And hospitality major is a type of business major...just specialized. I don't think it is a less rigorous major than any other business major (but I could be wrong). I had friends who were leisure/recreation majors. ...but my friend who has really sick kids adores the child life workers in the hospitals (leisure/rec is one path to that career).
Business majors aren't rigorous to begin with...they're fluffy. The increase in fluffy majors that's concomitant with the rise in college luxury was my point: a lot of those kids aren't there because they want to learn stuff. They need a certification. There are less expensive ways to get that.
Students are told that they have to go to college to get a decent job. But a large majority of students aren't smart enough to handle a college education as it might have been defined 40 years ago. However...student loans are non-dischargable debt, and colleges and employers see opportunities there: the colleges get revenue and the employers get people who are trained in a narrow set of skills (which pushes the cost of training onto the future employee). They aren't educated in the real sense of that term, but this handicap is invisible and can be ignored (and it is a handicap, because training is narrow whereas education is broadly applicable).
I'm not devaluing work like the type you mentioned at all. NO WAY. I'm criticizing the
majors. IMO, universities and employers have created unnecessary certifications as gateways to jobs that a reasonably intelligent person could do by working his way up, with a few training workshops along the way.
Certification-degrees remind me of test prep, which is focused on a narrow range of skills. The skills acquired this way don't generalize to other areas, which makes test prep a pursuit with little long-term value. If the schools just taught subjects properly, they wouldn't need test prep beyond an hour or two the week before the test.
This is what I meant by certification-degrees being invisible handicaps. They don't teach students how to think about things in a new way and solve problems the way that a real education does.
