One indication that an idea is catching on is that the President of the United States refers to it frequently. In recent remarks by President Obama, I’ve been pleased to hear mentions of STEM careers and STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). Two recent articles have pointed out the rewards of STEM careers and the barriers to them.
Last month, my former ETS colleague Anthony Carnevale and his research team at Georgetown University released a report about the career experiences of people who majored in STEM subjects. Analyzing Census data, they found that, on average, 65 percent of those holding a bachelor’s degree in a STEM subject out-earn those with a master’s degree in a non-STEM subject. And an associate degree in a STEM subject brings in a higher income than a non-STEM bachelor’s for 63 percent of those surveyed.
The Georgetown researchers also found that STEM degrees are excellent on-ramps for careers in medicine and in management, career changes that can lead to higher income than staying in a STEM work role. They note that although the traditional STEM career fields employ only 5 percent of the workforce, the need for STEM competencies keeps increasing in other fields. For example, along with the rapid growth in the number of technology products, there’s a growing need for an appropriately skilled sales workforce. So, even though the STEM career field is growing at a pace exceeded only by health-care careers, the careers that are competing for STEM-competent workers (including many health-care occupations) are among the fastest-growing and highest-paid in the economy.
Given this growing need for STEM-skilled workers in a broad range of occupations, it is not necessarily alarming that (as Carnevale et al. found) 43 percent of STEM grads immediately go off to work in non-STEM careers. To be sure, I’d rather see engineering graduates go on to engineer bridges instead of financial derivatives. Nevertheless, market forces will divert STEM talent to many non-STEM work roles, and many of those roles will benefit our economy.
What is alarming, however, is how many young people don’t even get as far as the initial STEM degree. Carnevale and his team estimate that our K–12 educational system turns out enough students with initial STEM skills to fill the labor market’s need for STEM-skilled workers, but more than 75 percent of them do not go on to develop their potential by majoring in STEM subjects. Furthermore, of those who do major in STEM subjects, 38 percent switch to another subject or drop out of college. This is twice the combined attrition rate for all other subjects.
An article last week in The New York Times investigated the reasons for this massive leak in the collegiate STEM pipeline. The main reason seems to be the inherent difficulty of the STEM curriculums. This is not helped by the high level of competition often found there. It’s significant that the highly selective colleges, which get the best students, also have higher STEM attrition rates. Evidently, the problem is not that the students are poorly prepared or lack good work habits.
GPAs tend to be lower in the STEM majors, and grade inflation in the non-STEM majors may be part of the reason. Another factor discouraging STEM majors may be the emphasis on theory, especially in the lower-division courses. Some STEM faculty members are experimenting with using project-centered curriculums to sustain the interest of the students. The traditional engineering major leads to a senior design thesis, but for many students this opportunity to turn STEM skills to practical applications comes too late.
It’s important to understand that a specific college degree, while it provides useful quantitative evidence for researchers, does not tell the whole story about the skills a young person acquires. A friend of mine dropped out of the engineering curriculum at a highly competitive engineering school and graduated with a degree in a humanities field. He would be considered a STEM dropout, but the STEM skills he acquired in high school and during the two years of engineering curriculum that he completed served as the foundation for a very successful career in technical sales.
You may also consider me a STEM dropout. Although I gave up on a STEM career goal well before entering college, I have had a lifelong interest in science and managed to acquire enough STEM skills to hold my present job, in which I spend a lot of time (sometimes days on end) working in databases and spreadsheets, even occasionally writing programs.
As Carnevale and his team found, the need for STEM skills in non-STEM occupations (even writing!) keeps growing. Educational policymakers need to do more than just encourage students to get STEM degrees. They need to ensure that the curriculum of everyone in high school and college includes STEM subjects and imparts STEM skills.
Showing posts with label skills. Show all posts
Showing posts with label skills. Show all posts
High-Paying and Low-Paying Skills
Wednesday, July 27, 2011 0 comments
The book I’m trying to finish right now is the second edition of 150 Best Jobs for Your Skills. (I’ll be able to complete the manuscript once release 16.0 of the O*NET database becomes available.)
Like all of my other books in the Best Jobs series, this one will include a lot of lists. I intend to include some lists that show the relationship between skills and earnings, because readers can learn a lot from considering this relationship. For example, consider readers who have not decided on a particular career goal but want to prepare for a high-income career. These readers can focus on developing these high-payoff skills and feel they are doing something positive toward advancing their careers, even though their goals are not sufficiently crystallized to allow them to work on developing occupation-specific skills.
Recently I came upon an astute analysis of the relationship between skills and earnings. The urban theorist Richard Florida asked his colleagues at the Martin Prosperity Institute (at the University of Toronto) to combine data from the O*NET database about the skill requirements of occupations and data from the U.S Department of Labor about the earnings of occupations, with the goal of seeing how an increase in a skill contributes to an increase in earnings.
For the purpose of their analysis, they collapse several O*NET skills into three large skill categories: analytical skills, social intelligence skills, and physical skills. (I do something similar in my book.) Then they look at how differences in level of skill affect level of income. For example, how do the earnings for occupations requiring the 25th percentile level of analytical skill compare to earnings for occupations requiring that skill at the 75th percentile level? In this case, they found that income increased by $25,600. The difference for analytical skills is charted in the graph below. Note that the x-axis is not a time scale, as it is in most line graphs; it represents a difference in level of skill.
For social intelligence skills, the difference in income is even more dramatic. Occupations at the 75th percentile level average $34,600 more in pay than occupations at the 25th percentile level.
But note how different the effect is when the researchers look at physical skills. It turns out that working in an occupation requiring physical skill at the 75th percentile level actually reduces your income by an average of $13,600 from what it would be at the 25th percentile level.
In his blog on The Atlantic website, Richard Florida uses these findings to explain why the economic prospects of men have stagnated recently. The Great Recession threw many more men out of work than women, and even though men have been getting rehired faster than women, their long-term outlook is not as good.
For the previous edition of 150 Best Jobs for Your Skills, “I computed the average growth and job openings of the jobs with the highest percentage of women and found statistics of 14.3% growth and 59,608 openings, compared to 10.2% growth and 29,421 openings for the jobs with the highest percentage of men. This discrepancy reinforces the idea that men have had more problems than women in adapting to an economy dominated by service and information-based jobs. Many women may simply be better prepared, possessing more appropriate skills for the jobs that are now growing rapidly and have more job openings.” I expect to find a similar discrepancy when I analyze the male- and female-dominated sets of occupations that I assemble for the new edition.
This difference in skills also helps to explain some of the narrowing of the male-female wage gap. In his blog, Florida posts two graphs by the blogger Alex Tabarrok that compare changes in per capita gross domestic product (GDP) to changes in male and female wages. Both male and female wage variations track pretty closely with GDP variations until about 1975, when the male increases level off even as the female earnings continue to climb in parallel with the GDP increases. Although some of this difference can be explained by the increase in female participation in the labor force, a lot is probably caused by the better match between the skills of female workers and the requirements of the new economy.
The lesson here for both men and women is that it pays to develop analytical and social intelligence skills. For greater detail about the skill requirements of high-paying jobs with good outlook, see the next edition of 150 Best Jobs for Your Skills.
Like all of my other books in the Best Jobs series, this one will include a lot of lists. I intend to include some lists that show the relationship between skills and earnings, because readers can learn a lot from considering this relationship. For example, consider readers who have not decided on a particular career goal but want to prepare for a high-income career. These readers can focus on developing these high-payoff skills and feel they are doing something positive toward advancing their careers, even though their goals are not sufficiently crystallized to allow them to work on developing occupation-specific skills.
Recently I came upon an astute analysis of the relationship between skills and earnings. The urban theorist Richard Florida asked his colleagues at the Martin Prosperity Institute (at the University of Toronto) to combine data from the O*NET database about the skill requirements of occupations and data from the U.S Department of Labor about the earnings of occupations, with the goal of seeing how an increase in a skill contributes to an increase in earnings.
For the purpose of their analysis, they collapse several O*NET skills into three large skill categories: analytical skills, social intelligence skills, and physical skills. (I do something similar in my book.) Then they look at how differences in level of skill affect level of income. For example, how do the earnings for occupations requiring the 25th percentile level of analytical skill compare to earnings for occupations requiring that skill at the 75th percentile level? In this case, they found that income increased by $25,600. The difference for analytical skills is charted in the graph below. Note that the x-axis is not a time scale, as it is in most line graphs; it represents a difference in level of skill.
For social intelligence skills, the difference in income is even more dramatic. Occupations at the 75th percentile level average $34,600 more in pay than occupations at the 25th percentile level.
But note how different the effect is when the researchers look at physical skills. It turns out that working in an occupation requiring physical skill at the 75th percentile level actually reduces your income by an average of $13,600 from what it would be at the 25th percentile level.
In his blog on The Atlantic website, Richard Florida uses these findings to explain why the economic prospects of men have stagnated recently. The Great Recession threw many more men out of work than women, and even though men have been getting rehired faster than women, their long-term outlook is not as good.
For the previous edition of 150 Best Jobs for Your Skills, “I computed the average growth and job openings of the jobs with the highest percentage of women and found statistics of 14.3% growth and 59,608 openings, compared to 10.2% growth and 29,421 openings for the jobs with the highest percentage of men. This discrepancy reinforces the idea that men have had more problems than women in adapting to an economy dominated by service and information-based jobs. Many women may simply be better prepared, possessing more appropriate skills for the jobs that are now growing rapidly and have more job openings.” I expect to find a similar discrepancy when I analyze the male- and female-dominated sets of occupations that I assemble for the new edition.
This difference in skills also helps to explain some of the narrowing of the male-female wage gap. In his blog, Florida posts two graphs by the blogger Alex Tabarrok that compare changes in per capita gross domestic product (GDP) to changes in male and female wages. Both male and female wage variations track pretty closely with GDP variations until about 1975, when the male increases level off even as the female earnings continue to climb in parallel with the GDP increases. Although some of this difference can be explained by the increase in female participation in the labor force, a lot is probably caused by the better match between the skills of female workers and the requirements of the new economy.
The lesson here for both men and women is that it pays to develop analytical and social intelligence skills. For greater detail about the skill requirements of high-paying jobs with good outlook, see the next edition of 150 Best Jobs for Your Skills.
Do You Mind If I Get Graphic?
Wednesday, May 18, 2011 0 comments
This week I was alerted to a skill that I had not thought about or heard about before. I was actually starting to think about this skill when I discovered that someone had already given it a name.
A journalist asked me to respond to some questions about what’s involved in career changes. In the response I composed, I wanted to call attention to my recent book The Sequel, so I emphasized the importance of accumulated knowledge. One of my purposes in that book is to balance the conventional emphasis on skills with this emphasis on knowledge, which is particularly relevant to career changers (as opposed to young people just starting out).
But the journalist specifically asked about important transferable skills, so I included a discussion that began by identifying communication skills as a key to employability. I mentioned that nonverbal skills are a significant part of these skills. When I first wrote that, I was thinking in terms of body language: being able to interpret the physical cues given off by people in conversation (or even when they’re not speaking) and being careful to project the right cues.
However, as I reread this discussion a day later I started thinking about other forms of nonverbal communication--specifically, graphics. If you follow my Twitter feed (LaurenceShatkin), you know that I’m very fond of Web postings with graphs and maps that communicate information about jobs and the state of the economy. A good example is a webpage at the Bureau of Labor Statistics that uses several kinds of colorful graphs--bar, line, pie, and scatter plot--to convey the latest statistics about women in the workforce. Because I use graphics in conference presentations and occasionally in my books, I appreciate that deciding on the most effective use of graphics is not as easy as it appears to those who haven’t tried it. Interpreting graphs also is not as easy as it sometimes appears. Interpretation obviously is a challenge if a graph is poorly composed, but even a well-organized graph can be challenging when it is based on complex concepts, such as the bar chart I found on Paul Krugman’s webpage this week, comparing the projected health-care spending of 65-year-olds under three scenarios, one of which is the budget proposed by Representative Paul Ryan. (The graphic is taken from a report by the Congressional Budget Office—PDF.)
In addition to data-based graphics, pictorial graphics can be very useful in communication. If you’ve ever played the game Pictionary, you know that levels of skill with this kind of graphic can vary widely. People who want to use this type of graphic have access to several styles, from highly realistic portraits to stylized cartoons to symbolic glyphs.
Even as I was thinking about these other nonverbal forms of communication, by pure chance I received a tweet from a friend, Nancy Millichap, about a skill called “graphicacy,” which was exactly the skill I had in mind. Think of graphicacy as analogous to literacy or numeracy. Nancy’s tweet linked to a blog entry by a geographer, Diana Stuart Sinton, which in turn referenced an article written in 2000 by two British psychologists, Frances Aldrich and Linda Sheppard: “Graphicacy”: the Fourth “R”? (PDF). The two psychologists make the case for teaching graphicacy to all schoolchildren to “equip them with a communication skill that will be useful throughout their lives.”
Obviously, some occupations require a high level of graphicacy than others. The need is greatest in occupations that involve the graphic arts or lots of data. But, like reading and writing, this is a fundamental communication skill that is needed at one level or another in all kinds of work. You will not find this among the skills in the O*NET database, but there is a case to be made for adding it.
A journalist asked me to respond to some questions about what’s involved in career changes. In the response I composed, I wanted to call attention to my recent book The Sequel, so I emphasized the importance of accumulated knowledge. One of my purposes in that book is to balance the conventional emphasis on skills with this emphasis on knowledge, which is particularly relevant to career changers (as opposed to young people just starting out).
But the journalist specifically asked about important transferable skills, so I included a discussion that began by identifying communication skills as a key to employability. I mentioned that nonverbal skills are a significant part of these skills. When I first wrote that, I was thinking in terms of body language: being able to interpret the physical cues given off by people in conversation (or even when they’re not speaking) and being careful to project the right cues.
However, as I reread this discussion a day later I started thinking about other forms of nonverbal communication--specifically, graphics. If you follow my Twitter feed (LaurenceShatkin), you know that I’m very fond of Web postings with graphs and maps that communicate information about jobs and the state of the economy. A good example is a webpage at the Bureau of Labor Statistics that uses several kinds of colorful graphs--bar, line, pie, and scatter plot--to convey the latest statistics about women in the workforce. Because I use graphics in conference presentations and occasionally in my books, I appreciate that deciding on the most effective use of graphics is not as easy as it appears to those who haven’t tried it. Interpreting graphs also is not as easy as it sometimes appears. Interpretation obviously is a challenge if a graph is poorly composed, but even a well-organized graph can be challenging when it is based on complex concepts, such as the bar chart I found on Paul Krugman’s webpage this week, comparing the projected health-care spending of 65-year-olds under three scenarios, one of which is the budget proposed by Representative Paul Ryan. (The graphic is taken from a report by the Congressional Budget Office—PDF.)
In addition to data-based graphics, pictorial graphics can be very useful in communication. If you’ve ever played the game Pictionary, you know that levels of skill with this kind of graphic can vary widely. People who want to use this type of graphic have access to several styles, from highly realistic portraits to stylized cartoons to symbolic glyphs.
Even as I was thinking about these other nonverbal forms of communication, by pure chance I received a tweet from a friend, Nancy Millichap, about a skill called “graphicacy,” which was exactly the skill I had in mind. Think of graphicacy as analogous to literacy or numeracy. Nancy’s tweet linked to a blog entry by a geographer, Diana Stuart Sinton, which in turn referenced an article written in 2000 by two British psychologists, Frances Aldrich and Linda Sheppard: “Graphicacy”: the Fourth “R”? (PDF). The two psychologists make the case for teaching graphicacy to all schoolchildren to “equip them with a communication skill that will be useful throughout their lives.”
Obviously, some occupations require a high level of graphicacy than others. The need is greatest in occupations that involve the graphic arts or lots of data. But, like reading and writing, this is a fundamental communication skill that is needed at one level or another in all kinds of work. You will not find this among the skills in the O*NET database, but there is a case to be made for adding it.
My Advice to PhDs in the Humanities
Wednesday, November 24, 2010 0 comments
Last week I was invited by the Career Services office at Rutgers University to be part of a panel speaking to humanities PhD candidates about careers outside of academia. I was at the receiving end of a similar panel discussion many years ago, when my PhD degree was new, so I was happy to pay back the debt I owed. I’ll give you the gist of what I said last week.
Your career will change many times during your working lifetime, and you will find ways to pursue interests you don’t expect to pursue. You also will find the need to develop new abilities and use abilities you don’t realize you have. But your immediate need is to find a job that matches the interests and abilities that you can identify now. You should start by clarifying these interests and abilities.
The panelists I listened to when I was a new PhD referred to a career-development book that helped me but that now is definitely showing its age. I’d rather you buy my books, but I’ll explain to you what specific career-development exercise in that book helped me. Take a sheet of paper and divide it into three columns. In the leftmost column, write the names of some jobs you have held or work-relevant accomplishments. In my case, I had done some college teaching and had written my dissertation. In the middle column, write the major tasks that you did in these jobs. Regarding the dissertation, I mentioned settling on a topic, identifying research resources, taking notes on research, organizing the notes, organizing what I wanted to write, and so forth. In the rightmost column, identify the skills you used to accomplish these tasks. Then notice which skills turn up most often and decide which you enjoyed using most. That should point toward your goals for your next job.
In my case, I realized for the first time that teaching did not satisfy me as much as researching and writing. That became my job target. At this time, my wife was working at Educational Testing Service and was passing on to me the job postings that she considered relevant to my background. I rejected two of these because they didn’t fit this new career goal, but the third was for a job researching and writing about careers for the SIGI computer-based career information system. I’ve been doing variations on this job ever since.
However, I’ve had to develop many new skills along the way. One of these is working with technology. In the early days of the SIGI system, we typed up information and handed the paper to the person who operated the ridiculously complex mainframe text-entry program. After a couple of years, I was given the responsibility of developing a database about college majors and learned a crude text-editing program. But the technical specifications for the database kept changing, and I needed an efficient way to be able to manipulate the text to match. My boss convinced me to take a computer-based course in BASIC to learn the skills to do this. Several years later I took three one-day courses, paid for by ETS, to learn Microsoft Access, a skill I still use almost every workday. I taught myself Excel from a manual.
I had struggled with math in high school and had avoided it in college, so I had assumed I’d never find a workplace use for my interest in technology. But now I was able to find an outlet for this interest and develop the appropriate skills. I’ve also needed to develop my writing skills in ways that I didn’t expect. Writing the narrative screens (as opposed to career information) to develop the SIGI PLUS system, I had to find ways to get my points across and extract input from users in an interactive format with highly limited space. Once ETS decided to get out of the career development business, I had to learn a different style to write books for JIST, my current employer. Actually, writing for JIST demands not one style but several. My recent book 2011 Career Plan called for a pushy style quite different from what I’d used previously, and I needed to use a simplified style for the Quick Green Jobs Guide and other booklets in that series.
As a JIST author, I also have needed to develop skills related to promoting my writing, such as the ability to make a good impression in a television interview.
Our economy does not have many obvious career paths for humanities PhDs, or in some cases the obvious careers don’t have a good outlook. When you look for work, it probably will help you to think not in terms of occupations but in terms of skills you want to use. I was not looking for “career information developer” as a job, and I would have missed the opportunity at ETS if I had confined my job-hunting to the obvious research-and-writing occupations such as journalist. You can increase your options if you avoid stereotyping yourself with a pat occupational label.
Because your career path is not obvious, your career is going to have many ups and downs. When you encounter adversity, don’t lose faith in your long-term prospects. When I was downsized from ETS, my 16-year-old daughter said to me, “Think of this as an adventure, Dad.” And it does help to put your career downturns into the larger context of the narrative arc of your life. Think of your immediate career difficulties as a plot complication and not as a tragic denouement.
The other really important lesson to take away is the importance of networking for finding jobs. Although I found my job at ETS through a job posting, this is no longer the most effective method. I found my job at JIST through networking with a JIST author whom I knew from a professional association. I started as a consultant, preparing the data-intense content for books, and I gradually increased the amount of prose I wrote and the number of hours I worked for JIST.
In my panel presentation at Rutgers, I discussed networking at greater length, but I’m not going to discuss that here because it would duplicate other blog entries.
My story was not greatly different from what the other panelists had to say. Although the specifics of their careers differed from mine, we all pursued new interests and developed new skills over the course of our careers, and we got hired for almost all of our jobs through networking. Humanities PhDs have tremendous potential for rewarding careers if they are willing to do the work (which never ends) of discovering and fulfilling their potential.
Your career will change many times during your working lifetime, and you will find ways to pursue interests you don’t expect to pursue. You also will find the need to develop new abilities and use abilities you don’t realize you have. But your immediate need is to find a job that matches the interests and abilities that you can identify now. You should start by clarifying these interests and abilities.
The panelists I listened to when I was a new PhD referred to a career-development book that helped me but that now is definitely showing its age. I’d rather you buy my books, but I’ll explain to you what specific career-development exercise in that book helped me. Take a sheet of paper and divide it into three columns. In the leftmost column, write the names of some jobs you have held or work-relevant accomplishments. In my case, I had done some college teaching and had written my dissertation. In the middle column, write the major tasks that you did in these jobs. Regarding the dissertation, I mentioned settling on a topic, identifying research resources, taking notes on research, organizing the notes, organizing what I wanted to write, and so forth. In the rightmost column, identify the skills you used to accomplish these tasks. Then notice which skills turn up most often and decide which you enjoyed using most. That should point toward your goals for your next job.
In my case, I realized for the first time that teaching did not satisfy me as much as researching and writing. That became my job target. At this time, my wife was working at Educational Testing Service and was passing on to me the job postings that she considered relevant to my background. I rejected two of these because they didn’t fit this new career goal, but the third was for a job researching and writing about careers for the SIGI computer-based career information system. I’ve been doing variations on this job ever since.
However, I’ve had to develop many new skills along the way. One of these is working with technology. In the early days of the SIGI system, we typed up information and handed the paper to the person who operated the ridiculously complex mainframe text-entry program. After a couple of years, I was given the responsibility of developing a database about college majors and learned a crude text-editing program. But the technical specifications for the database kept changing, and I needed an efficient way to be able to manipulate the text to match. My boss convinced me to take a computer-based course in BASIC to learn the skills to do this. Several years later I took three one-day courses, paid for by ETS, to learn Microsoft Access, a skill I still use almost every workday. I taught myself Excel from a manual.
I had struggled with math in high school and had avoided it in college, so I had assumed I’d never find a workplace use for my interest in technology. But now I was able to find an outlet for this interest and develop the appropriate skills. I’ve also needed to develop my writing skills in ways that I didn’t expect. Writing the narrative screens (as opposed to career information) to develop the SIGI PLUS system, I had to find ways to get my points across and extract input from users in an interactive format with highly limited space. Once ETS decided to get out of the career development business, I had to learn a different style to write books for JIST, my current employer. Actually, writing for JIST demands not one style but several. My recent book 2011 Career Plan called for a pushy style quite different from what I’d used previously, and I needed to use a simplified style for the Quick Green Jobs Guide and other booklets in that series.
As a JIST author, I also have needed to develop skills related to promoting my writing, such as the ability to make a good impression in a television interview.
Our economy does not have many obvious career paths for humanities PhDs, or in some cases the obvious careers don’t have a good outlook. When you look for work, it probably will help you to think not in terms of occupations but in terms of skills you want to use. I was not looking for “career information developer” as a job, and I would have missed the opportunity at ETS if I had confined my job-hunting to the obvious research-and-writing occupations such as journalist. You can increase your options if you avoid stereotyping yourself with a pat occupational label.
Because your career path is not obvious, your career is going to have many ups and downs. When you encounter adversity, don’t lose faith in your long-term prospects. When I was downsized from ETS, my 16-year-old daughter said to me, “Think of this as an adventure, Dad.” And it does help to put your career downturns into the larger context of the narrative arc of your life. Think of your immediate career difficulties as a plot complication and not as a tragic denouement.
The other really important lesson to take away is the importance of networking for finding jobs. Although I found my job at ETS through a job posting, this is no longer the most effective method. I found my job at JIST through networking with a JIST author whom I knew from a professional association. I started as a consultant, preparing the data-intense content for books, and I gradually increased the amount of prose I wrote and the number of hours I worked for JIST.
In my panel presentation at Rutgers, I discussed networking at greater length, but I’m not going to discuss that here because it would duplicate other blog entries.
My story was not greatly different from what the other panelists had to say. Although the specifics of their careers differed from mine, we all pursued new interests and developed new skills over the course of our careers, and we got hired for almost all of our jobs through networking. Humanities PhDs have tremendous potential for rewarding careers if they are willing to do the work (which never ends) of discovering and fulfilling their potential.
Classroom Subjects versus Workplace Skills
Wednesday, November 17, 2010 0 comments
Education is supposed to prepare us for our careers, but sometimes there appears to be a disconnect between the two. While in college, we are often forced to take certain required courses although we can’t see how they can ever help us in our careers.
Some of these courses may contribute to noncareer goals in life, such as being good citizens. History and political science courses obviously serve this purpose, and I wish that some of the people who are presently shouting about the Constitution had a better grounding in those subjects. Courses in the arts and literature may contribute to our leisure-time enjoyment of these fields.
But let’s set aside these “area requirements,” as they are often called, and focus on the required courses within college majors. Even some of these seem to contribute little to preparing for the putative career goals of your major.
This is true for math courses in particular. Sometimes it seems as if everyone studies more math in college than they ever will use in their careers. I was struck by this thought as I worked on Panicked Student's Guide to Choosing a College Major: How to Confidently Pick Your Ideal Path, which is due out in April of next year.
However, there are good reasons why so many math courses are required.
The curriculum developers who design the majors want you to be able to understand the people you’ll work with. In many jobs, you do not use a lot of math but work with people who do, so with a background in mathematical concepts you can understand how these other workers produce their results and can tell the difference between meaningful and misleading results. You can challenge the output of those workers and ask them intelligent questions. For example, market research managers need to understand the procedures of the statisticians who design market surveys. Physicians need to understand the procedures of the medical science researchers who make new discoveries about disease processes and pharmaceuticals. Many different kinds of workers need to understand how to interpret statistics about their field, and you can’t really understand the meaning of a statistic unless you know how it was derived, including the sampling method that was used. (I’ve blogged elsewhere about the importance of the sample in studies.)
Another consideration is the hard-to-predict outcomes of your career. While you’re still in college, you may not know that you’re going to specialize in research, which requires quite a lot of math in most industries. Or you may not realize that you’re going to change careers 10 years out and will be able to retrain much faster if you have a good command of math.
Math is not the only subject that college students need more than they may realize. Employers often find that new hires are woefully deficient in verbal skills. A 2007 report (PDF) by the National Endowment for the Arts surveyed several recent studies and found “simple, consistent, and alarming” indications that the reading and writing abilities of workers are not meeting the needs of employers. A 2004 survey by The College Board of 120 corporations in the Business Roundtable found that one-third of workers fall short of employer’s expectations for writing skills. The survey also found that writing is a regular part of the job for two-thirds of all employees. So if you think that your major requires you to take more English courses than are necessary, maybe you’re not aware of what level of writing skill your career goal actually will demand. And, as with math skills, the success of an unanticipated future change in your career may hinge on your verbal skills.
Some of these courses may contribute to noncareer goals in life, such as being good citizens. History and political science courses obviously serve this purpose, and I wish that some of the people who are presently shouting about the Constitution had a better grounding in those subjects. Courses in the arts and literature may contribute to our leisure-time enjoyment of these fields.
But let’s set aside these “area requirements,” as they are often called, and focus on the required courses within college majors. Even some of these seem to contribute little to preparing for the putative career goals of your major.
This is true for math courses in particular. Sometimes it seems as if everyone studies more math in college than they ever will use in their careers. I was struck by this thought as I worked on Panicked Student's Guide to Choosing a College Major: How to Confidently Pick Your Ideal Path, which is due out in April of next year.
However, there are good reasons why so many math courses are required.
The curriculum developers who design the majors want you to be able to understand the people you’ll work with. In many jobs, you do not use a lot of math but work with people who do, so with a background in mathematical concepts you can understand how these other workers produce their results and can tell the difference between meaningful and misleading results. You can challenge the output of those workers and ask them intelligent questions. For example, market research managers need to understand the procedures of the statisticians who design market surveys. Physicians need to understand the procedures of the medical science researchers who make new discoveries about disease processes and pharmaceuticals. Many different kinds of workers need to understand how to interpret statistics about their field, and you can’t really understand the meaning of a statistic unless you know how it was derived, including the sampling method that was used. (I’ve blogged elsewhere about the importance of the sample in studies.)
Another consideration is the hard-to-predict outcomes of your career. While you’re still in college, you may not know that you’re going to specialize in research, which requires quite a lot of math in most industries. Or you may not realize that you’re going to change careers 10 years out and will be able to retrain much faster if you have a good command of math.
Math is not the only subject that college students need more than they may realize. Employers often find that new hires are woefully deficient in verbal skills. A 2007 report (PDF) by the National Endowment for the Arts surveyed several recent studies and found “simple, consistent, and alarming” indications that the reading and writing abilities of workers are not meeting the needs of employers. A 2004 survey by The College Board of 120 corporations in the Business Roundtable found that one-third of workers fall short of employer’s expectations for writing skills. The survey also found that writing is a regular part of the job for two-thirds of all employees. So if you think that your major requires you to take more English courses than are necessary, maybe you’re not aware of what level of writing skill your career goal actually will demand. And, as with math skills, the success of an unanticipated future change in your career may hinge on your verbal skills.
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