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

Very interesting conclusion. I was actually a business major (finance emphasis) at the University of Michigan, which has one of the best business schools in the country at the undergrad level. As I said, the environment, work involved, and job outlook is much different at a elite business school than the other 95% of business programs. Michigan's business school is tough (relative to the rest of the school) to get into, and very competitive once in. They also have about a 90% employment rate for graduates. Probably a fifth of these people went on to make 120k+ directly out of school (investment banking). As you can imagine, these jobs are extremely competitive to get, and these companies only recruit on campus in 10-20 schools nationwide. About 10 kids per year get into the elite consulting firms, with the majority of the school going to Fortune 500 companies in finance, marketing, accounting, etc (45-60k/yr). This is the nature of top undergrad business schools - basically Wharton, Haas, Stern, Ross, McIntyre, Goizuetta, and maybe a handful of others.

Even at UMich, with as good of a business school it had, I respected the hell out of engineers and pre med kids. I easily admit that I couldn't have cut it in their degrees - didn't have the intelligence for the math, nor the discipline for the sciences. Financial accounting was competitive, but mainly because classes were graded on a curve. The only math needed for a BBA was Calc 1 - hence, the material was an absolute joke compared to electrical/mechanical/biomedical engineering. And keep in mind this is at a top business school. I can hardly imagine how easy a typical business school would be.

Bottom line is, engineering is a good degree at ANY school. The material you have to master gives you credibility. That's why engineers easily make 60k+ out of school. Chemical engineering is even higher, maybe 80k+. It's a very marketable degree because you learn hard skills - unlike marketing.

A final thought on the matter is that business is an inherently boring, unintellectual degree. I was happy that I was in the business school, but always regretted the fact that I was essentially in a trade school - the whole point of the business school was to funnel people into jobs. Liberal arts degrees are not practical, but all things equal I'd rather about learn international relations, classical civillizations, or macroeconomic theory than balance sheets, budgeting, and Porter's 5 forces.

So my final piece of advice: Work hard in high school and go to an Ivy League/similar caliber school. That way, you can earn a liberal arts degree and still have credibility through your school name, as well as top access to recruiters. I regret not working harder in high school and going to an Ivy so I could major in economics rather than business.

Any questions, feel free to ask.

It always drives me nuts when I'm in the library and I hear a business major complain about how hard they have it. The way to go is to get an B.S. in Engineering and then get your MBA. Money.

I agree that management is worthless. But Finance and accounting are different. And I would say that although the classes may not be the hardest ever, but I would say that most serious business majors are also carrying a job and an internship to set themselves apart from the people who are there because their parents are paying for it and they don't know what to do. I don't see many biology or anyone doing much outside of school..Don't lump us all together, some of us are actually hard working believe or not.

The mathematical difficulty of Engineering is overblown, I'm a Mechanical Engineer at an elite engineering school and honestly, the math is never really that hard. I think critical thinking is much more important than actual mathematical ability. Being able to integrate things easily, and being absolutely rock solid at algebra and geometry, are important skills, but the real key is knowing what math needs to be done.

You take a system, maybe it is spinning, maybe it has oil flowing through it, whatever. Ultimately the math you are doing is 98% algebra & geometry, with maybe a differential equation if you are unlucky. Most of the calculus is conceptual, and there is a ton of analog equations within each discipline.

Obviously the mathematical ability matters, but I think there is a lot more in common between an engineering degree and a liberal arts degree than most people think. Liberal arts majors don't give themselves enough credit (except for the ones that give themselves way too much credit!) because there is a stereotype that the job market for them is horrible. If you can think like an English major, you can make a pretty great engineer if you can put the math together.

But I agree, Business students are turds.

yeah U mad wrote:

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

------------

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?

Coming from a person who writes like a teenager.

Physics, if you listened in high school? You're an idiot. Physics is by far the most difficult major.

Biology, first two years take the exact same courses as first year math, physics, chem, chemical engineering students.

Speech Pathology is easy? It is a very dense, highly specialized major, with a huge work load required for credits.

Yeah, u mad. Lettuce be reality, physics and biology require basic math skills or the ability to memorize. Don't put basic math in the difficult category, it only reveals your ignorance.

Come at me bro.

BS in BA Economics wrote:

[quote]bba wrote:

I'd love to know where you are getting your numbers from. Everyone in this thread bashing business majors, do you actually have any stats to back up your arguments? Sounds like a lot of piss and vinegar from some enineering major who had to bust his ass in school and is making the same salary as a marketing major.

Oh man- Hey, next time before you post about a topic like this, go check the Fortune 500 CEO list.....guess what? For the umpteenth year in a row, the #1 undergrad background is.......engineering.

Nerds r us wrote:

BS in BA Economics wrote:

[quote]bba wrote:

I'd love to know where you are getting your numbers from. Everyone in this thread bashing business majors, do you actually have any stats to back up your arguments? Sounds like a lot of piss and vinegar from some enineering major who had to bust his ass in school and is making the same salary as a marketing major.

Oh man- Hey, next time before you post about a topic like this, go check the Fortune 500 CEO list.....guess what? For the umpteenth year in a row, the #1 undergrad background is.......engineering.

Yeah, and the only engineer to ever be U.S. President was . . . Herbert Hoover! The Great Engineer! Thanks for your contributions to American civic life, engineers!

Festizio wrote:

so you are saying it is more practical to major in art history or spanish? or maybe geography?

Actually, yes, it is more practical to get those majors, even though you don't believe it. Employers and graduate schools want passionate, curious, intelligent people who can learn and communicate. They don't give a crap about whether you've studied the latest theories on management or finance.

I'm telling you this as a member of the administrative faculty at a top university committed to maintaining their status--it's not good for students on the job market to have a business major. The statistics are evident and well-documented. Here's a link--compare how business majors perform, for example, on the GRE:

This is the most true post i've ever read on letsrun, and I couldnt agree more. I'll add a second caveat: MBAs aren't worthless, although they are becoming less and less meaningful these days, especially without a real degree in quantitative thinking.

Knowing who I know and what they do, this surprises me not at all.

yeah U mad wrote:

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

------------

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?

stole the words from my mouth, all of them

In my experience, education majors are the laziest, which might explain the laziness of students these days.

Business majors have it easy. I'm two year into an engineering degree, I had to take an economics class, easiest class ever. Half the kids couldn't do algebra, it was hilarious. They were saying "this is so hard". Engineering, Math, and the sciences are the hardest, hands down.

As an accounting and finance major with a very good job lined up, I hate discussions like this. These arguments always seem to degenerate into engineers taking the offensive against everyone else. Math is not the only way to measure intelligence, sorry to disappoint the engineers in this topic. For example, I am always fascinated with what some people can draw. One of my friends can draw my face at near photograph quality in 20 minutes. I can draw a circle with a smiley and eyes in that time. Obviously different parts of the brain are at work. In the same way I can make fun of him for not understanding calculus, he can make fun of my brain's abysmal ability to portray the world on paper.

Put me in a coffee shop for an hour with a math major or a art history major; I'll take the art history any day.

Actually, is there a "C" answer, where you get waterboarded for 3 days straight? I'll go with that.

hi wrote:

Put me in a coffee shop for an hour with a math major or a art history major; I'll take the art history any day.

As a biochem major, I cannot speak for engineers, but feel for them. They do the hardest work on any college campus (maybe physics is harder, but its tough to say). Further, they are vital for the country. imagine if all we had was business people (which is where we're heading). We would have a bunch of empty suits who are mostly glorified used car salesmen.

From the engineers point of view, they work hard as hell and are creative and can do things that most people cannot do, mostly due to the rigorous grind they've chosen to enter.

Then, you get these lazy business students with overinflated GPAs who probably wont get jobs. Even if they do, they aren't really contributing much to society, but are often times leeching off of the real workers (engineers being a huge group here) like parasites. Ed Abbey said that for every person in this country who actually makes something, you have 10 more leeching off of their hard work. I couldn't agree more. In other words, engineers drive the economy by actually making practical things, which the business people then sell.

Business ppl will argue that engineers are antisocial and can't do what they, the super cool and social people with "street smarts". the fact is that business ppl have an overinflated sense of importance. The engineers could, and often do, business quite well. This is why people with engineering degrees and MBAs kill it in the business world.

Id like to know how many business majors can do engineering. I'd take a country of engineers over a country of business people any day.

To add, business has a very important role in this country, and we need it as a profession. the problem is the droves of useless degrees and self important people who want to get paid a lot without working for it like engineers do, because they have the gift of gab or whatever they think makes them special. Whats truly special is hard work.

I'm not surprised you'd rather have coffee with an art history major. they have cool interesting things to talk about. engineers are busy doing something useful, floating the economy so that you guys can sit down and have interesting conversations.

I took a introductory theoretical math sequence my freshman year. About 3/4 of the class dropped by the end of the year. I ran into one of the girls I had talked to in the class at a party recently; she said math was too hard and she had switched to...engineering. I know a few people who have taken this path, but none who have done the opposite. Engineers have the most inflated egos of anyone on campus, but they do not necessarily have the hardest major.

Birth

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Work

Death.