Thats why. If you just major in journalism or education you have no real niche so its tough to compete for say a WSJ job when you have no real econ background or a Washington Post job if you have no polysci or IR background. Same with education. It gives you a specialty so you have some area where you are more competitive than the average journalism major. </p>
<p>All departments are valuable, but many undergrad majors by themselves are pretty useless. You need to add something to them or what was the point?</p>
<p>totally agree
i have taken 300 evel philosphy, sociology and history classes. and as an engineering major gotte an A in all of them. The one thing taught in engineering is the use of logic correctly. </p>
<p>and i think philosophy and sociology are the dumbest majors out there. they are good anciliiaries, but really. no need to know them through and through</p>
<p>I think all majors serve their purpose and are enriching, but here are the ones that I find to be relatively silly: </p>
<p>Undergraduate Business Administration - Leave it to grad school
Pre-Law - Nonsense
Legal Studies - Leave it to law school
Pre-Med - more legit than PreLaw, but these kids think that they’re doctors already. Most won’t even make it to Med School.</p>
<p>Communications - learning how to use a telephone? lolz
Fine Arts - good luck finding a job
Art History - some find it intellectually stimulating. I don’t.
Anthropology - something about studying other cultures like ant farms makes me uneasy…
Foreign language - I can see minoring in a language, but once you’re fluent, you’re fluent right?</p>
<p>These are purely my personal opinions, and I’m kind of joking around too, so please don’t attack me because I dissed your major.</p>
<p>“Thats why. If you just major in journalism or education you have no real niche so its tough to compete for say a WSJ job when you have no real econ background or a Washington Post job if you have no polysci or IR background. Same with education. It gives you a specialty so you have some area where you are more competitive than the average journalism major.”</p>
<p>But none of that is a reason <em>not</em> to major in journalism. Journalism provides you with certain skills that other majors might not necessarily give you. That’s why it’s important, IMO.</p>
<p>“Communications - learning how to use a telephone? lolz”</p>
<p>Isn’t that simplifying the matter a little too much?</p>
<p>MissSilvestris, congrats on your good AP scores. Now meet the entire population of my school, most of whom scored 5s on AP sciences and got 800s on math and science SAT IIs. Most of them are majoring in the humanities and social sciences. Engineering at my school isn’t the most difficult major. Ergo, all humanities majors excel at science, and all science majors are illiterate number-crunchers. Right.</p>
<p>Can we please stop using anecdotal evidence to support bogus claims? Different majors are easier or harder for different people. Difficulty also varies widely by school. A lot of my HS friends are at our big top 10 public, where engineering and physical sciences are by far and away the hardest majors. At my school, they aren’t – generally, humanities are at least as work-intensive, sometimes more so.</p>
<p>While on Google, I don’t get that new “Decision Engine” Bing. It’s ugly and I asked it what type of sandwich I should eat for lunch tomorrow and it gave me a 404.</p>
<p>What you major in doesn’t matter in job placement. What matters is experience in the field. You can be a sociology major and have tons of publishing and journalism internships and be set with a career. Conversely, you don’t have to major in drama to win an Oscar. (Most Oscar winners don’t even have a BA…) All people really care about is that you know what the hell you’re doing. Then you’ll be set.</p>
IMO, journalism majors provide you with skills that you can pick up on the job. It’s not like nursing or architecture where you actually need to go to school in the subject to be able to do the job. The major on its own is borderline useless because you aren’t necessarily more competitive than people who didn’t major in it. When its coupled with something it can be somewhat useful, but you’re probably better off writing a lot for your college newspaper than getting a journalism major. At some schools like Northwestern it can help with recruiting, but on average I’m not sold on it.</p>
That might be true at Yale (which isn’t a good representation of every college out there considering it is arguably the best school in the country). Yale also doesn’t have what most would consider a strong engineering program, probably just ahead of Dartmouth which doesn’t even have a real engineering degree. At Penn I can’t say that most of my humanities majors friends really venture into any real science or math classes and I have a good number of friends who didn’t want to do the work or couldn’t do the work of a science/engineering major and are how humanities majors. I wouldn’t say the average Penn student is too far behind the average Yale student.</p>
<p>Maybe people would respect humanities majors more if the courses were graded on harsh curves instead of seen as easy A’s…</p>