulate and prone to repeating bad mistakes.
22 percent of B.A. in business should panic the business community. When I was running companies, I didn’t want kids with B.A.s in business. I wanted kids who could speak, write, think about the world, who even had some sense of context. They were like gold dust. My best employees were invariably Russian, Chinese, Indian, gay, Jewish, female. Being outsiders, they’d had to struggle and struggling, they’d learned about the world. They'd also, usually, had an education that was both broad and deep.
I wanted – and still want – people who pay attention, reflect, and can handle complexity. But almost everything about current career structures militates against this. Do business in college, get a job in sales, specialize in high tech, then super-specialize in telecoms. Before you know where you are – you know almost nothing. Making people narrower and narrower as the world gets more and more complex is a terrible way to build the smart workforce we’re supposed to need for an innovative economy.
And let’s face it: the teaching of business to undergraduates is not exactly the acme of academic achievement. What I’ve seen – from employing interns and from employing business graduates – is that they’re mostly learning outdated, macho rubbish that replaces creativity and commonsense with doctrinaire, slick mumbo jumbo. And they’re usually learning it from people who couldn’t run so much as a lemonade stand. What’s even more obscene about that 22% is that these kids are paying for this. They’d do better to take a year out, get a job, and learn from that. They’d end up wiser and richer.
American education is the most expensive in the world. If you’re paying over $100,000 for a B.A. in business, all that tells me is that you have no business sense at all.
6 comments:
Margaret,
Amen!
It is so alarming that even with the decline in educational quality, there still seems to be this increased focus on 'specializing' a field and improving on a student's ability to memorize twenty-years worth of outdated information. In a business (hell, cultural) environment where the drop from current to archaic may happen within hours, our upcoming workforce must learn to empower themselves in seeking knowledge beyond the 'cookie-cutter bullet-point slideshows' of chapter outlines.
I myself am a relatively recent graduate who spent almost a decade in school, not because of my lack of drive but rather my awareness that the true value in my schooling was limited to the networking opportunities it provided. So, I learned at work and at home and networked at school. It proved to be very valuable to me in the end, but I'm still painfully aware that the current ROI on my 40k+ 'education' makes my bachelors the worst financial decision of my life.
Thank you for an great post and keep 'em coming!
-D
p.s. For a rant of a similar color, see our recent post 'Educate Thyself, Skip School'
Margaret:
The situation in UK education is different, but still manages to turn out mostly unemployable graduates.
Our left-dominated education system does not offer much in the way of graduate business courses, preferring instead to stick with old favourites like law (the stepping stone to politics - and no nasty sums to learn. Accumulated experience still seen as valuable, so a long and happy life to look forward to on the golf course).
Then comes design and media studies (for those without for any career inspiration, but at least there are no nasty sums to learn).
Psychology next - again no maths - and another profession where there is an assumption that with no extra learning required, skill and wisdom just accumulate until a happy retirement.
Eventually we get to management studies, business studies and computer science.
But God forbid anything to do with subjects like pure science and technology where the rules are rewritten daily and advances just keep on coming thick and fast, requiring constant learning through one's professional life.
In any case, what's the point? There is no manufacturing industry left in the UK, and almost no research.
The UK will just carry on importing the output from other countries' science education systems, and hope for the best.
TMP
Great blog. I wholeheartedly agree with you. Speak louder! My son is 16 years old and we talk a lot of college and what he wants to do. I would love for him to take a year off after high school and send him to Europe to travel, work and do some studying abroad to expand who he is and his ideas about life and the world.
I studied religion, and organizational communications. I loved them both, yet, I have to admit, I still struggle with writing and articulating my ideas. I am learning though.
I love your blog.
I really agree witht the comment before mine that you have a strong voice and are a really great wrtier, please write more often so teh world can know your opinions. I love what you are doing and i love that post abour mom's who are also entrepreneurs. we should all stop scrunching our faces when people suggest they do in fact do two things well. Especially other women, our job is to encourage one another and lift each other up. We are SO committed to making every woman feel like she can go ahead with her goals and make it in business. Keep up the GREAT words.
My non-checking of my spelling in the above comment has proven that i really need to go back to University;)
Thanks for writing this.
Post a Comment