Against Weak Majors: Universities Should Focus on What Matters

Stephen Kershnar

Winnowing Out Weak Majors

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

April 30, 2018

            Some college majors are clearly worthwhile. For others, it is less clear. With college becoming an increasingly risky investment, weaker majors should be discouraged.  

            Consider college as an investment. According to the National Student Clearinghouse, roughly half (53%) of students who in 2009 were enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities graduated within six years. Jaison Abel and Richard Dietz of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that in 2010, 62% of U.S. college graduates had a job that required a college degree. Thus, roughly a third of students who enroll in college graduate in a reasonable time and get a job that requires a college degree. According to The Institute for College Access & Success, the average college graduate who borrows money owes roughly $30,000 in loans. Many people would be hesitant to purchase an investment that cost so much, but was unlikely to generate a positive return.

  

There is also a significant opportunity cost for going to college and not graduating or graduating and being unable to find a job that requires a college degree. Giving up years of income and on-the-job training in one’s 20’s is a serious cost. This is in addition to tuition, room, and board. These costs matter to society because oftentimes other people pick up the bill. Taxpayers pay through the nose for other adults to go to colleges. Writing in The Atlantic, University of Colorado Law Professor Paul Campos reports that in 2014 the federal and state governments spent roughly $7,500 per college student ($160 billion total). Listening to college administrators whine about lack of government support involves such a break with reality that one wonders if they are sniffing glue.   

In addition, Americans as a group owe far more in college loans than they owe in credit card debt. More than one in nine people with student loans default. When they do, someone has to pick up the tab. This is usually other people who borrow money. Ominously, taxpayers back up the debt.

Enter the problem of weak majors. Weak majors have some combination of these features: lower salaries, higher unemployment, weaker students and a less important subject matter. They include art (drama, music, studio, and visual arts), communication, education, ethnic and gender studies, foreign languages, and recreation (physical fitness and, also, parks, recreation, and leisure). Stronger majors include accounting, economics, engineering, mathematics, and physics. Some majors are harder to categorize. Consider, for example, English, psychology, and sociology.

Government dollars are a scarce resource. Spending them on college major that has less value to the student who majors in them, less value to society, and less knowledge-related value results in taxpayers getting less bang for their buck. This also results in fewer dollars to spend on first responders, infrastructure, medical care, or, more importantly, to be returned to long suffering taxpayers. Federal and state governments should discourage weaker majors by lessening, if not eliminating, the number of public colleges and universities that are permitted to offer such majors, transferring some of the subsidies from students with weaker majors to those with stronger ones, and when supporting private colleges favoring those that concentrate on stronger majors.

The argument for families and professors discouraging students from declaring these majors is that they are often a poor choice for all but those who are most committed to or who most enjoy those majors. No parent wants to see her child unemployed, underemployed, or frustrated by graduating but being unable to find a suitable job. Similarly, professors want the best for their students and should advise accordingly.

According to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, the lower paid majors include the art, education, recreation, and psychology. This applies to both recent college graduates and those with significant time in the workforce. The pattern for graduate work on these fields has a similar pattern (with sociology added to the list). The unemployment rates for recent graduates for some of these fields are high, although some of them reverse course later in their career. Consider, for example, art.   

Several of these majors tend to have students with lower IQs than other majors. IQ here is estimated by average SAT scores for majors. Here, again, we see some of the usual suspects: art, communication, education, and psychology.  

Some of the more difficult calls have to do with a field’s importance to knowledge. This seems relevant in that majors in comedy, martial arts, and sex might be popular, but lack content that is sufficiently important. Subjects such as English, psychology, and sociology are important to our knowledge of ourselves as people, animals, and members of groups. On some accounts, although not ones that focus on economic value, the importance of a field of study in part makes it worthwhile, even if it has a lower return on investment than other fields.

The weaker fields are sometimes ones that depend on other fields. For example, communication does not have its own body of knowledge or methodology, but instead depends on other fields such as economics, literature, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. The same dependency is true for education, ethnic and gender studies, and recreation. The upshot of this is that their contribution to our understanding of ourselves and the world is less than the fields on which they depend. Some of the fields (consider, for example, gender and ethnic studies) focus in part on social justice and activism, which detracts from their value. Still other fields, such as foreign languages, not only depend on other fields, but also teach skills readily available in the market.

Lavish education buffets cost real money. The people who pay some, or all, of the bill should ensure that the buffet excludes substandard dishes. They should do so by discouraging majors that are less valuable to the students who major in them, less valuable to society, and that have less knowledge-related value.