What major at CAL is most successful at its respective purpose?

[sakky]

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From where do you get these reputations, besides your own claims?

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<p>Let me put it to you this way: which majors are where the ‘money’ athletes - that is, the football and men’s basketball players - known to congregate? It certainly wasn’t Cognitive Sciences, last time I checked. </p>

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Also, the American Studies major is mostly composed of courses in other departments, while Media Studies / Mass Communications and Legal Studies have significant requirements of courses in other departments for their majors. So if they are considered “creampuff” majors, wouldn’t the other departments whose courses are used by these majors also be considered equally “creampuff” majors?

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<p>Which gets down to my definition of what is the true ‘goal’ of the major. Recall that the original question of this thread is: ‘What major at CAL is most successful at its respective purpose?’, which then means that we must deduce what that purpose actually is. Certain majors, such as Linguistics, are fully fledged academic disciplines, with actual intellectual aspirations. The goal of that department may well be to provide undergrads with the best possible academic training in linguistics. {Whether they actually accomplish this goal is not the issue, the issue is what their goal happens to be.}</p>

<p>However, as you correctly pointed out, American Studies & Mass Comm/Media-Studies aren’t even true academic ‘departments’ per se, but rather a mishmash of different courses, often times with little underlying theme amongst them. It’s hard to escape the notion that the true, albeit unstated, purpose of those majors is to provide its students with an easy pathway to a degree. </p>

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That doesn’t mean that they will graduate with a GPA high enough to get into a top 14 law school, or be looked at favorably by a university considering an application for a second bachelor’s degree if the student decides that some other subject is a better fit.

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<p>But they’ll still get a degree and still be eligible for a job that prefers somebody with a degree. And apparently, according to the salary figures, that job will actually pay respectably. </p>

<p>The nation’s labor market is increasingly becoming one where, if you want a decent job, you will need a degree. It doesn’t matter what the degree is in, it won’t matter whether you really learned anything or put in much effort towards that degree, and it will matter only relatively marginally what your grades were. What will truly matter is that you have a degree. Those majors I mentioned provide an easy pathway towards obtaining that degree. </p>

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Do you know this from personal experience of taking significant numbers of the courses for these majors?

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<p>I can certainly think of one guy who majored in one of them (which shall remain unnamed) while working fulltime, and hence never showed up to class except for the first day and during exam days, for which he would take time off from work. Nor did he bother to do much of the reading. He nevertheless not only passed the classes, but got quite strong grades to boot.</p>