EDITORIAL: Charting a Course
By The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio
Jan. 2–More and more U.S. college students have difficulty choosing a major and sticking with it, and colleges have begun to acknowledge this as a serious problem.
The longer students take to commit to their fields of study, the more debt they rack up by taking classes they don’t need, and the more likely they are to drop out in frustration.
The more Ohioans who graduate from college, the better off Ohio will be. As college-rich as Ohio is, in 2005, only 23.3 percent of residents over 25 had earned a bachelor’s degree or higher.
The University of Dayton recently told the Associated Press that 39 percent of first-year students who started in the fall semester hadn’t declared a major.
One problem could be age and maturity. Many 18- and 19-year-olds do not know what they want to be doing a decade from now.
And even if students come to college with a major declared, they’ve had little experience to discover all the possibilities available to them and the realities of their chosen fields. Plenty of students change their minds after they see the curriculum or find out that the job they’re likely to get won’t be what they had envisioned.
But maybe age isn’t the real problem. In 1966, only 1.7 percent of students started college without declaring a major. Perhaps these days, society applies less pressure to young people to know their life course and stick to it. Besides, no one can know how many of those 1966 students ended up in careers that they found to be rewarding or switched to something different.
A likely source of student indecision is an abundance of choices. For example, Ohio State University offers 12,000 courses, and an undergraduate student can choose from 170 majors.
Particularly at four-year public universities, majors are so specialized that a student can go seamlessly from college into the work force. That kind of focus is supposed to make students more competitive when applying for jobs but it also can be a problem: They’re stuck on a track where they have little chance to explore alternatives, with no turning back.
More personal and regular advice from college counselors has to be part of the answer. Many Ohio colleges are starting to improve their advising and establish innovative programs to help students find their place.
Most colleges require a freshman orientation class, but this fall, the University of Dayton offered its first sophomore orientation. Ohio University holds a majors fair, with booths with information about various fields of study.
Last year, the event drew nearly 2,000 students.
OU also lowered the number of credits from 90 to 75 before students must declare a major, and many students meet with their advisers every quarter to ensure that they are moving toward graduation.
Ohio State University and the University of Cincinnati offer exploration programs for undecided students. Advisers evaluate students’ strengths and interests to help them with their decision.
Through UC’s 3-year-old Center for Exploratory Studies, a student can shadow an alumnus or be paired with another student who is already in a major.
If these efforts help young people find and stick to an appropriate degree track, the students and Ohio will benefit.
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio
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