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Old 10-04-2012, 05:33 AM
Daldolma Daldolma is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2010
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They're not the only courses offered, but they're the courses pursued by the vast majority of American college students. There are 60,000 STEM graduates a year in the US, out of 1.75 million college graduates per year. That's about 3.5%. For everyone else, undergraduate coursework is a joke. It's virtually impossible to fail. As it relates to the professional world, college is a testing ground to prove that you're not too incompetent to read, write, meet deadlines, and not get expelled. Again, I'm painting in broad strokes. These are generalizations. If someone graduates from Harvard with a humanities degree, they're probably well prepared for a good number of jobs in a variety of fields. But most college kids don't go to Harvard.

I'd also quibble with the notion that undergraduate STEM degrees are all that much more difficult. The knowledge, and theoretically the grading, should be more absolute, but most STEM courses grade on curves that effectively set your difficulty at a peer-equivalence standing. Don't be the weakest in the herd and you pass.

But regardless of difficulty, I don't really see what your point is. That graduating with an engineering major is so difficult that you are entitled to a job within the field, by sheer virtue of the fact that you graduated with a degree in that field? Of course that's not true. Like any other field, you need to be competitive with your peers to get a quality job. But the world is not exactly closed off to STEM graduates. You're a college graduate, like everyone else -- you can get jobs in other fields, like everyone else. The point is that your degree doesn't really mean all that much. It's a good investment relative to not having a college degree, but it's no guarantee of the successful career path that college degrees used to ensure. And it's certainly no guarantee that you'll be able to pay off significant college loan money in any kind of reasonable time frame.