Quote: (01-29-2015 11:48 AM)Americas Wrote:
Quote: (01-29-2015 11:45 AM)komatiite Wrote:
Agreed Tall and Blond. If anything, learning it on your own is a better bet over having some washed up Marxist who has never worked a real job in their life trying to brainwash you.
How on earth is being a professor not a real job?
I can tell you don't have much experience in college, considering you think professors are there to 'brainwash' you.
BTW, the dogma of "stem or bust" is the biggest crock of shit with regards to education in current-day popular opinion.
As for the OP's question...
Like I said, economics is probably the cream of the crop for a few reasons. Economics as a discipline is fairly versatile in its applications and lots of public and private sector jobs like economics graduates. Secondly, economics does have a pretty solid mathematics component to it; courses like econometrics, economic development, and economics methods classes all have a decent math component to them; economics majors are encouraged to do calculus and statistics as well.
Sociology and political science are also pretty good. The recent trend has been the quantitative transformation of these disciplines. However, many undergraduate programs have lagged behind and don't require heavy methods or math components. Of course, you can seek these if you want on your own will. Many entry and mid-level public sector jobs do look for social science majors, particularly in developing countries.
The rest are kind of hit or miss. Disciplines like anthropology aren't great money-makers, but geography, particularly if you focus more on things like GIS and mapping, can be quite lucrative if you play your cards right.
I mean, at the end of the day you need to look at what skills you want to achieve. For example...someone studying sociology, with a background in statistics and programming can be an extremely valuable asset for a public sector job. Think about it, you know how to design questionnaires, write programs to analyze the data, and use statistics to measure policy implementation. That right there is worth a fuck load more than someone who cruised through a B.Sc in Chemistry.
You greatly overestimate the value of an econ degree. At the undergraduate level, it's not very useful: think tank work requires a masters degree, and most analyst jobs can be learned by anyone on Excel in a weekend. I know guys with philosophy degrees working in analysis, it's not a hard field to break into. And the math component at the undergrad level is a joke, most schools require a "business calculus" that's watered down to pure nothing and a stats 101 that covers about as much as a physics lab manual. It's not a good major if you don't plan on continuing it at the grad level.