“This is easily the hardest class I’ve ever taken,” said one International Business major.
Photo by Jordan Whitlow
Following a recent survey that revealed that approximately 99.99% of all college students nationwide choose to pursue a major in business, UC San Diego has announced that beginning in the 2025-26 academic year, a new course requirement will be added to its degree plans. All students wishing to earn a major in Business Economics, International Studies, International Business, or Business Psychology will need to earn a passing grade in MGT 1935: Business in Monopoly.
“With so many students expressing such a strong passion for business, we wanted to implement a brand new method of filtering out the weak from the strong,” said Rady School of Management president Mark Buckson. “By allowing students to experience the competitive passion found only in a classic game of Monopoly, we’ll see who truly has what it takes to succeed in the cutthroat world of business post-graduation.”
Unlike most courses offered at UCSD which only last one quarter, students enrolled in MGT 1935 will participate for the entire academic year. “Students will play in a standard, 30-person game of Monopoly,” explained Buckson. “Naturally, this will take at the very least one year to complete.” According to the syllabus, students who remain in the game until the last day of Spring Quarter will receive a passing grade in the course, while those who were eliminated will receive a failing grade and must wait until the next academic year for a chance to retake the course. In the event that the game of Monopoly ends early, the winner will be allowed to “relax” for the rest of the year.
The budget for MGT 1935 reportedly “raised several eyebrows” across various departments when first proposed. Standing at a staggering $2,000,000, this makes Business in Monopoly the single most expensive course a university has implemented. Literature department head William Writingsworth made an official statement saying, “That absurd amount of wealth could be used to fund a large quantity of other, equally crucial departments and areas. We could be aiding programs that develop the expression of the human spirit with the arts, cultivating an in-depth understanding of history and its consequences among our young thinkers, or even upgrading the quality of the food offered in the dining halls! Surely a budget this ridiculous will not be approved.”
The budget was immediately approved by UCSD’s Super Council on February 28. “We want to invest in careers whose students will make big bucks in the future, and those who pass the class are guaranteed to become gazillionaires. For those somehow discouraged by the very fair requirements needed to pass MGT 1935, Computer Science, Engineering, and other STEM majors are great fields of study to also make lots of money,” said Anonymous Council Member 13. When asked about where the funding for the course will come from, they responded, “We’ll just further slash the budget of the humanities departments. They’ve been getting greedy lately and aren’t going to be useful in making money.”
The new course’s announcement has sparked a variety of reactions from its soon-to-be students as well. Some feel positively about the introduction of the class, saying that it will “create a competitive nature within the student body, which the world of business is built on.” Others claim MGT 1935 is unfair, and especially a waste of time to have the course last the entire academic year. In response, third-year Business Economics major Presley Poundsley had the following to say: “They just don’t have the dedication necessary for the grind. Or a hotel on Boardwalk.”
