I'm sure you've heard of prerequisites, but maybe you haven't encountered any questionable requirements in the classes you took at the schools you attended?

Personally, I had to take classes like "Ancient Eastern Civilizations" while pursuing a degree in Audio Production. So while the term "useless" is a bit strong, I understand where they're coming from.

Caltech had a requirement for classes in social studies. This was a rather broad category, and included things like language, history, and even accounting. So there wasn't any reason for me to select a useless class.

There were specific required classes that I didn't like, but they weren't useless.

Prerequisites, of course, prevent one from wasting the professor's time from unprepared students.

>There were specific required classes that I didn't like, but they weren't useless.

Sure, course is never 100% useless, but when in one course you can learn "10 things" and on this one you can learn "1 thing" and have to spend similar amount of time on them meanwhile you're working full time, studying on weekends and trying to learn other things for your job/career, then things are tricky and you gotta pick - you put effort into some classes that aren't really efficent or maybe some OSS side project?

(not US)

I couldn't

I could only take "specialisation" - a few courses at the last year or something like that.

It could be software engineering / cybersecurity / something else