The College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) students are getting a bum rap. Even before the bad economy lowered the job prospects for graduates, these students faced ridicule for studying easy majors for years.
When the recession hit, the ridicule bloomed. However, there is no college, department, field or major that guarantees a young student employment in today’s market. Nurses are coming back into the workforce, lawyers won’t retire, hospitals are overstocked with physicians and businesses don’t want to hire.
Somewhere in the middle are students in CLASS. These are students who study languages, psychology, politics, economics, health and human performance, and yes, these are the students who study art.
These same students face criticism for not going into computer science, biomedical science, chemistry or engineering.
The negative stereotype emerges because most of what is studied in CLASS isn’t quantifiable. Even the social research of political science and psychology have no true scientific method — when you’re studying people, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Not to be cliché, but isn’t quality more important than quantity?
To concede a few things: It is true that, because of demand, science, technology, engineering and mathematics students have better chances of finding employment than CLASS students.
Likewise, STEM majors will have a better chance at high pay. According to payscale.com, engineering and computer science majors are at the top ten for 2011 to 2012 salaries.
However, these are umbrella generalizations. Economics majors were above majors like mathematics and biochemistry. And political science was above information technology and architecture.
In a nutshell, CLASS students might face more competition in the career they want, and their salary might not be the highest.
Many of the criticisms of Liberal Arts and Social Science majors are just stereotypes. The most frequent one is that CLASS majors don’t work as hard as STEM majors, that they won’t contribute to society and that they’re lazy rich kids who can’t hack it in the hard sciences.
These critics probably never spent hours upon hours digging through the library in order to stitch together a 10 page research paper on the history of Anarchy in 20th century Spain.
They probably never poured over dozens of mathematical formulas in order to prove or disprove a null hypothesis during a psychology statistics class. And the critics probably didn’t study a second language during college.
Furthermore, most of these critics probably don’t realize that most psychotherapists, lawyers, judges, politicians, reporters, writers and the hundreds of faceless people in non-profit groups are former CLASS majors.
You might know students who have these criticisms of CLASS majors. These are the students who stopped taking political science after 1337, who sat in the back of the auditorium on their laptop, loudly complaining to their friends about the boring professor.
The next time someone criticizes CLASS, ask them to define the terms. A true critic would accurately say that Liberal Arts is about a broad introduction to the arts, Social Sciences and humanities. A cop-out would be saying something about junk science and easy grades.
The truth is that CLASS majors are at a disadvantage; there is less demand for them, they get less respect and less instant gratification.
Students in these majors will have to work harder to prove their worth, not only to the job market, but to society at large. But these students know that this is all worth it in the end.
David Haydon is a political science senior and may be reached at [email protected].
I think you missed 2 of the biggest reasons for the "no love." One, spending "hours upon hours digging through the library in order to stitch together a 10 page research paper on the history of Anarchy in 20th century Spain" seems frivilous to someone researching protein synthesis in pre-cancerous cells, vibrations in building structures, or information asymmetry in market transactions. Sure, researching anarchy in 20th century Spain might be interesting, but what does that effort accomplish? STEM and Businsess students have a hard time understanding the point of it when everything they study has real world application and demand.
And two (admittedly stereotyping here), the loudest crys of "there are no jobs for college graduates" often come from those who majored in subjects that have no, or very few, job prospects. You mention that class majors go on to be writers (tough job market), reporters (worse job market), and lawyers (market in free fall – many coming out of law school $150k in debt w/ no job prospects), but as parenthetically noted, the prospects in these fields aren't good. I wish you luck and I hope it is worth it (like you said). Just don't expect a ton of sympathy if you complain about there being no jobs for college grads.
Maybe it's because successfully studying something like anarchy in 20th century Spain requires foreign language or translation skills, critical thinking, finding and weighing sources and coherent writing and argument making. It's simply a different skillset than studying protein synthesis or structural engineering — one isn't necessarily better or smarter than the other. These skills are why a number of CLASS students don't just wind up in the media or legal field, but also in fields like sales and account management, marketing, nonprofit management, social work, human resources and supply-chain logistics, among others. In reality, for most non-technical jobs the degree is not the most important pre-requisite — it's networking.
As an Econ major, I find the 'CLASS is lazy' argument annoying and misguided. I study calculus based analysis in one class and learn about agricultural development in another. There are several subjects that are both quantitative and qualitative in nature, and also have job prospects after graduation.
Additionally, several students major in liberal arts in preparation for grad school. Liberal arts teach students how to reason and analyze, among other skills besides just reading about topics like Greek mythology or 19th century psychology.
As a sociology graduate student, let me tell you that many Liberal Arts subjects have both qualitative and quantitative aspects. I am primarily a qualitative researcher, focusing on comparative studies of religious and political terrorism (which is no simple matter), but in the course of getting my MA I have also studied such complex subjects as social epidemiology and world-wide distributions of harmful industrial pollutants. I may not discover the cure for cancer, but I probably have a better chance at influencing public policy than some lab tech. My point is, don't judge a subject based on an intro class. Everything has its place and purpose.
Jared and StayCLASSy – You both make excellent points regarding your respective fields. However, I think most of the "no love" is directed at the traditional liberal arts (philosophy, english lit, etc…), not the social sciences. But, because UH chose to lump social sciences in with liberal arts for adminstrative purposes, the social science students at UH often get painted with the "no love" brush that isn't intended for them.
When I was working on my MS at Bauer, I took Econ 6342 – Phd Microtheory and it was easily the most difficult class I ever took.
Lastly, from what I witnessed, "lazy" is not an attribute I would assign to the students of CLASS – liberal arts or social sciences. Anyone making that argument is speaking from a position of ignorance.
Less instant gratification?
I disagree. As an engineering student I had to study long hours to be able to make decent grades. I passed up on many social events and parties because it this. That's not instant gratification, I was always stressed out and tired during midterms and finals.
Now, I won't generalize and say that engineering is the most demanding field of study because I know that majors like architecture and music performance are very rigorous as well, and I know that difficulty is relative to each person's ability. That being said, my friends majoring in creative writing and psychology partied a LOT harder than I did, because they had the time to.
Instant gratification, no.
True. The OP is sadly mistaken if he thinks that an engineering degree is by any measure "instant gratification". If he means that engineering students are more likely to get jobs right out of college and equates that with "instant gratification" he is being childish. That's like saying, a person was instantly gratified as soon he climbed on top of Mount Everest, disregarding the years of physical training and the actual feat itself. Narrow minded thinking if you ask me.
With all due respect.. perhaps CLASS students should first try to understand what STEM students go through during their time in college. I understand that blank check generalizations should not be made about any major but the fact of the matter remains that as an engineering student I could get a masters in a CLASS degree and do fairly well with a lot of hard work, the converse is not true. A CLASS major would find it impossible to get through a Masters in Engineering degree. There is a reason for that. Yes liberal arts is a gateway to graduate school but the point of the criticism is that: if someone wants to become a doctor — take Bio-medical Engineering (instead of Pre-Med or Music…… etc) – If someone wants to become a lawyer – atleast go to business school and for that matter if you want to get MBA — go get an undergraduate degree in Industrial Engineering. This country NEEDS engineers but it has a surplus of CLASS majors.
I think there are alot of misguided statements made in all of these responses. Yes, STEM is more difficult than CLASS (if your arguing against that point then you've been mislead). However, everyone has their gifts, and CLASS has its place in society but some , not all CLASS majors, choose CLASS because its easier, rather than choosing something they like to do. However, there are people who choose STEM majors like engineering because they want to get into a field with a higher earning potential.
In my opinion, this is just as bad as someone taking the easy route. You should always live up to your potential, and you should always pursue a career you'll enjoy. CLASS students can choose a challenging curriculum, and STEM students can choose to see past the dollar signs. Study the assortment of successful and fulfilled individuals in this country and you will see a whole spectrum of skills, majors, and types of people represented, The common factors are: drive-to overcome obstacles, passion-to create new and desirable objects or concepts, insight-to anticipate the future of society, and other qualities that come from constantly being challenged and facing their fear of failure. Some majors inherently have these challenges built-in to the curriculum, but still it is necessary for individuals to choose their own path to success and set a challenging pace to get there.
The disregard for CLASS is quite ridiculous, and I simply do not understand people coming and saying STEM is more difficult than CLASS or vice versa. If you major at a CLASS subject the core of your studies is the human or human organization.
You can go on days end thinking about the human organization, comparing different theories thinking what fits where. We are using the scientific methods these intellectual tools help us to understand the world we live in. People coming from this end of the sciences are supposed to be the leaders and organizers of our civilized world. It’s not a simple matter to identify and analyze different sets of human problems and to find sustainable solutions for them.
I have often, as it happens, talked with engineers and chemists and upon them hearing my scientific background some of them usually get eager for a debate. It’s amazing that people from such background try to lecture me on politics and economics. Imagine that we’d put some engineers or chemists to organize our society, and to lead it. It would be as awful as having a CLASS person engineer a bridge. Yes social engineering is not a very simple matter! There are tons of considerations that we’ll have to make. People who want CLASS people for their services want their analytical minds and the scientific methods.
We don’t stop learning the moment we put our foot outside the shelter of our University. When we go to the real world we’ll have to see what we are made of. CLASS subjects have their core focus on the human and the imaginative but real institutions and norms she creates. This division of labor gives STEM people the freedom to focus on making beautiful objects.
A poorly lead society will work as bad as a badly constructed engine.