Re: OT: Top Five Degrees

On 1 Sep 2006 09:49:00 -0700, dgenglish@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:


Jenny6833A wrote:
AOL is touting one of it's badly padded articles, "Degrees Through The
Decades" by Jennifer Merritt. It's not worth reading. However, it
does list the "Top Five Degrees" by decade. By "Top Five" Merritt
means 'degrees most awarded.'

1970s: Education, Social Sciences and History, Business, English, and
(in 5th place) Biology.

1980s: Business, Education, Social Sciences and History, Health, and
(in 5th place) Engineering.

1990s: Business, Social Sciences and History, Education, Health, and
Psychology.

2000s (so far): Social Sciences and History, Business, Education,
Psychology, and Visual & Performing Arts.


Note that Biology and Engineering each made the list just once, but not
recently, and then only in fifth place. In 35 years, nothing else of a
scientific nature made the list at all.

Sad.

:-(

Jenny

"Health" might count as a technical field. It appears to replace
"biology" after the 1970s.

I'm curious to know the further breakdown of "Social Science and
History" degrees, since I just can't imagine that a straight-up
Bachelor's degree in "history" would be very popular in any decade.
I'm guessing public policy and political science majors?


Somebody has already pointed out that the results may be an artifact
of how they count fields. If "Social Science and History" includes
political science and economics, it will include all the pre-business
and pre-law students. The pre-med and pre-other professional health
students will be fragmented around a variety of majors. Biology, in
particular, is often now divided into several different possible
fields and these may not be lumped together for that report.

In the United States, there is a categorization called "HEGIS
disciplines", (Higher Education General Information Survey) which is
supposed to standardize majors by category. The report should at
least use comparable HEGIS groupings. Even that is often very
misleading.




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