Most Useless Undergraduate Majors?

[GraphiteDirigible]

Also Creative Writing for the same reasons.

[firewalker]

Philosophy

Guess I'm throwing $50,000 a year down the drain, eh?

[dashrashi]

Good point, dash. Anything ending with "Studies" sums up this thread nicely.

When the campus tabloiod did a feature a few years ago on which residential college was objectively the best of the 12, one of the categories was intelligence (another was whose courtyard had the best-tasting grass). The way they calculated intelligence was by counting the number of people in the college facebook with glasses, and then subtracting the number of American Studies majors.

[dashrashi]

At my UG, McKinsey and Goldman put up special posters in the English department to recruit English majors. And English is the most popular major for medical students in the US, according to one statistic I've heard many, many times but can't cite. A friend of mine is doing her post-bac after majoring in English and will be applying to med school soon.

Note that the first thing said was that arguments DO NOT apply to specific top UGs.  There are a very small handful of them.

Arbitrary.

[«ě»]

Oh, but you're being silly. Someone with an engineering degree also needs to go to medical school to be a doctor.

Indeed, but I never claimed an engineering person could get any kind of job. The claim was that an English major can get any job except chemical engineering. You can't apply the contrapositive here :p

My boyfriend was an American Studies major, even worse than an English major, yeah?

I'd rate American studies over English, it can be useful in jobs where culture, trends well, anything sociological comes into play I think.

Currently he's one of three finalists for director of programming at a major folk radio station, which he will get (if he does) because of all the AmStud work he's done on folk music, rock music, and ethnomusicology. (Also, cross your fingers for him.) There are a lot of jobs, with a lot of different skill sets.

Yes, indeed. Nobody's (seriously) claiming there's no jobs at all for English majors out there. It's the blanket "An English major can get any job!" statement that's really taking heat.

[Captain]

Seriously, yes there's jobs out there for English majors. Very few of them offer any career interesting to people with ambition (which I assume most people on a law school forum is).

Depends  on what your ambition is, I suppose. If you consider Law/Engineering/Medicine/Finance as "ambitious" careers and everything else as not so, then sure, it isn't likely without further schooling that an English major will get into any of those fields (although they do get into Finance in pretty high numbers, actually). That said, I find it hard to believe that TV Producers, Advertising Executives and Public Relations people aren't ambitious. What about Journalists? Are they incapable of ambition? Did Dan Rather just basically glide into the anchor chair at CBS?

That is really a preposterous statement.

[Hank Rearden]

My boyfriend was an American Studies major, even worse than an English major, yeah?

I'd rate American studies over English, it can be useful in jobs where culture, trends well, anything sociological comes into play I think.

Did you go to ug out here? American Studies = useless.

But you study culture!

[Captain]

My boyfriend was an American Studies major, even worse than an English major, yeah?

I'd rate American studies over English, it can be useful in jobs where culture, trends well, anything sociological comes into play I think.

Did you go to ug out here? American Studies = useless.

Don't question KeNo... He is the bearer of all that is truth.

[TheCanadian]

I'm a History/Poli Sci double. Its a good thing I want to go to LS... what else could I do?

woot! Poli-scie...I almpst fol;lowed that major pairing...however, I'm doing a Theatre/Poli-scie major.

[dashrashi]

At my UG, McKinsey and Goldman put up special posters in the English department to recruit English majors. And English is the most popular major for medical students in the US, according to one statistic I've heard many, many times but can't cite. A friend of mine is doing her post-bac after majoring in English and will be applying to med school soon.

Note that the first thing said was that arguments DO NOT apply to specific top UGs.  There are a very small handful of them.

Arbitrary.

I don't think McKinsey and Goldman look at it that way... surprisingly they recruit at the same schools year after year.  Arbitrarily I guess.

The fact that they recruit there is not arbitrary. Excluding them from your argument is arbitrary.