The NY Times had a recent article on Saturday (“Frayed Prospects, Despite a Degree”) and this follow up post about the lack of advice about majors
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/college-counseling-and-job-prospects/#more-165893
The problem is probably more than a lack of advice. The question is, when the advice is available, can it be trusted? Here is the comment I made.
There are two serious issues of trust involved in consulting an advisor about a major. First, on whose behalf is the advisor acting? The advisor’s job may be to keep the student enrolled in the university, in a particular school within the university, or, in a department. All of this is important to the university’s ranking (read “revenue and prestige”) and to the particular school and department’s revenue and ranking. At the “elite” (translation: good at getting good US News ranking) school where I taught for many years, it seemed that the School of Engineering was more interested in their own needs than in the students’ needs. This led them to go to great lengths to keep students in the program. This included giving students two advisors, and, even asking instructors to teach important courses as “cookbook” courses so that students who could hardly do MIT homework problems could still get A’s. (I refused and my students could do MIT problems.)
This leads to the next issue of trust. Can the students trust the education that they get – in many cases, probably not. (See my example above.) This confounds the issue of what to major in. A good education in literature and history is an excellent part of preparation for many management jobs, but this is not what most such educations are now.
The chase for revenue and rankings by universities leads them to treat students in a dishonest way. Until this problem is addressed and solved, advising won’t help like it should.
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