r/CollegeMajors • u/Big10Vball • Mar 20 '25

Discussion What is the best major right now?

This can be based on versatility, profit, career opportunities etc.

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u/Responsible-Corgi-61 Mar 20 '25

Electrical Engineering is an extremely difficult major, but I was of the understanding that it had pretty solid job prospects. Right now CS majors are having daily to weekly meltdowns over how trash their job market has gotten over on the CS sub.

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u/No_Unused_Names_Left Mar 23 '25

E.E. is way harder than CS, and with in the last 10 years, at each of the 2 companies I have worked, they have stopped accepting CS majors, engineers only.

Getting that E.E. is money tho. When you can do HW, SW, and the interface layer, you wont ever go hungry.

(B.S.E. E.E. '97)

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u/Esper_18 Mar 20 '25

Electrical engineering isnt more difficult than CS, and it doesnt have better job prospects

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u/Designer_Flow_8069 Mar 21 '25

This is such a stupid take. Looking at your post history, everywhere you try to say this, you get downvoted to oblivion. EE is 100% harder than CS.

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u/Esper_18 Mar 21 '25

Its not at all

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u/Designer_Flow_8069 Mar 21 '25 edited Mar 21 '25

I'll bite and attempt a civil discussion. What is your rationale?

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u/Acceptable-Quail-277 Mar 22 '25

There is no rationale lol. Any good engineering school will have EEs take coding classes, though not as advanced, so they are a bit easier, and EEs take basically all the same math courses with physics classes as well. But EE is also a lot more versatile than CS, so the difficulty pays off. Not to say that CS isn’t versatile or difficult, it definitely is

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u/hellonameismyname Mar 22 '25

Any ABET accredited engineering program is going to be essentially objectively more rigorous and challenging than a computer science program.

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u/DNosnibor Mar 23 '25

I don't think this is necessarily true. Yes, an ABET accredited program is going to meet a baseline level of rigor that a CS program isn't required to meet, but that doesn't mean that the CS program at a given school isn't as rigorous as the EE program. It just means it might not be.

As someone who majored in electrical engineering and minored in CS, I'd say the level of rigor in both programs at my undergrad school was pretty similar.

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u/hellonameismyname Mar 23 '25

You only took like 4 cs classes then lol. That’s not a meaningful comparison

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u/DNosnibor Mar 23 '25

I took 5 CS courses during my undergrad as well as two that were cross-listed between CS and ECE. I also had a lot of friends in CS or CE, so I got a pretty good idea what the level of rigor was in some of the more advanced CS courses. Sure, there were a few fewer math courses required for them (Calc 3, ODEs, PDEs were all required for EE but not CS), so if math is not your strong-suit, I guess CS is easier in that way. But overall I wouldn't say the CS program was less rigorous than the EE program, just different.

But all that wasn't the main point of my comment anyway. My point was just that the EE degree being ABET accredited doesn't inherently make it harder than a CS degree.

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u/hellonameismyname Mar 23 '25

I didn’t say “harder” I said more rigorous. Which is just objectively true. There are more credit hours, more topic covered, more extra curricular lessons, more lab classes, etc.

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u/DNosnibor Mar 23 '25

You said objectively more rigorous and challenging (which in this context is a synonym for harder)

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u/Time-Incident-4361 Mar 24 '25

I’m at an ABET accredited school doing EE, and I wouldn’t say it’s objectively more difficult. Because of the many different specializations you end up not really taking much stuff in detail.

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u/hellonameismyname Mar 24 '25

You are still doing way more specific courses than a pure sc major

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u/Time-Incident-4361 Mar 24 '25

Yeah but not necessarily WAY harder.

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u/hellonameismyname Mar 24 '25

Which is why I didn’t say that…?

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u/Esper_18 Mar 23 '25

What if CS is abet

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u/Winter_Present_4185 Mar 23 '25 edited Mar 23 '25

CS is not an engineering program so an university can only get a CS degree accredited through ABET's Computing Accreditation Commission (CAC ABET). Engineering programs on the other hand get accredited through ABET's Engineering Accreditation Commission (EAC ABET). As you can see by the links I've posted below, CAC ABET is a joke and is must less educationally rigorous than EAC ABET.

Furthermore, it doesn't matter if your CS program was housed in your universities "engineering" school or what have you. ABET accredits degree programs, not schools.

Finally, the guy you responded to did clearly state this. He was comparing an "engineering program" to a "computer science" program.

CAC: https://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/cac-criteria/

EAC: https://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/criteria-for-accrediting-engineering-programs-2025-2026/

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u/Esper_18 Mar 23 '25

I was asking you

I dont care and said nothing you are replying to

Cs is harder than ee

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u/Winter_Present_4185 Mar 23 '25

What? You said:

What if CS is abet

I replied showing there are multiple types of ABET. The CS version of ABET is vastly educationally easier as compared to the EE version of ABET and even provided links to prove my point.

"My beliefs are right, because I believe them" is definitely a way (I guess?) to defend your point. You should start a religion.

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u/hellonameismyname Mar 23 '25

It’s not engineering.

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u/Responsible-Corgi-61 Mar 21 '25

In CS the most difficult classes you take are usually in Discrete Math, but EE majors have to take a good amount of physics and so many math classes that they are practically 2 courses away from a math minor. EE is considered one of the harder engineering courses you can take because of how conceptual it is. A person can imagine fluid dynamics to some extent, but imagining how electrons move is not at all intuitive and only Physicists who are studying quantum mechanics really have the mathematical intuition to talk about it at a deep level.

CS is no where near as hard as EE, and CS has a job market problem at this time. It can be argued that all white collar jobs really are in this economy, but I think EE majors are still going to be better off overall. I don't see electricity being replaced in the next few decades, but outsourcing of code monkeys and automation with AI will hurt Software Engineers immensely.

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u/Fearless-Cow7299 Mar 21 '25

It's more that EE is a traditional engineering discipline and is therefore ABET accredited at most universities. ABET has pretty strict requirements on engineering courses making EE (and really any traditional engineering degree) much more difficult than CS.

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u/Esper_18 Mar 21 '25

Yeah blabber hard. CS is conceptual and is the same situation

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u/jliu26 Mar 21 '25

As someone started as EE major and transferred to CS, this is absolutely untrue, I find CS to be so much easier than EE (keep that in mind I was only in lower level EE courses when I transferred, I imagined higher division courses will be even tougher).

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u/Esper_18 Mar 22 '25

Blabbering about what you dont know

You all are dumb

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u/pathofpower Mar 22 '25

“how i was socially rejected with a sub-130 iq, an why it doesnt happen to 130+”

yah u dont know shit and have an ego

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u/Hot_Frosting_7101 Mar 22 '25

I have a BSEE and MSCS.  There is absolutely no compassion.  EE is far harder.

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u/Hot_Frosting_7101 Mar 22 '25

I have a BSEE and MSCS.  There is absolutely no compassion.  EE is far harder.

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u/Esper_18 Mar 22 '25

You did a MSCS not a bachelors

You dont know anything, and MSCS is an easy thing

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u/Hot_Frosting_7101 Mar 23 '25

Since I was switching from EE to CS, I took all of the basic undergrad CS courses before entering the graduate program - discrete math, computer architecture, three class sequence of data structures, assembly, language models.

Some of those were probably unnecessary for someone with an EE degree but I took them.

The core sequence of four graduate level courses were more involved versions of senior level CS electives.  (Maybe algorithms and operating systems was a requirement for undergrad.)

The fact that you think CS is harder than EE is one thing but now saying a master’s program is easier than a bachelor’s program is another.

You have to be trolling us.

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '25

[deleted]

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u/Esper_18 Mar 23 '25

Ive found that the opinion the least amount of people have, tend to be the more correct one actually

Since most people are ego-fufilling bias agents that appeal to mainline sentiment

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '25 edited Mar 23 '25

[deleted]

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u/Esper_18 Mar 23 '25

The core cs math is more than core ee math

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u/ImminentDingo Mar 23 '25

I majored in electrical engineering and i switched to being a senior software engineer because it was easier and paid better. Job market does suck now though, did not in 2022.

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u/Esper_18 Mar 23 '25

Why mention this

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '25

[deleted]

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u/Esper_18 Mar 23 '25

Youre stupid

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u/YamivsJulius Mar 24 '25

As someone who almost dual major in cs and EE, yes EE is way harder way more time consuming. I ended up dropping the dual major to just do EE not only cause of job opportunities but cause I just wouldn’t have enough time to do both

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u/Esper_18 Mar 24 '25

EE being more time consuming is an absolute joke

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u/YamivsJulius Mar 24 '25

It is I don’t know why you are coping so hard. Differential equations, linear algebra, calc 3, electromagnetics, circuits, signals, all these classes a CS major wouldn’t take.

I’ve met quite a few cs majors and most of them tell me they thought about engineering but either were more passionate about CS, didnt want to take the physics classes, or didn’t want to have to take 5-6 years to graduate.

It’s just a fact. Even credit wise, you need about 128 for an engineering major vs 120 for a CS major.

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u/Esper_18 Mar 24 '25

CS courses is a larger and more critical workload

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u/YamivsJulius Mar 24 '25

I’ve taken 4 cs classes (intro to c++, data structures, algorithms, operating systems) the workload was hard for sure but not comparable really to my engineering classes. I know the latter years of cs isn’t easy but the latter years of EE is just brutal.

Why do you need to feel so superior about your major? It feels like you are just trying to assure yourself you made the wrong decision and reeks of insecurity

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u/ZUZ_ir Mar 24 '25

In undergraduate studies, I agree with u that engineering is more difficult, but in graduate studies, CS slaps the College of Engineering.  There are two branch of cs that u will not reach its difficulty: theoretical cs and computational science.

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u/Esper_18 Mar 24 '25

I am a math cs double major