Survey Reveals the Most-Regretted (and Least-Regretted) College Majors - Slashdo...

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• • Society needs teachers and journalists, and sociologists have brought some major benefits too.

    Particularly with teacher it's messed up that we pay them so badly. They are preparing the workforce of the future, the ones who our pensions depend on. Not to mention the future electorate.

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    • • Re:

        And when public schools are gone, then they will all get vouchers for home schooling so that they kids don't get taught anything subversive, like being kind to one another, go to the doctor for medical advice, evolution is a thing, and that people in far off places are people.

    • Meh

      We do need teachers, but ones that can actually teach. We do need journalists, but ones that can actually do the journalism thing.

      Before the liberal arts went off the rails with their post-modern, post-fact, Critical Theory bullshit^WMarxism indoctrination, they were somewhat useful. Now?

      One way out of the regret is religious zeal, so that's why a number of the most useless studies, even actively detrimental to society "studies", aren't actually regretted. "DEI officer" is the new political officer. They'

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      • Re: Meh

        Some of these we really don't need. Sociology is an umbrella term that covers, among other things, gender studies. I've yet to see a compelling reason why our economy would benefit from gender studies.

        Some college degrees are what I refer to as passion projects. Passion projects are fine and all, if you really want to do them, then by all means go for it. But don't expect to actually make a career out of them. If you're already rich and/or already have a means of making a living, then yeah, do these things.

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        • • by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 ) on Sunday November 13, 2022 @02:26PM (#63048163)

            Because if it doesn't, then your income is going to be dog shit, and then you're going to be dependent on welfare, a drain on everybody else that works for a living, and you're going to spend all of your free time talking about how evil capitalism is because it doesn't reward you for doing things that nobody cares about but you, even though in theory communism isn't supposed to do that either.

          • Re:

            That's generally how you earn a fat paycheck. Which is the main topic of discussion.

          • Re: Meh

            Because if you depend on taxpayers to pay for your degree then your field should pay an income that is both sufficient to repay the taxpayers AND support you via employment because your education provided skills that are in demand

    • Re: Trade School

      While there is some specialized knowledge particular to teaching in general and teaching children in particular, there is no substitute for experience in communicating technical subjects especially.

      We'd be doing a lot better if the bulk of math, science, and rhetoric were taught by experienced professionals at mid career pr later than by kids fresh out of university who majored in "education" alone and just read out of the teacher's manual.

      What you're talking about is a very superficial credentialism: teach

      • Re:

        The problem, of course, is that there likely aren't many people at this stage of their lives that are actually willing to do a career-change to something that pays significantly less than what they're used to and demands an additional set of skills they still need to develop. (and might not necessarily be good at)

        Of course we'd all be better off if we actually could get people to do this, but the instances of it actually happening are likely extremely rare. You pretty much need to find people who are alrea

        • Re: Trade School

          Iâ(TM)m in what is probably my last decade or so of a highly technical career in industry since getting a PhD. Would be tempted to forgo the remaining income and teach high school, college, or grad levels, if I could figure out how to do it while avoiding the incredible amount of overhead bullshit that comes with public schools and university administrations. Iâ(TM)d teach for free, but you couldnâ(TM)t pay me enough to deal with that stuff.

          My opinion is informed by observing family members

      • Re:

        Among other things, that would probably require paying the teachers better. Also, the quality of students matters as well. It's pretty clear that this article is conflating university majors with careers. These people aren't regretting their majors because there was something wrong with the teaching or the subject. They're regretting their majors because they aren't making enough money and/or their jobs are bad in other ways. That raises the question though, can everyone actually cut it in computer science

        • Re: Trade School

          It's hard to say one way or another.

          Saying "no, not everyone can cut it" implies that the talent pool is exhausted and we have perfect matching between talents and employment opportunities.

          Saying "yes everyone can learn to code" would imply that the talent pool is infinitely deep, which doesn't sound correct either.

          Some anecdotes from my own days in school is that programming 101 was the big weed out class for electrical engineering at an overall highly selective university with a respectably top 40 enginee

    • Re:

      "Society needs teachers and journalists, and sociologists have brought some major benefits too."

      When there are far too many of them that many end up working as baristas or taking orders at the local Denny's it's fairly safe to say we don't need any MORE of them.

      I was originally a philosophy/history major. I switched when I realized there's not a huge market for corporate philosophers or historians. Got an degree in CS and have been gainfully employed since and well respected in my field (data/programming

    • Re:

      Where I live, the school district had a massive number of retirements as experienced teachers decided they had enough and bailed; and younger ones, especially math or science, decided they would rather earn much more with fewer headaches. Even now, some are retiring during the school year rather then stick it out. Most of the coaches stayed, but unless they start winning they are likely gone as well.

• I thought that was a subset of sociology - which is one of the least appreciated post facto. Instead it's highly valued. Are the mafia requiring a degree to be recruited to their ranks these days?

  • Re:

    In the same sense that medicine is a subset of biology...

    Then there is the distinction between sociology and what is going on in the Sociology Department, which is very contentious. There are deep divisions within the field about what the field is about, and what valid methods for exploring it are. This is perhaps symbolized by how so many movements in academic are "anti-" or "post-" something.

• The push to have everyone go to college is misguided. Learning a skill or trade can be just as valuable. It is important to choose a skill/trade that is valuable to the world. If you can find the intersection of doing something you love and doing something that others value then you will do just fine.

  • That's because people think they can comfortably pay back their loans by majoring in sociology. Yes it is possible to be a millionaire in that, by marrying a wealthy person you meet at some fundraiser. But the vast majority of people in that major are screwed. People are sold into it by the glamor of changing the world, and how sociology is super essential for society. Umm, yeah maybe it is super essential.. but what use is majoring in that if you're gonna be shift leader at McDonald's? Do you need a degree in sociology to work your ass off for hard rote labor? We are ruining lives by doing nothing about this bullshit.

    • Re:

      Or, just hear me out on this one. College shouldn’t be the cost of a McMansion. Or at the very least government loans shouldn’t have interest. Education shouldn’t incur decades of debt.

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      • • Re:

          So that's how all the European countries with free or extremely cheap university education do it? Professors who work for free?

        • Re:

          Yeah all those college profs driving around in Lambos...

      • Re:

        Cheaper college tuition would require fewer people taking out loans to attend college.

    • Re: College is not for everyone

      Two things could help.

      1. Require colleges and lenders to publish the financial reality of any given major. How much do graduates in average make on graduation and then after 5/10 years? How long do graduates take to pay back the loans.

      2. Allow newly taken loans to be discharged through bankruptcy. Get the government out of the lending business, forcing private lenders to properly assess risk. If this means a poor student can't get stupidly in debt to study political science and dance then so be it - they sh

      • Re: College is not for everyone

        Or maybe we stop subsidizing universities with a seemingly bottomless pit of money so they have to figure out how to educate students without piles of no instructional admins and miles of luxury buildings?

    • Re:

      The people who major in sociology think they'll find a comfortable job in the HR department of some Fortune 500 company where other people will do all the real work and they will oversee the diversity quotas and other things of that nature. Now don't get me wrong, such jobs do exist, but how many such positions does a Fortune 500 company like Google can have, and how many software engineering and technical leadership positions do they need? It's a numbers game plain and simple. Among sociology etc graduates

  • Re:

    The funny thing is, computer science, criminology, engineering and nursing aren't much different than a trade job. Sure there's more intellectual heft to it than say learning carpentry or welding, but the net effect is you get a job skill that will basically define your career until you retire.

    Communications folks make good marketers, which is necessary and frankly sociology or psychology make people better leaders; it's just that the path isn't as clearly laid out so you need to be a little creative t

  • This is the path I took. I went to a technical school to get a degree a EE. Then once I had secured a job in that field that paid the bills, I returned to a university to get my masters in CS.

    When people ask me what I think they should do. I always say secure a education in what will pay the bills first. Then go after your passion. You want to be a bullshit artist, err philosophy major, go for it. But first get a education with a practical skill that you can fall back on.

    • Re:

      I'd agree there's a lot more people going into journalism or sociology than there should be, but don't under estimate the value in the arts.

      The further you go in your career the more important communication and interpersonal skills are, and the Sciences and Engineering aren't great at teaching that. I have my bachelors and masters in CS, which certainly was essential to start my career, but at this point I feel like I draw on the soft skills I learned on the arts side more than the majority of the CS course

  • I disagree

    learning is for everyone, and there's no learning that's wasted. There's no indication that there's any genetic predisposition to or away from higher learning. It's environmental. So when you mean somebody who's "not college material" it's because we, as a civilization, didn't do our job.
    
    And we're going to need a better educated population for two reasons. First, automation is coming [businessinsider.com]. The reality is the rate of job destruction is outpacing job creation.
    
    That's how it's supposed to be. We're not suppo

    • Re:

      It is not about judging capability, I'm saying that not everyone *needs* a college degree to be successful and productive in society. I work in IT and I never graduated college, I went to some college but when to work instead of finishing. I am the only person where I work without a college degree. Lack of a degree is not holding me back. A mortgage worth of debt before I got a job would have held me back. Not finishing college does not make me some kind of dumb lemming either, don't be so pretentious.

      • Re:

        Oh I know what you're saying I'm disagreeing with it. You're only thinking in terms of how much money a person can earn. I'm thinking about the kind of citizen that can maintain a stable and functioning democracy indefinitely. I don't think you get that with just a high school education.
        
        When you're dealing with someone who can be manipulated and creating a fascist dictatorship and extra four years of education including a healthy amount of additional history and philosophy goes a long way. It's also dif

    • Re:

      First off, can it with the stupid class warfare rhetoric. It's tiresome, and no, nobody is out to kill you as a matter of policy. If anyone kills you it's most likely to be in an auto accident. You're dragging the conversation away from the actual topic in order to push agenda-driven dialogue.

      Secondly, university education with all the bells and whistles is expensive. Very expensive. The more people you expect to educate in this fashion, the worse it gets. We I'm the United States are arguably already

      • Warren Buffett didn't seem to think so

        He rather famously said there's a class war going on and his side is winning.
        
        And who are you to argue with Warren buffett? He's more wealthy than you. That automatically makes him smarter and better/s.
        
        I never said University education was cheap I said that having universal college education would be so valuable to our civilization that it would be worth the money. And we most definitely have the money.
        
        It's a question of where we want to put our resources as a civilization. Do we want the kind o

  • Re:

    To back that up, "Construction trades" is listed among the list of least regretted college majors. Just about all the least regretted ones seem to be related to actually building something, like comp sci or engineering, or at least focus on something that translates well into a specific job that we value, such as criminology, health, nursing, and even human resources management.

    I do wonder how this list would compare across other countries though, especially in places where the cost of attending college i

• Journalism, Sociology, Liberal arts/general studies, Communications

  Oh the humanities!

  • Re: The most regretted majors

    The humanities were always for people of independent means. The lesson seemed to get lost through a combination of aversion to saying non-PC things, the fact that people were drawn to easier subjects by virtue of being lazy, and the fact that student loans were given out like candy regardless of field of study because it was good politics.

    • Re:

      I think this has more to do with a hiring practice that I like to call the "college bias". Job offers required you to have some college degree. Emphasis on some. In other words, companies didn't give a fuck just WHAT you studied as long as you had a masters in something. Of course this means that people tried to get their degree in something that didn't require a lot of work.

      Guess what, companies noticed and now want relevant degrees.

  • Re:

    People who go into Journalism and are actually clever and motivated end up investigative journalists or war reported for a renown journal. The good ones in sociology can end up in government agencies. These ones don't regret. People who take journalism or sociology because they lacked skills and motivation to get into engineering or nursing and thought humanities had to be an easy pick, get very disappointed at their low prospect for an interesting and/or well-paid job.

    • Re:

      Journalists see themselves being wedged in between amateurs reporting on Twitter and having their Twitch shows and the propaganda outlets that spew whatever nonsense their owner wants the public to believe.

      "Real" journalism is on the way out.

  • Re:

    Best joke of the day? Oh well.

    I had some high hopes Funny for the story.

    And a vested interest? I actually completed four majors (and failed with a couple of others). I have one from both the top and bottom lists, and I can't say that I regret the one that is supposed to be most regrettable or feel like the least regretted major was that valuable (except that I acknowledge most of my income came from that side). (Now I'm retired and finally reading some of my old textbooks cover to cover (rather than in exce

    • Re:

      I just have one (statistics) and don't make a lot of use of it.

      Frankly, if hiring someone, I care more about him showing me passion for the work and that he invests his own time and potentially even money into honing his skills rather than him having some sheet of overpriced paper. A github account with a bunch of your security related projects speaks louder than any degree from some security diploma mill.

• Which are two bulwarks of civilization and democracy are both in the top three regretted. What those people regret is the low pay and bad treatment not the work. The problem isn't them it's us for treating people that important that poorly.
  
  Also if you get a communications degree and you don't go in the marketing you're doing it wrong. There's plenty of good-paying jobs as project managers too. The problem with communications majors is they have a hard time thinking outside their degree because they all want to work in television.
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  • Re:

    "The problem isn't them it's us for treating people that important that poorly."

    They aren't treated poorly in as much as they are treated like an abundant commodity. There are way too many of them to warrant a high salary.

    There are WAY too many lawyers, too. Many are working as legal aids rathern than working lawyers because they can't find a job or open their own business in super saturated markets.

    I'm serious. If you tied a sociologist to a string and dipped them in a pool of folks qualified for that f

    • Re:

      There's a massive teacher shortage. Instead of training and paying teachers Florida is letting random people who happen to have been in the military and teachers with no training except a couple of months rather creepy borderline propaganda. And I would argue that there's an absolute shortage of actual journalists versus propagandists.
      
      We're not talking about sociologists but we could do with a lot more of those and a lot less SWAT people doing no knock warrants. Broken windows policing has not worked fo

      • Re:

        "We're not talking about sociologists but we could do with a lot more of those and a lot less SWAT people doing no knock warrants"

        FTFA:

        "Journalism, SOCIOLOGY (emph mine), communications and education all topped the list of most-regretted college majors"

        The more you get, the less they'll be paid or find employment in their field of study.

        We hire more of them in CA than pretty much anywhere else and easy to document property crime (basically anything that requires a police report for insurance) are way up. O

      • Re:

        What is sick is that many schools teach propaganda in the SAME department they teach journalism!
        (P.R. == propaganda)
        Journalism sadly == reporting == teleprompter reader for many... let the com majors read the prompters but bring back journalism.

        Fascism like many critically important words are being destroyed in todays newspeak right out of 1984. That comes 1st... Hell, ANTIFA (which is most of humanity) is now some manufactured boogie man; this is precursor. Propaganda leads the movements.

  • Re:

    What those people regret is the low pay and bad treatment not the work. The problem isn't them it's us for treating people that important that poorly.

    Plenty of journalists regret discovering that their job is to write listicles with better CTRs. Plenty of teachers regret discovering that their job involves babysitting monsters who don't want to learn and administering standardized tests and implementing policies they disagree with.

• Before giving someone the gift of half a million dollars in debt, they should attest that they have read this report on the employment prospects and salary of their major. If financial institutes, and the government, were a little intelligent, they would require that colleges publish what their graduates of a particular major makes. Every university should be surveying their graduates to find out what situation they're in. Students are making dumb decisions because they aren't properly informed what they're getting into by taking massive loans. I don't see how it is in anyone's interest to have people skilled in things we aren't willing to pay people for knowing.

• Sorry, I know 44% of you think you're "not good at math". But if you want a job that uses your degree that's one you have to go for. Also note that being bad at English doesn't seem to matter much in STEM fields, I'm proof of that.

  • Also note that being bad at English doesn't seem to matter much in STEM fields, I'm proof of that.

    Yet somehow, every single job listing mentions "excellent communications skills" as some sort of hard requirement. You read that enough, and one would think someone like you should be completely unemployable.

    As someone with "mediocre" communications skills (compered to a liberal arts major, which might make me a superstar compared to the average engineer), I'm glad that's not enforced.:-)

    • Re:

      Excellent communications skills is 3 items.
      
      1. Can Speak and Email to a western audience without sounding like classist idiot.
      2. Effectively listening to the question presented.
      3. For IT, be able to draw a logic or network diagram without hours of instruction.

  • Quality of teaching varies

    I've encountered a lot of people who claim to be bad at math, and my advice is always the same: go online and find someone teaching the exact same subject in a different way.

    I've sampled and/or taken a lot of online college courses, and some of them simply "click" with me and I can see the value. The exact same information taught by a different teacher can be a boring nightmare of incomprehensible gibberish. I cite as a specific example "Probabilistic Graphical Models" from Stanford, whose teacher wrote the

• $ != actual value.
  
  Beware of market populism. They system we have now is warped, and doesn't function in the ways most people think it should.
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  • Re:

    When it comes to pay, higher pay has never gone to workers who do the most important work. It goes to the people who are the hardest to replace. Childcare, a critically important job, pays next to nothing, because it's so easy to find somebody who can do it. Even a teenager can successfully watch out for kids. On the other hand, pro athletes--a job arguably not very important in the scheme of things--pays so much, because it's so hard to find somebody who can do it well.

    In between the extremes are STEM jobs

• Like so many others, my degree is only tangentially related to what I do.
  
  First, I will go over what I do. Then will come what degree I have. . . oh hell, I will just get it out now. I have the much maligned MBA. Then, I will go over the path that led to here.
  
  Firstly, I am a middle school teacher. I am sometimes asked, why not a college teacher? It is really simple, I had to draw the pay line somewhere and the colleges pay less. I teach computer applications, Photoshop, personal finance, robotics, and programming. Yes, I realize that is a lot of classes. many subjects are combined. For example, in computer 1, which is an even mix of sixth and seventh graders, we start the semester with personal finance through computer applications.
  
  The way that works is, for example, I start a day with a short reading and explanation of the effect of interest rates on the amount paid for financed goods. Then we would make a spreadsheet illustrating this. Now, about 2/3rds through the semester we are switching to the photoshop units. There they will cover the first three chapters in the photoshop book. For those wondering, it is the Shelly Cashman book. in Robotics the students complete increasingly complex tasks with a Lego EV3 robot. That class is largely sixth and seventh grade. Programming is concurrent, meaning I have two classes in the room at the same time. The programming students are performing increasingly complex tasks with the Arduino while also learning basic electronics and fabrication. An example of the fabrication is the soldering project, where they make a simple LED Christmas tree.
  
  Running the two classes at the same time also serves as a hook for the Robotics 1 students, in that some of them want to move on to that class. Frankly, Robotics 2 (the actual name of the programming class) does look like more fun. However, for Robotics 2, the students have to have the instructor's (me) permission to take it. As such, I have less of the problem of students just sitting around and letting their lab partner do the work. They want to be seen working on, and testing the EV3 programs along with being seen helping struggling students (this is a title 1 , read poverty, school. A lot of these kids have never done anything even closely similar, to what they do in my class, before).
  
  Now, the path here. After community college, where I studied electronic technology, I worked as an office machine repairman for about ten years, yes, copiers, duplicators, and high-volume printers. There came a point when I noticed that I didn't see any old guys doing my job. The few that had been there seemed to be the first people caught in layoff rounds, it is true, as people got older, their numbers did sometimes start to slip.
  
  I finished my BA and then spent some time as a field manager. There are two ways to have field managers. The first is to keep people at that rank forever. The problem is that there is no promotion path for people in the position I had been in. The second is the Up-or-Out approach.
  
  As you can guess, I went up. As yu can also guess, I was not a good fit. To rely on the o'le hiring question "what is your biggest fault?" The right, but oh-so-very wrong answer is, "being honest, I frequently make the mistake of being honest."
  
  I had picked it up in my decade-plus as a technician. I would first be honest. Then, if the customer insisted on an answer that reflected a different reality, I would tell them what they wanted to hear. It went like this, ". . . . I expect to have that part the day after tomorrow, which accounts for order processing and shipping time." At that point, the customer sometimes got very irate and demanded an answer that reflected a different reality. I then told told them something like, "well, I can check with the other technicians at lunch and see if anyone has that part in their van. If so I can be back first thing after lunch." I then called them after lunch and told them it looked like I needed to order the part.
  
  H

  Read the rest of this comment...
• I did a PhD in philosophy, and my only regret is not pursuing degrees in philology and paleography as well...

• I have two degrees in engineering. I regret not taking another semester and studying more humanities. It would've done me good both in my high-tech career and just as a person.

  Why didn't I extend graduation to do that? One word: Finances.

• In 1989 - 1994,5,6,7.... Lab report prep was the number one skill that had changed in the 1980s.
  
  Got pulled away multiple times with long term consulting gigs doing grunt work on Microsoft, Cisco, 3COM and Novell. A good amount of getting people off of doomed platforms. Never really did graduate.... but I passed Differential equations and had enough of a backround in Fortran and Pascal that the other object related languages were not foreign. By 1997 Y2K spending was in full swing, and building PCs and a bit of AS400 export skills was profit to support keep up the other skills.
  
  The time spent looking at data presentation methods of physics was the most valuable items. Learning the techniques of 1990s Autocad, Quatro, Access and WP probalby got me alot more credit than I deserved through the 1990s, and lauched me at MS SQL, VB, PHP, IIS in the early 00s, mostly presenting data via a Webbrowser and a graphing library. Wrote a few shopping carts like everyone else, but knew the lifetime for online retail programing was very limited.
  
  Once I entered fortune 500, never really needed a technology outside of networking to fall back on until 2008-2011....fun dumb times. That is the only era where the next job did not call me. By 2015 I was pulling down more in 4-12 week consulting gigs than I make today as a middle level IT manager. Giving up 60-90 hour billable weeks for a stable paycheck for a personal life was very hard.
  
  Today I have 15 years more of 40-60 hour weeks, and the more I do, the more I change, the more I am working on a system more like why I got into physics. Connected systems of behavior that only very rarely do strange things.
  
  Today I manage a very select technology platform and keep 30 something with to few skill sets working in a generally aligned direction for fortune 500 and keep the discussion in the tone of science and not SJW. Knowing how to miniplate a query and present data is still my value add. Learned how to talk to people who were clearly much smarter than myself while keeping liberal arts majors engaged. The guys from former Warsaw pac, china and india that flooded the physics departments of the 1990s taught me how to listen to critically different voices in team efforts.

• I believe that CS majors have the fewest regrets, but I'll be honest, I feel like it's one of the least required degrees for the job market.

  I have a friend who is an incredible programmer. He's much better at it than me, picks up on concepts faster than I do, and has risen to a higher level of responsibility than me in less time. I don't feel badly about it; I'm a good programmer, he's just better. But he doesn't have a degree. He had to drop out for financial reasons. He's really worked his way up and taught himself how to be a good programmer.

  My CS/Math Sciences degree doesn't factor much into my day-to-day games programming job. Over the last 20 years, I've only used my formal education a few times. Unlike my nursing friends, the practical part of the CS degree doesn't really show itself particularly often. I notice this a lot with those of us that have CS degrees. The only reason you need one is to overcome the automated resume checkers that look for your BSc.

  A CS degree has lots of interesting parts to it, but you'll never use most of it unless you go to grad school. If you want to be a programmer, just go be a programmer. My sister did a programming boot camp, and she's got a great job now. (She does data analysis for a provincial health board; she has good data analysis skills from doing a PhD in archaeology. The programming in Python and R was something that she could do in a few months.)

  Honestly, the most valuable part of my degree is the part that I have regrets about, and it has nothing to do with computers: I did a minor in Earth and Atmospheric Science, and I wish I'd pursued that more. I regret not going into those physical sciences. Programming has given me a great career, but when I read scientific stuff for pleasure, it's almost never about computing and almost always about biology or geology or something that I had a chance to go after.

  We're not ready to make life decisions at 18, honestly. The problem here isn't that there are too many 'useless' degrees, it's that we're pushed to make decisions before our brains can truly understand what we want, what the repercussions are, what we want out of our lives. Not as many things require a degree as we tell people they do; a lot of degrees are just gatekeeping. You can be a programmer or an artist or a writer without a degree.

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• ... to make ends meet matters. A lot. I don't dispute this.

  But there is a lot to be said for a job that might not pay as well, but you have more of a passion for than something that you are only doing because it might happen to pay you more.

  Again, I'm not saying that making less than what you actually need is ever okay, but once those demands are actually met, making more than that at a job you dislike or where you are otherwise treated like you don't matter is only going to deprive you of the kinds o

• The majors that are difficult to obtain tend to pay much more. Big surprise.
  "Fluff majors" (ie: Liberal Arts majors) give people mostly worthless degrees that don't allow graduates to earn a decent living.

  It's like trying to sell dirt. It's everywhere so it's not worth much.