How Important Is Your College Major?

Is the college major all that important? Yes and no. It can be, but does not have to be. It is more important for anyone going into a ‘vertically integrated” program that prepares them for a specific profession, such as nursing, engineering, architecture, actuarial science, accounting, etc., than for “academic” majors. The good news is: A major university may have well over 100 undergraduate majors, and only a handful are highly vertically integrated and therefore require early entry and lead to a specific professional career. Most majors are broad and flexible, so they permit later entry and they prepare people for a very wide range of jobs and career paths after they graduate.

Your undergraduate major might not “determine the rest of your life,” but at minimum it will determine to some extent which courses, or at least types of courses, you have to take to get your bachelor’s degree. It will also likely influence at least to some extent your first job and initial career path. For most majors, after that first job, all bets are off. Statistically, you are unlikely to be working in a field related to your major ten years after you graduate. All that being said, it is advantage to pick a major that you like, and one that leads to types of jobs that you might stay in for a while.

Unfortunately, some students do make a mistake and get into a major, particularly a pre-professional one, which leads them to a job that they do not like at all. A high proportion of education students, for example, do not last long teaching in the public schools. In some school districts, half of the new teachers drop out in their first two or three years. Why does this happen? It seems safe to say that these young people did not know what teaching was going to be like. They may have had a false impression, shaped perhaps by the media, of a more idealized teaching experience. In addition, they may have underestimated the amount of work required to be a good teacher, and over-estimated the rewards, financial and otherwise. So they quit and move on to something else, with a bachelor’s degree that has limited relevance to most other jobs.

There is no question that a major that leads to a more acceptable first job or two is better than starting all over right away. Many, if not most, people will start over someday when they change careers, but of course, there are some who will stay in their career path for a long time, a few for their entire working life. Since most people will not stay in their career path very long, those who crash out after just 1-3 years are just ahead of those who will change careers at a more common and acceptable period (say 5-10 years). What difference does it make if you change careers after 2 or 3 years versus 6 or 8 or more? I think anyone who prepared for a job for four or more years of college and lasted only one to three years is going to experience some regret. They are likely to feel that they wasted their college years. They may feel that they could have been further ahead had they picked a different major and career path.