A college arts degree means a competitive advantage over everyone at the temp agency, provided they didn’t sleep in. These days even the guys selling ice cream on bicycles have BAs — and we’re talking about the ones who actually need the job, not film students doing a documentary or anarchists staging a protest.
So, with employment prospects dimmer than the romantic eateries people with more practical degrees can afford to further adulterous relationships in, it’s important to choose a college major carefully so you don’t end up like one of Dostoevsky’s grubbier characters, forced to parry drunken “What are you gonna do with that?” queries at family barbecues.
Still, there’s something to be said for four job-free years of testing the resilience of your liver and chasing coeds unperturbed by labs, deadlines, or STDs, while your parents rent out your room to parolees. What’s more, there’s something to be said for attending a morning class while robbed of the capacity for critical thought by recreational drug use and still being able to follow along. In that spirit, we offer here a guide to The 10 Easiest College Majors.
Since it’s already mid-September, the deadline application for almost all college programs worth enrolling in has long passed. Luckily, that is probably not true for many of these majors, where “Hello! Magazine” is likely to be course syllabus material. We’re guessing you could just call up, attend a couple of classes in November, deconstruct an illustrated version of Animal Farm over the Christmas break, and be shaking the chancellor’s scaly hand by springtime.
[Editor's note: The two of us hold three of the degrees on this list, so we know whereof we speak].
10. English is the hardest of the easiest majors as it requires more reading than would be required in five years of heavy Twittering. Class sizes are usually small, making it doubly important that you come up with an impressive-sounding take on the text that the author never intended in 1,000 years, but that someone comely in a loose sweater appreciates. Fortunately, the rise of internet piracy and the increased availability of film versions of many classic books can save the wily English student hours that would be otherwise have been wasted reading.
9. Journalism. This was an attractive and practical option at one point for arts students who were resolutely bad at math, but that is no longer the case with the industry going through more belt-tightening than a patient post stomach-stapling. The utter dead zone that is the journalism job market means that getting into and graduating from journalism school is a cinch. Reality comes crashing in though when you find yourself as an intern filling a chair that had been occupied by a 25-year veteran prior to your product of cost-cutting backside occupying it.
8. Marketing is the major most likely to have a textbook with the phrase ‘for dummies’ following it. It’s unlike any other major offered in the business/management department in that:
A) It’s easier to get into than the city drunk tank and
B) There is less math than usually required to tabulate a tip at the hairdresser
C) It’s easier to get on the dean’s list than be registered as a sex offender (very easy apparently, especially if you ride Public Transit)
7. Economics might be the ‘dismal science’, but a future in Psychology is pretty damn grim. Psych might be useful for determining which of your coworkers is most likely to put an office stapler down his pants, but aside from that it offers little real-world application. With neurobiology providing the only real advancements, there’s little left in the field other than devising questionnaires asking random people whether stressful situations give them gas and nodding knowingly when the term ‘Pavlovian’ is used.
6. Communications: Most of us go our entire lives heckling athletes and giving other drivers the middle finger without realizing we’re doing field work in communication studies. Rather than teaching you practical communications-related skills, such as how to set up a pirate radio station or get hooked up to your neighbor’s satellite dish without having to climb up on his roof, communication studies looks at the works of major communications theorists, and the only one of those worth knowing is Marshall McLuhan, just so you can understand that scene from Annie Hall.
5. Women’s Studies. The best female to male ratio on a college campus, as to the best of our knowledge, no male has ever come away with a degree (well nobody’s copped to it yet, anyway). Blaming male power structure hegemony means a guaranteed ‘A’ and the grudging respect of Sapphic classmates.
4. Film. On a college campus, unless you’ve got electrodes attached to your temples in a lab, film is the most conducive for sleep and while you’re teaching English in Phnom Penh, you’ll be able to discuss Scorsese’s lapsed Catholicism and Kurosawa’s intertextual themes of human entrapment.
3. Acting. While the ‘Fine Arts’ encompass rigorous fields of study like industrial design, music and animation, there’s nothing that underutilizes 1300 grams of gray matter more than acting. With course offerings in ‘auditions’, or how to respect yourself after you pick up your belongings off the casting couch, and ‘speech’, the quickest way to get beat up in a Cockney pub, this is the easiest way to get a degree that doesn’t involve opening a website and hitting print.
2. Sociology. Some believe there is a pecking order in science, with math at the top, physics second, as you can’t have physics without math, followed by chemistry, which you can’t study without physics, etc.
Further down this hierarchy — to picture how far down, imagine tossing a small stone off the edge of the Grand Canyon and take note of where gravity takes it — is sociology, from the Latin for, “the study of the obvious”. A sociology student symposium is one of the ways of gathering 300 people who think completely unjustifiably that what they’ve studied actually has merit other than holding a psychic expo.
1. Hospitality Management means all the excitement of an office security guard but with secretary skills while sitting at the concierge and learning how to stay calm while a service bell is rung. Also includes ridding bed & breakfasts of fleas brought in from a hygiene-deficient back-backers.