Why Picking a Major Is a Bad Idea for College Kids
It’s an old saw: higher education can never change because, after all, it hasn’t in the 2,500 years since Socrates paced the Academy. There’s only one problem. That’s not true. It has not been the case in the past, and it should not be so — especially now.
Between 1860 and 1925, the old Puritan college designed to train ministers underwent massive changes to become the modern American university we know today. Industrialization was the motor. Alongside the movement for compulsory public grade school that trained farmers to be factory workers, a cadre of educators and business titans banded together to redesign higher education to shape an emerging professional-managerial class.