I am an immigrant who went to a university outside North America at the time when applicants had to choose both the university and the department within the university to study at before they applied. I was accepted to the Department of Mathematics and took nothing but math related courses the entire time I was there, as was required. Fast forward 25 years - my son was specifically looking for a college where he didn’t have to declare a major for as long as possible, saying that he wanted to give himself time to explore. I know it’s the American way and I respected his decision, but I see examples of children spending four years at college, trying this or that and emerging with no clearer idea of what they want to do than when they started, in some cases even ending up back home continuing that elusive pursuit. Am I wrong to be worried? Please share your stories.
In a nutshell, a liberal arts education is better for some kids and a professional/pre-professional education is better for others. One is not “right” or “wrong,” just different.
Honestly, IMO an undecided kid pursuing a general curriculum might have an easier time of it than the child who starts off in, say, engineering, and changes his mind two years later to become a poly sci major.
What I would recommend to him is to go to ALL the events that the different departments hold.
For example if he is taking into to economic: Go listen to the economist speakers. Meet the faculty there and the older students and ask them what they have done with their summer, where do they see themselves ending up?
My daughter’s college brings in biology speakers twice a month during lunch. It provides exposure to the various fields and an informal interaction with staff.
Getting a clearer picture isn’t going to happen through divine inspiration. He has to go out and engage.
For career matching and happiness, the North American (and Scottish) way that allows for exploration before declaring a major tends to be better.
Very few 17/18 year-olds actually have a clear idea of their strengths and interests.
It’s not wrong to feel the way you do. It’s different from your own experience and you’ve heard horror stories of what can go wrong. What you don’t hear about as often is when it goes right. A good liberal arts college doesn’t just let students wander aimlessly among courses…it offers layers of resources to help undecided students choose the best major. Done right, this is much better than forcing an unsure 17 year old to make a lifelong choice under pressure.
Maybe a way to calm your fears would be to look closely at universities and colleges that offer the most open curriculums to see how they operate. If you look at Brown, Amherst, and Grinnell you see students who are exploring but who are also passionate, focused, and who are well supported by the schools in finding their paths. Your son may not end up at one of these three but looking closely at them should put your mind at ease that the system can work.
So when looking at colleges, look for schools that provide the kind of support your son will need to make his decision. Large universities can provide this too…just in different ways than smaller LACs.
However, note that some majors have sequenced prerequisites. So even if the college is administratively easy to wait and declare major later, a student considering a major like physics needs to start on the sequences early to keep the option open.
But the one who’s worse off than either of these kids is the one who starts out in poli sci and changes his mind two years later and decides he wants engineering. Because engineering is a sequential major, this means either spending longer than the usual time in college (and therefore spending more money) or giving up the dream of a career in engineering.
Although there’s nothing wrong with a liberal arts curriculum, it might be helpful to talk with the student to identify several areas he might want to major in and suggest that he take at least one course in each as soon as possible after he starts college. (Since these are fields that interest him, he probably wants to do this anyway.) This gives him a chance to start judging his interest and aptitude for the different fields. Also, it gives you a chance to look at the curricula in the college catalog. If you see that any of them is highly sequential (among subjects taught in liberal arts programs, chemistry is usually the worst in terms of being sequential), then make sure the student takes the right courses in the right order to qualify for the sequential major – at least until he decides that he prefers something else.
Like @PurpleTitan, I think the American system is the better one. But on the other hand, both of my kids picked their majors before they started college and never changed their minds. So what do I know?
Speaking as someone embedded within higher ed, and quite openly biased toward the North American/Scottish liberal arts education model (which, I’ll note, is slowly eroding in the United States):
[ul][]The most obvious strength of a focused preprofessional curriculum is that students graduate prepared for a specific—and fairly often, relatively lucrative—job, and so the immediate return on investment tends to be quite good. The most obvious drawback is that if that job training becomes outdated—whether because the job field itself falls victim to something like automation or because the job description changes in radical ways over time—then the narrow focus of the individual’s training may well become a liability in searching for a replacement career, and (often expensive) retraining may be required, which could significantly reduce the return on investment potential.
[]The clearest weakness of a liberal-arts curriculum is that students graduate not prepared for a specific job field, and so enter the job market requiring on-the-job training, and therefore, since the costs of professional training are being borne by the employer, the relative salary and benefits are likely to be lower for a period of time, possibly for many years. The corresponding benefit is that individuals trained in such a curriculum have a wider range of career fields to choose from at the outset, and appear to find it easier to switch career fields (whether by choice or by necessity) later in life. (Also, perhaps related to all that, the return on investment ten+ years out appears to be pretty much even from studies I’ve seen, though the opportunity costs of a lower income earlier in life are difficult to measure.)[/ul]
Really, as with many choices in life, it’s an exercise in risk tolerance.
I was undecided coming out of high school. I purposely chose a college with many general education requirements. so that I could take classes in many subjects to help me decide. The plan worked. I graduated in four years with an economics degree. I’d encourage your son to use his time to explore some career paths in his area of interest, make use of college career planning and job fairs, do internships and use his time in college to hone in on a career starting place.
My older daughter chose a decidedly pre-professional path. She used AP credit for literally all of her general education requirements and has focused entirely on engineering in college. She’s been very happy with that. Second daughter chose a liberal arts college but has already chosen her major and a minor and plans to graduate in three years. Son will likely be pursuing a particular major and career path straight out of high school and would prefer to never have any classes outside of that path!
There’s many ways of doing things and many ways of getting from high school to a fulfilling life and career.
The US/Scottish model has more than enough LA education embedded in it. That is what the first two years of college, and the Gen Ed credits, are for. Once you get into your junior year and above it makes sense to study/major/concentrate in one area so that is when you should be getting the specialized/preprofessional/vocational part of your academic training which can and should include an internship and capstone experience. So the two models are hardly mutually exclusive.
Regarding the so called downside of a preprofessional education preparing someone for a vocational field and then having those skills change and leaving the graduate out of luck almost all professional fields have some sort of continuing education to prevent that from happening. In fact, instead of looking at higher education as a 4 or 5 year period of someone’s life around the ages of 18 to 22 or 23 we would all be better off if we realized formal education needs to be related somehow to lifetime learning and continuing education credits. The human brain, I just heard, doesn’t even stop developing until 25, for example.
My D’s approach was something like Marian’s suggestion. She figured, at age 18, that she’d want to do something in science or math, maybe pre-med, maybe public health or something similar. (She knew she didn’t want engineering and her college doesn’t even offer it - or accounting or actuarial science or finance or anything else that specific). So she chose her classes with the idea of trying out a few different things but keeping her major options open as long as possible. She took the pre-med Chem, Bio, math, a language, a writing course, and continued to through this year. If a course she was considering satisfied 2+ majors she would take it over one that only satisfied one.
She now has chosen her major (not pre-med), is in a position to complete it on time, and has good career prospects. Some courses will count towards her current major, some won’t, but she will have everything she needs.
Many Us and liberal arts colleges have general education requirements (her college didn’t), and it makes sense to do those early both to get them out of the way but more importantly to try everything and see what feels like a good fit.
Thanks everybody for your perspectives, I do appreciate your taking the time to share them. So should I trust a respectable LAC to guide a reasonably smart and mature student through this process, or do I need to nag (I actually don’t like nagging despite what my son might think) to make sure he doesn’t procrastinate to the point where he ends up at a law school as a way to delay those decisions some more.
I think it is a bit of both. He needs to get himself into the offices and career center but there they will have lots of advice and workshops to help. They won’t come looking for him.
You can encourage your son to consider the advising and career services offered at different schools when he’s looking at colleges. All colleges will offer these services but there are differences in individual programs, some of which may appeal to him more than others. It’s a matter getting him to the point where he thinks about using these services as part of the college experience.
Read this, http://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/career_earnings_by_college_major/. There are significant differences in both income means and standard deviations by major.
Even majoring in petroleum engineering doesn’t get you a job (especially now). A kid still needs a resume, interview workshops, signing up for on campus visits, etc.
All kids need to learn the tools for finding a job- not just for senior year but for life.
If you look at the highest paying fields right now, many of them include titles that include manager, data…skills and focuses that you can’t generally get a degree in. Many of today’s high earners couldn’t have imagined of their career paths 15-20 years ago, and the same will hold true for today’s students. Even in STEM fields, automation, machine learning, AI and globalization will have profound impacts on the workforce.
If you agree and have concerns about a specialists ability to navigate the next 40-50 years of unimaginable change to the workforce (for reference, the guy who invented the world wide web is a whopping 61 years old right now), then the ability to problem solve and communicate with an appreciation for multiple disciplines is what may well prove most valuable from today’s educational spectrum. LAC’s I believe provide the best opportunity to learn broad, flexible skills that can be applied to the opportunities none of us can consider as the future arrives. Specialists who make large salaries are a dying breed.
You can get a liberal arts education at a non-LAC. And learning broad, flexible skills that can be applied to unforeseen situations can be done in the context of a variety of colleges and majors.
Probably also worth noting that nearly all non-profit US colleges and universities use a liberal arts curriculum model to provide a general core curriculum even for putatively professional fields (e.g., engineering and nursing).
I question how true this is. While technology might improve efficiency somewhat, I think doctors, lawyers, bankers, and upper level corporate managers are still doing the same fundamental jobs that existed 20 years ago.