Famous youtuber Shane Hubris repeatedly mocks communications degrees. Hubris, or hummus, calls communications the “Athlete’s major.” But Why should I even care? I followed Shane because I tend to agree with the spirit of his podcast, that a lot of university degrees are scams, that the price does not always translate into a good return on investment, and so on. But when he uses false information to support these claims, it hurts the message.
I think that a lot of communications degrees are scams. The quality of education in the communications field has fallen incredibly over the past 30 years. A lot of the professors in the field should not be teaching, and should not even have degrees. But the students are far from athletes.
As with almost every degree, supply outweighs demand. Outside of fields like medicine and education (that require a degree by law) most people do not get a job that sounds like their college major.
But let’s test Shane’s hypothesis, that communications is an athlete’s major. He shows a video of a non-English speaking athlete, probably a soccer player who never went to university and didn’t even graduate high school, who struggles with his words. Come on Shane, I challege you to do better in an African language.
To prove this, I tried to find some famous communications majors. Apparently Dan Rather, and Connie Chung are famous communications majors. I couldn’t find any big athletes that I heard of that studied communications, however. The closest I could find was sports broadcasters, who studied journalism, broadcasting or a related field so they could relate what is happening in sports.
Most athletes do not have a college degree. The NBA recently tried to force more basketball players to graduate by changing the minimum age rules, but people still drop out at softmore year.
In the old days, a lot of athletes studied medicine or medical related fields. Tom Ditcka, the American football player who starred in “Kicking and Screaming,” didn’t go to university to play football, but to become a dentist. If you walk around a town like Cluj-Napoca, you will see a statue of a med student by the association football stadium.
Looking at the names of famous athletes, it is difficult to find a single one that went to college. I haven’t found a single soccer player or baseball player that I heard of. I heard of a rugby player who studied history, but if anything university might have slowed down his career. American football and basketball are the only two sports that universities pay players well enough to entice top athletes to play at university level.
Football players, I found one who was an engineer, others studied things like psychology. Sports science would probably be the best major.
What did Michael Jordan study? Geography. You can see his transcript online. He also took math classes, more math classes than any communications student in Europe has to take.
Communications is generally a very time consuming subject. Students do not have time to participate in sports. I have taken summer school courses in languages, in culture and those in film, and each says how many hours I was expected to spend to gain the credits. Film was by far the most labor intensive short course, requiring the most hours per credit. A similar course in something like artificial intelligence would have been around half the hours or less.
At the universities I attended, a lot of maths and computer science majors, and a few language majors, participated in sports. I can only remember one film or media (or communications) student being on a university sports team. And, when I went to university gyms in various countries, I never bumped into a media or communications student.
Say what you will about communications degrees, but they do not leave you more time than other courses to play sports. As much as some of us are fans of 80s action movies, communications is anything but an athlete’s major.