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The push for more higher education has led to an excess of business degrees (nces.ed.gov)

6 points by clp16 ↗ HN
Was the explosive growth of business degrees what was envisioned when "everyone gets a college education?" It's not that degrees are useless, but that there are too many of them, while the growth rates of many other degrees fields have stayed more or less stagnant. Shouldn't a push for higher education aim to lift all ships?

6 comments

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clp16
So much for encouraging people to get college degrees. If they all end up getting the same degree and flooding the market, what was the point? I hoped that the growth would be spread out between many fields, but everyone just piling in and getting business degrees doesn't help.
tdfx
Those are some pretty strange groupings. I suppose they're counting Economics and Finance degrees as business? I'm also pretty surprised about the amount of social sciences/history degrees that are being pursued. What exactly were these people planning to do? Certainly explains the law school problem.
clp16
What's the law school problem? I'm not familiar with it. This link breaks the groupings down into more distinct pieces: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_271.asp
tdfx
The "law school problem" is that there's too many law students and not enough jobs. People are increasingly using law school as their "I don't know what to do with my life" card, whereas those people used to just get a business administration degree and trip into some element of the corporate ladder after undergraduate studies.

The "problem" is that they're incurring another $80k of debt for another degree that doesn't make them particularly useful to anyone.

whathappenedto
Is there newer data? The latest data is 2007-2008 and now we're in academic year 2010-2010. A lot has changed in 3 years.
clp16
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/ is the original report where the numbers were compiled. It seems like 2009 was the last report and that 2007-2008 academic year is the latest data available that the report used when dealing with degrees conferred.