5 College Majors That Still Suck

Daily Finance had the balls today to post an article describing five college majors that you didn’t guess could make you rich. It’s possible nothing more ridiculous has ever been published on the internet. The article gives hope to the hopeless by pointing out that English majors could grow up to be Michael Eisner and that Oprah majored in Drama. Hear that, drama majors? You could become Oprah. No shit.

Anyway, with that in mind, let’s revisit the list from Daily Finance with a more practical eye.

Social Work

Article Example: Suze Orman

Real World Example: Average starting salary of $33,000

Head-to-Head: Suze Orman hosts her own television show and has written 7 New York Times best sellers. According to someone or other at California State University, up to 97% of social workers experience verbal abuse and up to one in four have been physically assaulted.

We sent an intern from our New York office to find Suze Orman and kick her in the shins, but he wasn’t able to even confirm she was in New York.

Conclusion: Suze Orman is a financial advisor and we’re not sure if her name is supposed to rhyme with “ooze” or “uzi.” Whatever the case, she’s not a social worker, she just has a degree in social work and if you try to follow in her footsteps, there’s a good chance you’ll have deadbeat parents calling you a shithead and trying to punch your neck.

Drama

Article Example: Oprah

Real World Example: $35k starting salary plus high chance of having to work as extra in Rob Schneider films

Head-to-Head: Research suggest Oprah is rich enough that, if she wanted, she could strike a deal with the whole of the world to murder you, in public, and everyone would pretend like they never saw a thing. On the other hand, the average drama major in LA is waiting tables and if they get the garnish wrong, it’s possible they’ll get cursed out and fired.

Conclusion: Oprah could have majored in millionairology and she’d still be a fluke. Using Oprah as an example of anything other than as a person who will always be richer than everyone else or someone who survived a run-in with Tom Cruise is pointless.

Psychology

Article Example: Hugh Hefner

Real World Example: $35k salary and chance to have to work with people who talk to their own poo.

Head-to-Head: Are you f*cking serious? Hugh Hefner? This is like saying you saw Hef eating carrots, so probably carrots cause massive amounts of boobies to follow you everywhere you go for 5 decades. Hefner started a magazine empire based around the idea that dudes like naked women. That doesn’t take a psychology degree, that takes being a real thing.

Elsewhere in the world, psychology is famous for about two things, Sigmund Freud, a coked-out dude obsessed with incest and Dr. Frasier Crane, who’s actually a psychiatrist.

Conclusion: Noticing a trend here? Hefner’s expertise in psychology may have helped him convince some chicks to get naked in those early years, but it likely hasn’t been relevant since the days he opted to never war anything but pajamas and have Scotch for breakfast on a regular basis.

History

Article Example: Carly Fiorina, aka Who?

Real World Example: $38.5k salary and the brooding frustration that comes when you realize the Da Vinci Code is full of shit

Head-to-Head: Clever, Daily Finance. Way to throw a curve ball at us by offering up someone we’ve never heard of before. Apparently Carly Fiorina used to be CEO of Hewlett-Packard and is running for US Senate, officially making Fiorina just someone we don’t care about. The important part is tat CEO thing, as HP and History go together like your history degree and any job that’s not going to make you despise your history degree.

Conclusion: There’s still one entry left here, but we’re going to be dickish and try to predict how this all turns out – each one of these “impractical” degrees is going to have a thoroughly outlandish example as a reason why the degree could be a good thing, despite the complete logical disconnect between the degree and the person being profiled.

On the other hand, what the hell kind of skills do you need to be a senator anyway? Last we heard you just needed to be willing to watch porn during abortion debates and occasionally try to pick up dudes in public washrooms.

English

Article Example: Michael Eisner

Real World Example: $38k and the chance to be editor of an online comedy website.

Head-to-Head: Michael Eisner used to run Disney. Disney, for God’s sake. Maybe with your English degree you could run Dreamworks, right? No. Eisner is the 5th example of a massively successful individual who coincidentally had a degree most people find useless. If you have a degree in English, you can apply to run a massive animation empire, hopefully it will work out for you, too.

Conclusion: It’s worth noting Eisner is generally considered to have ruined the Disney corporation and had to be ousted from his post, but that’s neither here nor there. What is worth noting is that very few degrees tend to lead to you being the CEO of one of the richest companies in America.