Submission + - The Danger of Picking a Major Based on Where the Jobs Are
theodp writes: In his new book Will College Pay Off?, Wharton professor Peter Cappelli argues that banking on a specialized degree’s usefulness is risky, especially since one reason some jobs are in high demand is that no one predicted that they would be. "A few generations ago," notes Cappelli, "the employers used to look for smart or adaptable kids on college campuses with general skills. They would convert them to what they wanted inside the company and they would retrain them and they’d get different skills. They’re not doing that now. They're just expecting that the kids will show up with the skills that the employer needs when the employer needs them. That’s a pretty difficult thing to expect, because of these kinds of problems. So the employers now are always complaining that they can’t get the people they need, but it’s pretty obvious why that’s not happening." On CS-as-a-major, Cappelli says, "If you look at most of the people who are in computer programming, for example, they have no IT degree-they just learned how to program. Maybe they had a couple of courses in it, maybe they were self-taught. In Silicon Valley, the industry was built with only 10 percent of the workforce having IT degrees. You can do most of these jobs with a variety of different skills. I think what's happening now is that people have come to think that you need these degrees in order to do the jobs, which is not really true. Maybe what these degrees do for you is they shorten the job training by a bit, but that's about it. And you lose a bunch of other things along the way." One wonders what Cappelli might think of San Francisco's recent decision to pick a preschool curriculum based on where today's tech jobs are, echoing President Obama's tech industry-nurtured belief that "what you want to do is introduce this [coding] with the ABCs and the colors."
