Question

The premise that the choice of major amounts to choosing a career path rests on the faulty notion that the major is important for its content and that the acquisition of that content is valuable to employers. But information is fairly easy to acquire and what is acquired in 2015 will be obsolete by 2020. What employers want are basic but difficult-to-acquire skills.___They care about a potential employee's abilities: writing, researching, quantitative, and analytical skills. A vocational approach to education eviscerates precisely the qualities that are most valuable, about it intellectual curiosity, creativity and critical thinking.

• A. As students flock to the two or three majors they see as good investments, professors who teach in those major's are overburdened, and the majors themselves become more formulaic and less individualized.
• B. Often it is the art historians and anthropology majors, for example, who, having marshalled the abilities of perspective, breadth, creativity, and analysis, have moved a company or project or vision forward.
• C. Furthermore, the link between education and earnings is notoriously fraught, with cause and effect often difficult to disentangle.
• D. Ideas such as education is necessary to be successful in corporate life are unacceptable because education isn't that relevant in today's society.
• E. When they ask students about their majors it is usually not because they want to assess the applicants' mastery of the content, but rather because they want to know if the students can talk about what they learned.
  

Answer 1

The correct option is E When they ask students about their majors it is usually not because they want to assess the applicants' mastery of the content, but rather because they want to know if the students can talk about what they learned.


Option E best completes the passage.