So, for those who might not know, I'm pursuing a psychology bachelors as well as some others, and one thing that has always bothered me is the fact that psychology isn't considered part of the college of math and science. There are two main reasons why this might be: psychology isn't a science or psychology isn't the type of science that STEM refers to.
The first argument doesn't hold much water, as you'd have to be pretty clueless to believe that psychology isn't a science at all, This leaves the second possibility. There are two different forms of science; hard sciences and soft/social sciences. Social science is defined as: "A branch of science that deals with the institutions and functioning of human society and with the interpersonal relationship of individuals as members of society." (1). Hard science, on the other hand, is "a science that deals with things that can be observed and measured." (2). Between the two, it feels as though psychology should fall into the second definition, yet higher education treats it as if it is the first.
The problems is that colleges and universities present psychology as a social science, creating courses that don't get at the actual science in the field. At its core, psychology is an application of neuroscience, being the symptoms for problems within the body, usually the brain. However, neuroscience doesn't often fall in the center of the program. For the program my university has, we do have to take classes such as cognition, but that's overshadowed by the weird classes like psychology of leadership that don't really have anything to do with the science.
If we want to actually be able to advance research in the field and have it be recognized as a hard science, we need to treat it like it is. Psychology students should be taking biology courses and learning neuroscience. The one true science class I have to take is a Seniors only class, which means that it doesn't even set the groundwork for anything else that I've learned. And that's before we even consider the redundancy within programs. In Chemistry, they build off of the knowledge, they don't keep starting every class off with the history of all of the failed models of the atom, but in Psych, you're expected to hear about the same list of incorrect personality theory research in at least three different classes. I've heard people argue that there isn't enough time to fully teach psychology, but I think we can find some if we decide to never teach about Freud and his weird sexual ideas about children again.
Don't get me wrong, I love learning about the history of psychology, but treating it as a fundamental of the field (and the education) serves only to limit it. All they've done is remind us of the past instead of talking about the new research in the field. I understand that obviously I haven't completed my studies in psychology yet (I am only 63% of the way done) but every time I read a new required class, it feels as if I'm being cheated out of the education that I deserve. This isn't intended to attack any Psychology professors, I know they aren't the ones who get to decide this, but rather higher education as an idea.
Undergraduate psychology students deserve better. We deserve programs that teach us the physical science behind what we're learning. In abnormal psychology, I read the entire DSM-5 but they didn't teach us in the material that physical abnormalities in the brain can cause each of them. We should be able to explain why these things occur just as easily as explaining that they do. Psychology is a very young science which is being left in the dust because those who are learning it do not have a strong platform to stand on. The main complaint is that Psych isn't objective, but when you spend all of our classroom time on incorrect theories and the various methods of why and how some people become leaders, can you really expect more?
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