Yahoo! didn't make very many friends in the agriculture community yesterday. When they came out with a list of college degrees that are "useless," several of my friends blew up my social media feeds with outrage. What is most interesting to me is that Mr. Loose quoted a statement, "Just don't expect farms and ranches to be calling you."
Farming and ranching is a huge player in the agriculture industry. It is not, however, the only job available! Agriculture is probably the most diverse degree you could obtain. I know many of my peers who studied in the College of Agriculture at Kansas State University and have gone on to obtain careers in law, banking, medicine, nutrition, event planning and even international relations. They don't seem to have a "useless" degree.
Here's a blog post that was written by a woman who majored in Ag Economics from Oklahoma State University. She did a pretty good job of responding, and the post is pretty funny!
I also can appreciate this commentary on the post from Allen Levine. He presents the facts!
Want to see another rebuttal? Check this one out on another blog. She also posts the e-mail address to Mr. Loose, the author of the Yahoo! post, so that others can join in on bombarding him with our disappointment.
Enjoy!
Tera
Hi Tera, I am a soon to be graduate from Kansas State University. I found yesterday's article to be very disheartening and it made me feel like I'm wasting my time. More importantly though, it angered me. Agriculture is constantly being knocked down and taken for granted. I am working on a letter that I will mail to both Mr. Loose and Yahoo!. I am hoping that he takes these responses to his article as fuel to learn to do some better research and maybe ask around the agricultural community before writing about something he doesn't understand. I also noticed that the article cited Newsweek's Daily Beast.com's "20 Most Useless Degrees" report, in his article. I may write them too. Thanks for listening, Chelsey Darrow.
ReplyDeleteChelsey - Thanks so much for reading the blog! I'd love to see your letter when you have it finished! All we can do is respond and respond in a whole-hearted manner. Show them our passion and they won't have a rebuttal to that! Also, I think Agriculturists have to think about the importance of being proactive. Reacting to articles like this is important, but we've got to start thinking about being proactive so less of these articles get written in the first place. We appreciate you reading the blog and following Food For Thought. Hope you enjoy you're curriculum, it's a top notch one at KSU!
ReplyDeleteAlways an Aggie Wildcat,
Tera Rooney
trooney@ksu.edu