Most difficult business majors
What business majors do you think are the most difficult and the least difficult?
Different and Easiest Business Major
This is a very difficult question to answer due to varying difficult, professors, natural talents, and courses within schools. However, in order to begin to rank the most difficult business majors, first we must establish the different business majors that are available. Although the list below may differ between school, this is typically what would be offered within a business program.
- Accounting
- Actuarial
- Finance
- Financial Engineering
- General Business
- HR
- International Business
- Marketing
One could consider the easiest majors to be those with less of a quantitative component - these would include general business, HR, international business, and marketing.
Ranking Business Majors In Difficulty
User @guyfromct", an investment banking associate, ranks majors in this order based on course load, which most of WSO community agrees with:
Financial engineering>Actuarial>>>Accounting>Finance>General Business/International Business>>Marketing>HR
Is Accounting Or Finance A Harder Major?
One of the biggest debates is whether finance is harder than accounting. While both majors have different concentrations in business (finance being more conceptual and accounting being more rigorous), within undergraduates their difficulty is roughly the same in terms of overall course load. Some like user @t-jfk", an investment banking analyst, argue that:
finance is basic maths so anyone who can count and knows how to use a calculator can do well whereas accounting has so many bs little rules you have to remember
While others such as @CountryUnderdog" refute with:
you have to understand accounting to understand finance, but you don't have to understand finance to understand accounting.
Is Accounting Masters More Challenging than a Finance Masters?
Though your experience may vary with master's program and the concentration you are aiming towards, some advanced courses within the finance program can be extremely challenging. User @hopefulinvestmentbanker" has valuable insight regarding deciding which master's program is more difficult:
So at undergrad the finance and accounting difficulty are about the same. At a masters in finance vs masters in accounting, based on the course description from what I can see, a masters in finance is a lot tougher.
Do Other Factors Affect Major Difficulty?
The short answer is yes.
The university that you attend is a factor. Some schools who are targeted towards business or some aspect of business: NYU Stern, Upenn Wharton, Cornell Dyson, etc. all will have greater access to professors and course material. However, this does not mean that you cannot get a great education and place yourself on the same footing as those students.
Possibly the biggest factor is your natural talents. For instance if you’re numerically challenged or find formulas difficult you may find finance or account hard. Successful marketers are individuals who are creative and can deal with analytical concepts.
Here's a quick video that encompasses varying business majors!
If you have any other advice on selecting majors or have an input regarding your experiences please comment below!
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It's a business major. They're all more or less the same.
Financial engineering>Actuarial>>>Accounting>Finance>General Business/International Business>>Marketing>HR
Would agree with this except for accounting being harder than finance. You have to understand accounting to understand finance, but you don't have to understand finance to understand accounting.
Ask a trader to walk you through the financial statements, and you might find that some aspects of finance aren't all that highly impacted by accounting.
Gonna have to disagree. Finance is basic maths so anyone who can count and knows how to use a calculator can do well whereas accounting has so many bs little rules you have to remember
I've never seen actuarial as part of a business program as it tends to be a concentration within applied math. What school has it as part of their business program? I'd be interested in checking it out, I've always thought that it would fit better as a math heavy business subdiscipline (e.g. like fin eng), and I've always wondered why I've never seen one.
For undergrad, NYU's actuarial program is part of Stern.
St. John's has it as a part of their college of business within the school of risk management, insurance and actuarial science, here is the link http://www.stjohns.edu/academics/undergraduate/tobin/risk/programs/bs_as
^ Yup.
I'm an accounting major (shit on me if you want) and the accounting courses are much much more difficult than finance. I think people think of accounting as pure math, instead it is more learning the processes than calculating numbers. I have friends that were actuary majors at UGA and of course that major is harder than accounting. I honestly don't know much about a financial engineering major so I can't comment. Marketing please.....its the first department cut and a joke of a major.
I think that it all depends..I agree with the fact that there may be one or two concentrations that are a little bit more difficult or less difficult, but for the most part it is just how your mind works..accounting and finance have similar difficulty levels, but depending on the way you think you may enjoy or understand one or the other better.
Depends on the strength of your school's program.
RE Accounting vs Finance:
My finance classes were basically glorified algebra courses where you just had to know the formulas, how they work, and then plug and chug numbers into generic word problems in order to ace the midterms. Derivatives was a fair amount more complicated, but anyone who did well in calculus 1 would crush their finance classes.
My accounting classes involved A LOT more work outside of the classroom just based on the sheer volume of knowledge required. Not only did you have to know the accounts and how they worked, but there were also various rules, exceptions, exceptions to exceptions, exceptions to an exception's exception (this was particularly true when we did some tax stuff) that it could become very challenging.
Maybe I'm biased because I tend to do better in math-oriented courses than memorization-based ones, but I thought accounting was much, much tougher than my finance courses, The fact that even the smartest kids at my school were happy to get 85s (85-88 was frequently the highest score on accounting exams) on the midterms/finals despite getting 100% on their finance tests leads me to believe I'm not alone. Even my friends at top-tier state schools agree, although it may be different at Wharton/MIT/Stern, which are more rigorous than the school I attended.
Also, to the person that said you don't need to know finance to do accounting, I disagree. You don't need to know trading concepts, obviously, but basic concepts like time value of money, etc. are necessary for understanding and complying to GAAP rules. We used time value of money concepts, for example, when accounting for long-term notes and we discussed some hedging concepts for accounting for hedges.
I haven't been very active over the last several months, but had to comment on the sheer stupidity of this post. Accounting courses are math oriented and finance is memorization-based? How exactly is that? Other than basic arithmetic, what level of math do you need to learn accounting? What you really need is to memorize a shit load of rules. Conversely, modern finance is written in the language of measure-theoretic probability and stochastic processes, for which you need a fair bit of math.
It looks like you read that comment completely wrong. Accrual Dictator was saying exactly what you just said: ACCT = Memorization and FIN = Math. You might consider going back to your inactive status.
Tax accounting > finance > accounting in general. This semester I get to cope with a class graded on the law school curve with my entire grade consisting of written assignments and classmates including an A3 clerk (I'm a MAcc student). I'm also in an MBA finance class, and most of those guys seem like morons. Morons who are going to make a ton more money than me in a few months.
Anyone else really want the word "think" in between 'guys' and 'are'? Also do, not would? Make sure you take writing for business OP
Thanks GoHuskies! I'm sure you haven't made an error on this site.
I would disagree with this post. Yes, finance is easier for the kid that's going to be working at Domino's HQ and just wants to party his last two years of undergrad. Finance and Accounting are equally as challenging if you take respectable finance courses. An unbelievable amount of statistics and probability has gone into the last 5 finance courses I took in undergrad. You can memorize accounting rules all day, but some people just don't comprehend financial statistics.
We have a Business Analytics major at my school, you start out in the engineering college taking physics/math courses and then finish up in the business school.
Re: accounting vs. finance, I double majored and found the accounting classes much more difficult for the same reasons listed above. Advanced finance classes could be a pain with the some of the longer formulas, but it was no more difficult than my high school calculus.
I also don't think marketing deserves the low placement - my marketing classes were often filled with relatively advanced statistics. Some HR classes were also highly quantitative, but HR in general was a joke. I would definitely put general business at the bottom.
Totally serious. How do you think Towers Watson makes money from their non-actuarial division? They're not making millions putting together PowerPoints about fluffy HR stuff. Granted, the HR majors did nothing but complain and struggle to pull off a C-.
Here is the problem at undergrad a lot of finance studies tend to be fairly basic. So at undergrad the finance and accounting difficulty are about the same. At a masters in finance vs masters in accounting, based on the course description from what I can see, a masters in finance is a lot tougher.
Agreed.
I agree with hopefulinvestmentbanker, accounting courses are in general tougher than finance ones. But when it comes to masters in finance, some advanced courses can be extremely hard.
However, there's a degree named "Business Engineering", very popular in Belgium (also available in Germany,Finland & Chile). I'm sure it's easier than actuarial sciences, but tougher than finance/accounting combined: on top of the Econ, accounting, finance and management courses, we have pure sciences like physics, industrial chemistry or IT programming in the BSc. There's also a big big focus on statistics, multivariate stats & econometrics...
In the MSc, it gets worse (especially if you take Quantitative Finance as a minor), there is a "technology course" where you get your ass whopped: mechanical modeling, electronics, data mining and materials engineering.
PS: our science courses ARE NOT tougher than the ones in pure engineering schools :)
Computer Information Systems > Actuarial Science > Accounting > Law > Logistics > Finance > E-Business> Business/Management > International Business > Marketing > HR
This entire thread eerily reminds me of those obnoxious sorority and fraternity rankings on anonymous websites that are ever so popular amongst freshmen with nothing better to do.
Any rankings or opinions on here are hopelessly ruined by personal bias and the variability of majors at the universities attended by the commentators, and we would be be better served and no less informed if the subject of the original post was "The Best Flavor of Ice Cream".
I completely get what you mean. Harvard Econ is a lot more difficult than u of Texas accounting. But u of Texas accounting is more difficult than marketing at a small college. I purpose of the question was to start a conversation of what makes each major difficult.
Just so we're clear, a Harvard degree in Economics is not a business degree; Harvard does not have an undergraduate business school. Cornell (Dyson) and UPenn (Wharton) have the only accredited business programs in the Ivy League.
Even when it comes to what makes the majors difficult, that will still greatly vary depending on the university.
What do we consider business majors? - Finance - Accounting -Management -Marketing -HR
or what
I tend to side with those who are saying that finance is conceptually more challenging but accounting is more rigorous. I think the theories, ideas, etc. presented in finance are more difficult to understand, and the math is definitely more challenging than accounting (but definitely doesn't exceed the difficulty of high school calculus at the undergraduate level). Accounting, on the other hand, requires a bit more memorization and understanding of the core logic. However, once you understand the logic behind accounting, you can reason your way through the vast majority of it (except for those "exceptions") and the math is not nearly as difficult.
IMO, I think accounting can be tougher than finance due to the memorization of laws and regulations. And thats not just memorizing rules, that's staying abreast of the ever changing regulatory environment. In this sense, as one of my early mentors taught me, accounting is more of an art than it is a science. Accounting can paint completely different pictures for different people using the same information, all within the law. Accounting is also tough because of the breadth of disciplines, i.e. audit, managerial, tax.
However, when you leave college, the accounting area always works for the finance department. The finance group will use the work of the accounting group to make decisions. And so, with garbage, garbage out, you can't discount the accounting function. I'd just say the finance is more extenal, application, forward looking, and collaborative in nature. Finance also include the financial markets, which is a "business" in and of itself.
Accounting = what do we have, where are we, how do we process and collect it. Finance = where are we going, why, what's the best use of capital and funds. PLUS, the whole concept of the capital markets and forecasting of local and global economies, which influences supply, demand, and value.
Oh, and how could forgot the most important one for finance......HOW MUCH CAN WE MAKE!!!
How hard is finance compared to human tesorces
Any major, including business, that doesn't require you to take past calc II is a joke and should be considered very easy.
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