<p>This is probably a very stupid question, but is it possible to find out (some special place to look on the website) how many students participate in a particular major at a particular college?</p>
<p>Often buried somewhere in the depths of the website. No standard, easy to find data. I would email the school (which dept to try??? registrar’s office?) and ask how to find data. That would be less time consuming than trying to guess where they put the data.</p>
<p>I think you can find the percentage of students attend each major in most schools’ websites.</p>
<p>The info is there but hard to find in my experience. Ask how to locate it.</p>
<p>I find the nces website has a good proxy for this information - number of degrees granted.</p>
<p>[College</a> Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics](<a href=“http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/]College”>College Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics)</p>
<p>You’ll have to navigate to the college (putting in the name should get you there, if not go by state and it will filter it enough for you to find the school). Once you’ve pulled up the school, expand the programs/majors category and it will have the degrees granted (both undergrad and grad) divided by academic disciplines.</p>
<p>BTW, I believe this is all generated from the common data set information the Department of Education gathers from schools. </p>
<p>Best of luck.</p>
<p>The best source for this info is the school’s Common Data Set. You can usually find it by googling the school name and “Common Data Set” more easily than through the school’s website.</p>
<p>Most schools do not post their Common Data Set statistics on their own websites. Papachicken did a thorough scouring of top colleges in the country a while back and came up with only a few dozen links.</p>
<p>The NCES site I linked to above is built from the Common Data Set data gathered by the Department of Education (note the site is a Dept of Ed site). It may be a couple years behind, but for the purposes of the size of the major, it should be adequate for most purposes (unless it is a relatively new major on campus). It has all of the major categories of data people look for - FA, test score ranges, etc.</p>
<p>^^goaliedad, thanks for that link. I found exactly what I was trying to find on the school’s website 
Even though the data is a few years old, it’s a good starting point for my son.</p>
<p>That’s a great site, and I too used the number of degrees granted as a proxy. A few of the schools we are looking at only graduate 4-5 people per year in D’s proposed major. I can’t see how that is a good thing, but then I went to a mega-big school.</p>
<p>I used your site, goaliedad. Great information. I couldn’t find the specific breakdown on the school’s CDS, which is posted on its website.</p>
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<p>Really? I’m surprised. I did tons of digging around CDS to come up with a spreadsheet of key facts for my kids’ search, and they were almost always on the school’s website under Institutional Research.</p>
<p>Glad everyone seems to like the info.</p>
<p>I’ve used it for a couple of years trying to identify good match (from a major perspective) school for goaliegirl as her interests evolved through her high school years.</p>
<p>It is important to find schools with both a good match of major AND alternative related majors that might be of interest to a student as they will more than likely change majors in their 4 (or 5) years in school.</p>
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<p>From my own personal research (before I found the NCES website), I tried to develop a spreadsheet of schools with D1 or D3 Women’s hockey, with some basic statistics (enrollment, test score ranges, etc.) 3 years ago, using the links Papachicken listed and then googling the other schools’ websites for “Common Data Set”. My overall result was a little less than 50% of the schools had the data where I could find it with google. </p>
<p>Granted this was a wide range of schools with very different results. For example NESCAC (Amherst, Williams, Bowdoin, etc.) schools all had the data available, while NCHA (upper midwest mix of UW publics and some regional privates) had only a couple of schools with CDS data posted where I could find it.</p>
<p>I think the more selective a school is, the more likely you are to find the Common Data Set info posted on their website. I think that research and techincal oriented schools also are more likely to post. Just my thoughts on this though.</p>
<p>treetop- I graduated with a major in one of the smaller departments in my college (back in the dark ages) as did one of my kids a few years ago. There are many advantages… but also many variables.</p>
<p>There are named professorships at many universities with endowed chairs for relatively obscure subjects. So a small department (in terms of number of undergrads) can actually have a huge footprint at a university- big name professors, lots and lots of money for undergrad fellowships, research, travel subsidies, special programs, etc. I was the recipient of a major award my senior year which for sure would have gone to someone with a much higher profile in a bigger department- but even little 'ole me was fellowship-worthy given that there were lots and lots of professors, and not that many undergrads competing! My kid was not the top student in his department either-- far from it- and yet got gobs of benefits including professors who were happy to make phone calls on his behalf when it came time for the job hunt.</p>
<p>So lots of variables. I think it might be hard to be an undergrad in an underfunded department-- but lots of fun to a big fish in a small pond if there are lots of senior faculty with time and resources to lavish on their undergrads.</p>
<p>Wisconsin provides all kinds of useful data on its site from student enrollment by actual course to number of majors by class year over the last two decades using a very cool graphic presentation.</p>
<p><a href=“http://apa.wisc.edu/Charts%20of%20undergraduate%20majors.pdf[/url]”>http://apa.wisc.edu/Charts%20of%20undergraduate%20majors.pdf</a></p>
<p>If you select your college on CollegeBoard and then click on major, it will give you the percentage broken down by major.</p>
<p>Great links Goaliedad and barrons…barrons, it is fun too watch the trends on your link.</p>