Ask an Emory student about the pre-professional culture, and you'll probably hear the same thing: yes, we are very much a pre-professional school.
However, with a student body of 7,656 undergraduates, only 23 percent are actually registered in pre-health, pre-law and BBA programs. Emory's College of Arts and Sciences is perhaps less pre-professional than originally thought.
That said, while the first five years of the past decade saw a steady increase in humanities majors at Emory, the latter half has brought a decline, according to College Dean Robin Forman. Many are pointing to economic pressures and a controversial advising system as causes for the changing academic environment.
It's All About the Money, Or Is It?
In light of a struggling national economy and a stubbornly high unemployment rate, conventional wisdom encourages students to place more emphasis on credentials that will land them a place in the job market. Forman says that this economic climate attracts job-conscious students to schools like Emory, where strong business and pre-medical reputations translate into a greater perceived sense of job security.
Judy Raggi Moore, senior lecturer in French and Italian and director of the Italian and Catholic studies programs, cites "the confluence of an upper administration that's not in the humanities, the economic crisis of 2008 and a growing public challenging of high tuition costs at universities" as key causes behind the rise of pre-professionalism at Emory.
Senior lecturer and economics professor Samiran Banerjee agrees, noting that the trend is "symptomatic of what's going on in society: college education is getting more expensive and there is no learning for the sake of knowledge alone."
Forman cites a growing tendency on the part of politicians, in Washington as well as around the country, to view college from a vocational perspective. The politics behind government funding for research universities have played a significant role in the disproportionate expansion of certain departments.
Rachelle Spell, senior lecturer in biology, has seen a similar trend play out at Emory. The number of majors has nearly doubled in the past 10 years, according to Spell, with an increase in the number of students taking introductory classes who declare themselves "pre-med" and in the number of students taking preparatory classes in human physiology and biochemistry.
But Forman cautions that this increase in "pre-med" students may be overinflated by students' discussions on campus.
"It's my experience that there's always an overestimation of the number of pre-professional students because the students who know what their path is talk more openly about it than those who don't know their path," he says.
Emory senior Marissa Devar, a business and economics double major, chose the business route because it offered her "more tangible job opportunities."
Last year a whopping 91 percent of Goizueta BBA graduates were placed into jobs within three months of graduation.
"Emory is a really great school, but given the price of going to school here, I think most people use it as a means to an end to get a really good job or to go to a really good grad school," she says. "The price wouldn't be worth it if it were just a [place] to learn."
Raggi Moore believes the sociopolitical culture of the United States has manifested itself at Emory as well.
"Here, we can justify our high tuition by promising your parents that in four years you'll have something in your hand," she says, referring to high-paying jobs or coveted seats in graduate and professional schools.
The notion that getting a job is more important than learning is alarming for some. Banerjee says students come into college with a very acute understanding of the financial rewards they get from their education, but they have no concept of the developmental rewards.
"It's all about personal development: the rewards of being exposed to new ideas, of seeing the world in different planes, of stretching your brain. That is why you are here. The degree is incidental," he says.
College junior Sehe Han, a neuroscience and behavioral biology major, says her interdisciplinary science and nature of evidence class is the most intellectually rewarding class she has taken. The class is co-taught by her former biology professor Arri Eisen and Sataya Negri, a Tibetan monk.
"(Eisen) teaches outside of science. You would only find that at Emory. He's teaching how science interacts with the world," she says.
An Advising System that Exacerbates Unease, for Some
The current advising system in the College calls for all faculty members to take on three incoming students as advisees each year. Though students can indicate preferences for faculty advisors in their fields of interest, there is a disproportionate number of faculty who align with these preferences.
As is often the case, those who underperform on pre-professional tracks can be left in the dark when paired with ill-suited advisors. Some are saying this advising system, which launched three years ago, hinders intellectual growth among such students who enter the college with vocations in mind. Many fall short of their academic expectations and are forced to reinvent themselves down the road as upperclassmen.
Emory senior Brian Fuller has seen this firsthand after two years as a residential advisor for freshmen in Dobbs Hall.
"Most students come to Emory on a pre-professional track, though many change their minds later on because they aren't doing well enough," he says.
Spell sees the situation differently.
"I think that many students rethink their directions after they come to college," she says. "The grades are a reflection of this process, not a cause."
In an email to the Wheel, physics lecturer and pre-health faculty mentor Dr. Thomas Bing challenged Fuller's assessment.
"Maybe some people get low grades and that causes them to re-think their career plans. But I think lots of others just discover a passion for some other career or academic field," he says, citing the rich liberal arts presence at Emory.
In this process of personal growth and exploration, Han and others say they are unsatisfied with the role that faculty advising has played in their decision-making.
"The advising program at Emory is not satisfactory at all in my opinion," Han says. "You have a confused population of professors and an incoming confused population of freshmen, so nothing really gets done."
Fuller, who has not used an advisor in two years, says most people don't talk to their advisors because advisors don't reach out to them.
"A lot of students get into pitfalls because of a lack of advising," he says.
Banerjee suggests that inadequate advising in the College stems from an imbalance of incentives and rewards. Faculty at a large research university are praised, promoted and rewarded for making research their number one priority, while advising takes a distant back seat.
"The way incentives are at any university, including [ours], is that teaching is number two; advising comes even lower," he says.
Banerjee says that professors who are heavily invested in research are guaranteed job security provided that their teaching simply isn't negative. And with regards to advising:
"Oh my god, that's in the basement. That's the last thing!" he says.
Growing student independence exacerbates the lack of incentivized faculty advising.
"It's a two-way street," Raggi Moore says. "Students aren't clamoring for anything different. Every single one of my students is too busy."
Raggi Moore is a great proponent of the old Freshmen Advising & Mentoring at Emory (FAME) system, in which faculty were given $500, a van and 12 to 16 students.
Raggi Moore says the trip allowed faculty to foster bonds with incoming freshmen on trips to places like Nashville, Tenn. and Montgomery, Ala. Everyone met as a group on a weekly basis thereafter. Initially the program lasted a whole semester, though it was eventually phased out due to a lack of funding and faculty interest, she says.
As part of the new advising program, Raggi Moore advises three students per year, but bemoans the number of students who don't show up for appointments or who ignore her emails. When advisees do show up, they think they already know the paths they want to take.
Students are "completely advised by peers and by computers," she says.
Banerjee, meanwhile, believes most faculty aren't taking their role as advisors seriously. For them, the advising system is just an affirmation of what already happened.
"If there isn't anything new being fed to this kid, then I don't think any advising is going on," he says.
Forman declined to comment on the comparison between FAME and the current advising system, but maintains that the decision to switch was not made behind closed doors.
"It was a decision made by the faculty, not driven by the administration," he says.
According to Forman, the decision made sense because there are roughly 500 faculty and 1,500 incoming freshman each year.
"And so this idea that every member of the faculty will advise three freshmen is a remarkable commitment on the part of the faculty. It's a very powerful statement," he says.
Looking Ahead
Though students, faculty and administrators have differing opinions about the causality, everyone agrees that these numbers in the College reflect national trends in higher education: students are turning to the web for advising, technology for learning and facing economic pressure to choose "vocational" majors like business or computer science over traditional liberal arts majors like English and history.
On a more positive note, Forman insists that the number of humanities majors is back on the rise and that increasing enrollment in the humanities has been an explicitly-stated priority for the college.
"This year, the number of incoming freshmen students who say their primary interest was in the humanities is 20 percent higher than last year's freshman class," he says.
Though this is a move in the right direction, Forman hopes to keep the momentum going with relentless promotion of its liberal arts mission.
"Emory is a great place for premed students, and we are a great place for students who are interested in business. But that's not the whole story," he says. "And I think we need to do a better job of telling the whole story."
With regards to advising, Forman says the administration has been communicating more openly with students and faculty in the last two years since the new advising system launched. Incoming students receive more detailed materials that delineate the advising process in greater depth, he says. Students learn what advising should be, what they can expect to gain from the system and what their faculty advisors expect from them in return.
"What I've heard from both students and faculty is that the relationship is much more rewarding and the conversations more rich now than they were two years ago," he says.
Regardless of how students feel about the advising system, Banerjee says that it's too much to expect the institution to provide the impetus.
"The impetus has to come from the student, and the institution has to provide fertile petri dishes so that their rankings can grow," he says. "But you have to do the growing. You've got to be the material."
Some students move through pre-professional regimens without exposure to liberal arts class outside the minimum general education requirements. Banerjee believes that by bypassing these other opportunities, students miss an opportunity to "develop the human being." Speaking to pre-professional students, Banerjee has one suggestion.
"If you take four or five classes, at least one or two of them should leave you a different human being at the end of the semester," he says. "If they're not, then you are not choosing your classes correctly."
– By Nicholas Goodwin
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