Art: One of the best majors for entry into fun, exciting, aesthetically interesting and intellectually engaging jobs, assuming that you’re a woman in the seventies and also independently wealthy.
Art History: Spending 4 years of your life getting wasted and bullshitting about the art of dead white men is less fun than it sounds. Less employable than philosophy.
Biology: All the stresses and high workloads of a STEM major, none of the employability of a STEM major. On the plus side, very little math.
Biomedical Engineering: 90% of your peers are here because they want to become doctors. Statistically, most of them will flunk out by sophomore year or change to easier majors. But you’re different, right? Right?
Business: Easy major that sounds practically relevant (Hint: it isn’t).
Chemistry: I hope you like graduate school.
Communications: The second best major for joining a dying field.
Computer Science: Is programming your passion? Want to learn how to write good, maintainable, bug-free programs? Want to be up to date on the latest frameworks and debugging tools? LOL. What is this, a trade school? Nah, you’ll spend 4 years of your life doing actually important stuff, like proving the Turing Completeness of your toaster. Still employable, for some reason.
Creative Writing: You can communicate your angst in a lot of creative and interesting ways! Don’t worry, you won’t run out of angst anytime soon.
Economics: The least Marxist of the social sciences. Come because you want to learn how the world actually works. We don’t teach undergrads that, but we do teach you to solve fun puzzles with hard math! If by “fun puzzles” you mean “IS-LM models” and by “hard math” you mean “basic calculus.”
Education: The less said, the better.
English: Please tell me you double-majored in Education.
Geology: Come because you like rocks and “saving the planet,” leave to join a petroleum company.
History: Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do know history are unlikely to do much better, since they have the decision-making prowess of the type of person who majored in history.
Kinesiology: Enter, ye of absolutely non-existent academic ambition.
Mathematics: I hope you didn’t take this major because you liked numbers. Most of your professors can’t count past 10.
Nursing: All the stresses of med school, minus all the prestige. But hey, you can actually get a job!
Philosophy: Come in as a freshman asking dumb, ill-formed questions like “What is the meaning of life?” Come out 4–6 years later asking deep, sophisticated questions like: “What is ‘is’ in the Hegelian dialectic of the Kantian framework in a postmodern age?”
Physics: You get to do a lot of math.
Pre-Law: Statistically, the major that leads to having one of the lowest possible LSAT scores.
Psychology: A recent study (n = 13, p = .04999) says that psychology majors are smarter, hotter, richer and more statistically savvy than every other major. That study will probably fail to replicate, but hey. So will just about everything else you remember from class.
Sociology: Learn about how society is fucked. Also, Marx is great.
Linchuan Zhang, “If college majors had honest mottos, what would they be?”, Quora, 2018-01-08.
