 the most regretted college degrees and college majors. That's what we're going to be talking about today in this video. But before we get into that, make sure to gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. On this channel, we talk about personal finance, college degrees, careers, and other opportunities that will lead you to success. And we also go over some of the death traps, the financial death traps that are so common in our times. If that sounds like something that interests you, make sure to, if you haven't done it already, hit the subscribe button and ring the notification bell so that you don't ever miss an upload. Now, with that out of the way, let's jump right into it. Zip Recruiter came out with a list of five college majors that people regret the most. So they've got a lot of internal data and they basically sent out surveys to a lot of the different people who register on their website. And if you didn't know, Zip Recruiter is basically a website that will help you get a job. And they basically just asked people, you know, do you regret your college degree or not? They sent this out to a bunch of different people with a bunch of different degrees, and they released some of the data for us. Now, I wish we had access to all of the data. That would be great. But here are the results. We're going to talk about it. And I'm going to talk about why some of these things are so important for you and your future decision. Number five on the list is going to be communications. Now, communications is the study of how to communicate information effectively across different areas and platforms. So for instance, how to communicate information on YouTube, on video, for instance, or through radio or through writing or through speaking or in different public industries as well, such as maybe public relations or all sorts of other different things. It is kind of hard to define what communications is because of the fact that it's so broad and it's so general. Now, if I was making this video back in the 1980s, which I probably wouldn't be making a video on YouTube back in the 1980s. But if I was, you would probably be able to get this degree and it would be no problem whatsoever. I might have told you that this degree isn't bad at all. It's a great career and you should definitely get into it. And I probably would have been right. That was back in a time where you could pretty much get any degree and you'd be good to go because all companies wanted to see is that you had a degree. Sure, some of them were a little bit better than others. But overall, you just get any degree and it didn't matter. And I agree communication as a skill is one of the most important things that you can study. I mean, after all, right now I'm communicating to you, I'm broadcasting this to you using a camera and using YouTube. However, now that we have more access to data, we know this is one of those degrees that's a little bit overrated. There's quite a few people who graduate with this degree every single year. And unfortunately, it's not as good as it should be. Now on this list, it comes in with 27% of people who graduate with a degree completely regretting it. And the main reason for their regret is because it's too general. Now, that's great because I've been saying this for a long time about communications. I've made several videos on this. I even made fun of them a little bit in one of my first videos way back like eight months ago. And what do you know? The reason so many people regret this degree is because it's simply too general. The reason you go to college is to learn a specialized skill that will prepare you for a career in the real world. When you learn something like communications, you're not really a specialist in anything. You're kind of just a generalist. Now let's compare these numbers to the least regretted degree, which is of course computer science. Big surprise. Computer science comes in at about 12.78% of the people who graduated with it regret it. So over double the amount of people, if you compare a communications degree with a computer science degree. Now you might think, oh, that's not that bad. If only 27% of people regret it, that means that 73% of people were actually okay with it. Well, as it turns out, it has a lot to do with the framing of the question itself in the survey. This is why survey data isn't the best. It's because the way that you frame the question is going to seriously influence the results. So to compare this to another really popular site that's in the same niche, which is PayScale, about 66% of people who were surveyed regretted their college degree choice. So what's important to see here is that double the amount of communications graduates regretted their choice when you compare that to computer science. That's a lot, especially considering the fact that 88,000 students graduate with a communications related degree every single year. Now this major does have a reputation of being one of the easiest ones that you can kind of just coast by on. That's why a lot of student athletes choose communications because they know that they're going to be leaving in a year or two and they're going to be making like $10 million a year so they don't need to use their communications degree. And it's one of those degrees where just try to put yourself in a business owner or a hiring manager's shoes. Try to use a little bit of empathy here. They're going to be looking at your resume. They're going to see a communications degree and they're going to just ask themselves, how is this person going to help me? How is this person going to justify their $50,000 salary or whatever it is? I can't just pay them $50,000 and then they just take that money and I don't get anything out of it. They have to at the very least recuperate that $50,000 so they're not a net negative. Number four on the list is going to be social sciences and the law. Now social science is going to be a bunch of different ones like economics, political science, history, etc. Now I think the reason that they lump this one in with law is because of the fact that a lot of social science majors actually do end up going on and applying to law school. So with this one 29% of the people regretted their decision and the main reasons were that it's too general and practical, hard to find a job without further study so there was a lot of reasons for that. Now the seven major branches here are going to be political science, geography, economics, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Now out of those I can tell you that economics is by far the best one. I did a whole video on that one. That one's actually pretty good overall. Now I think a lot of these as a subject are extremely interesting. A lot of them I take extra classes in for instance. I think history might be my favorite subject and I do see a lot of value in studying these different subjects. However, when it comes to going to college, getting a degree, going $40,000 in debt and spending four years of your life studying it, a lot of the time it's not going to be worth it. Because the purpose of going to college is to prepare yourself for a career and a lot of the time you're not going to be able to get a career in anything related to these subjects. A lot of these are too general. Many of them are also just impractical, very interesting information. You might even be able to use it in other parts of your life but when it comes to actually having a career, a lot of the time you're just not going to be able to use that information. These might make good double majors, good minors. You might want to study these on the side but I wouldn't just simply major in one of these on its own. It's going to be really hard for you to find a job unless you have a really good plan going into it and you know exactly what you're doing. You'll see I'm doing a video on this pretty soon. A lot of these majors they'll end up graduating and then they find out that they can't get a job and what did they do? They go to grad school because that's pretty much their only choice. It's not because they wanted to go to grad school. It's because they didn't really have a choice. Number three on the list is going to be education. This one is really sad to see. I hate to see this one here. I think everybody knows what education is. They go into this in order to become teachers. I wish they were paid more but unfortunately they aren't. Now for this one 31% of people regretted it and the reasons were low pay and job satisfaction as well as limited job opportunities. Now I wish they were paid more but unfortunately they aren't and I have to give you guys my honest opinion. For most people I would not recommend going into this. Low pay job satisfaction and on top of that there's not much room for advancement. Now according to the National Education Association teacher pay actually fell by 3% between 2006 and 2016. So they were getting paid a certain amount and inflation went up so that certain amount is actually not even the same anymore but teacher pay actually fell by 3%. It didn't catch up with inflation. It actually lowered by 3% in a 10-year period. Teachers on average in the US make about 60% of what other professionals with related educational backgrounds make and the United States had the lowest relative teacher pay out of 28 different nations that were surveyed in that particular study. Now on top of this about one in five teachers actually work a second job on top of their normal teaching job and that's probably because they don't make enough money. Number two on the list is going to be biological and physical sciences. Now this is one I've been talking about a lot. I've gotten quite a bit of hate on this one. I've been trying to you know tell you guys in the nicest way possible but people still get triggered in the comments. When it comes to STEM degrees right everybody thinks STEM is good. STEM equals good but the truth is there are some types of science degrees specifically the S in STEM that aren't as good as a lot of the other STEM degrees and biological and physical sciences is a perfect example of that. So it's not as much that this one is horrible you know when you look at the actual statistics on it it's about average I'd say but I think people are just really surprised because they have an expectation that it's going to be really good because of the fact that it is a STEM degree and then the reality just doesn't meet the expectation unfortunately. So this one could include you know evolutionary biology, microbiology, all kinds of different biology related degrees. So 35% of people regretted this degree and the main reasons were because it's hard to find a job without advanced degrees or licenses. So this actually happened to a close friend of mine. She was planning on going to med school so she majored in biology. The med school thing didn't work out plans changed. She graduated with a biology bachelor's degree and unfortunately she couldn't find a job. She was really shocked. I mean even though she you know did all kinds of extra stuff she was an excellent student she couldn't find a job. So what did she do? She went back to graduate school she didn't really want to but it kind of was her only choice and she eventually got a doctorate. So in my opinion and I've studied this stuff a lot. I've really spent like hundreds if not thousands of hours of looking at this stuff. When it comes to a bachelor level degree unless you are somebody who's really good at planning things out you want to make sure that you secure the bag with your four-year degree and what do I mean by that? I mean you want to make sure that you can get a job with just that degree alone. If at that point you choose to go back to school get a master's or a doctorate to make more money or to have better opportunities that's great that's awesome but it's because you chose to do that not because you had to. There's actually a lot of great opportunities with some of the STEM degrees when it comes to masters and doctoral level degrees. For instance there's quite a few engineering degrees where you're going to have a lot of opportunities and you're going to be able to get paid more with a master's instead of a bachelor's but the thing there is is they chose to get a master's they didn't have to get it. This is a very important distinction that makes all the difference because if a ton of people are more or less just forced to get a master's or a doctorate not only does that make the university more money so it kind of incentivizes them to put people in that kind of situation but on top of that your bachelor's is worth even less and it's almost like a master's or a doctorate is the new bachelor's. So that is always a huge red flag in my opinion when you see a degree and you're not able to get a job with just a bachelor's and they're saying oh you can you know get a job with a master's no problem. Now I know some people are going to comment down below well what if your plan is to be a biology professor you need a PhD for that. Okay awesome if you have a really good plan going in you know exactly what you need to do in order to get to your goal that's great don't let my video dissuade you at all I get it I'm not a dream killer here you should do your thing do what you're passionate about I'm just saying that for most people it's not going to be a good idea. Number one on the list is going to be English and foreign languages. So I think everybody knows what this is it's going to be the English language of course and also studying foreign languages. Now in one of my most popular videos the most worthless degrees I made fun of several different degrees and one of them was foreign languages. Now I got a lot of angry comments from people who study psychology and I think it's probably because I didn't really explain myself that well it was kind of just a joke video but I'd say the second most hate comments I got out of all of them in that video were from people who studied foreign languages. So many people said stuff like oh there's no way you can learn how to read and write without going to college or there's no way you can become a translator without a degree. I can't tell you how many different people said stuff like that. Well here you go guys here's the data right here English and foreign languages 42% of people regret the degree and it's because it's impractical and there's limited job opportunities. So this means that four times as many people regret getting a language degree then they regret getting a computer science degree. This is the number one degree that Starbucks Barista's have actually I made that up but there might be a little bit of truth to that. Now some people might say hey you should get an English degree because you want to be a professional writer. Let's see did George R. Martin get an English degree? No. How about the author of Harry Potter JK Rowling? Nope. English is one of those subjects where you can learn all you need to know about it by studying it online or just by reading other people's works especially if you want to become an author. There's another one of those degrees that I think a lot of really smart people tend to be attracted to it and fall into the trap so don't fall into this trap study it on the side mine earn it if you're passionate about it maybe even double major in it but do not major in this one unless you have a really really good plan going in you know exactly what you're going for. If you haven't done it already go ahead smash the like button hit the subscribe button ring the notification bell comment down below any thoughts comments criticisms etc and before you leave make sure to check out my other videos right here I made them just for you