Many young people and their parents are concerned, fearful and even panicked about making choices about what to do after high school. Should I go to college? If so, which one? What should I major in? What job should I try to get? Admittedly, these are often the first big decisions that young people play a central role in. Additionally, they may feel ill prepared to make decisions are going to “determine their rest of their lives.”
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1. Longitudinal follow up studies have shown that ten years after college graduation, most people are not working in a job related to their undergraduate major. So, the idea that choosing a major will “determine my whole life” is completely and demonstrably false. College is higher education, not training for a specific job.
2. People these days change careers several times during their lives. This was not true 100 years ago, but it is now, and it is especially true of younger generations born in the 1980’s and later. They don’t just change jobs, they switch to completely different fields. Obviously, the specific knowledge and skills gained in their college major will not generalize to completely different jobs. What carries over is general competencies, basic communication skills, abilities to gather, organize, analyze, and summarize information, write clearly, make clear and compelling presentations, work effectively within a team, identify and solve problems, and so forth. None of these skills are unique to any major.
3. Most, but not all, college majors are flexible enough to allow entry after the first three or four semesters of college. It can be an advantage to get into a major early, but for most majors it is not necessary to declare early be successful. In fact, many liberal arts colleges do not let students declare a major until they register for the first semester of their junior year. There are a few “vertically integrated” majors where the courses are almost all specified and many courses are prerequisites for the next course in the sequence. Not starting off in the sequence right away, therefore, creates a problem. Choosing the major later would require extra time to go back and pick up the missed courses. Engineering and Nursing are two examples of highly vertically integrated majors. However, many of these fields have alternative entry points to get into the profession. Nursing, for example, has BS to RN retraining programs to prepare people with virtually any undergraduate major to become registered nurses.
4. You might envy someone who says they already know what they will major in, but their decision-making is not over. Ask someone who says they are going to major in Engineering, for example, which field of engineering they are going in to: Aerospace Engineering? Biological Engineering? Chemical Engineering? Civil Engineering? Electrical? Computer? Industrial? Nuclear? Moreover, each field has many subfields. Civil Engineering, for example has four subfields: Geotechnical, Structural, Transportation, and Environmental. And each subfield has specializations: Within Civil Engineering, for example, Structural Engineering has specializations in Earthquake Engineering, Wind Engineering; Architectural Engineering, and Ocean Engineering. Do these choices matter? Yes they do! They will determine which courses you take, what type of job and pay you get, and where and what type of environment you work in. How’s that for pressure?
5. The Masters is the new bachelors. More American adults today have a masters degree or higher than had 4-year college degree in 1961. Not surprisingly, a bachelor’s degree is not the golden key to success the way it was fifty years ago. Many young people today will go on to get a masters degree during their working life. In fact, a masters degree is increasingly required for entry level positions in many fields. Most professional masters degrees do not require a bachelors in a particular field, but accept smart, motivated students with almost any undergraduate preparation. Lack of undergrad courses in an area may force a student to take additional prerequisite courses in the masters program. But it does preclude students from choosing a field after they finish their bachelor’s degree.
6. Lastly, the pressure to make decisions under uncertainty—where we don’t have enough information, and do not know how things will work out—is a universal aspect of human life. It does not apply just to choosing a college or major. So get used to it. Everyone is in the same boat when facing decisions throughout their lives—choosing a spouse, choosing between job offers, buying a house, deciding to move, etc. It seems worse to young people facing big decisions for the first time. One of the lessons to be learned is that no one has all the information they want or need before these decisions have to be made and no one has a crystal ball to look forward and see what will happen in the future.
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