See this NY Times article. Folks, this is not good news. Back in the 1990s when being a corps member meant nothing more than sleeping with your CMA and your collaborative, we would have welcomed philosophy majors, because, and lets be honest, student achievement did not mean anything to us.
But it does now! And despite what colleges are saying, being a philosophy major prepares you for little more than smoking pot on your parent's couch. See this guy:
Don't worry my TFA foot-soldiers, this neck-beard has been banned from Teach For America. We've adjusted the selection rubric to include an automatic rejection if you even know this guy.
Young people in America, allow me to say this only once: We don't want philosophy majors. They aren't closing the achievement gap, and quite frankly play right into the stereotypes our critics hold of our corps and our organization. From the article:
But Ms. Onejeme, now a senior applying to law school, ended up changing her major to philosophy, which she thinks has armed her with the skills to be successful. “My mother was like, what are you going to do with that?” said Ms. Onejeme, 22. “She wanted me to be a pharmacy major, but I persuaded her with my argumentative skills.
Listen your Mom might have gone for that soft-science rhetoric, but when your staring down a class full of slightly angry, marginalized, 13 year-old minorities in room in Compton, your latest diatribe on Kant isn't going to get them to sit down. Trust me, I've tried. Well I haven't actually tried, but there are still a few former corps members on staff who we haven't been able to replace with management consultants, and they tell me it wouldn't work (the management consultants think it might, so we've formed a committee with bi-weekly conference calls, but that is another post). Even if you wrote as your objective "SWBAT understand why Descartes wants you to sit the fuck down" the kids wouldn't do it.
The article seems to say that this trend is really taking off at schools like Texas A&M, University of Pittsburgh and some other school in Massachusetts that isn't Harvard. So, phew, right, I mean we haven't started recruiting at community colleges yet, so I think we are safe for the near future. But I've got 10 McKinsey associates making sure this trend doesn't jump the fence into one of the 13 accredited colleges we care about like some mad cow outbreak.
We are on it.
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