A World Without English Majors? Why Colleges Should Tell Students About Job Prospects Before They Commit
Recent college grads still looking for full-time employment—or faced with the prospect of moving back home to live with mom and dad—are probably cursing their English and philosophy degrees. But while they're sending out resumes and getting rejected, in May there were 2.6 million unfilled jobs. The problem is that many of those positions are in science and tech—fields that most grads simply aren't prepared to enter. Now officials in the United Kingdom are proposing an interesting solution to the mismatch between majors and job prospects.
They plan to require colleges to collect data about the employment and salary prospects of each degree. That way, majors with a poor employment track record will be "named and shamed" and the degrees with the worst records several years in a row would eventually be axed.
