Undergraduate majors.... What are these people thinking?

There is a tradition in the US that the best education at the college level is a liberal arts education. There are some liberal arts colleges (not that many these days) that don't have majors at all. Students just study whatever they want.

I didn't go to a liberal arts college, but I definitely believe that the best college education consists of taking a broad range of courses that allows students to explore a lot of different topics and ideas. I believe that all college students should study philosophy, poetry and history to expand their thinking, but also improve their ability to understand and analyze new ideas.

I was an English major at UCLA. I totally agree that it would have been more difficult to land a job with an English degree, but I was planning to apply to law school. One of my law professors at Michigan told me that studying English is great preparation for studying law, because in both cases, they are both fundamentally about the study of language.

I also know that that many jobs that require strategic thinking favor students with liberal arts backgrounds. For example, McKinsey has a reputation of preferring students with quirky backgrounds. During my final round interview, among the other candidates that were there on the same day were a Columbia Law student history major (in addition to me, a Michigan Law student English major), a Germanic Studies PhD student and two Psychology PhD students. There were, of course, several MBAs that I didn't find out the backgrounds from.

Here's a link to a recent BW article that talks about how undergrad students aren't being properly prepared for the working world because they lack appropriate writing skills. They cite Wharton's undergraduate business program as one that favors a more liberal arts based education:

https://www.businessweek.com/bschools/co ... 682947.htm

Finally, there was a really good reason to be an English major at UCLA, the girls were MUCH better looking and socially adept. The UCLA campus is divided into North (arts) and South (sciences). UCLA is also an extremely competitive campus for some majors (lots of pre-med students). A large portion of the student literally do nothing but study the entire time they are on campus - no exaggeration. On the flip side (north campus), UCLA has some of the best looking women (and men I suppose) around. Perhaps not as uniformly good looking as some colleges in the South, but the cream of the crop at UCLA is hard to touch. It's sad actually, to think about the large portion of students that spent their entire times studying biology, chemistry, applied math and computer science, competing for grades from day 1. I sure hope most got at least a bit of exposure to philosophy, history and language. But I agree, it's not ideal for landing a job right out of college.