Thursday, January 19, 2012

Are Agriculture degrees useless?

While on Twitter today I ran across a lot of buzz about an article written titled, College Majors That Are Useless. Being an #agvocate, that caught my attention and it immediately made me furious!
Here is their top 5 "useless" degrees breakdown:

#1 Agriculture
#2 Fashion Design
#3 Theatre
#4 Animal Science
#5 Horticulture

I am a KSU Alumni that majored in Animal Science and I am now working towards my masters degree in Animal and Dairy Sciences studying Reproductive Physiology. I have found my degree extremely useful from the time I began working on my bachelors in 2007. I remember calling home my freshman year to tell my Dad what I had learned that day in Animal Science. I now have the opportunity to teach undergrads and one of the best things is seeing that light bulb go off when they finally are able to pass an A.I. rod through the cervix when learning how to artificially inseminate cows!
As you can tell, I have a very hard time believing that Agriculture or Animal Science are "useless" degrees. I think I can speak for myself, my colleagues, and the students I teach when I say that the reason we major in an agriculture type degree is because we are passionate about the industry and learning how we can better feed the world. We are committed to supplying the world with a safe food supply and every one of us are contributing to that whether we are feeding cattle, breeding a heifer, harvesting a field, or milling wheat to make flour. When you think about all the steps that your food has to go through from the time it leaves the pasture/field and ends up on your plate it a process that involves a lot of people dedicated to feeding America.  Without these people with these so-called "useless" degrees, where would America be? I think that these degrees are pretty dog-gon important and I commend the young people that choose to pursue these degrees!

Leave your opinion on eburnsthompson // From Small-Town Iowa Girl, To Big-City Lawyer blog and be sure to vote in her poll!

I love seeing these signs as I drive down the highway in Kansas!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the mention! I am so proud of the whole #ag community for the outstanding response to the Yahoo article.