Written by Holy Taco
College is a great place to learn and have fun. But let’s not kid ourselves, some degrees are as useless as the plot in a Michael Bay film. Here’s a list of 10 degrees that may be interesting, but do jack shit for you in the real world.
10. Art History
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: With an art history degree you could maybe curate an art gallery or work at a museum or….yeah, that’s it. That’s all you can do. And seeing as how every art gallery and museum I’ve ever been to has exactly one dude sitting quietly at a desk reading a New Yorker and eating a food that requires chopsticks, I’m going to go ahead and assume there’s not a lot of positions open in the field. That means you’re going to have to venture out into the corporate world. And let me inform you, when you’re interviewing with Bob from the HR team at Wal-Mart who’s wearing a tie that has the twin towers smoking with writing underneath that says “We Will Never Forget,” your art history degree says to him “I’m a commie a-hole who thinks I’m better than guys with 9/11 ties.”
What Job You’ll End Up With: After your parents boot your ass from your bedroom to make room for anything that’s not your bedroom, you’ll wander towards the nearest coffee shop and get a job there, which will allow you to meet artists who will thank you for allowing them to put fliers by the cash register that inform people of their upcoming show that touts “the combination of art and flute.”
9. Philosophy
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: This isn’t ancient Greece: No one is going to pay you money, or allow you to sodomize their attractive son, in exchange for your knowledge of existence. Never has there been an employer who’s said “Man, we’re having all kinds of problems, I wish we had someone on our team who could reference and draw conclusions from the story of Siddhartha that would pull up our fourth quarter numbers.” I took many philosophy classes and it involved reading and smoking a shit pile of weed. You don’t need to pay 20,000 dollars a year to do that. All you need is twenty dollars and a library card.
What Job You’ll End Up With: Thanks to your extensive knowledge of philosophy, you’re now self-aware enough to know that most jobs out there will make you totally miserable. So most likely you’ll wait tables part time and hope someone starts paying you for the bi-monthly entries on your blog.
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: If you’re not named Achmed or Bjork or G’Day Mate this isn’t a degree, it’s the last 18 years of your life. If you really want to study us you don’t need to go to some stupid class, you need only to sit back and watch a two-hour block of Must-See TV to understand The American. After doing my own research, it seems that this mysterious creature is a pot-bellied humanoid with a hot wife and bad credit who has a penchant for low-calorie beer, Chilis, Applebees, TGIFridays, Denny’s, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Dave and Busters, Steak and Shake, Chilis (again) and Red Lobster. Oh and he can totally demolish a White Castle Crave Case in, like, 20 seconds. OK, now give me my degree.
What Job You’ll End Up With: To take your American Studies degree one step further, you will be qualified to do 40-50 years of “graduate work” cleaning tables and taking orders at a Chilis, Applebees, TGIFridays or Red Lobster. Or possibly Denny’s.
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: I didn’t even know this was a major until I found it on the Appalachian State website. According to their actual explanation of this major: “Music therapy is the scientific application of the art of music within a therapeutic relationship to meet the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs of individuals.” Which is a big, fancy way of saying “We’ll teach you how to make a mix tape.” I guess I, too, am a qualified music therapist because my “Summer Jams ‘95″ tape I made in the 10th grade totally rocked my house party. All my friends told me that kicking it off with Wreckz-N-Effects “Rump Shaker” followed by Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” totally met their physical, mental and spiritual needs to help them get wasted on my dad’s Schnapps and Drambuie.
What Job You’ll End Up With: After realizing that yoga studios and elderly homes don’t pay people just to come in and set mood music, you’re sadly going to end up putting your degree towards burning a fire to keep warm because you are homeless.
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: Go into a communications class on any given day and it’ll smell like dried semen and booze. Reason being, communications is the major for anyone who wants to graduate, but doesn’t want to stop getting totally wasted on weekdays. Here’s the bad news, if an employer is going to hire someone to help decipher how human beings communicate, he’s going to hire someone with the letters “Dr.” before their name, not the person who first checks to see if a class is offered online, then when they find out it’s not, let’s out a “gaaaaay bro.”
What Job You’ll End Up With: You’ll go to several job interviews that turn out to be pyramid schemes, even though at first you won’t realize this and come home and tell your parents, who you still live with, “They said I’ll probably be making six figures in less than a year just by selling these beer cozies.”
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: Despite what “Dancing with the Stars” and “High School Musical” may tell you, there aren’t a lot of dancing jobs out there-so you better be good because there aren’t any gigs for mediocre dancers. Outside of New York City or some crap in LA there is absolutely nothing you can do with a dance degree that doesn’t involve actually dancing for money. And since the Des Moines interpretive dance movement hasn’t really taken off yet, you have a better chance landing a job as an 8-Track repairman or a member of the Beatles.
What Job You’ll End Up With: After moving to New York and trying out for Hello Dolly! or Damn Yankees or any of the other seven Broadway plays that want dancers and not landing a single one because you got your dance degree from Ball State, you will find ample opportunity to show off your choreographic skills at one of the city’s many strip clubs. You’ll just need to change your name to Crystal or Bambi and you’ll be able finally live out your dream as a dancer. (Mom and Dad will be so proud!)
4. English Lit
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: If someone can spend a weekend with a box of Cliff’s Notes and have only a slightly less conversational knowledge of what you spent 4 years studying, you probably don’t have the most employer friendly degree. Having an English Lit degree is like being a member of the Kansas City Royals: No one cares and the best you can hope for is every once in a while someone buys you a beer because of it.
What Job You’ll End Up With: You can read and comprehend, so that gives you an advantage over 99.5% of the people that peruse Craig’s list job listings. Therefore, you’ll most likely end up landing an entry level position at a random small company, or showing up to your interview and being raped repeatedly by a group of masked men.
3. Latin
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: Not only does no one speak this language anymore, but we already have all the Latin that exists in the world. There’s no new Latin that’s hot off the presses that needs immediate translating. I’m no business major, but majoring in a language that doesn’t exist anymore doesn’t sound so good for job security. And I’m sorry to break the news to you, but the world doesn’t need someone to translate The Bible or the inscription on the side of a Post Office or El Loco Latino’s “Latin House Party.”
What Job You’ll End Up With: Since you majored in something that doesn’t exist, you’re going to have two jobs. Your first one will be as the annoying pretentious guy who gives everyone the Latin etymology of every big word he hears at every dinner party he attends. Your second, and most lucrative job, will be as a Subway Sandwich Artist.
2. Film
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: No one in hollywood gives a shit that you made a short film about an alcoholic albino that discovers the meaning of life through the help of a retarded child. Unless that retarded child was played by the son of Harvey Weinstein, your film or degree will be as pointless as the last three seasons of Lost
What Job You’ll End Up With: If you’re lucky, you’ll have an uncle who can get you a job as a production assistant on CSI Miami, where your time will be spent making coffee runs and finding whores that will let David Caruso pee on them.
1. Religion
Why It Won’t Help You Get a Job: Sorry God, but a major in Religion is about as worthless as St. Brice (The Patron Saint of Stomach Aches.) Even Duke University can’t put a solid sell on this degree: “A major in religion offers intellectual excitement and can be a pathway to a liberal education.” OK, you sold me. So now I get to shell out about a hundred thousand dollars so I can know what to wear to a Shinto ceremony and learn how many virgins Allah will give me if I blow myself up in an Israeli square? If it’s OK with you, I’ll keep my money and stick to my sinning-a-lot-now-and-repenting-on-my-deathbed plan.
What Job You’ll End Up With: This one is tricky. On one hand you’ll probably end up working behind the desk of a Christian Science Reading Room. But on the other, you may end up with everlasting peace and spiritual enlightenment. Let’s call it a draw.
20 Responses
The 10 Most Worthless College Majors
June 5th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
1[...] Go to the author’s original blog: The 10 Most Worthless College Majors [...]
Sarah
June 5th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
2I think that you gave a simplistic view of the Communications degree. Yeah, employers may automatically look at it as an easy major, but that just gives you the opportunity to stand out from what they expect of you and push yourself to prove that you are a capable person that they can benefit from by hiring.
mmhan
June 5th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
3Okay, I totally disagree on the film major and communication major.
I do have lots of friends who’s majored in Film, which also equips them with other media related skills that will help them get employed. I do agree this major has significantly less demand than other. Even though you might have to start up by running chores and cleaning out trash bin, a motivated individual would find a way or another to make his way to the top.
And Communication, companies are hiring PRs these days. I don’t see a reason, why a communication graduated would go jobless.
yohan
June 5th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
4Roll up, Roll up ! Come defend your bad choice of majors.
tres
June 6th, 2008 at 12:05 am
5What I can’t stand are the chaff who think the purpose of college is to get a better job. College is supposed to be about enriching and deepening one’s understanding of and interaction with the world. There’s a big movement to make all education — even college — some sort of job-training course; george w’s standardized tests and ‘no child left behind’ are the symptoms of this misuse of education.
They would propose that we we should be institutionalized as if we were automatons to be wound-up and set upon a course. I think Ben Franklin would think the modern perversion of education into a technical institute is a travesty. The ideal of education that men like Franklin and Emerson believed in has been eviscerated from education — except for these “worthless college majors.”
“Worthless” is a matter of perspective. I’ll call your pragmatic, career-driven degree worthless, simply because you lived through the “days of rife” with only a mind to make money.
And yeah, I got a Comp Sci BS along with my Philosophy BA.
Looney
June 6th, 2008 at 9:48 am
6As for philosophy: you’re right that there are no actual jobs for philosophers other than professorship. However, philosophy majors usually don’t end up waiting tables. Most of them go to law school instead.
Dana
June 6th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
7Yeah i can imagine that most of these majors are pretty useless, the only thing you can do with them is to turn around, go back to school,and teach them.
monk
June 7th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
8the two DUDES under art history…I’ve never laughed so hard at anything on the internet. HAHAHAAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAAAAAAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAA!
herman king
June 7th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
9history may get you a teaching job…perpetuating the lies that fill our textbooks.
herman king
June 7th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
10history may get you a teaching job…perpetuating the lies that fill our textbooks.
Jacob
June 8th, 2008 at 1:10 am
11Actually, the music therapy i know is VEEERY different from that description. AND your highly un-knowing mockery is just stupid. the music therapy i know (and that pays for my private school education) is about giving skills, confidence, etc to the mentally retarded or physically handicapped. My mom’s been a music therapist nearly 30 years, and i’m willing to bet she couldn’t make a mix tape to save her life. you’re making a total fool of yourself by making fun of something you clearly know jack shit about. it’s nothing like the dj-esque ‘description’ of it you provide. dumbass
Edward Domenick
June 9th, 2008 at 5:31 am
12The dude nailed it. Nice job Nick C.
Dilip Muralidaran
June 17th, 2008 at 11:18 am
13“how many virgins Allah will give me if I blow myself up in an Israeli square”…
awesome man!
zizou
July 1st, 2008 at 5:46 am
14very naice….. this should be made a must read…
Andrea
July 4th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
15Ehh. . .dance majors learn to be all cerebral and anatomical about dance. You learn how to be a good teacher. And. . .get lots of non-pay extra-curricular performance opportunities to supplement our foodservice/bank/dumpster-diving jobs? Oh, I’ve got nothin’.
That said. . .mean! We with useless majors are already insecure enough, and now you have to go and make us think about it and get us all defensive and irritated? Damn.
Seriously though, not all of these jobs are as useless as you think they are. They’re just incredibly specific. Not so much with the flexibility. Oh, well. I guess you’re just having fun.
Andrea
July 4th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
16Oh, yeah - and good point above with the philosophy + law comment! I also hear a lot about uber-successful businesspeople who’ve combined philosophy w/ marketing or economics or, obvs, business. Snap!
Vignan
July 7th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
17The point isn’t that people can actually make something of these majors. My friend right now in medical school is a film major so it’s not like you can’t do anything out of these worthless majors. But can you really tell me that the average person is going to be able to run with this major to make a life for himself? And Tres, I can understand you want to enrich yourself in college but you do need to learn a skill set to survive in the modern world too eh? Here’s a thought enrich your knowledge of the world by doing the things you love ALONG with the things that are practical maybe if you get lucky what you love can be practical hence philosophy/poly sci going to law school and so on…
Vignan
July 7th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
18oh yeah, I forgot to say I love the article funny shit=P
Rilla
July 13th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
19Lol does anyone with a philosophy + law double degree actually make practical use of philosophy in their future career? Sorry no, they practise law instead. Philosophy assists with the logical thinking involved in law, but taking one basic Philosophy paper would do (if you really want to). No need to go as far as an actual philosophy degree. Might as well take something more useful like a commerce + law or science + law where you can actually make use of the other complementary major to law.
Crystal
July 14th, 2008 at 2:18 am
20GREAT ARTICLE. Loved it =D
Thank god you didn’t put Business haha
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