Although I'm a strong believer in the importance of the liberal arts and in learning for the sake of learning during college, I'm not going to bore you with a rehashed version of those arguments. That's not the point of this post. Instead, I'd like to talk about things from a slightly more pragmatic standpoint: standardized testing for graduate school.
In addition to the SAT and ACT, I also tutor the Verbal portions of the GRE and the GMAT, and every summer, I inevitably end up with a couple of recent college graduates who want to apply to graduate school and who have no choice but to jump back into the perilous waters of standardized-testing. So not only do I routinely deal with high school seniors freaking out about where they're going to go to college, but I also get to teach college seniors and recent graduates freaking out about where they'e going to go to grad school.
If you're a high school student reading this, let me explain how it works: in order to apply to graduate programs in most fields, you are required to take the GRE (Graduate Record Exam), which is essentially a more difficult version of the SAT. It's just been revamped to eliminate the analogy section, so the essential exercises are now pretty much those on the SAT: sentence completions and reading comprehension passages. They're now structured a little differently, but the basic skills tested are the same.
If you want to apply to business school, you are generally required to take the GMAT (although more and more B-schools are accepting the GRE), whose Verbal portion includes critical reading passages, sentence corrections similar to the ones on the SAT Writing section, and critical reasoning passages, which involve identifying the assumptions on which an argument is based, as well as the information necessary to strengthen or weaken it.
(There's also the MCAT for med school, the DAT for dental school, and the LSAT for law school, but no one's asked me to tutor those...yet.)
Anyway, if you think SAT Critical Reading is hard, then GRE and GMAT Readings are downright terrifying. Here's an excerpt from a fairly typical GMAT passage:
Two modes of argumentation have been used on behalf of women's emancipation in Western societies. Arguments in what could be called the "relational" feminist tradition maintain the doctrine of "equality in difference," or equity as distinct from equality. They posit that biological distinctions betweeen the sexes result in a necessary sexual division of labor in the family and throughout society and that women's procreative labor is currently undervalued by society, to the disadvantage of women. By contrast, the individualist feminist tradition emphasizes individual human rights and celebrates women's quest for personal autonomy, while downplaying the importance of gender roles and minimizing discussion of childbearing and its attendant responsibilities.
Hard, right? But then again, if you're in high school, that would be the normal reaction.
One of the interesting things I've noticed, however, is that among my students -- most of whom attended very well-regarded colleges and none of whom majored in a liberal arts field -- every single one has found GRE/GMAT reading to be incredibly daunting. Not only did they have serious problems determining things like main point and tone, but a lot of the time they could barely even discern the topic. Sometimes they couldn't even figure out what the questions were asking. Given that they had attended some excellent programs at highly-ranked schools, I was at first a little surprised by just how much trouble they had. But then I realized that the specialized programs they had gone through simply hadn't equipped them with certain fundamental skills that most liberal arts majors tend to pick up somewhere along the way.
While it's true that majoring in History or English or Economics (or Anthropology or Sociology or Philosophy, etc.) doesn't give you a fixed set of skills that are directly applicable to a single career, those majors do generally require you to do a lot of reading and writing and analyzing. Furthermore, you get exposed to what academic writing looks and sounds like, and you get familiar enough with its conventions that you can figure out the basics of pretty much anyone's argument -- even if it's in a field you have absolutely no familiarity with (like, say, astrophysics).
People who major in things like business or speech pathology, on the other hand, tend not to get exposed to that side of academia as much, and as a result, they can actually be in far *worse* shape when it comes to standardized testing for graduate school -- even if they have an undergraduate degree in the same field they want to do graduate work in. They tend to lack the flexible knowledge that allows them to draw rapid connections between ideas and instantaneously decipher the kind of impenetrable academic langage that inevitably appears on graduate entrance exams. For the students I've worked with, such language was quite simply alien. Although they'd spent four years in college, they seemed to have no idea how scholars thought or expressed their ideas.
I'd never suggest that someone major (or not major) in a particular subject solely for the sake of standardized testing. If business is truly your passion, by all means declare a business major. But if you want to get an MBA eventually, you should be aware that waltzing into a top program -- or even a solid one -- might be a bit harder than you thought.
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