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Professor of philosophy and chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn
Why a Sociology Major?
Posted: 07/03/2012 10:34 am EDT Updated: 09/02/2012 5:12 am EDT
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A college education leaves the graduate better prepared for career and citizenship. Certainly we must believethat if we continue to value college enough to spend the time and money that goes into a four-yearbaccalaureate. But what precisely are the new attainments that the college curriculum makes possible for thestudent?
Consider sociology. There were 26,500 sociology baccalaureate degrees awarded in 2009 in U.S. universities,
and certainly many times that number of students who were taking courses in sociology or pursuing a major orminor in the field. Forty three percent of those degrees were awarded to students of color -- up from 30 percentin 1995. (These data are reported on the website of the American Sociological Association.) So there are a lot ofsociology graduates. But why is this a good thing? In what ways is it valuable for undergraduates to major insociology? What does this discipline contribute to the undergraduate's knowledge and skills when it comes topreparation for a productive career and life as a citizen and leader in a rapidly changing world?
The most basic justification for a liberal education is the idea that these disciplines help students gain importantqualities of mind that lay the foundations they will need for productive and innovative lives -- rigor, criticalreasoning, creativity, communications skills, ethical capacities, respect for human diversity, and the like. MarthaNussbaum describes these ideals in Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.So how does sociology fit into that idea? What are the qualities of mind that a sociology education cultivates?
One good way to address this question is to ask a sociology professor. What do sociology professors expecttheir graduates to have gained from the experience? I asked this question of Alford Young, chair of thedepartment of sociology at the University of Michigan. Al is a talented and productive sociologist whoseresearch concerns the experience of young African-American men. His recent book, The Minds of MarginalizedBlack Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances, is an important contribution to thefields of cultural sociology and the sociology of race and poverty. (Here is a post on this innovative book.) AndAl has thought long and hard about what he hopes that undergraduate sociology students will learn from theexperience.
Al begins with the fact that sociology students learn some of the organized and rigorous methods thatcontemporary sociologists use to understand the contemporary social world. They learn about statisticalreasoning, qualitative research, and sociological theory, and these skills provide them with a foundation forunderstanding the social world around them throughout their lives. But there is more to it than this. Al arguesthat the contemporary social world is one in which patterns of power and hierarchy are constantly changing, andit is very important for well educated young people to have the tools to piece together their own understandingsof how these social forces work. Here is Al's summary:
Sociology is the discipline that gives the greatest attention to social difference -- social hierarchy,the relevance of social power in everyday life. Sociology allows for consideration of things that arenot immediately visible in our ordinary lives, and often not neatly understandable. These things arerelevant to how social life is structured and organized. We need to look beyond people's individualmotivations or their psychological foundations and gain a better understanding of how people'ssocial location with regard to gender or race influences their thinking and behavior. We often don'tnotice those factors and how they influence us and the opportunities we have. These matter verymuch in ordinary life.
This comes down to several convincing points. First, sociology is a scientific discipline. It teaches students touse empirical data to understand current social realities. And sociologists use a variety of empirical researchmethods, from quantitative research to qualitative methods, to comparative and historical studies. Students whostudy sociology as undergraduates will certainly be exposed to the use of statistics as a method for representingand analyzing complex social phenomena; they will also be exposed to qualitative tools like interviews, focusgroups, and participant-observer data. So a sociology education helps the student to think like a social scientist -- attentive to facts, probing with hypotheses, offering explanations, critical in offering and assessing argumentsfor conclusions.
Second, the content of sociology is particularly important in our rapidly changing social world. Sociologypromises to provide data and theory that help to better understand the human and social realities we confront.Moreover, the discipline is defined around the key social issues we all need to understand better than wecurrently do, and our policy makers need to understand if they are to design policies that allow for social
progress: for example, race, poverty, urbanization, inequalities, globalization, immigration, environmentalchange, gender, power, and class. We might say that an important part of the value of a sociology education isthat it gives the student a better grasp of the dynamics of these key social processes.
So sociology is indeed a valuable part of a university education. It provides a foundation for betterunderstanding and engaging with the globalizing world our young people will need to navigate and lead. Itprovides students with the intellectual tools needed to make sense of the shifting and conflictual social world welive in, and this in turn permits them to contribute to solutions for the most difficult social problems that weface.
Follow Daniel Little on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dlittle30
More:College Studying Sociology Studying Sociology Major College Majors Sociology Major College SociologyMajor College Majors Sociology Sociology College Curriculum
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