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Name That Major

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Don't Miss Out

“Applied Economics and Management? What does that even mean?” If you’re an AEM major at Cornell, this is undoubtedly a question you’ve received in the past, either from a potential employer, graduate school recruiter, friend, or Mom and Dad. The ambiguous labels assigned to many of the state-college majors have confounded students, faculty and alumni for quite some time. One could argue that the creative nomenclature here at Cornell is one of our weirdest assets — second only to the infamous swim test.

A good friend of mine applied to the Policy Analysis and Management major as a high school senior mainly because his mother’s name is Pam. “I didn’t exactly understand what it meant,” he said, “but really, who does? I ended up liking it, sticking with it, and now I’m in law school. So it all worked itself out.”

Picking a college major as a 17-year-old is hard enough when one actually understands what the major entails. Physics, government, comparative literature — these liberal arts subjects are relatively easy to identify. Ironically, the not-so-understandable departments are in the very colleges that require applicants to commit to a specific major. Policy Analysis and Management; Environmental Engineering Technology; Biometry and Statistics; Industrial and Labor Relations; Communication (entirely different, according to professors, than Communications, with an ‘s’) — are all majors that high school seniors must choose before they apply. The College of Arts and Sciences, on the other hand, gives freshmen two years to decide. And the courses of study in that college usually possess a more typical title, like Biology.

The differences in department names reflect a fundamental distinction in the types of education that each college at Cornell provides. The curricula in Arts and Sciences are broad and theory-based, allowing for simple titles like English and History. In contrast, the New York State “contract units,” (as we now call them) provide much more applied and specific courses of study. The State originally funded those schools hoping that, after graduation, students would apply specific expertise directly to different communities. Thus, the lengthy and confusing department names are, in my understanding, the colleges’ attempt to lump each major’s skill set into one whopping title.

The bizarre taxonomy in Cornell’s state colleges hardly prevents prospective students from applying to these majors, nor does it seem to interfere with graduates getting hired. However, a time comes in every AEM major’s life (to continue with my AEM example) when he or she asks: “Why couldn’t Cornell just call it Business?”

According to Dale Grossman, AEM Senior lecturer, the answer is simple. “The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences was established to educate farmers in the 1940s. To be a successful farmer, one had to know about business [in order to effectively sell their crops.]” The early AEM courses were, therefore, designed to teach farmers about how to apply economics and principles of management to their farms. This also explains why the business major remains in the school of Agriculture and Life Sciences, despite the fact that current AEM courses have little to do with agriculture at all.

The major’s name has, indeed, gone through several transitions to reflect the department’s expansion beyond agricultural economics. AEM’s current title is the result of a name-shift several years ago from ARME: Agriculture, Resource, and Managerial Economics. Similarly, Biological and Environmental Engineering (BEE) shifted away from the more specific title of Agriculture and Biological Engineering (ABEN) around the same time.

Much like the Agriculture school, the College of Human Ecology appears at first glance to be a jumble of unrelated departments crammed together under one roof. The school consists of majors like Nutritional Science, Textiles and Apparel, Human Development and Policy Analysis and Management. Can you detect a trend? I couldn’t. That is, until I looked into the college’s life story. It was founded in 1919 as the School of Home Economics, an educational institution geared toward women. Its original mission, according to the College of Human Ecology website, was to teach women “how to take care of their homes and families more efficiently, how to prevent illness and how to provide better nutrition to their children.” Cooking, child-rearing, sewing and check-book-balancing courses evolved over the years into majors like Nutritional Science, Human Development, TXA and PAM, which are now research-based departments with widespread influence that reaches way beyond individual homes.

The third land-grant school — the College of Industrial and Labor Relations – was founded with a specific purpose that expanded over time. Coming out of the Great Depression and World War II, New York State had to improve conditions in the workplace and therefore established the ILR School in 1945. Its current mission is still “to improve the world of work,” as Dean Harry Katz states on the website, but today, that mission includes a combination of disciplines like law, management, economics and history.

So there is actually a rhyme and reason for the current arrangement of Cornell’s state-subsidized schools, though the logic is hard to detect at a glance. The existing condition of the colleges is an extension of each one’s individual history. And, although the departments have expanded over time, their applied educational philosophies remain the same.

The lengthy names of our majors are meant to reflect the sets of skills we acquire as students of that department. A one-to-two word limit would be nice, but concise titles might not accurately represent our degrees. Could we change Industrial and Labor Relations to Pre-law? No, because it’s not entirely true. Switch Human Biology Health and Society to Pre-Med? No, because it’s not all-encompassing.

So it looks like we’ll have to continue dealing with questions like: “Policy Analysis and Management? How’d you choose that?” Answer what you will. And if you ever get stuck, say: “My mother’s name is Pam.”

Missy Kurzweil is a senior in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She can be contacted at mek37@cornell.edu. Don’t Miss Out appears Thursdays.

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