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Across the globe, college students are studying important information. They’re mastering the basics of electrical engineering, puzzling over mathematical equations or tackling the ins and outs of the high-stakes business.

Then there are the students learning about surfing. Or UFOs.

Colleges are home to some amazing courses. They’re also home to some that are amazingly useless. Here is a look at some of the most useless courses that students are paying tens of thousands of dollars to study.

David Beckham Studies is a real course, focusing on the soccer star, at Staffordshire University in the United Kingdom. At Melbourne University, students can receive a doctorate in UFOlogy. That’s right, students earning this degree will become experts in flying saucers.

At Occidental College, students can take a course called, simply, The Phallus. And at Melbourne and Plymouth, instructors actually teach Surfing Studies. Queer Musicology is offered at UCLA, and Georgetown University offers its own Star Trek course. Both Birmingham University and Florida Gulf Coast University offer Golf Management.

For those interested in a bit of sorcery, Frostburg University offers a course titled The Science of Harry Potter. And at Pitzer College, students can enroll in a class called Learning from YouTube.

Of course, not all of the most useless college courses are weird ones. Some very traditional college degrees simply won’t help students find much work in the real world. Countless colleges, after all, offer doctorates of philosophy. There isn’t much demand, though, for philosophy majors in the real world. Then there’s art history. It’s a degree you can find at many colleges. But do employers, who aren’t art schools, actually look for art history majors?

This is just the beginning. Universities are also home to some of the strangest and most politically correct courses you can image.
For instance, students can sign up for a course such as Nonviolent Responses to Terrorism or CyberFeminism. Other colleges offer courses titled Taking Marx Seriously, American Dreams/American Fallacies, Blackness and Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism.

There’s even one college that offers this rather lengthily titled class: Mail Order Brides, Understanding the Philippines in Southeast Asian Context.

Some college degrees aren’t useless. But many won’t nab students a strong salary. That includes such traditionally low-paying degrees as social work, elementary education, theology, music, Spanish, horticulture, education, hospitality/tourism and fine arts and drama.

Students who are interested in the big bucks after education should focus on engineering. The best-paying college degrees are petroleum engineering, aerospace engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, nuclear engineering, applied mathematics, biomedical engineering, physics, computer engineering and economics.