Why are DCUM parents less inclined to have their child major in business?

[Anonymous]

Business is a safe major and pretty much guarantees a well paid job after college and lucrative career options afterwards

The young adults now who majored in business or attended an undergraduate business program are thriving post college. Some are in PE others are in investment banking or in finance teams at Fortune 500 companies.

[Anonymous]

Because their kids have the luxury of looking for more out of college than a safe major.

[Anonymous]

Because my sister-in-law majored in business, and had a terrible post-college employment record. It’s probably her, but it’s colored my perception of the major irreparably.

[Anonymous]

Depends on schools. How competitive if a candidate is the kid?

Might be better strategy to go for liberal arts and then switch to Econ.

[Anonymous]

It’s not a major for academically smart kids.

[Anonymous]

I just have found the business majors in my life to be incredibly...money-driven in the most charitable way I'd put it. They bemoaned having to take anything creative or abstract or...beneficial to know as a human being. Even peers in econ would gladly take a language class or go into classes they had never tried before, but the business majors always seemed to into money to realize that they'll be 30, burnt out, and tired of the perpetual "grind" and won't have any time to use the money they hoard after their imaginary Investment Banking career.

It's a shallow reading, but I rarely find a business major with interests beyond their work.

[Anonymous]

Because DC's parents are two products of liberal arts and didn't play the safe game and turned out fine.
If they want to be business majors, fine, but I wouldn't want to pay as much for it.

[Anonymous]

I have an MBA and still believe that if you are going to go to B-school then there is no need to do an undergraduate business major. That may be less true today than it was in my day but I still find the most successful people I know, including younger generation, have an MBA and not just undergrad business. So that's what I advised my DC who wants to get an MBA as well.

[Anonymous]

I don't dispel or encourage DC to major in business. I just don't see much purpose in the degree.

[Anonymous]

If you're talking about just a generic business major, it is a bad degree. Business majors are more likely to be unemployed and underemployed than average. A lot of people choose it without thinking a lot about it, assuming that because it relates to finance they will automatically get a good job. It's an extremely popular major so there is sort of a glut of them and they often don't cultivate any specific skills to stand out to potential employers.

Things are different if you major in something more specialized. And, if you major in business at a prestigious university you'll be fine. But overall it doesn't serve any of the potential purposes of a college education: it's both shallow intellectually and doesn't necessarily give you hard skills to make you marketable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s not a major for academically smart kids.

+1 unless it's from a really highly regarded program, it's viewed as less rigorous than other majors (econ, writing-heavy liberal arts degrees, stem degrees like math, etc.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you're talking about just a generic business major, it is a bad degree. Business majors are more likely to be unemployed and underemployed than average. A lot of people choose it without thinking a lot about it, assuming that because it relates to finance they will automatically get a good job. It's an extremely popular major so there is sort of a glut of them and they often don't cultivate any specific skills to stand out to potential employers.

Things are different if you major in something more specialized. And, if you major in business at a prestigious university you'll be fine. But overall it doesn't serve any of the potential purposes of a college education: it's both shallow intellectually and doesn't necessarily give you hard skills to make you marketable.

💯

[Anonymous]

Many good schools don’t even have undergrad business degrees.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Many good schools don’t even have undergrad business degrees.

This. Think about that.

[Anonymous]

I was a business major and wouldn't recommend it for my kids unless they clearly were interested in a specific career path like accounting. I think "business" is essentially an "undecided" major. I did eventually find my path in a concentration w/in the business major and added a statistics minor. But, I really should have just been a math or statistics major. I was really, really good at math in high school but, as a 1st gen student, I didn't really understand how a major leads to a job and in my world could only see math = math teacher.

My siblings also majored in career-path fields -- nursing and computer science. My family didn't understand liberal arts degrees.

One of my kids now majors in Applied Math and the other in Environmental Biology.