Useless Courses , Majors and Degrees?

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The worth of a degree cannot be quantified universally.
It is always a function of the degree and the person holding the degree.

There are very successful people with degrees in obscure majors, there are very successful people with degrees in the STEM field, there are very successful people without any degree.
There are also very unsuccessful people with STEM degrees.

Science Ph.D.

Life-draining, soul-crushing waste of time, energy and youthful exuberance. Faculty jobs are nonexistent, reserved only for the top 1% of the top 1% who happen to know someone. You find yourself having squandered the best years of your life in pursuit of something that will never materialize. If you are an Aspie with all the social grace of a rusty nail, your degree and all of your hard work are rendered worthless and you will be passed up for someone who does no work but has managed to hone his or her snake charming skills.

I'm not that bitter -- it's just kind of true. Everyone knows it but they keep offering these silly degrees to beef up the cheap labor force (grad students and postdocs). If you must do something science-related, engineering or health care (MD, PharmD) may be better options.

i wonder what percentage of MBAs/finance degree grads get high-paying quality jobs?

One thing that seems to be sought after the world over is Statisticians. They're used in official Government statistics, medicine, and probably a few other things not coming to mind right now. Some with degrees in Mathematics become Statisticians.

I studied Psychology (often considered a somewhat useless subject) and am soon (luckily) starting a job as a Statistician.

Thats highly subjective, since it depends on what you want to do in life, plus
the job market.

Realistically, I'd say anything to do with arts, photovoltaics, quantum physics or philosophy have a niche job market.

I was actually about to make a thread on this, but it seems you did it for me . I personally think it's irresponsible at best for colleges to offer so many, essentially worthless, degrees without warning prospective students of that fact beforehand.

Most students who enter college are fresh out of high school, still slightly immature, little to no work experience, very little idea how the real world works. How can you expect them, then, to pick a degree out of the hundreds offered that will give them a good chance of employment afterwards? Most are simply told to follow their dreams and be what they want to be, so you end up with all of these people going into English because they like to write, or history because they find it interesting...only to have a rude awakening 4 years later. I really hate seeing people make those mistakes since many of them think that a college degree is like a golden plaque that will give them a free pass into employment, but it just isn't the case.

I really think that since you're paying soo much money to universities nowadays, they should take more responsibility towards steering students to viable majors. It's a downright crime that you have these students paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a degree that they will probably never use for the rest of their lives.

I wish America had more of the efficient European-style education system which steers people towards educations which are in line with their talents as well as what the local job market will bear. in America, it is strictly a crap shoot [picking the right major].