People like double majors for a variety of reasons, but itās usually some version of one of the following:
ā I want to major in theater, but Dad says I have to major in economics to get a job.
ā Why should I have to choose between biology and math?
ā If I triple major in economics, math, and political science, Iām sure to get hired by McKinsey and make bank.
and the ever popular
ā I have always been the best student in the class, and now that I am in the big leagues double majoring will show that I am still the best.
The fact is, coming out of a Harvard peer ā I wouldnāt give exactly the same advice to someone going to Southeast North Dakota State ā employers and graduate schools donāt care what your major was. They do care about your basic skills to some extent ā no one is going to hire you to develop trading algorithms if you donāt have the math for it ā but you donāt need a major to show that.
The point of having a major is to teach you how to go reasonably deep into a subject, and how to get to the point where you can do original work in that area. That in and of itself is a critically important skill, but you can learn it no matter what subject you choose. And you donāt necessarily learn it twice as well if you do it twice. Usually what happens is you wind up doing the minimum in both areas, whereas most people with one major do more than the minimum, or take courses in other fields that are closely related even if they donāt count for the major. If a college wants you to do a senior thesis, doing two of them can be really oppressive in a way that can affect the quality of what you are learning, both in and out of the classroom.
The other thing double majoring does is to take away your capacity to look for great courses in random areas. Sometimes, the courses that are most meaningful to you have no relationship to your main area of interest, but wind up opening up a whole world to you (and sometimes even changing your major). My best friend in college was a history major. He took Rocks for Jocks fall semester of his junior year, and completely fell in love with geology. He wound up as a geology major (with a lot of helpful flexibility from a Geology Department that didnāt have so many majors). He never became a geologist, but he has been a solid environmentalist and, as part of what has been a really varied career, he spent a decade as a policy specialist with Environmental Defense. All from a course he took for fun.
When you want to show that you are more than just a one-trick pony, you donāt need to jump through all the major and minor hoops to do it. I was a Literature major. I took a basic accounting course because it was supposed to be easy and fun, which was true, and because my Dad wanted me to take accounting, That was my random course that changed my life. It got me interested in business and finance. I took two further accounting courses, and a couple of economics courses, and I got a fabulous internship on Wall St. with the help of the university. I had no trouble at all getting financial industry job offers, even though I was still only a Lit major.
Of course, it helped a lot that I was a really good student. But part of why I was a really good student is that I was almost always studying exactly what I wanted to. What makes you most excited and most willing to work hard, to learn more, and to be creative, is what serves your interests in the long run.
Also, not wanting to choose between two loves: Sometimes you gotta choose! Itās not like itās a permanent choice ā in the long run, your college major means nothing ā or an absolute choice ā because you can always take a bunch of courses in another field you love. But life does force choices on you, and thereās some value in teaching yourself how to make them (and how to mitigate the negative consequences, too).
By the way, itās not like I think double majors are inherently evil. There are some pairings where getting a double major may be a question of taking one or two courses beyond what you would take naturally. Math plus a variety of fields is like that: economics, physics, lots of social sciences require so much math that double majoring can be natural. My wife wound up double majoring because she was two courses shy of completing one major when she fell in love with another major (having already decided that she disliked her original field).
