When students change their majors, the decision is often thought to create a significant stumbling block in their march toward a degree.
But a pair of studies being presented this week at the annual meeting of the Association for Institutional Research suggests that changing majors happens far less often than is widely assumed, and that it does little harm when it occurs early in a student’s college career.
The first study, by Matthew J. Foraker, research coordinator at Western Kentucky University, looked at 7,000 first-time, full-time students who were seeking bachelor’s degrees in three cohorts at his institution. He closely tracked their majors, and if, when, and how many times they made a change.
Mr. Foraker identified 77 unique sequences in which students chose a major, including those who entered undeclared, selected a major in their third semester and switched it in their fourth, or those who entered with a major and never changed, among others. He followed how the students in each sequence fared: their semester-to-semester retention, their six-year graduation rate, and the time it took them to graduate. The results from Western Kentucky, he said, are very likely to be found at other public regional universities.
Among students who remained in college for more than two years, just 6 percent changed their majors more than once, Mr. Foraker found, and about 70 percent never changed it at all.
“The idea that there is an epidemic is completely false,” he said of the notion that students change their majors three or four times, which he said was often expressed on the campus in Bowling Green, Ky. “It’s just not happening.”
Students and their parents tend to think that changing majors is a significant obstacle, according to surveys, but higher-education researchers over the past decade have begun amassing data showing such worries may be overblown. That is one reason Mr. Foraker was not surprised that his findings debunked the view that changing majors is both widespread and highly damaging.
He was, however, stunned by another finding. Students who entered the university without a major but declared one before the end of their sophomore year had the highest graduation rate, 83.4 percent, which was 10 percentage points higher than the three next-most-successful groups of students.
Students who entered with a major and never switched had a graduation rate of 72.8 percent; those who switched majors once graduated at a rate of 71.7 percent; and those who switched several times graduated at a rate of 70 percent.
Mr. Foraker guessed that students who enter college undeclared and choose a major in the first two years might fare so well because they take the time to gather information and pick a field that best suits them. While some students who enter college with a major already declared can excel, he said, others may select a major on the basis of poor information or in response to parental pressure, and find that their choice ill suits them. Many drop out.
“My theory is that early major-change activity—changing from one major to another or from undeclared to declared—is a proxy for being engaged,” he said.
Mr. Foraker hopes his findings will give confidence to first-year students to begin college with open eyes instead of rushing into a major, and help shift the assumptions of faculty members.
“If nothing else, I’d want to educate faculty to be grounded in reality instead of saying to students that changing a major is bad,” he said. “It’s not.”
And yet he cautioned that his research also suggested that students must make a choice of majors before it’s too late. Students who had the worst outcomes, graduating at a rate of 62.6 percent, were those who waited until their junior year or later to select a major.
Excess Credits
Researchers in California reached similar conclusions about changing majors, though the focus of their study was different.
Jing Wang-Dahlback, director of institutional research at California State University at Sacramento, and Jonathan P. Shiveley, assessment research analyst there, looked at the track records of 1,200 students who entered Sacramento State as first-time freshmen and graduated from the summer of 2009 to May 2010. The researchers excluded transfer credits and remedial courses from their analysis.
Ms. Wang-Dahlback and Mr. Shiveley examined three factors that caused students to take more credits than they needed, a phenomenon that has received increased attention from administrators and lawmakers. Policies have recently been put in place in Indiana and in Nebraska to discourage students from remaining enrolled longer than necessary, and for faculty to cap credits at 120.
The researchers at Sacramento State defined excess credits as 124 to account for incidental credits earned above the typical 120.
Switching majors turned out to be the least important of the three factors they studied. “If you change once, it may not be significant,” said Mr. Shiveley, “but if you change more than once, then definitely you will affect your graduation rate.”
The second factor they analyzed was whether students double-majored or took on a minor, which affected their time-to-degree a bit more than changing majors did. The most important contributor by far was if students retook a course, which was most often because they wanted to earn a higher grade.
Using a regression model, the researchers were able to put the three factors together and weigh their relative power to predict whether students would exceed the number of credits they needed.
Students who retook a course were eight times as likely as nonrepeaters to earn extra credits. In contrast, those who took on a second major or minor were 1.7 times as likely as those with single majors to earn excess credits, and those who changed majors were 1.3 times as likely as those whose major remained the same to earn the extra credits. Changing majors was not significantly associated with earning excess credits once the researchers took the other two predictors into account.
Ms. Wang-Dahlback and Mr. Shiveley recommended better enforcement of existing academic policies, including one that limits students to repeating no more than 16 credits. They also suggested improving academic advising and guidelines to students in selecting their majors, and choosing second majors and minors.
In the future they will look at other factors that may be driving the accumulation of unnecessary credits. They will focus on the decreased availability of classes, a growing problem as the California State University system has curtailed sections to cope with budget cuts.
The researchers said that students had complained to them in surveys about blocked access to classes, which has multiple effects. When students eventually do get the classes they need, they often must pad their schedules with other courses to maintain their eligibility for financial aid. When they do this, other students can be frozen out of those courses, which they may need to graduate.
“It becomes a vicious circle,” Ms. Wang-Dahlback said. “There’s a lot of frustration going on in the campus.”
