The most worthless college courses I personally took

This is kind of a follow-up to the article I wrote yesterday about how I feel as though university (in USA at least) is largely a sham and also a method of insuring the population becomes a slave to massive debt very early in life. Just for fun, I wanted to detail some of the dumber classes that I took in college in an attempt to showcase how absurd a 4-year college degree is.

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no, this is not an actual course

Bowling

You are required to take a certain amount of physical education classes in a 4 year program in order to get a degree. Your guess is as good as mine as to why. We had an instructor and I'm borrowing from Jim Gaffigan a bit here when I say "what sort of instruction is this guy going to actually give us?"
Me: Fails to convert a spare
Coach: You know next time you should try to knock all the pins down
Me: You sure coach?
Coach: Just do it! Trust me on this!

Regardless of how you performed in this class you got an A as long as you attended class. Our college didn't even have a bowling alley so we went to the local lanes and received almost no instruction, ate nachos, smoked (it was the 90's) and even drank beer. Sounds like fun right? It was, but it was around $1000 and you learned nothing. I have never heard of any business deals that took place at the bowling alley. I guess there are some... i dunno

Scuba Diving

You may know that I am actually a certified dive instructor. I accomplished this well after leaving college. This was yet again to fulfill my physical education requirements in order to tick all the boxes of requirements for the degree. This was a semester-long program that was just for the beginner certification in Scuba. If you know anything about dive courses, this course can be competed in a week at a private establishment.

To make things more frustrating, the hot chicks in bikinis were given massive breaks for what I now know to be mistakes that could result in their deaths in an actual diving environment while the guys were held to a very different standard. I could have sued the pants off of that place.

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obviously you are getting an "A"

Due to inclement weather on the final day of class, the required 2 dives in the ocean for certification were called off, so none of us actually got certified.

Jazz Appreciation

I have to admit, the fact that I took this class instead of something else is my fault. I had other choices and don't recall why I took this class. I probably took it because it is obviously and easy "A" but the level of psychosis that was exhibited in my instructor has turned me off to jazz music forever.

The guy would play jazz standards like "ride on the A Train" over and over while shaking his head and snapping his fingers and chanting "dig man... dig!" and he would get upset with us if we didn't share his enthusiasm for hearing the same song over and over again.

I remember looking him up and finding out he has absolutely no qualifications to be a teacher of any sort. He is just a guy who likes jazz a lot. I wonder if there are "video game appreciation" courses in colleges because I want to apply to be an instructor of that.

History of Computing

Believe it or not, this was (and may still be) a requirement for all Computer Science majors. Like most other fluff classes, this one had a textbook that was more than $100 and detailed such life-enriching data as explaining how the Babbage machine worked and also showing how hardware has changed over the years and really focused on failed projects and antiquated equipment. It was all "in-one-ear-and-out-the-other" and honestly could have been accomplished by a free trip to a museum in a day. I remembered very little from that class beyond the exams and I can't really imagine how this information is meant to benefit anyone aside from knowing a few facts for a pub quiz.

Sex and the Family

This was actually considered to be a psychology course and I have no idea why i signed up for it. I think it was by advice of a previous student who informed me that class was incredibly easy.

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This class was not easy because it was a very uncomfortable topic matter to be discussing sex with complete strangers. The fact that the instructor's confidence in talking about things like this just made him come across as creepy. Very few questions were asked, and mostly the sessions were completely silent while the instructor kept trying to convince us that these were not subjects we should be uncomfortable discussing with others. I disagree. So did a vast majority of the other students. I ended up dropping the class and changing majors.

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I'll end it there

There are more, but I am running the risk of this being too long as it is. The real tragedy isn't that these classes exist, or that they are required to a certain degree. The real tragedy is that the grade you get in Bowling counts just as much for your overall GPA as the extremely complicated Accounting and Physics classes that I took. Most students use these electives in order to make themselves appear to be good students when in reality all of their good grades are coming from the absurd classes while the meaningful ones (for their major) are average at best. I know many people that only graduated because of this - perhaps they are thankful for the "filler" but I found it to be a waste of time and money.

All the garbage classes that are required for graduation I think, unnecessarily make the process take a lot longer so that the University system can steal more money from you. Would you believe that these absurd classes also had $100 textbooks? I had a textbook for my bowling class that could have very easily been written by hand with crayon.

In the comments I would like to hear any sort of silly classes you took in college due to the flawed 4-year degree system. I will reward you accordingly :)

As always, thanks for reading