Laziest students on campus? According to this, Business Majors.

Makes sense, I applied myself to some classes that interested me, but probably 50% of business classes in most schools are a waste of time, organizational management and organizational behavior being two examples.

Teaching students always seemed lazy at my school, same with psych kids.

Does that surprise you...?

no way they have education majors beat.. no f'in way.

Common super easy majors:

Spanish

Art History

Early Childhood Education

Biology or Physics (if you listened in high school)

Psychology

Speech Pathology

Human Performance or Exercise Science

English Literature

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Neat, these are the same majors that will never get you a job. GJDM repped.

In b4 "study hard guy" of one of these majors tells his success story.

U mad?

yeah U mad wrote:

Common super easy majors:

Biology or Physics (if you listened in high school)

I will agree with most of your list. But Biology and Physics? You must have gone to a school with some seriously shitty science departments.

I have no idea what you wrote in your post below the line. Is that supposed to be coherent language?

Second the poster above. Physics is arguably the hardest/most impressive major out there, along with math. And Bio, just like any other pre-med track, is one of the most competitve majors.

As a whole, the more quantitative a field of study is, the more difficult is. Hence why math, physics, engineering, and other sciences are the most difficult majors. Other majors can be difficult/easy depending on your school. Obviously anything at UChicago is difficult.

Liberal arts majors are always the easiest, because they require the least rigorous quantitative thinking - which is why they are least appealing to employers. Liberal arts majors at lower schools are a joke (i.e. any school with above a 50% acceptance rate). This isn't to say there aren't smart people in these programs - this post is a critique on the programs, not the students, although of course there is strong correlation between intelligence/work ethic of students and how difficult/competitive their major is.

As for business, it is easily a joke degree in almost all schools. It is for people who don't know what they want to do or think they are going to make big money because its "business" and that sounds impressive. The material they study is high school level. The one caveat to undergraduate business degrees are the top business programs. At schools like UPenn, NYU, UMich, and UC Berkely, the business program is more selective/prestigious than the college as a whole. While this doesn't necessarily make the material studied harder than "real" majors, the classes are extreme competitive and the students are very hard working/ambitious. But they are competing for an entirely different segment of jobs than the business school student from, say, the University of New Hampshire or similarly poor program. Top business students go into consulting, corporate finance, investment banking, trading. The ones in the other 90% of business degrees get jobs as the local store manager, in human relations, IT, secretarial work, or more often than not, no job at all.

To prospective college students, I would highly advise not majoring in business unless you go to a school with a highly ranked/recruited business school. If you are smart and want a degree that is useful, attractive, and flexible, but aren't interested in medicine, law, or academia, go into engineering.

I read this article this morning. It blew me away. We are getting really stupid and lazy in this country.

Post a link that does not require a subscription.

Here is the article

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/education/edlife/edl-17business-t.html?hp

Accounting and Finance are not “Easy” Business majors.

Accounting and finance may be challenging, but they are nothing compared to real math. Trust me, to your average engineering student, even the most difficult accounting is much easier.

You do not need a subscription to read the article on the link I posted. The Chronicle has many free articles, and this is one of them.

bba wrote:

To prospective college students, I would highly advise not majoring in business unless you go to a school with a highly ranked/recruited business school.

Agreed.

The idea of the business administration undergrad degree has always been a bit strange to me. You don't sell business. You sell some product or service. The best businesspeople are experts in their product first and foremost. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs know computers. CEOs of companies that build cars and planes are usually engineers who understand cars or planes.

You don't just learn about business and then become a businessman. You learn about a product and its market and the industry that the product exists within. If you want to be a businessperson, spend your undergrad years learning your product. I don't have the numbers on this, but I would guess that the majority of CEOs have engineering degrees and that a small minority have undergrad degrees in business.

I love the proverbial horde of liberal arts students who, because they supposedly can't even do basic tasks like addition, go jobless for months or years.

Sure, the top of the class at places like Harvard or Stanford might get away with a liberal arts degree, but for the vast majority of the state school kids, those with Psych and English degrees are doomed to a life of fast food jobs and janitorial positions. . .

. . .except for the fact that in 2010, still not recovered from the recession, starting salary for liberal arts majors was ~33,000 dollars and the unemployment rate was about 8 percent, below the national avg. Obviously, computer science people and their ilk had better starting salaries and lower unemployment, but let's not pretend that there are millions of liberal arts students are adrift in a permanent state of underemployment.

But I mean, let's not let facts get in the way of a convenient narrative.

-stats guy sans sense of superiority about his major

business degrees are universal. 90% of grads will get a desk job, that's just the way it is.

Thanks for the link. I work at a top-ranked university, and although many freshmen and their parents are very upset that we do not offer a business major, this is a very conscious choice on the part of the university. We know that business majors do not have a good track record of getting jobs or getting into graduate school, which is why we resist the pressure by "practically minded" people to offer a business major.

If you are practically minded, you will do the research and figure out that business majors are a dime a dozen, and that practically any other major is a better path to business school and the working world.

The great irony: the least practical thing you can do as an undergraduate is major in business.

so you are saying it is more practical to major in art history or spanish? or maybe geography? yeah, those will line you up for awesome jobs. why not just major in running?

Festizio wrote:

so you are saying it is more practical to major in art history or spanish? or maybe geography? yeah, those will line you up for awesome jobs. why not just major in running?

Are you calling geography impractical? People with GIS skills are highly employable and most geography programs that I'm aware of offer a GIS focus.

Thank you 'proverbial horde,' you hit the nail on the head.

I took the intro management class at what was supposed to be a pretty good business school and our group project ended up being a case study of one guy's frat house. I guess nobody in the group had interesting jobs or parents who worked for interesting organizations.

English isn't so bad. You can teach English abroad and experience other cultures in your twenties.