US colleges and universities are overstating the degree to which their course content is interdisciplinary, with especially significant workplace implications for students in the sciences, a nationwide course analysis has found.
The peer-reviewed investigation compared course catalogue descriptions with the actual syllabuses across more than 110,000 courses at 80 four-year colleges and universities in the US – many of them leading liberal arts and research institutions – to show that the ideal of teaching multiple field-specific skills is more often claimed than delivered.
And that difference was shown through data to be especially important for science majors, given how much more they earn with a better interdisciplinary experience, said a lead author of the study, Peter Bearman, a professor of social science at Columbia University.
“There’s a high return either way” in the job market for students who graduate with a degree in a scientific field, Professor Bearman said. “And then there’s premium for those who have interdisciplinary experiences in college.”
The data was compiled by Professor Bearman with three colleagues at Columbia and one at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The discrepancies between course catalogue outlines and actual syllabuses, he said, probably reflected the fact that a true interdisciplinary experience is expensive for a college to provide, mostly because of the challenge of finding or training science instructors who can supplement their teaching with content from outside their field.
“It’s really difficult in the academy to create incentives for faculty to be teaching across disciplines,” Professor Bearman said.
The 80 US institutions chosen for the study cover a range of types and reputational heft, and include about 20 top-ranked research universities and another 20 leading liberal arts institutions.
The study team used text-scanning technologies to read the course catalogue entries and then assess the syllabuses on the extent to which the course actually covers multiple fields of academic expertise.
It was possible, Professor Bearman acknowledged, that individual instructors might teach in ways that provide more interdisciplinary exposure than their syllabuses indicate. However, that is not likely to happen to a significant degree in most cases, given the specificity of most syllabuses, he said.
Professor Bearman also acknowledged that students in all fields benefit from interdisciplinary instruction, but said the relative benefit is higher for science majors because they tend to get less cross-major exploration from their regular coursework.
The data showing higher starting salaries for science majors with interdisciplinary course content might understate the later-career gains by humanities majors, Professor Bearman said. But generally, he said, early career pay differentials tend to hold, and later-career wage growth tends to reflect multiple factors beyond the worker’s particular college major.
