This is where the Reddit bias comes in.
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Reddit doesn’t contain a good sample of the general population, it tends to skew towards persons with more free time on their hands as well as persons who tend to lean a little more left politically.
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This in mind, think about the typical psychology student. Many psychology students are moderate / liberal and many of them are more likely to spend time on reddit than let’s say an engineering student, a business student. etc.
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Now that we’ve touched on this, there is also a bias in the r/college sub towards arts degrees as most business / stem degrees who are on reddit engage with reddit in communities more specific to their interests such as finance, economics, engineering, biology, etc.
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Psychology in itself really isn’t a crazy popular degree, it’s just as popular as degrees like economics, finance, computer science, communication, and mechanical engineering which is to say that it’s widely taught but not necessarily any more popular than other traditional degrees.
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So why is psychology such a common degree? IMO there are a few big factors here:
We have a lot of students entering college who don’t know what they want to do for a career but they think psychology is an interesting subject so they study it out of interest (and often times this might be because they want to understand themselves or other people better) Most universities tend to push psychology as a major rather than a minor. Ultimately, if you’re not getting a masters in psychology or you’re not trying to work in behavioral analytics (which honestly has more stats / math majors in it than psychology) then there is no reason to major in psych but rather one should minor in psych. IE: A good degree would be communications with a minor in psych. For some, they have limited exposure to what many jobs look like (and though we do have the internet – they don’t seek that content out on their own) so when they go to college they tend to study what they are familiar with. IE: Nursing, Education, Psychology. It’s an easy degree as long as you do your assignments. I’ve never heard a psych major complain about a hard assignment however they do tend to consistently have assignments and many times their exams aren’t weighted too harshly like they would be in a stem major. IE: A Psych exam might be 10% to 15% of your grade, an engineering exam might be 25% of your grade. To be honest, there really isn’t a good reason for there to be so many psych majors and there really should be a transition to having more people get a minor in psych but most universities are slow to follow societal trends.

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