Students are typically directed, either intentionally or through coercion of other students, into the majors that are "in" at their school. At Yale vast numbers of students are English and history majors despite the fact that there is no call for such majors in the job market. They decide on these majors because it is well known that the faculty at Yale in these areas is first rate. Students at Yale have absorbed the ethic that a liberal education is what matters, not job potential. I was once booed at a meeting where department chairs advertised their departments to freshman when I said "major in computer science and you'll get a job when you graduate." This was not the zeitgeist at Yale. College education at Yale is the same as it was in the nineteenth century, a place to study the classics. Fortunately, the students of that era had daddy's business to go into. Today, students get the same advice, but find themselves with only law school to attend when they graduate.

JB: There appears to be dissatisfaction in corporate America with the students of many universities. How do employers view the graduates?

SCHANK: The dissatisfaction is real enough but the blame is often oddly placed. What would employers like students to know that they don't know?

Corporations across America worry about students knowing basic business concepts (like accounting), knowing about how to work in teams, knowing how to write well, make oral presentations, and generally knowing how and why businesses work. But, where would students learn all this? Even a major in business might not learn all these things, and most universities discourage undergraduate majors in business. So, a student interested in business is likely to major in economics where he learns about macro and micro economic systems and learns next to nothing of what I have listed above.

Of course, I am not recommending that a college education ought to be proper training in business. (Although the idea that, in our world, understanding business is considerably less important that understanding Dickens is of some mystery to me.) The problem is really with the conception of a liberal education and the monopoly on education that is held by those who have that conception. Students think they should go to college to get a job and colleges think students are there for some other reason entirely. A compromise might be nice. Colleges do have some obligation to raise the consciousness of students beyond their initial aspirations. On the other hand they also have the obligation to respect the practical exigencies that are extant in today's world.

Political science majors presumably want to work in politics and usually do not want to work on the theory of political systems. Psychology majors presumably are interested in the mind and might want to work in health related fields and are not likely to become experimental psychologists. Do these fields care about this when they design their curricula? You bet they don't. Professors often share the idea that they are really training their students to become academics like themselves and that their job is to cater to the one or two students who show promise in that regard. All other students, those who will become practitioners in these fields, are given short shrift and not taken seriously by the curriculum committee. Individual professors can and do work around the system they have set up, but by and large the system does not enable or even care about future student employment.

JB: Given this focus on making students into mini-academics, don't colleges prepare students for graduate study? How do the graduate schools view the graduates?