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I freaking HATE the discourse around “useless degrees” that I’ve been seeing all day. Our society needs historians, philosophers, and English majors. Frankly, their decline is a huge reason our society lacks understanding of pol issues + the ability to scrutinize information
A useless degree is one that will likely result in its recipient not ever earning enough money to repay the costs associated with earning it. Here is a helpful guide of majors for four year degrees that are offered at University of Florida that are likely useless:
- African American Studies
- American Indian and Indigenous Studies
- Art
- Business Administration (unless you get an MA)
- Classical Studies
- Most Education Degrees
- Environmental Science
- Golf and Sports Turf Management (This one is a minor, but seriously?)
- Music
- Political Science
- Nearly every language based Bachelor’s
- Psychology (unless you go on to receive a Graduate level degree)
- Sports Management
- Women’s Studies (oddly enough, there is no Men’s Studies degree. This makes this major into Lesbian/Feminist studies)
These degrees may well have value to the person taking the classes. There may even be people making a living in those fields. However, most people with these degrees won’t make enough to repay their loans, and that is the problem.
A four year degree from UF will cost you about $100,000. To repay a student loan for that amount within ten years, you would have to pay $1300 a month.
This problem is even worse when you stop talking about state colleges and look at private ones. Not only are there even more useless degrees, the cost of those degrees becomes even higher. Rollins College would cost you $340,000 for a four year degree. University of Miami, about $380,000. Imagine earning a degree in elementary education, only to graduate and find out that your teacher’s salary isn’t enough to pay your $4600 per month student loan payments. Even consolidating your loans to a 30 year repayment is a $2600 per month loan payment. A starting teacher makes $4200 per month before taxes.
Student loans should not be granted to people that will result in this kind of situation.
25 Comments
Boneman · April 25, 2025 at 5:01 am
As long as certain Companies suffer from acute “Degree Worship” this will only in part be a thing. Place I worked for was a perfect example. Packaging Scientist pulling down $100k a year… Degree in? HORTICULTURE. Senior Packaging Scientist pulling down $250k a year… Degree in? ANIMAL HUSBANDRY.
The poor bastard… the ONLY poor bastard in the entire corporation doing CAD work for the same packaging group… who happened to have no less than FIVE patents hanging on the wall behind his desk? $65K with salary “topped out” for 13 years (ZERO INCREASES) all because? You guessed it. No “Degree”… and sadly, because they didn’t teach “CAD Science” back in the early 1980’s, I never really felt the need to pursue one. Though I was actually offered a position by a local College to TEACH it.
Miguel GFZ · April 25, 2025 at 6:22 am
“There may even be people making a living in those fields. However, most people with these degrees won’t make enough to repay their loans, and that is the problem.”
Case in point with Golf and Sports Turf Management: Grass for must of us is that green crap we are supposed to take care of on weekends, but for what I have seen in sport’s fields, it is a frigging science and an investments of many many millions, especially in Europe with the soccer stadiums so it is good pay if you can get it, but the field is very narrow and already populated.
At best you can get a degree and join a company promoting lawn systems for suburban homes which pretty much anybody who like gardening and can read can also do.
It's just Boris · April 25, 2025 at 8:09 am
And then, is the average homeowner willing to pay a premium for their lawn guy’s education? Let alone the extra cost for materials and consumables needed to produce a golf-lawn like result.
Divemedic · April 25, 2025 at 8:29 am
Why would they? I own a Husqvarna Automower. Sure, it cost 2 grand, but it mows my grass three times a week, and the only maintenance it requires is to change the blades every year.
Cederq · April 25, 2025 at 9:12 am
“Husqvarna Automower” Is that a Roomba on steroids? The “it” denotes it is automatous? Did you have to map out your lawn with sensors so your Roomba doesn’t mow your neighbors lawn and flower garden? Or trundle out to mow whatever is in “it’s” wee silicon based processor?
I attended Portland State University for my graduate degrees and I never seen a more wretched facility for useless degrees and useless students and professors.
Divemedic · April 25, 2025 at 10:46 am
You bury a wire around the boundaries of what you want it to mow. Then it works just like a lawn mowing roomba
oldvet50 · April 25, 2025 at 7:31 am
I believe anyone should be able to study and advance his knowledge in any field he chooses. I also believe that the government should subsidize only the fields in which a future need is predicted. Evidently, we had (and may still have) a massive need for physicians in this country since the majority I see have been schooled outside the US. Government is a necessary framework to improve the function of society, yet most people view it as Santa Claus or the Fairy Godmother able to grant your every wish and desire.
It's just Boris · April 25, 2025 at 8:06 am
Miguel nails it.
The questions prospective students of a given field should ask, is what’s the ratio of the number of students to active workers in that field, and is the field expanding in demand. The higher the ratio, the worse the prospects are for getting a job closely aligned with your field of study. If the ratio becomes greater than about 1/30, you have more graduates than needed to replace retiring practitioners. If the ratio is, say, 1/15 and the field’s not expanding, you have maybe a 50-50 chance of being hired into that field upon graduation.
We can argue where the “useless” threshold is, but I’d guess anything with a ratio greater than 1 (more students than active practitioners) is pretty much in that category.
Frankfurt School Long March · April 25, 2025 at 8:08 am
EDU=Commie RAT POS.
Himself · April 25, 2025 at 8:35 am
There is a place for fine arts and music. I have two kids with art and music degrees. Here’s the deal – if you truly have talent, you will get grants and scholarships. From what I’ve seen the programs are designed to weed out the mediocre and lazy. That kind of thing, as well as classics, should be paid by endowments for those with the skills and talent.
BTW – they both have good careers and neither spent anywhere near 100K. BTW – My son redlined his SAT and ACT and didn’t pay a nickle for a computer science degree.
The way I explained it to them, back in the day, was to tell them $120K is what we owed on the house, and this is what we have to pay for 30 years. Don’t borrow any more than a decent car and pay it off just like a car.
The big picture problem is that with mainstreaming and lack of discipline, a high school degree is worthless. Kids that want to learn have to deal with knuckleheads they can’t get rid of. This makes college like 13-16th grade. They need to return value to high school education, reserve college for useful study for those that have talent, and bring back an employers ability to have tests for candidates.
Back in the day, you could take a test with the bell system, and if you passed, then they looked at you for employment, and invested in training you. Hell, I took tests for at least three jobs back then.
JustaGuyFromTheWest · April 25, 2025 at 12:53 pm
There used to be mechanisms to weed out the mediocre and lazy. These mechanisms disappeared about the same time the DOE was created and the student loan program kicked in. Later in my career, I did some adjunct teaching at the local state university and at a for-profit university. The grading scale I had to use was to award grades of A or B. Any grade of C or below I had to justify to the department head.
TRX · April 26, 2025 at 8:45 am
In the half-century since I dropped out of high school, no potential employer has ever asked if I had a high school diploma. If they ask anything related to the subject, it’s carefully phrased as “where did you attent high school?”
I suppose it was technically possible to fail to get a diploma; but as far as I know everyone who met the attendance standards managed to graduate somehow.
Robert · April 26, 2025 at 11:05 am
I graduated from a military dependent’s high school, and yes that mattered. That is because it was a specialized “club” with a relatively small number of members.
I was hired in later years, more than once, on the strength of that High School name appearing on my resume, which is why I thought to put it there. It was a coded message for a selected audience, ignored by all others. I would subsequently discover that my new boss had attended the same High School or one its’ notorious football team rivals.
A small psychological edge, totally unrelated to job performance or suitability.
No one actually cared about my High School graduation or even my college graduation.
The question “When did you graduate” was important. They wanted to know my age. Resumes with more than five years difference in age of the candidate and age of the manager were probably discarded without further consideration. I was never hired by anyplace that asked that question.
I obtained the best paying (and best) jobs from personal contacts where a resume or an educational credential was completely irrelevant. I still do not understand how I made those contacts, other than they were people I met at work and kept in touch with them.
Tom from East Tennessee · April 25, 2025 at 8:50 am
A good rule of thumb I once heard re- useless college degrees is that if it has the word “studies” in it’s name, it’s BS. “American studies”, “black studies”, “women’s studies” or whatever else.
That’s not saying the other ones you mention aren’t worthless also (Business, the arts, the majors they have to keep football players academically eligible and whatever else)
Don Curton · April 25, 2025 at 9:37 am
I totally agree for young students, those are useless degrees. But some state colleges have that rabid fan base that rivals Harley owners for sheer fanaticism. Texas A&M Aggies is the go-to for rabid fan base in Texas. I know of at least 4 or 5 guys who were never college material, from back in the day when most people graduated high school and just went to work. Yet they were so enamored of A&M that they just had to have a degree from there to say they were honest-to-God Aggies. So later in life, as adults, they enrolled and got degrees in Feedlot Management (no shit, an actual degree), Business Admin, something English, and something else. Those were the only classes they felt they could pass and graduate.
But yeah, that’s the exception. They were adults and they paid out of pocket, so there’s that. And yes, we still made fun of them.
SoCoRuss · April 25, 2025 at 9:39 am
I agree with old vet, you should be able to get any useless degree you want to seek your joy. One person useless is another’s dream. So I aline with DM some.
BUT, If you cant find a job after graduating that’s your problem for the next 20-30 years paying it off and YOU fucking will one way or another, not .GOV or us taxpayers.
Bad decisions are a bitch.
Anonymous · April 25, 2025 at 10:59 am
I have a friend who has a masters in Early Childhood Education; BA from Chapman and MA from Pepperdine, Malibu. She taught preschool for 6 years, hated it because half of the time the owners didn’t want to pay her, and so she became a realtor. It was when Cali real estate was on fire, she made tons of money. And….she is not the smartest tack out there. I have often heard that education makes you smarter and a better person. I have a college degree in Pharmacology. I am still not seeing the majority of degree holders levels above the rest. I was genius level in grade school, and college was 85% boring stuff followed by the dismals of job hunting. I have had Pharmacists yell at me because I was wearing white sneakers on the job interview and he only allowed brown or black shoes. A Mexican Pharmacist wouldn’t hire me because I was white and the Chinese one only hired gay men. I considered none of those “more educated” to be my equal let alone superior when it came to intelligence. I do talk with one of the janitors at work; he is well read on most issues and can give you valid points on political discussions. None of the management can do that-with or without a degree. The public smack talks on their local nurses in the ER and yet most of those folks have more knowledge than the doctors. This society needs to start valuing “intelligence, training, and commitment” over DEGREE.
JimmyPx · April 25, 2025 at 11:02 am
Like many legacy institutions, BIG COLLEGE is teetering on the edge of collapse.
WHY does it cost SO much for this when you could seriously go online and learn just as much as any course for FREE ?
Colleges are bloated beyond measure with WAAAY too many people with 6 figure salaries that have nothing to do with teaching the students.
I foresee in the decades to come a massive change in colleges and universities because it HAS to because the value of a degree has plummeted because standards majorly dropped because “everyone should go to college” and everything is dumbed down. Combine that with having to take on massive debt to get a degree and it NOT helping you in your career ?
It is a better investment with much better job security and with much better long term pay to go to a trade school and learn a skilled trade rather than get a useless degree.
Rick T · April 25, 2025 at 1:26 pm
The entire structure of a University goes back to before Gutenberg. A group of students would meet with a teacher and they would go over the one copy of the book they were studying. Now that we have an Internet where everything can be shared (text book, reference materials, class notes, student discussions) the only thing keeping brick-and-mortar colleges alive is needing specific and expensive physical equipment (labs, etc.) and tradition.
As an Mechanical Engineering example you don’t grok fracture toughness until you have run Charpy v-notch tests in person and watched the test pendulum swing thru with a ‘ping’ for a brittle sample and then stop dead with a ‘THUNK’ for a really tough one.
@HomeInSC · April 25, 2025 at 2:03 pm
A broad education makes stronger citizens. To me broad means arts, sciences, math, humanities AND real world skills like carpentry, cabinet building, electrical, plumbing, mechanics, machining, welding, hunting, gardening. Myself, Physics + Chem, Computer Engineering, a shitpile of math. BUT, along with that STEM overload I mixed in oil painting, economics, and lit courses for majors like Chaucer in the original Middle English.
Time to go tear out and redo some horrendous wiring done by the previous owner. Exposed 120v wires, extension cords and so on feeding one outbuilding and exterior lighting from another outbuilding. It’ll be fun with the spoiled cows yelling at me for treats all the while.
lynn · April 25, 2025 at 3:31 pm
That is a lot of useless degrees.
I will stick with my Mechanical Engineering degree from TAMU in 1982. It has served me well and allowed me to earn a LOT of money over the years.
hh475 · April 25, 2025 at 4:28 pm
They are only useless if you assume the people getting the degrees will be unsuccessful at what they do.
A lot of those degrees are in fields that are high risk/high benefit career paths. A great discussion of this is in the book “Freakanomics.” These are professions where people tend to either hit it very big of do very poorly. The classics here are sports and acting. Consider a kid focusing on playing football through middle school, high school, and college. The chances of that kid making the NFL is very small, and the risk — because the kid has to give up on learning other things in school — is high. So, a very few hit it big. A few more end up as high school coaches, etc. The rest have to try to leverage it into sales, etc. or retrain in something else. The same is true of acting, or music, or art. Was Jewel’s training a Juliard important for her success in music? Absolutely.
Political Science, History, and Language are similar in that a BA should be considered a step to an advanced degree. I know a fair number of folk who leveraged those degrees at the Master’s and Doctoral levels into jobs at three letter agencies, and a few who went in with a Bachelor’s and then got a Master’s or Doctorate on the job (mostly in military pathways). I was a Japanese minor in college, which lead to recruiting from, of all things, Naval Intelligence, which I did not take advantage of. So, viewing a BA in History as a *terminal* degree may not be great, but if you dream of working for the State Department, it may not be a bad idea.
But the same is true for other majors that are not so obvious. I’ll use my own path. I got a BS in Microbiology in preparation for applying to medical school. Medicine pays well, but a BS in Microbiology has limited uses (lab tech, meat inspector and other food safety stuff, civil service in regulation enforcement) none of which pay a lot. So, if I hadn’t made it into med school, I would have had to scramble. Similarly, I have another friend who did the football thing, got a BA in Business, and used his contacts from sports and fraternity to get into the promotion ladder at a company filled with ex-sports people (and fans).
The other group are those that are not *meant* to pay a lot, and calling them “useless’ on the basis of expected degree-related income is the wrong metric. A bachelor’s in Business Admin does not guarantee a good income, but it may be a good thing for the son of a small business owner who is planning to take over the business. I have a friend who go a BA in Business Admin, apprenticed as an electrician, and now runs a very successful small business.
Finally, there are those for whom these degrees are their calling. The world needs people like JRR Tolkein and CS Lewis, etc. who devote their lives to medieval languages or esoteric literature or whatever. I know a woman who spent her entire career agonizing over Spencer’s Faerie Queen. The world needs people like her, though they don’t need a lot of them. For them, income isn’t the thing. The subject is an end in itself. Again, though, the BA is just a start.
Jonathan · April 25, 2025 at 8:53 pm
It is instructive to look at private loan programs and how they consider future earnings and usually require the student to have a part time job to earn a portion of the tuition as they go.
Grove City, Hillsdale, and the other schools that don’t accept federal aid have private sector loan programs.
Not surprisingly, these schools work to keep costs down and keep majors relevant and well paying.
Aesop · April 30, 2025 at 2:11 am
They aren’t useless, just ridiculously overpriced.
If the degree cost you $2-3K, no one would flinch.
Pricing 120 semester units at $1K/unit or more is simply retarded, much like the students who pay it.
And if I was paying $0.50/min for class time, and the professor was always on 10-30 minute off-subject socio-political rants, we’d go about two class sessions, and then we’d have a chat about their kneecaps and a steel pipe in the faculty parking lot before the end of the week.
There should be a standard catalog of college classes, they should be taught on digitally recorded lectures by the greatest professors in the business in their respective fields nationwide, shown online, (think something like Neil DeGrasse Tyson on astrophysics, Thomas Sowell on Economics, etc.) with standardized textbooks for each class, and graded by proctored in-person tests at centers requiring photo and biometric ID, at a cost of about $20/class.
In person lab time shouldn’t be more than $10/session.
Special lectures would be available too, again from the cream of the crop. They’d be like TED talks, by bona fide subject-matter rock stars. Actors on acting, musicians on music, titans of industry on business, Nobel Prize winners on chemistry, medicine, etc.
And the online library would be every college collection plus the library of Congress, accessible by anyone anywhere with a login.
For a 40-person lab, that would net the lab assistant $70-200/hr, and leave $200/session for the facility and materials, every single day. That’d be $9K per semester, per class that used the facility. Four labs/day would pay a mortgage on any building in the country, and anything after about 4 years would be nearly pure profit to whoever ran it, whether it was a science lab, a computer lab, or a music/dance studio. The universities would be in charge of regular inspection and certification to make sure they all were up to spec.
College would cost more like $1K-$5K, all in, except in extremely rare cases, and thousands of mediocre professors would be laid off and have to get real jobs, while the best second tier of professors would be available to answer questions online, individually. Colleges bidding for the best and brightest for those gigs would keep things honest and competitive, and weed out the dolts.
Students could learn anywhere, anytime, eliminating room, board, travel, and ancillary nonsense.
Classes would never be oversubscribed.
If the NCAA wanted to form a sub-pro set of leagues for athletes, in conjunction with schools, so be it. But a kid from Harlem would only need wi-fi and a laptop to get a degree from Harvard or Stanford, and take his labs and tests uptown instead of in Massholia or San Jose.
If the Unis wanted to go for corporate research, they could hire their best graduates, and pay them real wages to do the work, and use their now-empty facilities for that, for profit.
Otherwise, sell it all but a building or two, and turn the rest over to developers for huge bucks.
Then no one would sign up for Anything “Studies” again, everyone would be on equal footing when they graduated, and the whole liberal hogwash brainwashing program would be de-funded overnight. What’s more, since courses would be bandwidth, not chair space, anyone could get a degree in anything, including Latin, from anywhere, since the course pool and texts would be the same anywhere in the country, and all just digital lectures in a central database.
Foreign students? Same-same, from any Trashcanistan or Shitholia, at prices they could afford, without ever needing a visa to come here.
And the internet wouldn’t be 90% about porn any more, it would literally blow up the brick-and-mortar universities, and force the ones that survived to serve their students, not their endowments and alumni-pushed sports programs.
Which courses, from the master list, a given college or uni required would allow enough specialization, so degrees from Notre Dame, Hillsdale, or religious (or secular) universities wouldn’t lose their character.
But since butt space in a class was blown apart, any school, from Harvard to Whatsamatta U. could accept and graduate 10,000 or 50,000 students a year, or more. And they’d all have passed the same classes to the same standards. The most they might need to require might be a trip to the school for in-person vetting and final permission to graduate, along with cap-and-gown ceremonies.
College degrees would cost less than a family trip to Disney World, mediocre teaching would disappear like fog on a summer’s morning, and degrees would mean something, without costing a kidney and your firstborn.
The only tears would come from the communists, as their march through the institutions would have gone right over a cliff, forever.
Next problem.
TLF · May 2, 2025 at 3:42 am
As Paul Harvey would say, there’s the rest of the story: most people coming from under-represented/disadvantaged groups don’t pay full price (or, in some cases, anything). Those from over-represented groups do tend to pay full price, and the pricing structure in essence uses some of the money from those payments to subsidize those who don’t. Throw in the deceptive student loan program, and you make it easy for some students to basically tax themselves for life to hand money to people who got in on DEI criteria. There’s a Wall St Journal article from about 10 years ago that detailed the whole scheme, but it’s paywalled.
Although the repayment terms for student loans are disclosed, the practice of “take it home today; pay later in x easy installments” has been known for generations to induce people to spend more than they would otherwise. And all of this is being targeted at teenagers.
Adjusted for inflation, in-state tuition at the school I attended about 40 years ago has risen 500%. This is only possible because of the expanded student loan system. The increase pays for admin staff and more DEI students.
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