What Do We Know About College Majors?
When people ask me what field I work in, I usually say "career information," and most people assume this means occupational information. Indeed, much of my work time is spent finding helpful ways to use the O*NET, salary survey data, job-growth projections, and other databases of occupational facts and figures.
But another important part of everyone's career is education. A young person's choice of a college major is often considered to limit or even determine that person's career options, at least for the first decade following college. Even if this is not true (and I know academic advisors who argue against it), the choice of a major will influence how the student spends several years in academia--which amounts to a lot of time, plus probably a great amount of money--so it is still a crucial decision. Wise decision making depends on the availability of good information, and young people have access to abundant information about occupations. But what information is available about college majors?
The Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) taxonomy developed by the U.S. Department of Education provides a hierarchical arrangement of program names and, for each one, a concise definition. The definition usually provides a highly condensed listing of important topics that are included ("includes instruction in..." or "focuses on..."), and sometimes it specifies an occupational goal ("prepares individuals for...").
Here, for example, is the definition of Architecture: "A program that prepares individuals for the independent professional practice of architecture and to conduct research in various aspects of the field. Includes instruction in architectural design, history, and theory; building structures and environmental systems; project and site planning; construction; professional responsibilities and standards; and related cultural, social, economic, and environmental issues." Various crosswalks have been developed to link these CIP programs to occupations, career clusters, personality types, and so forth.
The CIP definition gets at the heart of what makes the academic program what it is, but young people trying to decide which major to take need to know so much more. For a start, it would be helpful to know what courses are normally required. The part of the CIP definition that details what the major "includes instruction in" tends to focus only on those courses that are covered by the department offering the major. CIP doesn't mention supporting courses in subjects such as math, history, and language, which take up a large part of a student's schedule, especially in the first couple of years of college.
If we want more specific information about course requirements, we must turn to college catalogs, often (and sometimes only) available online at the college's Web site. This information is specific to the way the major is structured at that particular college, and requirements elsewhere may be quite different, especially for liberal arts majors. In a small number of cases an accrediting organization specifies the contents of the major, especially in allied health programs. For most majors, however, the contents may vary greatly from one college to another. This means that a young person who wants to know what the major would be like must review the catalogs of several colleges to get an idea.
And what a burden that is! First, the catalog description of the major often enumerates the requirements by listing course numbers rather than names. "First Year: Math 241 or 243, English 105, History 150," etc. If we're lucky, and the catalog lists actual course titles, the next hurdle is figuring out what material the courses cover. I have read hundreds of these catalog course descriptions and have found that often the language is so technical that the average reader can't understand it. It's almost as if you need to have taken the course, or at least its prerequisites, to be able to understand the catalog.
Fortunately, there are some resources that achieve a middle ground of specificity, identifying the course requirements for a major in generic (rather than institution-specific) terms. For example, the Web site of the Princeton Review describes majors in its "Majors Search" section. I describe 41 popular majors in my book 10 Best College Majors for Your Personality (JIST).
But wouldn't it be nice if we had descriptions of majors that were as thorough as the occupational descriptions that we're accustomed to seeing? I'm thinking of certain standard aspects of occupational descriptions that we almost never see in descriptions of majors: skill requirements; ability requirements; interests. To be sure, we sometimes see these characteristics identified based on research into the characteristics of the occupations to which the majors are linked. But these are occupational skills, abilities, and interests. Surely there are academic skills, abilities, and interests that differ from their occupational equivalents as much as the classroom differs from the workplace. Wouldn't it be nice to have research that allowed us to identify the key factors that predicted success in a wide range of specific majors?
In my first job in career information, almost 30 years ago, I was part of a team at Educational Testing Service that was doing the preliminary stages of this kind of research. The SIGI system (System of Interactive Guidance and Information), developed by this team, included a section called the Prediction System. Students exploring an occupation would be told what major was the normal preparation route and what "key course" was a good indication of their likelihood of completing the major. They were told what factors predicted success in the key course--such as grades in related high school courses or commitment to the program--and were asked to give an honest self-rating on those factors. The computer then told them their chances of getting a specific grade in the course.
The predictions were based on research done at the specific user institution, in which students' responses to a questionnaire administered at the beginning of the semester were compared to their final grades. As a result, predictive factors could vary from one college to another. It was the hope of the SIGI research team that, given such studies at enough colleges, they could discover generic factors for predicting success. However, the research was expensive and time-consuming, so only those colleges that received grant money for the field test took the trouble to gather the data. The Prediction System therefore was removed from subsequent upgrades to the program.
It's still a dream of mine that we could have an "M*NET" that would do for college majors what O*NET does for occupations. Unfortunately, it seems as if the U.S. Department of Education, which politicians periodically target for elimination, does not receive the level of support that the Department of Labor enjoys, nor does the National Center for Educational Statistics receive the same level of support as the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the past, when education occupied only a small part of each citizen's life, this made more sense than it does today.
Dr. Shatkin can be reached at laurence@myself.com
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