College is not a vocational school. You are there to learn to think critically, communicate, analyze and become educated. Very few jobs coming out of college actually require you, or expect you, to use the very things you studied in college. What they do expect you to do is to be able to solve problems, communicate answers, analyze data and think.

Obviously, there are some exceptions to this: nursing, engineering, elementary education, to name a few. But most employers are looking to find people that are smart, nice and driven.

Political Science is a relatively short major (if I remember correctly). While it can teach skills like critical thinking and communication, it is generally pretty weak in the analytics area. So have him beef that up. Do a math minor, or statistics minor, or even do a double major with economics. Just do something that requires analytics, as too many college grads come out without much analytical ability outside of basic algebra. Not that you use that everyday, but the process that you learn in higher level math is very useful from a problem solving perspective.

During the first 10 years of my career when I worked for a management consulting firm (Bain & Co, and then, later a boutique firm, The Parthenon Group), I did a lot of recruiting of undergrads. The specific major wasn't a concern to us, but what was of concern was what type of coursework had been done and did it include things that help an individual develop communication skills, problem solving skills and analytical skills. We hired a lot of "poets" (i.e. people who majored in English Lit, or Philosophy), a lot of economics majors, a lot of engineering majors and a lot of science majors (physics, chemistry and biology primarily). We knew that the econ, engineering and science majors had the analytical skills down by the nature of their program. For the poets, we made sure that they also took math/science/statistics courses as well to ensure that they had those skills.

Who did we never hire? Business majors. We didn't expect our undergrads to come in on day one and calculate a cash flow or produce a marketing plan. Those were the kind of things that our MBAs did. And we expected our undergrads to go back to b-school after a few years to get an MBA. The reality is that the coursework in b-school isn't terribly different from the coursework in an undergraduate program other than it comes much faster. But MBA students at the schools we hired from had 3-5 years of pre b-school experience which helped put the business school classes in context and made it much more valuable for them.

Investment Banks looked at people in a very similar way. Didn't care if you knew how to calculate a cash flow on day 1, they would teach you that. But did care that you could communicate, analyze and think (and be willing to work ridiculous hours). I now work in Corporate Strategy for a large firm, and our hiring procedures follow this same premise. I don't hire people because they've worked in publishing before (I can teach them the unique aspects of our business), I hire people that are smart, nice and driven and it has been very successful.

So, my very long-winded $0.02 is: Poli Sci has lots of opportunities if he's willing to do some other things with it to fill out the analytics skillset that many companies look for. If he wants to do Poli Sci b/c he wants to be campaign manager, then, good luck, that's a tough road.