Top 10 Easiest and Hardest CollegeDegree Majors (Updated!)

There’s no such thing as an “easy” college degree. Despite the promises of online diploma mills,there simply is no shortcut to a college degree. Whether you’re pursuing an online degree at anonline school or at a traditional campus, getting a real college education takes a significantinvestment of time and effort. Anyone who tells you it will be easy is either ignorant or lying.

However, not all college degrees take the same amount of time and effort or are themost. Determining which degree will be the easiest for you depends greatly on your ownpersonal abilities and the particular school you choose to attend. Some people arenaturally good (or horrible) at math, others are good (or horrible) at writing. Such naturalstrengths and weaknesses will help determine which majors are more or less difficult fora particular person. Some schools are far more rigorous and demanding than others. Thistoo will influence the difficulty of a degree.

Determining Which Degrees are Hardestand Easiest in General

With these caveats in mind, we created a weighted formula that helped us rank 10 generalcollege majors from easiest to hardest. We’ve updated this list using a formula that shouldcreate a more accurate picture of a major’s degree of difficulty. Using available data from the

National Center for Education Statistics, we were able to identify three helpful categories: theaverage GPA within a major, the average time it took to complete a degree in that major, andthe amount of work and leisure time students could afford while studying in that major. Weassumed that more difficult majors result in lower average GPAs, longer completion times, andless time for outside activities, and developed the formula with that in mind.

The Easiest

Education: While we don’t ascribe to the idea that those who can’t do, teach, our researchconfirms years of evidence that those students who arrive in college with the lowestaverage SAT scores and graduate with the highest grades tend to be education majors.Education courses emphasize skills like oral presentation and classroom management,which, although they may be difficult for certain personality types, fall into the category ofhard to master but easy enough to learn.

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Humanities: Sorry, humanities majors: not only do you have to deal with constant queriesabout what you plan to do with your dance, English, or classics degree, as a group you’reone of the easiest majors a student can sign up for. The average GPA for humanitiesstudents trumped even education for highest percentage of students in the 3.5+ bracket.The good news is despite calls to shutter humanities departments because of a perceivedweakness in degree marketability in the job market, a growing body of commentators iscalling for more students to enter the field.

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Math: With the third-highest rate of GPAs in the 3.5+ category and tied for the lowestmedian completion time, math lands in the easy category, popular belief notwithstanding.Math majors sail through college quickly and make good grades, even though nearly aquarter of them that work do so for more than 40 hours a week. It could be that the waymany math subjects relate to and build on one another makes them easier for majors anddifficult for non-majors who merely take a course or two.

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The Hardest

Computer/information science: The inclusion of CIS in the “easiest” category maysurprise some readers, but the major clocks the fifth-highest average GPA while recordingthe highest percentage of students working or doing leisure activities outside class for atleast 40 hours per week. Because the major covers a broad range of topics on technologyand information systems, graduates can land positions in tech support, information security,network administration, and elsewhere. But because it is a broad area, industry pros saybecoming a programmer, for example, requires the more in-depth study involved in acomputer science (CS) degree.

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Health: The difficult years of schooling doctors have to endure before donning the scrubsare well-documented. But for those who wish to work a little more indirectly in thehealthcare industry, there is this somewhat easier bachelor’s degree. Holders of a B.S. inhealth administration study to work on the business side, dealing with human resources andhospital operations. A B.S. in health and wellness allows more direct contact with “patients”but in a much lower-risk, preventative care environment that is more general in scope thanthe one a heart surgeon works in, for example.

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Engineering: Congratulations, engineers, now you finally have some proof for what you’vebeen telling everyone all along: yours is the hardest major. From chemical to civil toelectrical to mechanical, the courses you take in chemistry, physics, calculus, statistics,geology, biology, and other tough prereqs give you the lowest rate of As and the highestrate of Cs for any major. Because of this, the path has a notoriously high dropout rate somehave pegged as high as 60% per year.

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Life sciences: It’s a rare student who doesn’t find at least one or two concepts that trip himup in cell biology class. The life sciences include anatomy, biochemistry, neuroscience,biology, genetics, zoology, and more tricky subjects, landing this field just behindengineering on the low GPA spectrum. Many graduates of a life sciences path go on to

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careers in the medical, dental, or veterinary fields, which famously require as many asseven or eight more years of difficult schooling, internship, and residency after a bachelor’sdegree is earned.

Business & management: You may think what your boss does is not difficult at all, andyou may be right; a degree in management is probably not what makes this category adifficult one. It more likely lands here thanks to the challenges of getting a degree infinance or accounting. Either way, the data shows well below half of business andmanagement students are able to pull off a 3.5 or better, and they average the second-longest amount of time in which students complete their degrees.

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Physical sciences: Physics, chemistry, and geology all fold into this major, making it one ofthe hardest paths to take on in college. With the lowest percentage of students able to workfull-time (more than 30 hours a week) and the fourth-lowest rate of students with GPAsover 3.5, majoring in this field proves to be a challenging undertaking. And the uphill battledoesn’t end after graduation. A glut of graduates, a poor economy, and a move towardcleaner energy has created a troubling outlook for chemistry majors.

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Social/behavioral sciences: This category seems to be a popular choice for studentsseeking an easy A, but they could do so more easily by picking something else. The socialand behavioral sciences encapsulate what are sometimes known as the “soft sciences”:psychology, economics, sociology, anthropology, and political science. Although they aremuch more closely related by GPA to some of the easy major entries than they are toengineering, the social and behavioral sciences house the fourth-lowest number of fulltimeworkers and are tied for shortest median degree completion time.

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