Preston Cooper: Students are "Learning with Their Feed" by Shunning Bad Colleges

Good.

The other aspect of this problem: lame majors.

Not: low-earning majors; but genuinely lame ones.

I'm in no way against students with genuinely scientific and scholarly interests pursuing them, despite (allegedly) dim employment prospects. In fact, I'm among those dinosaurs who think that that's what college is really for.

I knew that the job market was crap in philosophy. And I've had many colleagues and student who knew that. We all pursued it anyway.

Now, to some extent, young people are overly optimistic, and overly-inclined to think that they'll be an exception to the rule. But there's really no correcting for that--it afflicts everyone.

But: so long as a student is fully informed about the job prospects associated with a given major, they should, of course, be free to pursue it.

Also but:

Just as students should be informed about job prospects, they should be informed about scholarly and intellectual content.

There are many majors that are widely--though not universally--recognized as bullshit.

If a student wants to spend four years inhabiting some intellectual wasteland like women's studies, "gender" studies, any of the racial/ethnic studies...or, for that matter, sociology...they ought to at least be informed that the intellectual standards in such fields and pseudo-fields are notoriously low, and their content is suspect to say the least.

Philosophy, I'd say, is in the gray zone--and I tell students that. Much of it is hard and genuinely interesting. Much of it is silly bullshit. Little of it is guaranteed to be of genuine importance.

But there's a large number of majors that are not merely of little merit--they probably tend to make you dumber. A major that takes an ordinary undergraduate and simply teaches him (or, more likely, her) to make up a story about hidden racism (or sexism, or x-phobia, or WTFever), no matter what the topic under discussion, has made that student dumber than when (s)he entered college. It's analogous to a version of religious studies that merely taught students to say "God did it" or "God so wills it" regardless of the phenomenon to be explained.

I'm not saying that there should be some sort of official intellectual content ratings agency or any such thing. But much of what ought to be said, at least by someone, isn't being said by anyone--because it would be uncollegial. But this is all too important to be left unsaid--especially merely on account of politeness.

For example: Here are some made-up, almost-certainly-worse-than-useless majors (or thesis topics, or WTFever they are supposed to be):