Want to Graduate With Job-Ready Skills? Don’t Major in Business

It’s a question I get often as I crisscross the country speaking to high-school students and their parents about the college search process: does the college major matter? We spend so much time on the college search process but relatively little time on this other question—what should we do with the rest of our lives? Of course, so many of us end up in jobs unrelated to our major that we think it doesn't matter what we study in college.

I attempted to answer this question in a recent piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education that draws on some current research about the subject of the college major. Here’s the bottom-line: majors matter when it comes to how much you learn in college, and then how much you earn and your job satisfaction later in life. So in other words, majors matter a lot depending on your life goals.

But one caution on the studies I cite: they mostly examine the college major, not the resulting job held by specific majors. In many sectors of the economy, your college major doesn’t matter as long as you can do the job.

Majors sometimes matter more for the first job right out of college as the degree is the only strong signal to employers that you’re prepared for the workplace. Later in life you have more experience to show off to potential employers, and as a result, your degree and major often matter less.

If majors matter more right out of college, then employers might want to think twice about hiring business majors, the most popular undergraduate major on campuses these days. Students who major in business—as well as the helping and service fields, such as social work—start off in college lacking complex reasoning skills compared to some of their classmates, and then make some of the smallest gains while undergraduates in obtaining the skills employers say they most want: critical thinking, writing and communication, and analytical reasoning.

Perhaps it’s because undergraduate business majors spend so little time in college doing actual classwork. Nationwide, nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. An analysis by The Chronicle of 10 public four-year institutions in Texas found that business majors take fewer than five writing-intensive courses—requiring 10 or more pages of writing—over four years. And when business students take the GMAT, they score lower than students in every other major.

Perhaps college majors don’t matter in the long run, but you still might want to think twice about majoring in undergraduate business.

Jeffrey Selingo is an author of two books on higher education. You can follow his writing here, on Twitter @jselingo, on Facebook, and sign up for free newsletters about the future of higher education at jeffselingo.com.

He is a contributing editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education, a regular contributor to the Washington Post’s Grade Point blog, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University.