What should I study in college?

Purpose and major

Selecting a major and degree depends on what your purpose is in attending college. If your primary purpose is college as an experience, then it does not matter what you study. If your primary purpose is using college to launch a career, it matters what your major is for some professional careers, but not at all outside of those few career paths.

College as experience

It does not really matter what you study if you are looking for the experience of attending college. I encourage people to select something they enjoy. College requires many hours of study and classes, and the experience will be better if you are studying things that you enjoy.

You should study what you are interested in learning. If you are interested in a variety of things, then take a variety of courses. Most college degrees offer flexibility in what you can take as electives or to meet distribution requirements, but this is something to pay attention to. Also, learning for the sake of learning can usually be achieved without enrolling in a college degree program, which we will explore in a later chapter.

The type of community that you want to be part of is also a factor in deciding on your major. If you are an artist, chances are you will want to hang out with other artists. The best way to do that is to take art classes, and while you can take art classes as part of any major, you will take more if art is your major. Substitute music or theater or computer programming or any other topic for art. At the same time, if you don’t know what your community is, college is a great place for exploring and discovering your place and people. You do not need to know that when you start, and in traditional schools, you don’t pick a major until your second year at the earliest to give you time to explore.

If your goal in college is the achievement of graduation, you will want to pick the major that is something you will enjoy and offers the shortest path to graduation. In the next chapter, I will discuss transfer and other forms of credit that can decrease your time to graduation. Different majors even at the same college can go faster.

College for career preparation

Many people outside of higher education feel that the purpose of college education is career preparation. Even through that narrow lens, there are variations in how a college degree translates into employment.

The most direct connection is when a specific major is required for a professional career. Many professional careers that require college require a specific degree and/or major. This includes careers as diverse as barber/cosmetologist, truck driver, accountant, schoolteacher, engineer, lawyer, and doctor. The level of degree varies. Many career programs only require a certificate, a diploma, or an associate degree. Other careers like law and medicine require graduate degrees. Teachers, accountants, and engineers can usually get by with a bachelor’s degree, though a graduate degree in these fields can be helpful.

If your goal is to earn a college degree for the status of being a college graduate, the major is not relevant. Again, I recommend majoring in something that you enjoy. You might also look at what major will give you the quickest path to graduation. The end goal here is having a degree and what the degree is in is irrelevant.

A frequent criticism of the liberal arts and liberal arts majors is that they are not aligned to a career path. My undergraduate major was sociology. I enjoyed sociology, learned valuable things about how to conduct research, but my career in information technology was based on a series of on-campus jobs that developed my IT skills.

College is generally not the best place to learn marketable skills for employment unless it is part of a degree aligned to specific career. Accounting majors learn some useful concepts and processes as accountants. In general, though, technology means that most skills are out-of-date within two years. In a four-year degree, only skills learned in the last year will be relevant for the job. College was not designed for this type of learning.

College can be effective for developing soft skills like communication and problem-solving, but these general skills are not career specific. They apply to all majors and are part of the value of a college degree in general for employment opportunities.

The key for developing marketable skills in college is to find jobs or volunteer opportunities that allow you to develop and practice real world skills to create value. In job interviews, it will be these experiences that will demonstrate your potential value to an employer and not what you covered in class.

If your purpose in attending college is to develop your career opportunities, you should start by identifying what career you are interested in and researching what type of education and training is required. Working backwards, you can identify whether college is a requirement, and if so, whether a specific degree or major is required.

As part of your research, you should also look at whether a career requires that you graduate from an accredited program. Some professions require state licensure, and these requirements vary by state. For a lawyer to take the BAR exam in every state except for California, she/he must have attended an American Bar Association (ABA) accredited law school. While most law schools are ABA accredited, not all are. In contrast, there are three accreditors for business programs, but I am not aware of any state that requires accountants to have studied in an accredited business program to sit for the CPA exam. Each state has similar requirements on what a student has studied, and generally it takes more than four years to meet these requirements. Most business majors do not have professional licensure for people working in the field, so program accreditation is not a requirement for professionals. To become a teacher in most states, you must graduate from a teacher prep program licensed by the state, which may mean that the program is accredited in some states.

In general, if you know you want to work in a specific state, you should look at the requirements in that state. I know someone who graduate with a degree in massage therapy, but when she moved to a new state, she discovered her program did not have enough hours of practice, so she could not get licensed. These rules vary widely from state to state and profession to profession, and often colleges are only familiar with the requirements in the state they operate. Upfront research can save you a great deal of pain later.

At this stage in your decision-making process you should know whether you need a specific major and degree or if any major will be acceptable. If possible, it is best to put off deciding on a major as long as possible. You will know more tomorrow than you do today and waiting will help you make a better choice. Unfortunately, for some careers, you need to know what your degree will be before you start.

Selecting a major

At traditional colleges, you are not typically expected to select a major before your junior year. The thinking is that your first two years you are exploring different subjects and taking your general education courses that are required for all majors. In this setting, there are few risks that you will take a course that you do not need for graduation or that you will miss a class that you will need. The major is generally the focus on the last two years, and even then, you will have some flexibility to take courses outside of your major. This is what a liberal arts education is all about. The “liberal” means taking a variety of classes in your education. It has nothing to do with politics.

The exception to this generality is when you are pursuing a specific career path that requires you to be admitted to a particular college from the start. Engineering is a great example of this. Typically, students apply to engineering versus liberal arts, and the course requirements will be somewhat different. Even in this case, though, you will not select an engineering major until the second year. Business and education schools often start in the junior year, so at the same time you would be declaring a major, you might be applying to one of these programs. Nursing can vary. You might start in nursing from day one, or you might apply to nursing school later in your studies.

Some professional fields like law and medicine do not have undergraduate majors. These professions are studied in graduate school. While some colleges may offer “pre-law” or “pre-med” as a major, the reality is that any major can work, though for medicine you need to take specific science and math courses.

It is possible to do a double major where you take the required courses from two majors. Some colleges also have minors where you take fewer classes than a full major and the minor is listed on your transcripts. Usually these options do not add much to your qualifications. The exception would be in secondary education where your major and minor will restrict what subjects you can teach in high school.

In addition to traditional colleges, other colleges focus on career preparation. Often in these schools, you must declare a major from the time that you start, and many of your classes may not be used by all majors. If you change your major, you may find yourself with courses that do not apply to your degree.

Community colleges offer both types of programs. Transfer programs are general and designed to allow someone to transfer to a four-year college to earn a bachelor’s degree. Career programs are specific to a career path, and while they may also transfer to some four-year programs, the curriculum tends to be very focused on a specific field of study.

Accounting provides a great example of how these differences play out. At a traditional college, you would spend the first two years without a major, taking general education courses and courses required to apply to the business college such as calculus and economics. In your second year, you would then apply to the business school, and if accepted, could select accounting as a major. At a career school, you would select accounting as a major when you apply to the school. You would probably begin taking accounting classes in your first year. At a community college, you could either do a transfer program and apply to a business college, or you could pursue an associate degree in accounting. At the end of the 2-year associate degree, you could leave school to pursue employment in an entry level accounting position as a bookkeeper or accounting clerk. You could also apply to business school. You could also apply to a four-year accounting degree at a career school. While you can be an accountant without being a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), CPAs command higher salaries and prestige. The requirements to be a CPA vary by state, but they all include additional study after the four-year bachelor’s degree. Accounting is the most complicated major and career path in the different pathways that are available, but the example shows the different approaches to declaring a major and how that varies by the type of college.

Key Questions

As you consider your major, there are three critical questions to answer:

• What is your purpose in going to college? 
• How does a major align with your purpose?
• When do you need to decide on a major?

Your purpose in going to college should dictate your choice of major. In general, your major only matters if your purpose includes using college as a pathway to a career that requires a specific major. At career colleges, typically you will have to articulate a major and career pathway at the time you begin studies if not sooner. At traditional schools, the major is less important regarding a career pathway. My recommendation in both cases is that you should major in something you enjoy. College is hard. It requires a great deal of time. You should get some pleasure out of the process. Studying something you are interested in will make it easier to stay in school through graduation and often will lead to better grades. If there is nothing that you like studying, then you should be reconsidering the choice to be in college at all.

You should put off making a final decision on a major as long as possible. The more classes you take and the more you learn about different majors, the greater the chance you will want to switch majors. You will always want to be aware of what classes apply to many majors and which are specific to a major. If you take courses that you later do not need, it will increase both the financial expense and time to graduation.