All Posts Tagged With: "social science"
Which students work hardest?
Business? Engineering? Arts? You may be surprised.
Courtesy of NSSE. Click to enlarge.
Engineering students have been known to curse friends in other majors. That’s because they often spend hours sitting in their residence rooms sweating over near impossible differential equations while their non-engineering roommates leisurely read a couple chapters and then head out to party.
Then again, ask an arts major how hard they’re working and they’ll start rattling off the number of essays they have due.
But finally, it’s settled. Engineering students study more. The new release of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) shows that North American Engineering students spend 19 hours per week, on average, preparing for class. Arts, humanities and biology majors study 17 hours per week. Social science and business students study only 14 hours.
But don’t assume all non-engineers are slacking. Business students study the least, but they aren’t socializing any more. Instead, they work seven hours more per week at paying jobs. In fact, if you add jobs and study together, business students work the most—30 hours per week. Social sciences students work the least overall (27 hours). Engineering students are in the middle (28 hours).
NSSE, considered the gold standard of student surveys, involved polling of senior year students at 683 U.S. and 68 Canadian institutions in 2011. It had a response rate of 33 per cent.
For the love of humanities
The liberal arts can be invaluable when students are encouraged to think critically
“Humanities”
Just saying the word makes my coffee-pouring hand start to tingle.
But are we history/philosophy/literature buffs really destined for a life behind the counter at Starbucks? Is the inherent value of a soft science subject essential to the holistic self? Or has post-secondary ideological warfare destroyed any worth to be found in Sociology 101?
Those seem to be the questions on the public mind these days. Paul Wells from Maclean’s and Margaret Wente from the Globe and Mail both printed pieces on the value of the liberal arts course a few weeks ago. (Note: all further references to “liberal arts” should be accompanied by a hissing sound.) They’re interesting reads, with starkly opposing views. You can check them out here and here if you want, but I’ll summarize below.
Wells’ “In Praise of the Squishy Subjects,” which was originally written for the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation, emphasizes the value of soft sciences. He uses examples to show how funding research in fields like criminology and sociology can offer economical return, though that’s not really his main point. After all, “No social scientist can win a fight for scarce funds if the debate is framed in terms of return on investment,” Wells writes, “because nobody who will make the investment will be able to tear their gaze away from the competition’s lab coats and microscopes.”
Instead, emphasizes Wells, the value of a “squishy subject” is in its ability to evoke critical thinking.
If you spend a few years wrestling with the idea of society as propounded by Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Rousseau and Marx, you come away with a better understanding of all the alternative ways our own society might choose to configure itself, with their attendant risks.
[. . .]
This sort of study instills in the student an appreciation for the richness of our human enterprise. It shows that the way we live is not the way we have always lived, nor is it the way everyone lives. It demonstrates the role of ideas and the possibility of massive change.
You never know what you’ll need to know, Wells points out. And if you’ve studied the ambiguities of the social sciences, you’ll be a lot more comfortable making connections, accepting the possibility of multiple answers, and thinking outside the box.
But ask Camille Paglia about the value of the contemporary social science course and you’ll get a totally different answer. Paglia, a social critic and professor of Humanities and Media Studies at University of the Arts in Philadelphia, was interviewed by Margaret Wente for her article “A landscape of death in the humanities.” In the Q&A piece, Paglia argues that the current trend toward hyperfocused humanities courses (Women’s Studies, African-American Studies, etc.) has eroded the overall purpose of higher education, which, she says, is to provide a broad overview and foundation for learning. She says:
I’ve met fundamentalist Protestants who’ve just come out of high school and read the Bible. They have a longer view of history than most students who come out of Harvard. The problem today is that professors feel they are far too sophisticated and important to do something as mundane as teach a foundation course.
[. . .]
But instead of that, the kids get ideology. They’re taught that global warming has been caused by factories. They have no idea there’s been climate change throughout history. And they’re scared into thinking that tsunamis are coming to drown New York.
Long live social science
Gender imbalance persists and social science continues to dominate, says Stats Can.
Students graduating from Canadian universities increased by 43 per cent between 1992 and 2007, according to a Statistics Canada report released today. The study revealed few demographic shifts among Canadian students and what they studied. There were a few notable changes in the gender distribution and in the share of international students graduating from Canadian institutions.
The proportion of graduates aged 22 to 24 has held steady at 44 per cent. Graduates between 25 and 29 increased slightly from 22 to 25 per cent, while graduates over 30 decreased slightly from 25 per cent to 23 per cent.
The gender imbalance on Canadian campuses has persisted, as the share of women graduating increased to 61 per cent from 56 per cent. Data on international students prior to 2000 was inconsistent across the provinces, but between 2001 and 2006, international students graduating from Canadian schools increased to 7.4 per cent from 4.7 per cent.
There has been virtually no change in the fields that Canadians study, with the social and behaviourial sciences and law accounting for a little more than a fifth of all graduates. Additionally, the top three fields including business and public administration and education, as well as the social sciences account for more than half of all graduates.
Health related fields are almost exclusively female, with 82 per cent of all graduates in 2007 being women. In fact, women dominate in all fields except for three: architecture and engineering, math and computer science, and protective and transportation services. However, the only category that saw a decrease in the share of women is math and computer science, which has been accompanied by a similar decline among Canadian males pursuing those fields. It is a trend that has been offset by a greater proportion of international students, mostly male, studying math and computer science.
Statistics Canada says data for 2008 will be released next year.
