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

[sakky]

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Those in the football Pac-10 All-Academic team include two Political Economy majors, and one each Business Administration, Media Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies. Men’s basketball had one each in American Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies. Women’s basketball had none. We also know that at least one football player is in civil engineering. But this information is only a small subset of the total.

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<p>Exactly - these are the Pac-10 All-Academic Team members - that is, the most academically oriented of the players. What about the vast majority of the players who aren’t academically oriented? Surely we can agree that they probably aren’t all engineers. </p>

<p>Consider the entire Cal football roster. Notice that, of the ones who have declared a major or who are considering doing so, how an inordinately disproportionate percentage of them nominated American Studies as a major. Keep in mind that American Studies, overall, is not exactly the largest major on campus. Yet it seems to be unusually popular amongst the football team. </p>

<p><a href=“http://www.calbears.com/sports/m-footbl/mtt/cal-m-footbl-mtt.html[/url]”>http://www.calbears.com/sports/m-footbl/mtt/cal-m-footbl-mtt.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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Would you say the same thing for the following majors, which are not offered from standalone departments or include collections of courses from other departments as major requirements?

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<p>What you continue to neglect, I suspect intentionally, is that the metric in question is multivariable in nature. A major both has to be a well-known creampuff major that also has little academic standing as a distinct discipline, and offer relatively high-paying starting salaries to boot. For example, I think it’s safe to say that nobody takes ORMS, Chemical Biology, and certainly not Engineering Math/Physics because they are looking to skate by in a creampuff major with little work. PACS and Middle Eastern Studies don’t pay that well. Social Welfare is a true discipline that is the only major offered by the Social Welfare School. </p>

<p>But, to your point, if you want to add to the list of ‘highly efficient’ majors, then by all means, please do so. </p>

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Guess it depends on what you consider “pay respectably”, especially in the context of cost to attend university. Full in-state price for four years is about $116,000; full out-of-state price for four years is about $204,000. Of course, non-loan financial aid, or using the community college transfer route can reduce these costs. But if someone had to take up a lot of student loans, could they be paid off on the typical pay levels reported in the career survey for the majors in question?

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<p>That’s not the question at hand, for what you have brought up is whether somebody should even be going to college at all. I entirely agree that some people probably should not be. </p>

<p>But that’s a fundamentally different question. The question at hand is, given that somebody is going to college - and at Berkeley - what is the most ‘efficient’ major he could choose? An ancillary question is what is the true purpose of the major? In the case of American Studies and akin majors, it is hard to ignore the possibility that those majors exist primarily to offer students an easy pathway towards a degree. </p>

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One anecdotal example for one semester’s worth of courses (it is certainly possible that a student repeating already completed AP or other transfer credit could float through a semester doing minimal work)? Did the student do that every semester?

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<p>This was not a course that he was repeating, either through AP or transfer work. </p>

<p>Furthermore, while he didn’t undertake this behavior in every semester, he certainly did so in more than one…indeed, in at least 4 semesters as I can recall. Basically, the guy was working throughout his time at Berkeley and simply wanted a degree for minimal effort. His major provided that opportunity. </p>

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Did all or most students in that major that you won’t name do that most of the time, more so than students in other majors?

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<p>I suspect that other students were trying harder, because they were trying to achieve top grades. But that’s not the issue. The guy I know was not really trying to achieve top grades, he was satisfied with simply graduating. There are a number of majors that are trivially easy to complete if you simply want to graduate.</p>