[Craziaskowboi]

I get that there are useless degrees out there, but not everybody can work a STEM job either. There has to be something worthwhile for the non-STEM people, no?

[WVREDLEG]

Originally Posted by SportyandMisty

Thanks for pointing out she is an instructor, not a professor (not even an adjunct professor).

I've only been familiar with adjunct professors in a business-school or engineering-school context. There the adjunct professor had a full-time private sector job and had been recruited to teach to inject real-world experience into the classroom.

For example, Andy Grove was an adjunct professor at Stanford Business School.

Andy Grove was employee #3 at Intel Corporation behind co-founders Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce. He rose to CEO and Chairman of Intel Corporation, was the author of college textbooks in both semiconductor engineering and management, and one of the most influential business leaders of the 20th & 21st Century. He escaped from Communist Hungary as a teenager, by himself, literally crawling underneath barbed-wire fences; he spoke not a word of English yet managed to graduate at the top of his class at CCNY with a BS in Chemical Engineering before getting his PhD from Berkeley.

In the context above, adjunct professors are great; but having an adjunct professor teach English 101 seems silly.

I also think having an instructor teach English 101 is silly.

My experience with adjuncts mirrors yours. One of my MBA adjuncts was the Director of Communications for a huge telecom. He could relate virtually 100 percent of the course material to real experience in his full-time job. Another adjunct was a utility company director of labor relations. Adjuncts, in the purest sense, bring real-world practices, successes and failures into the classroom and grind it against the models and theories--makes the learner think and solve instead of just following the recipe.

[BBMW]

I think I gave a good definition of a useless degree previously. I consider a degree useless if the only real career path that degree confers is to teach that subject in the same context/audience in which you were taught it. Basically where it has no outside application where someone can support themselves doing it.

Originally Posted by Gnutella

I get that there are useless degrees out there, but not everybody can work a STEM job either. There has to be something worthwhile for the non-STEM people, no?

[bler144]

Originally Posted by Gnutella

I get that there are useless degrees out there, but not everybody can work a STEM job either. There has to be something worthwhile for the non-STEM people, no?

Even if everyone had the knowledge/capacity to work a STEM job, there's not nearly enough demand for that labor.

The BLS estimates about 15M work in STEM fields, and even within that about 10% of those jobs are in mgmt or sales, where some likely come from other fields (MBA, marketing). By comparison, that's only about 50% more than the number of people unemployed, and about 10% of the overall workforce.

One can argue that it makes sense for one marginal person to seek a career in STEM for personal advantage, but as a practical matter, it cannot work for everyone.

[aeros71]

As pointed out by others the author of the story is an English Instructor at UNLV, not a professor. If she is currently pursuing her PhD at UNLV and is lucky enough to received a stipend while doing so, I think the stipend pays around $15-18K for the year. So I can see where she would need to have a second job to meet her expenses.

[BBMW]

She is teaching for them, so they should be paying her something. In point of fact, this is how the colleges supply themselves with cheap labor to teach the undergrads. I wonder if she would do better not teaching for UNLV, but getting a "real" teaching job somewhere else in the valley, either at the college or K-12 level?

Originally Posted by aeros71

As pointed out by others the author of the story is an English Instructor at UNLV, not a professor. If she is currently pursuing her PhD at UNLV and is lucky enough to received a stipend while doing so, I think the stipend pays around $15-18K for the year. So I can see where she would need to have a second job to meet her expenses.

[checkmatechamp13]

Originally Posted by von949

It's a win-win situation. A student can either choose to graduate early or start taking college courses while in high school. That's a potential 50-60 free college credits towards a bachelors.

Unfortunately, I don't think it's that common to have that many AP credits offered in high school. A technical high school I was accepted to said students could get up to 45 college credits over the course of 4 years. On top of that, depending on what major you're going into, some of those classes might not even count towards the degree. (For example, I took AP Physics, but it was the non calculus-based version. I'm in engineering, so I had to take the calculus-based version).

Plus, a lot of schools end up filling up your schedule with unnecessary classes. For example, with me, I tested out of Algebra I, so they put me straight into Geometry, but after I took Algebra II, they decided to put me into Precalculus rather than Calculus, just because I was a year younger. The Precalculus was the easiest class I've ever taken (I literally learned nothing in that class. I just showed up, slept in the back, and aced all the tests). Then on top of that, they spread out one semester of Calculus over an entire year, and two periods per day.

Out of all the AP classes I took, the only ones that actually saved me time in college were Calculus I and English. Maybe I'll be able to argue for 4 Biology credits, since the incoming Civil Engineering freshmen have that as the requirement, but we're only talking 10 credits out of a 134 credit degree.

Now, if they changed up the education system so that a typical motivated high school student could actually earn 50-60 college credits, or at least graduate early, that would be great, but unfortunately, that's not the case.