The University of Illinois Urbana - Champaign

Date: Dec 31 1969
Major: Political Science (This Major's Salary over time)
UIUC is a fine place for any reasonably intelligent person who needs to get a bachelor's degree to get a real job. There is a palpable division of the campus into "real" and "fake" majors: the engineers and math/science people actually work their asses off and learn a lot, most of which builds to tangible, useful skills. The fake majors (including my own PoliSci) are mostly a degree factory. Based on my many conversations about this with other students, there's a group of students in each of those majors that is making the most of their time and really learning; these are the future grad school kids in most cases. The rest are not focused on academics: some focus on the jobs (like me), some focus on their social life.

In between the real and fake majors is stuff like Accountancy and Finance, who work, but don't get ulcers. In retrospect, either of those would have been better for me, even though I am ridiculously fascinated by politics. I'm disappointed but not surprised by the degree factory mentality; I knew that's what I was going to get at a school of 30,000+ students.