Yale Daily News

How about Gateway CC?

'sabout right in academic terms...

Guess what -- sociology tends to attract among the most lackluster students at Yale (a pattern for most universities) who then, true to their backgrounds, go out and lead uninspiring/less-lucrative lives; not a great recipe for donations to endow a departmental building later on.

Hieronymus- 'sabout right'? Does Yale not teach standard English?

Most of sociology is left-wing advocacy masquerading as science; for that and other reasons, the most talented social-science types go into economics.

references:

http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/11/chart-of-day-gre-scores-by-academic.html
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2007/08/sociology-of-economics.html
http://www.viet-studies.info/kinhte/Economic_Major_CHE.pdf

How true. I started as an economics major at Yale and was so unimpressed with the program that I switched to economics/political science after the first year. Yale so excels in these two areas that sociology will always remain a foster child within the social sciences.

@#3 haha! Jus' tryin' toe right so's u kin unnerstan, yo.

@#3 that's right, Yale does not teach standard English. It teaches 'world Englishes' in which all forms of uneducated speech are asserted to be equally acceptable. But just try submitting a paper full of grammatical errors in that class.

Jason, very good links. It is to Yale's discredit that this classes in this unacademic major are still being taught. Even for the social science-types who are too mathematically-challenged to succeed in Economics, Political Science is still an option.

What ridiculous, bitter comments. One of the best classes that I took at Yale was in the Sociology department, and I was an MCDB major. The blindly ambitious desire to marginalize "unacademic" subject matter and discredit valuable liberal thought can ruin a Yale education.

"Recent Alum," for one, could probably learn a few things from "this classes."

Here we go again, the arrogance of the economists and political scientists who think that having math on their side is a kin to having God there too. News flash #8: empirical rigor a la regression modeling can be as unsuccessful at providing causal explanatory power as any other qualitative method. As you well know, correlation is not necessarily causality, though where there is arrogance, nearby lies ignorance.

JasonM and Recent Alum:

Jason, go peddle your fluff somewhere else. I'm always amused by the 'hard-core science' argument in the social sciences. You seem to have confused quantitative methods with truth.

So the work of sociology is 'left-wing advocacy masquerading as science', huh? Interesting theory. I guess then that Krugman or Stiglitz are exceptions because they can crunch numbers right? Or how about the hundreds of 'liberal' political scientists?

I hope you do not plan on academia. Boring, narrow-minded fools like you are sucking the life out of the social sciences. There are places for quantitative methods as there are qualitative. If you find that you can't learn anything from sociology without being dismissive then I feel pity for you more than frustration. Special ED maybe?

To the YDN Editors,

Why do you let Hieronymus post on here? Your screeners dont allow posts deemed offensive. I think Hieronymus is offensive time and time again. How come he gets a free pass and his posts are always approved?

I am offended by jr's comment (#12). Can a YDN editor delete the comment please? Thanks.

#12: Any comment on a controversial issue (like whether Sociology is a legitimate major) can be deemed offensive to somebody. The YDN's policy is not to delete "offensive" comments, but to delete "abusive" comments, and generally I think that the YDN has done a good job of allowing controversial comments while deleting "abusive" comments.