<p>So...watching many college kids go to school with one declared major...and then change as they learn more about what college (and the real world) is, was wondering about looking into schools where one does NOT start out with a major (and not just entering "undecided"). Can anyone point me to a list of schools that require students to begin with general studies, then at a certain point after freshman or sophomore year declare an official major? Is this more in the LACs? Please point me to some specific schools where freshmen enter with the requirement they do their gen. eds before a specific major (if such exist).</p>
<p>AFAIK the majority of the most selective schools do NOT require that incoming students declare a major or apply as a major in anything. Usually majors aren’t declared until partway through sophomore year. I actually haven’t encountered, either personally or through my kid, a school that requires a kid to apply with a major.</p>
<p>It sounds as if you might be looking for something like the U of Chicago or Columbia, both of which have a common core.</p>
<p>It will also depend on the intended major. In some cases the class sequence is such that major specific classes start on the first semester and any change will make it almost impossible to graduate on time</p>
<p>Two issues that need to be considered:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Some majors have long prerequisite sequences that need to be started right away. An undecided student needs to check all of his/her possible majors to ensure that s/he is making progress in all of them, so that when s/he decides his/her major, s/he will not be delayed in graduating.</p></li>
<li><p>At some schools (often public schools enrolled to full capacity), some majors are impacted, so that declaring or changing to them requires applying into a competitive admission process, even if one is already an enrolled student. Wealthier schools are less likely to have this issue, or have it for fewer majors, since they can afford to maintain reserve capacity in most or all majors.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I am not familiar with any college that requires freshmen to declare a major. Something like 80% of all college kids change their major, I don’t really see an issue with this. Yes, there are a few majors that are difficult to finish in 4 years if you don’t start by sophomore year, but those are few and can be caught up with summer courses as needed usually.</p>
<p>Also, every college has requirements for general studies. Most of those required classes are more than enough to fill up a schedule freshman year if needed.</p>
<p>At most schools, students can apply as undecided but might have to decide whether to apply to a specific college (arts and sciences, engineering, business) within a school. Later on, ease of transfer between colleges differs among schools. </p>
<p>For a student with several interests that do not overlap, it might also be important to find out whether a school will allow a student to graduate with more than one major or with one or more minors. Some actively discourage this.</p>
<p>I would also consider the number of credits (including prerequisites) for various majors. At D’s school, even in arts and sciences, some majors require fewer than 30 credits and some more than 50 or 60 when prerequisites are included. </p>
<p>Also, courses required for a major are not always offered every semester or even every year, so especially for some of the less popular majors, careful planning is necessary in order to graduate in four years. A student who wants to take more than one sequence (four years of a foreign language in addition to sequenced STEM classes, for instance) might run into scheduling conflicts at a smaller school or even mid-sized school. Sometimes these problems can be solved by planning for summer classes.</p>
<p>In fact, if a school has a very high 4 year graduation rate, you might also want to to find out if students are actively discouraged or prohibited from taking less than a full load of courses each semester, or taking longer than 8 semesters to graduate. Find out also when students are required to declare their final major. </p>
<p>At some schools, students who declare in the spring of sophomore year and are not able to change after that can end up being very unhappy and unmotivated by the time senior year rolls around. In some majors it is not until junior year that students get past the prerequisites and get a real idea of what the major is all about.</p>
<p>In all, and I know this flies against conventional cc wisdom, I think it is a very good idea to have two or three possible majors in mind when applying to colleges. When filling out applications, this makes it easier to explain “why” a certain college. At accepted students visiting days, you can target your inquiries towards the classes typically taken in the first two years by students contemplating particular majors. Having interests in specific majors also makes it easier to connect with professors, other like-minded students, and opportunities outside of the classroom in the very first months on campus. And often the first major does not work out, so it is a very good idea to have a “back-up” major that is viable.</p>
<p>Students who declare early also seem to find it easier to spread difficult classes over a few years, instead of spending a very intense senior year completing their major. </p>
<p>Many interesting college majors are offered in subjects not offered in the typical high school. If your student is undecided, they might want to spend the summer before senior year browsing through a book about college majors and then visiting the public library to do more specific reading about various majors.</p>
<p>I would add that frazzled D applied with four possible majors in mind, and has taken upper-level classes in all four areas. In three of these, for reasons mentioned above, it would have been difficult if not impossible to start from scratch after sophomore year and still graduate in time.</p>
<p>All very good points, and it is true that many majors require students to start on their specific coursework to graduate on time. But are there schools that start their freshmen out on the same gen ed. track (since everybody needs that English and History, etc.) and then have a formal “declaration of major” after a specified time of exploration? Somehow, for a student with varied interests (again, knowing that this would not fit every major/career path), this seems more embracing than the cold “undeclared/undecided” or the stress of starting in one major, choosing another.</p>
<p>D’s college roommate last year (freshman) switched her major 3 times in the course of a year. Another friend is also on third. These kids, like frazzled2thecore mentioned, have discovered options in college they had never known about. The students also went into college with what they thought was a firm idea of what they wanted to study, then being in the classes, talking to other students and profs, that’s when they explored the change. It was not without some angst…</p>
<p>So again, knowing some of the pros and cons (and knowing it’s major specific whether it’s a good thing or not)…anybody got some specific schools to look at that require students to start in a more general track before an official designation of a major? Certainly seems this approach (for some) could lead to better results in getting done in four years!</p>
<p>mommafrog–even with majors that work best starting right away freshman year, there IS flexibility in the schedule to explore other options and finish on time. Most LAC’s will allow more flexibility with this then major universities however. Most kids I know do finish on time, even after “switching” majors several times. It’s the kids that switch majors second semester of junior year that typically run into issues. Don’t overthink this when selecting colleges. It’s not as much of an issue as people say. More kids don’t finish on time because either they don’t take full loads, don’t work hard enough or are at schools where classes fill up and no recourse to get added to classes. </p>
<p>As for “graduation rates” you really need to focus on the numbers showing kids that started college right out of high school and finished in 4 years. Many schools, especially state flagships and state directional schools have students that never intended on finishing in 4 years. I find that statistic very misleading, especially for larger universities. Thinking back to when I was in college, I don’t know of a single kid that didn’t change their major but everyone that planned to graduate in 4 years did. We had one friend that was on the 5 year plan, but did that on purpose because he had 4 majors and 3 minors and just couldn’t fit them all in :D. He now has 2 masters degrees and 2 PhD’s–he’s just a perpetual student :D.</p>
<p>In most cases, it’s not the school, it’s the major that matters.</p>
<p>Students in many technical and professional majors need to get started on their foundation courses right away. Those in most liberal arts fields don’t. </p>
<p>As for switching majors, this is also easiest in the liberal arts or if you’re moving from something else to the liberal arts. If you are a chemical engineering major but you decide as a sophomore that you would rather major in economics, you will probably be able to make the switch and still graduate on time, without paying for any extra semesters. If you are an economics major who wants to switch to chemical engineering, it’s going to be much more difficult and will probably require you to spend more than eight semesters in college.</p>
<p>There are also a number of schools with no core curriculum or required coursework. Brown is one. Grinnell (apart from a writing intensive freshman seminar on one of many topics) is another. Stanford recently dumped their year-long IHUM requirement in favor of a one quarter freshman seminar.</p>
<p>And most private schools don’t require students to declare a major until the end of sophomore or the start of junior year. Some of the savvier students declare earlier because there are privileges associated with declaring - a key to the dept/labs, preference in course selection, a faculty adviser whom they like in that area for the duration, summer internships or scholarships for which they get preference - but that doesn’t mean they won’t change their minds whenever it becomes convenient to do so. Stressfull? Not really. Just paperwork in most cases. Everyone else is busy shifting between majors in the first two years so it’s not unusual at all.</p>
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<p>You may not need to officially declare your major, but for some majors, you need to be seriously working on requirements long before the time comes to declare a major. For other majors, you don’t.</p>
<p>I was a biology major in college. To be accepted into the major, I had to have completed (or be completing by the end of sophomore year) three two-semester course sequences (in introductory biology, chemistry, and math). Moreover, by the end of sophomore year, most prospective biology majors had also made a significant dent in the extensive and complex requirements for the major. (Typically, sophomores took organic chemistry and genetics, although there were other options.) Those who had not done this would face very demanding schedules as juniors and seniors.</p>
<p>In contrast, my daughter majored in economics (at the same university I attended). She could have completed the three prerequisites for her major simultaneously as a second-semester sophomore without ever having taken an economics course before. As it happens, she did not do it that way, but it would have been possible.</p>
<p>My point is that even if a college says that you don’t have to declare a major until a certain point, you still have to be thinking about possible majors and taking appropriate courses long before then so that you will be prepared for your major when the time comes. For some majors, this is a simple matter. For others, it is not.</p>
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<p>Have you looked at Columbia and The University of Chicago?</p>
<p>I agree that it is a good idea to be looking ahead, even as an “undeclared,” during the first two years, to anticipate courses required as prerequisites. Some STEM majors will require between twenty and thirty credits of introductory courses, and Area Studies majors could require twenty to thirty credits of language instruction.</p>
<p>Also, as students complete gen ed requirements, they will need to decide whether to enroll only in classes that will “count” for major requirements or in some easier classes that will fill gen ed or “core” requirements but will not count towards a major in that area. A student taking classes that count as pre-med weeders might want to think twice about also taking that intensive Japanese class, for example, and take another language or humanities class instead, and the student who intends to major in Japanese might be more comfortable in Physics for Poets or Astronomy for non-majors than in calc-based physics, given the demanding nature of many intensive intro language classes.</p>
<p>I would not overthink this, but I would also try to get a feel for whether your student is interested in eventually applying to medical school or law school. (This is a large number of students at more selective universities.) If so, this should also influence their course selection, as maintaining a high GPA from the get-go rather than taking academic risks will be very important.</p>
<p>And speaking of academic risk, some students might find that at the most selective schools, certain majors that they might have enjoyed elsewhere will prove difficult or impossible to complete, because expectations from the get-go are very high and there is little room to recover from difficulties. It is a good idea to inquire about attrition from majors such as CS, physics, or math, for example.</p>
<p>You could always go to St. Johns and never declare a major at all! [St</a>. John’s College](<a href=“Concrete CMS Is An Open Source Content Management System For Teams”>http://www.sjca.edu/)</p>
<p>I’m really not seeing the problem here. Some kids like the idea of a core curriculum and gravitate towards colleges like Chicago or Columbia that have some required general education type courses. But even at these colleges I suspect that for some majors you are better off if you start the coursework freshman year. I think the best approach for a freshman is to take a variety of courses. Get started on the language requirement if there is one, take at least one course in an area that you don’t like, but fulfills a requirement, and two or three courses a semester in potential majors. Take a mix of seminars and lecture courses. Take a mix of courses with steady work every day, and ones with concentrated work at the end of the semester. Take at least one course in something you’ve never been exposed to at all (linguistics, anthropology, architectural history etc. that isn’t offered in high school.) If you can jump at the chance to take a freshman seminar no matter how weird the subject matter is.</p>
<p>If you have a major or two in mind, by all means get started on the prerequisites, but generally there is no need for freshmen to be declaring majors before they have to.</p>
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<p>Caltech: <a href=“Redirect Notice”>Redirect Notice;
MIT: [MIT</a> Course Catalog: Undergraduate Education](<a href=“Welcome! < MIT”>Welcome! < MIT)
Harvey Mudd: [Common</a> Core](<a href=“http://www.hmc.edu/academicsclinicresearch/catalogue1/catalogue-10111/academic-programs1/common-core.html]Common”>http://www.hmc.edu/academicsclinicresearch/catalogue1/catalogue-10111/academic-programs1/common-core.html)
military service academies</p>
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<p>Can you narrow this down a bit? Are you looking at liberal arts kind of majors or including things like engineering or physics? For LA, nearly any school will allow switching easily into the late soph/early junior year as many of the classes overlap. </p>
<p>In terms of required courses, I don’t see the connection with selecting a major. At Brown for example there are no required courses but you can certainly explore many areas.</p>
<p>Using Berkeley as an example, here is the latest one can start several majors and graduate on time (after 8 semesters), based on requirements and prerequisite sequencing. This assumes that other schedule space is used on breadth requirements; in practice, someone starting late in a major may be delayed if s/he has not also carefully planned breadth requirement fulfillment, since they will need to completely fill their last 2-4 semesters with their major courses.</p>
<p>Numbers are in the following format: L1 (L2) / L3 (L4)</p>
<p>L1 = latest semester to start to be ready to declare in semester 5 with no AP credit
L2 = latest semester to start to be ready to declare in semester 5 with maximum AP credit
L3 = latest semester to start to finish by semester 8 with no AP credit
L4 = latest semester to start to finish by semester 8 with maximum AP credit</p>
<p>Physics: 1 (2) / 2 (3)
Computer science: 2 (2) / 4 (4)
Molecular and cell biology: 2 (3) / 2-4 (3-5)
Music: 2 (2) / 5 (5)
Math: 2 (4) / 4 (6)
Art practice: 3 (3) / 5 (5)
Economics: 3 (4) / 5 (6)
Psychology: 3 (4) / 5 (6)
English: 4 (4) / 6 (6)
History: 4 (4) / 6 (6)
Political science: 4 (4) / 6 (6)</p>
<p>Just a cautionary grace note on ucbalumnus’ post:</p>
<p>A friend’s husband spent a few terms as Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Economics Department at Berkeley. He said it was the most depressing thing he had ever had to do: nothing but a string of meetings with students, most of them perfectly strong students who had planned ahead, telling them that they were not going to be able to graduate on time because they couldn’t get into required courses in the semester they had planned.</p>
<p>Something that should be kept in mind also is that there is a difference between eking out a minimum major in something like History or English, and being well prepared in a way that enables one to undertake a year-long Honors Thesis senior year.</p>
<p>Wow – I knew I could depend on the great minds here! I think what we’re thinking of at this end are schools where all students start pretty much on page 1 – then there is a formal entree into the majors as a cohort (i.e. all freshman start out in the University gen studies, then either because more formal work has to be done to be admitted to a specific major, or it’s sophomore year and that’s when you declare at this school) they become XX majors in the YY College of ZZ. Do these exist? This could both protect the student from “wandering” toward some courses in search mode, and maybe not graduating on time, or having a few credits from initial major #1, that now count only as electives, the same for major #2…while students are really spending that first year in exploration mode, getting “real” coursework toward their degree, then the major materials are really emphasized in the sophomore and following years. </p>
<p>Seems to me with the “degree in 3” programs I’m reading about (where, in attempts to decrease costs/time in college, kids with AP credit and willing to have full schedules and possible summer semester enrollment are able to complete a Bachelor’s degree in 3 years) that the programs could be structured in year 1 – preliminary, 2 and onward, major studies…</p>