06.04.08
Education: 10 most useless college majors?
Yeah, lists are popular. It’s fun to poke fun at stuff, especially if you have little or no understanding what it’s about.
But they’re often really off the mark, like right here. As many of the commenters have pointed out, some of these jobs really can lead to stable jobs and/or lucrative careers.
I think part of the problem is in viewing the bachelor’s degree as vocational training, which, in most cases, it is not. I don’t want to sound like one of those guidance counselors or college recruiters who is going to hide the fact that the classes you take do not prepare you to plunk down and do a particular job that first day, or claim that your degree will open magic doors for you, no matter what you major in. Some of the degrees profiled here that sound the most career-specific are for “careers” that actually have few or no openings, fair enough. But it’s hard to believe that anyone who decided on a degree in philosophy or art history had any expectation of finding a career in it.
Seriously, computer programmers studied programming because they liked it and were good at it. Abolishing dance majors will only mean that people who like dance and are good at it won’t study it. It definitely does not mean they will suddenly like programming and become good at writing computer applications.
The thing is, there are lots of jobs out there that have the requirement that you have a degree. They only require this because they can, and because there are so many people with degrees floating around aimlessly. But the degree requirement is to save them from having to screen you to see if you can read, write, and understand enough arithmetic not to make a complete fool of yourself on their dime in front of clients. Do you need a degree to do the job, to actually perfom its functions? No, but human resources people being way too much like the evil human resorces director Catbert, are basically lazy. Let you spend $100K so they won’t have to ask the real questions that determine whether you can do the job.
Philosophy? Not a major that attracts worker bees anyway. But Latin? A career for life teaching Latin in high school.
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