Economy Exacerbates College Students' Stress : NPR

NPR recently ran an interesting interview of the current studies of American college students.  It's somewhat inaccurately titled  Economy Exacerbates College Students' Stress : NPR but it really deals with current students, what they're studying and their views towards their studies.

View from the classroom of the S.H. Knight Building at the University of Wyoming, in the mid 1980s.

I found the interview to be pretty interesting, and it's another NPR Talk of the Nation broadcast that sort of roughly fits into the topics addressed here.  What the speaker maintains is that, due to the current economic situation, the current crop of college students had determined to major in fields of study that appear likely to have direct application to employment when they get out. That is, rather than study something that may be closer to their heart, they're majoring in fields that appear likely to be convertible into post graduation employment.

In terms of long term trends, which we try to track here, this is an interesting one, although I frankly wonder if the trend noted in the newstory  is somewhat exaggerated by their observations as it seems to me that university as a vocational training ground has been far more common than supposed.  What I think is accurate, although also somewhat exaggerated in the story, is that a college degree in general had more value in decades past. That is, as noted earlier here, any college degree tended to translate into white collar employment at one time.  Liberal Arts degrees, for example, at one time did open the door to office employment. This is certainly no longer true to the same extent. Now, with college degrees in general being much, much, more common than they once were, employers are going to take into account the nature of the degree itself. Therefore degrees that are real degrees, but with low relatedness to a field of employment, aren't going to mean very much to an employer.  A business employer probably wants some sort of closely related degree to be reflected for an applicant so, for example, a BA in History probably doesn't mean all that much to somebody seeking to fill an entry level managerial office position.  Or at least it won't if that same employer can choose somebody with a business degree, or something similiar.

The story also notes that the current crop of college students are attempting to tailor their studies to fields with readily available jobs. That seems to reflect my own college experience, however, of over 20 years ago, so I don't know how recent of trend that really is.  Perhaps that just reflects what people do when there's a shortage of jobs, which there was, locally, at that time.  Perhaps that also reflects the fact that I went to a state college that had its origin as a land grant college.  Land grant colleges had a vocational origin in and of themselves and were not originally seeking to compete with the big liberal arts colleges.  Now, of course, any university has expanded from that original purpose, but it probably still reflects itself to some degree in the programs at any one school. The University of Wyoming, for example, had really strong geology and petroleum engineering programs when I was there in the 1980s, and this had been the case for decades.  I'd suspect that this remains the case now.  The Agriculture Department at UW was excellent, and likely remains so.  This all reflects the nature of the regional economy, and the origins of the schools. It probably also reflects what people are taking in terms of courses, however. with the two sides of that coin supporting each other.

On a perhaps somewhat related note, in terms of long term trends, if this newstory is correct it cuts against a common recent observation that the newest generation entering the workforce has had low employer loyalty and high expectations.  This has been a very common observation by many in recent years, with there being many observations that new college educated employees expect high wages, good benefits, and not to have to work too many hours. The ABA Journal and Blogs had a lot of observations of that type a few years ago, frequently noting that new law school grads rapidly left their initial employers, or even the field of law entirely, with little angst.  There was even a muted degree of distress over the observation.  And this observation wasn't unique to the field of law.   Now, however, we seem to see the opposite being the case, with the very newest college educated work applicants simply hoping to get a job in general and, therefore, with a heightened emphasis on having marketable skills.  So perhaps things were more tied to economic conditions, as opposed to cultural ones, than people supposed.