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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26048 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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Plenty of female-oriented degrees such as psychology, behavioral science, speech pathology, etc. require a Masters in order to really start working in the field. Seemingly, most of the people who study those majors just aren't aware of this.

I'm unsure whether these women just haven't googled the most basic facts of the career they'll spend their next 4-6 years pursuing, or whether they're semi-deliberately deluding themselves.

Do you have any statistics here? It looks like 82% of men and 70% of women are employed full time after college, and 3% of both are unemployed, so it's weird how gendered you're choosing to frame this. In my personal experience, suppressing/repressing your future after college is quite common and pretty ungendered.

That 12% gap seems pretty large to me (presumably it's mostly driven by motherhood). But OP was talking about working in a particular field, not employment more generally. We should expect college graduates (who are smarter than average) to mostly be gainfully employed. That's different from studying Psychology and actually getting a job as a therapist or whatever.

I agree it'd be nice to have a "job in your field" statistic. It'd be nice if OP would provide one before baselessly claiming that one gender is delusional.

"Job in your field" is the wrong metric - there are a lot of jobs which require "any degree" which are clearly graduate-class jobs with the social standing that implies but which are not "in your field" for most of the people doing them. The relevant test is "Job which requires a degree".

The social contract was that university guaranteed a white-collar job and middle-class status, not that it guaranteed that you could follow your dream. Middle managers at Proctor & Gamble (back in the days when that was the typical non-specialist graduate career path) were not chasing a dream, other than the two-car suburban lifestyle.

It's not that women are delusional. My point is that there's a social reality we all claim to believe in, and an actual reality, and men and women who mistake one for the other get hurt. The social reality is that college is purely about education and pursuing your dreams. Women who buy into this fail to get married quickly enough, and men who buy into it pick suboptimal careers.

I'm unsure whether these women just haven't googled the most basic facts of the career they'll spend their next 4-6 years pursuing, or whether they're semi-deliberately deluding themselves. My guess is the latter.

Being evenhanded with "both genders that fall into this trap are negatively impacted" is fine. When you claim that women are the ones who predominantly actually fall into the trap, you are making an inflammatory claim made without evidence.

You didn't understand my post at all.

The cited text describes women who didn't fall for the trap.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics provides some "jobs in field of degree" statistics here. For example, among workers with psychology degrees, the top occupation groups are "management" (15 %), "community and social service" (13 %), "educational instruction and library" (13 %), "healthcare practitioners and technicians" (11 %), and "office and administrative support" (9 %).

Well I can't speak for psychology majors, but as someone who was dumb enough to major in history there are virtually zero jobs in history outside of actually teaching history (either in grade school or university). I majored in history but went on to become a software dev. My dad majored in history but spent his whole career doing insurance claims adjustment. My grandpa majored in history and spent his whole career as an electrician. My older brother was dumb enough to get a whole ass PhD in history, and somehow managed to land one of the tiny, tiny number of actual history jobs that aren't teaching jobs.

I've always thought of this as a class issue. The educated class imparts the knowledge of which degrees are ok to their kids while the working class gets taken for a ride by the education industrial complex, ending up with useless or unfinished degrees, a bunch of debt, a sense of failure and missed earnings.

I've always thought most psychology degrees(and communications etc) are backup plans for when more rigorous degrees don't work out, not a first choice.

Recalling college: many young women's first and only choice is a psychology degree.

It isn’t merely which degrees but which schools, how to get into schools, etc etc.

Uh, the USA doesn’t have a job market which strongly discriminates on the basis of where your degree came from- everything that isn’t an Ivy or a state flagship is basically interchangeable until you get to the very bottom.

  1. There are schools that don’t meet either of those definitions that matter (eg Chicago, Georgetown, Duke, Vandy, Northwestern).

  2. Good schools also matter to getting into professional school.

I'm not even sure what I would be looking for. I've known quite a few women who claim to have been taken by surprise by Master's degree requirements for their desired jobs, and no men. These women generally finish with a Bachelor's and enter the workforce doing something only somewhat related to their major.

I looked for surveys asking about how well people understood the educational requirements for their chosen careers and didn't find any.

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