<p>If you want to earn a college degree that will impress employers, you might want to avoid these five majors…
by Terence Loose</p>
<p>Do you want to go back to school to earn a degree that could help you impress employers?</p>
<p>If your goals include job offers upon graduation, you’ll want to choose your major carefully, says Vicki Lynn, senior vice president of Universum, a global talent recruiting company that works with many Fortune 500 companies.</p>
<p>To help navigate the numerous options available today, we took a closer look at five degrees you may want to avoid, and five more employer-friendly options to consider instead</p>
<p>There will never be a consensus about what majors should be avoided; philosophy, civilization studies and anthropology would develop skills (these skills may not be very marketable but at least they can carry over to other fields) that would be useful in many areas.</p>
<p>Please, I beg you, if you wish to keep your sanity, DO NOT pay attention to ANYTHING Yahoo says. They are always contradicting themselves, and many of those same majors appear in other Yahoo articles praising them as the best majors to choose.</p>
<p>If you REALLY wanna know which majors are getting jobs and which ones aren’t, do a google search for the linkedin profiles of the people that went to your college and graduated with your major. Take a look at their resumes and see which ones are working in their fields. 8 times out of 10, they will have jobs related to their field of study.</p>
<p>It also helps to ask people around campus, and speak to career advisers.</p>
<p>Let me give you a start:</p>
<p>Go to google and type:</p>
<p>site:linkedin.com “[insert your major here]” “[insert your school here]”</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Why is an 8% unemployment rate for a given field “respectable” and a 10% rate so bad it makes the whole degree useless? That’s a 2% difference, statistically practically meaningless.</p></li>
<li><p>Why does a field’s current unemployment rate have any effect over long-term earning potential? The economy is bad right now, but it won’t be bad forever. Choosing a career-specific major based on its immediate prospects when you’re anticipating a 40-year career is insane. </p></li>
<li><p>What’s the problem with an architecture degree? The major has a high unemployment rate because the field is not hiring right now, because people are unwilling to build as much on account of the economy. Again, that’s a temporary problem, but it relates to the field, not the major. If you really want a career as an architect, you actually have to learn how to design buildings somehow. And if a given architecture firm isn’t hiring, an architect with a business degree will do no better than an architect with an architecture degree.</p></li>
<li><p>If the main point of a college degree is to make money (which seems to be the warrant of this article), why bother with a degree in education? Perhaps it has a low unemployment rate, but it also has terrible pay, terrible benefits, ridiculously high stress, etc. So you might be able to get a job, but that doesn’t mean you will be successful or like it.</p></li>
<li><p>Why does this article not seem to get the concept of area studies? It seems to go right over the author’s head–apparently employers won’t “understand” it? Doesn’t the author realize that area studies is an umbrella term and your degree actually says something like “Latin American Studies”, “East Asian Studies”, etc.? The meaning of these majors is perfectly clear–someone with an East Asian Studies degree studied East Asia. If the employer values knowledge of this region (and why would a student with this degree apply somewhere that doesn’t?), they will value this degree.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>The real point of this article is that it doesn’t seem to get the point of college education. It scoffs at liberal arts degrees, but these degrees teach students how to write and how to think, which are certainly valuable to employers. And what if the student wants to get a graduate or professional degree? These liberal arts degrees help a lot with that.</p>
<p>And then this article acts like a major will affect every student in a given way. This article may be fine for a cookie-cutter student with no interests who only cares about which degree will bump their odds of getting a job by a percentage point or two. In the real world, students choose a career path and then a degree program that best fits their goals. They don’t just choose a major that makes money and wait for any job to fall into their lap. A psychology major might be a great choice for one student while leading to unhappiness, a low GPA, no extracurricular involvement, and no useful skills for another.</p>