Most Common Majors at Highly Selective Colleges and at All 4-Year Colleges

[Data10]

@blossom

@Data10

I’d expect switching out due to difficulty primarily occurs in math-heavy majors, not history and philosophy

I think this is very college-dependent. History and philosophy are much more difficult than many HS students think (history because the emphasis on primary and secondary sources vs. a textbook means hundreds and hundreds of pages of reading; philosophy because it’s must more logic based than just “I think, therefore I believe” or whatever a HS assumes that major is).

There are several ways to review which majors have higher or lower rates of attrition. One way is to compare the prospective major distribution when starting college to the major distribution of graduating students. Using the 2019 (pre-COVID test optional) SAT report, the change in distribution from college bound HS students to college graduates was as follows.

Change in Major Distribution from Pre-College to College Grads
Nursing/Health: 18% → 12% (lost 1/3)
Business: 12% → 10%
Engineering: 11% → 6% (lost nearly half)
Biology: 8% → 7%
CS & Related: 4% → 5%
Psychology: 4% → 7% (large increase)
…
History: 0.7% → 1.1% (large increase)
Philosophy: 0.2% → 1.6% (huge 8x increase)

Of the listed majors, engineering had the sharpest drop, which fits with my earlier comment about higher rates of attrition in math heavy fields. In contrast, history and philosophy both had large increases. Less than 1% of college bound kids said they wanted to major in history of philosophy, yet 3% of grads majored in history or philosophy. It is not suggestive of a large portion of kids wanting to pursue history/philosophy, but the fields being too difficult or not being “smart” enough.

I think much of this relationship relates to the more objective nature of grading in math-heavy courses. For example, many fields of engineering require completing a differential equations course. That’s not an easy course to fake your way through, if you don’t really understand the math. If you get the math wrong, the problems on your exam are objectively wrong, and you run the risk of failing the course. Grading of history or philosophy papers is more subjective. Even if it is not a good paper and you do not understand the material well, you still often have a good chance of getting a passing grade on the paper.

That said, I realize the list above doesn’t take in to account the reason why students change majors. Many students change majors during college for reasons other than difficulty, such as not being exposed to or even aware a particular field exists. Or taking a class, and deciding they like that field more than what they had originally planned during HS.