Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Free tuition at US public Universities?

An economics major from one of them would earn, technically, a "liberal arts" degree.

My own undergraduate chemistry degree is one of those. It's a B.S. degree, not liberal arts, but I did have to complete the same Liberal Arts core as everyone else, and it was definitely not trivial (two years of foreign language, fine arts at the 300+ level, etc.). So how would someone like that be classified for the purposes of that particular analysis?

Interesting. No one from my college would be labelled as having a degree in liberal arts. People have a degree in economics or a degree in biochemistry or a degree in English.

It is about the realities of the job market, not what someone wants them to be.

Holy toledo, what a dog's breakfast of statistics and correlation fallacy THAT is.

"Unclear?" Is that ever a polite euphemism. Unclear what any of it means, from that.

Though I suppose the high unemployment numbers at the outset (and from what cohort is this, anyway?? Times are far different than they were 30+ years back); that probably has a profound impact on lifetime earnings. Hey-- there's a thought. Maybe LIFETIME earnings is the right comparison.

How about apples to apples? Maybe a table with some data in it would have been clearer.

This doesn't even begin to address the problems inherent in the semantics in this-- where at some institutions "Liberal Arts" means anything that is a BA degree and includes a gen-ed core, and at others, comprises a balanced and thoughtful, intentional course of instruction. "Humanities" is "Liberal Arts" at a good number of institutions, as well. At some public undergraduate colleges, Social Sciences doesn't even have its own division/college, and could be counted as either of the above.

Where is this data even FROM?? Who is reporting the values?

The study analyzed public use files from the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey for 2010 and 2011. These files include information related to the education and occupation of about 3 million US residents between the ages of 21 and 65. The report authors grouped together for purposes of comparison college graduates with four-year degrees in a humanities or social science field (e.g. philosophy, history, or sociology) and compared the employment status of these individuals with that of three other groups: those with degrees in a professional or pre-professional field (e.g. nursing or business), those with a degree in science or mathematics (e.g. chemistry or biology), and those with a degree in engineering.

*The term “liberal arts” is used in the report as a description for majors in the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

course in instruction in what? What are you qualified to do? That is the question employers are asking. If you want a job, what skill set are you bringing to the table?

You come out of computer science, you can write code. You come out of materials engineering, you can work on new materials.

Newly minted university graduates who have landed coveted jobs on Wall Street may have impressive résumés and sought-after references. But often, nuts-and-bolts skills like spreadsheet building and database extraction are not part of university curriculums.

When millions of dollars can be won or lost on one calculation, firms are finding it essential that their new hires can tell the difference between a pivot table and a header row.

Enter specialized boot camps where — for fees that sometimes exceed $1,000 a day — would-be masters of the universe can perfect Excel modeling techniques and financial analysis. Each year, tens of thousands of students at the nation’s top business schools, and scores of new hires at financial firms, including Goldman Sachs and the Blackstone Group, now take courses run by companies like Training the Street and Wall Street Prep.

Graduates say the classes give them a new appreciation for the heart of financial analysis. An eight-hour crash course on leveraged buyouts from Training the Street was so intensive that it “kind of makes you want to slit your wrists,” said Michael Rojas, who graduated from Columbia Business School this month.

But over all, Mr. Rojas said, the training was thorough. “This is the stuff you really need to know, and that you don’t learn in business school,” he said. “They have a template model, and they walk you through page by page.”

...

The training does not come cheap. Business schools pay Training the Street as much as $1,300 a student for a course. Wall Street Prep, also used by most top business schools and more than 150 banks and financial firms, charges corporate clients as much as $1,499 per student for a three-day course.

Darin Oduyoye, a spokesman for JPMorgan, said that the bank uses both companies for things like basic training for new associates and helping analysts prepare for licensing exams. “We also obviously augment these training and development opportunities with our own in-house programs,” Mr. Oduyoye said.

In June, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil, and banks involved in the energy business, will send about 15 new or recent hires to a three-day course in New York run by Wall Street Prep on valuing oil and gas companies.

These programs are also courting ever-younger students, and their parents’ wallets. In June, Training the Street will start a four-day Undergraduate Wall Street Boot Camp in New York and will charge students $3,000 (not including accommodations) to learn the basics of financial modeling, valuation and analysis. Wall Street Prep, widely viewed as more intensive on analytics, sells CD-ROMs for $39, for a basic Excel course, and as much as $499 for a “premium package” detailing financial modeling.