David Kanter | Focusing on what really matters

If your major is in the social sciences or humanities, chances are your major has no practical value.

Now before you get all upset, hear me out. I'm saying your major probably has little or no value for what you're going to end up doing in life, but your classes, whatever they are, have a lot.

That value comes in the form of reading, writing and analytical skills. For most professions that social science and humanity majors end up entering, the subject matter really serves no other purpose than to function as an intellectual exercise that improves your analytical and communicative skill set.

If you find the courses in any given department to be the most appealing, you certainly should be allowed to take as many of them as you want. But why can't you take three upper-level Philosophy courses and supplement them with three completely unrelated courses in Poli Sci, three in History and three in Sociology and call that your major? The analytical skills developed in the different fields are pretty much the same, so it really shouldn't matter if the courses don't fit together nicely into a coherent "major."

Penn's program in Politics, Philosophy and Economics seemed to give tacit consent to this reality. Before this year, a major in PPE required two intro-level courses in each of the three disciplines and five upper-level courses of your choosing in your concentration (either Philosophy, Politics or Economics), supplemented by two upper-level courses in each of the other two disciplines. To me - and I think to a lot of my classmates - these requirements seemed like a dream come true: Our "major" essentially allowed us to take nine courses of our own choosing across three social science departments.

But this year, the PPE program has decided to change its major requirements. Now instead of just taking six intro-level courses, you have to take seven and then take four mandated "PPE-specific courses." Now instead of having a choice of nine remaining course choices, a PPE major only has four.

For some prospective majors, these changes aren't all that inconvenient. "I think actually, in my case, I was going to take a lot of these classes anyway. In that sense, I got lucky," College sophomore Avi Samerth explained to me.

Nevertheless, potential majors who don't necessarily want to take a specific sequence of courses should still have that option open. The fact that PPE majors had as much post-graduation success in recent years as students who had a traditional major that required them to take 12 or more courses in a unified, coherent program indicates that taking a little bit of a bunch of different subjects leaves you just as prepared as a concentration in a particular discipline.

Certainly there are some professions - for instance, those in academia - that require a major in a particular social science. But for what I see myself doing in a couple years, is it really going to matter what I majored in?

To put it another way, there's a reason that every engineer has actually taken engineering courses - the courses are necessary for the profession. But if you plan on becoming a lawyer, public servant or whatever else it is that social science and humanity majors do with their lives, it probably won't matter if your undergraduate degree is in Poli Sci, History or Philosophy.

Cristina Bicchieri, director of the PPE program, made a strong pitch to me about the benefits of the new requirements: They provide a unified program with some degree of choice that equips students with the necessary tools to analyze complex and changing situations.

The new, coherent PPE major certainly seems to provide a solid preparation. But when we get down to it, PPE is teaching a skill set that is no different than the one the old PPE major taught - only now, that skill set is suddenly being taught through a unified program that limits the choice of classes.

It just seems to me that my education is based more on concepts, not content.

David Kanter is a College sophomore from East Falmouth, Mass. His e-mail is kanter@dailypennsylvanian.com. David vs. Goliath appears on Wednesdays.

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