I wonder what the ratings would be if so many undergrad degree holders didn’t end up in law school? Of course this might explain why about half of attorneys wish they were doing something else with their lives.
Back in the seventies the U of I History department used to produce flyers talking about the wonderful things that people who got U of I History degrees were up to. Left unsaid was the fact that their degrees usually had nothing to do with what these success stories were currently engaged in. Oh well, there is always Grad School:
I have sometimes heard that history is the best prep for law, because well-taught history students know how to analyze documents. My grandparents received their law degrees in Maryland in the days before college was required. How would returning to that tradition of “reading the law” work out?
In a way it has never ended. Law school does not teach you how to practice law. You lean that during the first few years on the job through the tried and true system of monkey see, monkey do.
History gave me a substantial advantage in Con Law, not so much in my other classes.
Anthropology/Archaeology is why I ended up a traffic engineer. Not that I still am not an avid reader and detour to visit every site or hole in the ground that I encounter.
“In a way it has never ended. Law school does not teach you how to practice law. You lean that during the first few years on the job through the tried and true system of monkey see, monkey do.”
Ain’t that the truth. I would be fine with elimination of the requirement of a law degree to sit for the bar exam. In fact, since I believe most professional licensing exams outside of medicine and engineering act as devices to restrict competition, rather than actually demonstrating competency in the basic skills of the target profession, we could likely do without the bar exam, as well. Of course, neither of these things will happen, because it would overturn far too many rice bowls.
Schooling as currently constituted serves primarily to provide cross-subsidized employment for people in the schooling industry. It’s not hard to design a much more sensible system. The vested interests who like the current system just fine would have to be dealt with quite severely. So it might happen in the Keynesian long run.
“Schooling as currently constituted serves primarily to provide cross-subsidized employment for people in the schooling industry.” That is perhaps true of the bulk of students, but I think we do a good job of training scientists and engineers. About the only improvement would be to remove some of the social studies “core curriculum” in favor of an extra math or computing course, but I’m not even sure that is a good idea. The problem is not that they have to take humanities, social studies, and freshman composition, but rather how those courses are often taught; and that is so because our generation has gone mad. There is no fix for this but to suffer the consequences.
That is perhaps true of the bulk of students, but I think we do a good job of training scientists and engineers.
You don’t need a 120 credit baccalaureate degree to do that. The longer post-baccalaureate programs to prepare for medical school are about 60 credits. Extradepartmental courses required to major in chemistry in the arts and sciences faculty I know best consist of six credits of calculus. The subject-specific course work equivalent to that for a master’s degree in chemistry could be completed in 24 months, and that would suffice for industrial employment. The one observer who complained about the amount of time frittered away in the baccalaureate degree of today was Allan Bloom, who suggested that if you weren’t going to set up a defensible core curriculum, the honest course of action would be to cut foundational tertiary schooling from four years to two, except for ‘the hardest of the hard sciences’.
That does not even address the fraud professional schools. The teacher training programs are the worst and incorporate the most consequential scandals. After these, the social work programs are next. A minor addendum would be programs in library administration. All of these can and should be replaced.