A new survey from BestColleges sought to answer these questions and reveals how college graduates feel about their choice of major. In general, changing majors while in college is associated with additional time and money spent on education, leading many schools to emphasize graduating students within a standard time frame.
However, the BestColleges survey indicates that if schools help students align their majors with their ideal career paths — rather than just emphasizing graduating on time — it could improve overall satisfaction in the major. Quinn Tomlin, the public relations manager at BestColleges, helped shed some light on these findings. Moreover, many college students pursue their majors for reasons unrelated to personal fulfillment. They may place more importance on economic considerations, such as income potential or job availability, compared to their passion for a given subject.
And of course, college students tend to be younger and may not know what their passion is, making it hard for them to choose the right major. Younger Americans may be more concerned with wages, benefits, and in-demand skills because they are having a harder time making it in the workforce compared to older generations. Real wages are stagnant and the costs of college, housing, and healthcare have all risen astronomically in the last few decades. Research has also found that millennials are worse off in terms of wealth and personal income compared to their parents at the same age.
And what does a good career mean? How can we help students identify variables that really lead to a rewarding career? A study in The Review of Higher Education supports this assessment. Soft skills are generally considered to involve areas like creativity, critical thinking, and communication — abilities honed in the study of liberal arts and the social sciences.
Chestnut Hill College senior Alexis Stoner arrived without having picked a major; she eventually settled on psychology. Some faculty also discourage students from changing majors. Related: As students flock to credentials other than degrees, quality-control concerns grow.
Kim Cooney describes herself as one of those students who, at the end of her junior year at Temple University, changed her mind about her major. It took her an extra semester to graduate, and summer-school courses; now, as director of student success at Chestnut Hill, she works from an office hung with inspirational quotations and a Philadelphia Phillies poster helping others make the right decisions sooner.
Not everyone does. Christopher Bunn was among the roughly 10 percent of students who arrived at the college without having declared a major.
He started considering psychology, then picked music education, then spent the summer at the end of his freshman year working in the campus finance office and decided to switch to accounting. I was never the biggest fan of that.
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More by Jon Marcus. At The Hechinger Report, we publish thoughtful letters from readers that contribute to the ongoing discussion about the education topics we cover. Please read our guidelines for more information.
By submitting your name, you grant us permission to publish it with your letter. College students change their major at least three times over the course of their college career, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. About 80 percent of students in the United States end up changing their major at least once, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
On average, college students change their major at least three times over the course of their college career. A change of major can occur within departments, from business marketing to business management, or within the same college, from mechanical to civil engineering, and sometimes across colleges, for example, from education to health sciences according to CIERP.
Some students start college with a major their parents or relatives picked for them, not realizing that if they end up changing majors too far into their education it will take them longer to graduate. Chavez graduated in May with a degree in math education, five years later than anticipated and after taking a two-year hiatus from school to earn money to pay for his own education.
Some of these students might have had a lack of academic advice or career counseling. UTEP provides academic counseling resources and advice for undecided students to find out about some of their career choices.
The University Counseling Center provides students with career counseling for their career goals. Sherri I. Terrell, the Director of University Counseling Center. She graduated in , after taking classes part time for eight years. The idea of changing majors can be daunting, counselors said. A student who is contemplating a change of major should meet with a college advisor to approve the change.
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