Making Majors out of Molehills:

Bloated Minor Psychology B.A./B.S. Offers No Inroads into Career World

Career opportunities for the holder of a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) or Science (B.S.) in Psychology are more limited than those available to graduates with comparable degrees in other (major) areas of study. It is not uncommon to find psychology department web sites advertising links labeled "Career Opportunities." I find these misleading. While the vast majority of the jobs featured on these web sites are jobs for which psychology majors are invited to apply, these are neither psychologistic jobs nor do these employers restrict application to graduates with a degree in Psychology. I mean, you can almost see the stretchmarks, as psych profs attempt to impress upon their students this oft-strained relationship between functions in the job description and peripheral skills (e.g., critical thinking skills or research design skills) arguably refined by plodding through the pile of loose rock and rubble that is the psych curriculum. Compared to the cornucopia of major-specific jobs for graduates with degrees in marketing and biology, the jobs available to psychology graduates tend to be universally available to graduates of all majors, including those graduates for whom degrees in philosophy and english are widely regarded as self-inflicted wounds. Contrary to the perceptions managed by psych professors, the psychology major does not blaze a trail into a labor market wilderness. The only labor market psychology BAs and BSs will ever know is not open-ended, and the unfortunate, if not unfriendly, fact about the BA or BS in Psychology is that he or she is neither niched nor modular. To find any meaningful employment, they will have to rely on qualities and decisions that have nothing to do with the package of skills and knowledge they acquired in fulfillment of requirements for their major. To phrase this another way, they will have to set aside their persona as a psychology major and assert themselves as individuals. Unfortunately, from time to time, the media fosters the myth of psychology-related employment.

From a career preparation standpoint (deferring the educational shortfalls of the psych curriculum to another report), I recommend that students choose a major meeting either one of the following specifications:

• Choose a major that will enable you to be a candidate for a wide range of positions in the private sector, even if the major does not automatically qualify you for preferential consideration. I would say of such majors that they emphasize scope at the expense of specificity.'
  

• Conversely, choose a job-specific major that will enable you to position yourself quite competitively with respect to a specific industry or job function, even if that degree is relatively useless outside this industry or function. Such "farm league" or "trade school" majors accentuate specificity at the expense of scope.'
  

In keeping an eye to life after college, one should select a major that offers either scope or specificity. Since each major can be evaluated with respect to each of these criteria, I will opine that the psychology major does not rate nearly high enough on either of these two dimensions.

The problem with the design of the undergraduate psychology curriculum is that training and evaluation considerations have been allowed to contaminate educational objectives. Undergraduate psych majors are given the training they need to compete for a place in a graduate program in Psychology. There is far more pressure on the undergraduate psychology major today than ever before to have published while an undergraduate so as to compete for admission to doctoral programs, where he or she will learn to -- what?! -- you guessed it -- publish! So what's the problem with this? The problem is that undergraduate psychology courses have become nothing more than pale imitations of course work at the graduate level. The problem is that students are socialized far too prematurely into academic and professional culture, and those who choose not to go on for an advanced degree (or fail to win a place in a doctoral program), are stuck with a useless 'education' too academic for the private sector and too procedural to have offered anything substantive in the way of knowledge about the human condition. That's right. Somewhere along the way (and by that I mean every point along the way), psych profs forget to satisfy their students' curiosities and provide them with something that can pass for a package of relational knowledge/skills. Our departments of Psychology have evolved into trade/vocational schools rather than traditional bastions of 'higher' education. Psychology majors leave the table hungry.

And some things are never taught. A psych major who manages to get admitted to graduate school without having published at the undergraduate level is at a tremendous disadvantage for building a competitive CV. The graduate faculty assumes that, having been admitted to a doctoral program, the student has picked up somewhere along the way all the procedural knowledge with respect to publishing. When it begins to show they do not have the epistemology of the field coursing through their veins (and this happens to a lot of students who graduated from small liberal arts colleges with no graduate faculty), the students are treated as outsiders and ultimately outprocessed for lacking the 'street smarts' to make it in this field.

I remember my first driver's lesson as a 16-year-old. My instructor was quite surprised I had not illegally operated a vehicle at least once between the ages of 12 and 16. He tells me most teens find a way to get behind the wheel before they are legally of age to operate a vehicle. In a similar vein, everyone knows most teens consume quite a lot of alcohol before they turn 18, (let alone 21). Was it right for my graduate faculty to assume all this insider knowledge of academic culture from first-year graduate students? Is this or is this not a training program? The more the burden of professional training is placed on professors and students at the undergraduate level, the less time there is for real education. The original works of great thinkers (Freud, Jung) become more of an impertinence, and student minds are closed before they are ever opened.

Adding insult to injury, many advanced degree programs in Psychology do not even require a Psychology B.A. or B.S. for admission. Graduate faculty may not routinely admit applicants who majored in fields of study other than Psychology, but they leave the door open (at least they did in 1992-3). Many graduate programs in psychology admitted graduates with interdisciplinary majors or graduates of scientifically and professionally "sexy" fields of study (e.g. business, engineering, marketing, or life science). While I have not tapped psychology faculty for their opinions on this practice, I imagine, based on my intimate understanding of their values, that this practice is in keeping with their mission to win public recognition as a science of social import and (clinical and practical) application. Individuals with backgrounds in engineering boast a double-appeal for psych profs on the selection committee, as such applicants are likely to respect the growing emphasis on scientific rigor and precision within the psychological community, and are likely to publish research that finds its way on the national news wires (e.g., "new cockpit design by human factors psychologist raises the standard for aviation safety"). Such research represents a rising standard for psychological researchers seeking to upgrade the Science Theater marquee that currently boasts "cutting up rats on foundation grants." But from hanging around these psych folk, you get the distinct impression that it's more than just the grant-grubbing self-promotion of career-driven individuals with the souls of a company clerk window-dressing a CV. It's also about expanding Psychology's sphere of influence in the broader corporate and professional world, about playing advisor or executive assistant to as many agencies as possible. Admittedly, this might ultimately serve to widen the range of jobs for which the B.A. and B.S. in Psychology is a fitting or -- dare I say -- "preferred" applicant. But positioning Psychology as an ASP (third party provider of services, to use an analogy) for other enterprises and professions siphons resources (i.e., personnel, attention, journal space) from psychology's namesake or signature subject: the human condition or "psyche". Human nature talk around the psych department water cooler is at drought level these days. The growing disinterest combined with an uncanny aversion to risk and individual differences makes the psyche the 800 pound gorilla in the psych department. Even clinical faculty have discovered creative ways to neglect the human condition, allocating precious research and educational resources to vaunting "peripheral concerns," where we find a UC-Denver professor declaring on an APA listserv his intention to work professional ethics into the Psych 101 curriculum. Psych 101! Imagine all these 18-year-old innocents, awaiting with budding pristine curiosity their introduction to the mysteries of criminal and abnormal behavior and to the meaning and purpose of their dreams. As far as meals go, I cannot imagine how the Psych 101 student can walk away from this table feeling not only full, but that the food had any flavor. Not that the meat isn't dry enough. There's a course of illusions served on overhead transparencies and garnished with a 5th grade introduction to the structure of the eye, ear, and neuron. There's the laundry list of mneumonics and significant moments in the founding of the field, from the first laboratory to the first trade journal. The Muller-Lyer and Moon illusions are, by this point in the course, positively riveting after the parade of means and histograms and the oversimplified textbook renditions of the electromagnetic spectrum and the sodium potassium pump that at least once (by my count) drew contemptuous chortle from the seating sections reserved for the (declared) physics and biology majors. And while one might expect a chapter in Personality psychology to be flavorful, these hopes are hardly buoyed by a five-minute id, ego, and superego chased by a palate-cleansing equal-time political salvo on the charlatan chauvinist culture-bound case-studying Freud (proving that nothing has less personality than Psych 101!). Unless we invest heavily in celluloid-preserving technologies, we may lose the only mildly info-taining moment to the 60s wing of the Psych 101 archive: the Stanley Milgram obedience experiment. A shame this would be, considering what its sudden departure from the social psychology lecture would leave us with: the equal-time (not to mention vicariously contrite) apology for Milgram's ethics, followed by the reassurance that a meaningful social psychology experiment (like Milgram's) would never happen again.

Fortunately, most psychology professors have the presence of mind to resist the temptation to assign the chapter titled "Psychology and the Law" or "Legal Issues in Psychology." But before you heap helpings of praise on the chef, bare in mind that this subject occupies the obscure posterior of fewer living than defunct psychology textbooks now that the psych textbook world discovered new content areas.

The tastefully-named "content areas" is actually a synonym for more colorful (or off-color, depending on your viewpoint) terms depicting the field's zombified fiefdoms. All those myths and films treating vampirism as a contagious disease opened my eyes to the dangers of making membership in a community contingent on sacrificing one's soul (and pledging to plunder the lifeblood of others). Such is the case with psychology professors, whose nested allegiances to Science, University, Psychology Department, and [INSERT BRANCH OF STUDY HERE] leave little room for the kind of independent thinking necessary for true scientific progress, adult maturation, and individuation across one's true development as a professional. (Personally, I prefer the "Unit, Core, God, Country" code of the Marines somewhat less dehumanizing and considerably less deindividuating). As terms go, I prefer "gated (or planned) communities" but will also accept terms like "lodge," "hive," "nation," "(closet) denomination" and any term for adjoining lots in an industrial park. All are preferable to the funereally-genteel "content area" with its fits of mild manners and its embalming lines of demarcation.

Textbooks pander to more special interests than political candidates and will hereafter be referred to collectively as "the teacher's manual" even though the textbook itself comes with its own teacher's manual and test bank. And while it's always exciting to be present at the birth of a new caucus, I'd just as soon wait to see Human Factors added to the ranks of the $120 sixth edition Myers hardchassis (hereafter known as "Hummer H6"; please address all coupons, rebates, donations, raffles, and financing info to "Wyatt Ehrenfels: P.O. Box..."). But to make a long story short, lo and behold, the gentleman-professor from UC-Denver wants to yield the floor to a discussion of professional ethics. I'd be interested to learn what the electorate thinks of that fine delicassy, but I suspect I haven't seen such a public display of self-indulgence since the actor-of-Pee-Wee-Herman-fame and the honorably-mentionable James Bond films post producer Albert Broccoli, and won't again until Hollywood producers place auto-erotic characters in feature roles (or until Marvel comics debuts a superhero with superlative characteristics along these lines). If you just survived this torrent of sardonic quips, you should be congratulated. It is highly likely you understand my point: that the development of Psychology as a social institution and professional community has outpaced the progress of Psychology as a science (or conversely, that the progress of Psychology as a science has lagged behind the social development of Psychology). If you venture elsewhere on this web site, you are likely to find as a common denominator in all these reports that the political and professional aims of Psychology as a social institution/commununity is responsible for sabotaging its science...hijacking it for purposes not indigenous to its nature.