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Art is one of eight majors being ditched by university right next to two world-famous art museums
By adamg on Fri, 09/29/2023 - 11:17pm
The Simmons Voice reports Simmons University is ending eight majors, including art, French, music and philosophy, as it reorganizes to boost its programs in the sciences, business, management and the humanities, except in the majors it'll be ending.
Students currently majoring in the eight tracks will be allowed to finish out their majors - even if that means hiring part-time professors to teach classes.
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Comments
What the ROI
On a French degree in 2023? Minimum wage.
In my experience
What you major in has a fairly little correlation to pay and career. If anything, the smart and creative liberal arts people do fine.
I'm skeptical of CS majors. The best programmers I know are people with degrees in other things. Alternatively, I haven't found people with CS degrees are inherently good coders. They often lack creativity and problem solving (and social skills) that's needed to be good in the job. They just expect to make $$$ because they passed a few Java classes.
My gut feeling is that in 10 years the people with only STEM skills are going to be replaceable with AI and the people with soft skills will hold their value.
Okay boomer
International business needs translators. That's one track.
The other is that many places still put out job descriptions for admin assistants that require a bachelor's degree. I ended that at my last job, but that's the way many places *think*.
"Okay Boomer"
I find it odd that you would call someone else a boomer, when you yourself are a boomer. That's some John Costello level logic.
Absolutely Not a Boomer
1967 was the nadir of the birth dearth, honey. Absolutely GenX and absolutely treated by my husband's sibs and inlaws as if I were a child in perpetuity because ... boomers.
Depends on where the degree
Depends on where the degree is from. Get that French major from a Harvard or Williams and the Goldman Sachs and McKinseys of the world will still hire you long before considering debasing themselves so far as to interview a finance or econ major from, say, UMASS or BU, just as a Harvard Law grad who took all navel-gazing pseudo-philosophical "Law and Kantian Metaphysics" classes will get hired by Ropes or WilmerHale over the Suffolk grad who took a full slate of commercial and corporate law classes.
Elite employers tend not to care what you studied, so long as you have acceptable levels of eliteness - and the Ivies and their peers mostly graduate humanities and liberal arts majors.
.
Definitely wouldn't call Williams elite. It's just exclusive.
Williams is elite -
At least if the benchmark for elite is 'their students actively get recruited by investment banks and management consultancies regardless of major.' There are about three liberal arts colleges in the country that can say that: Williams, Amherst, and Wellesley. Go any further down the list, and being an econ or math major becomes an unspoken requirement for hiring, if not interviews. Go a little further than that - the bottom 1/2 of the NESCAC schools, say, and these companies do not come to campus and there's not a remote chance of getting hired unless you are summa cum laude econ AND you have an "in," which is the genteel way of saying an immediate family member who is a managing director of one of the firms or one of those firms' major clients.
You don't have to take my word for it; a few years back Kellogg professor Lauren Rivera wrote an entire book about the hiring proclivities and processes of consultancies, investment banks, and law firms. It's called "Pedigree," and it won academic awards in both sociology and business.
I had fun living through this version of hell as a nonelite law grad in the Great Recession.
I can only speak for art
But with Simmons being a part of Colleges of the Fenway, which allows cross-registration at MassArt, and the proximity to SMFA- a Simmons art program does feel a tad redundant.
Now do the Math…
Worth noting that half of the 8 majors being “sunsetted” are math/science, with other math and science majors being reduced to concentrations within other majors.
Some of the consolidations make sense
I'm a statistician and have no problem with undergrad Biostats and Stats being part of the math department, as long as students can concentrate in them. The first couple of years of coursework are the same for all three areas of math. Similarly, it makes sense for International Relations to be part of Poly Sci. Both of these consolidations are in line with norms at many other schools.
That said, I'm appalled at some of the majors they're getting rid of, including Music and Art.
Academic administrative puffery
Is there an administrative finishing course teaching how to spew a lot of words to hide actual motivations? The laser focus is about accepting the fact that in the dog eat dog world where the true religion of America (no matter what flavor) is moola, what moola brings, where anything not easily and obviously tied to that moola doesn't matter.
When Calvin Coolidge proclaimed,
he probably did not realize that he identified the most important factor in all American life. Not religious values (well, the Gospel of Prosperity and much of Evangelical America fits this paradigm), not international relations, not peace, love, truth and all the humanistic ballyhoo.
What makes human beings closer the angels, is that we can reflect upon ourselves. Reflection requires the capacity to know that how things are, are not the way things have to be. What makes human beings closer to animals, is the never ending search for food and protection.
Relegating the former, if not canceling it outright, and pushing the latter to the front is a subtle but profound continuation of reducing out humanity to merely being creatures that consume and produce. Not unlike what babies do when first born. Consuming things at the front end and producing what remains at the back end.