Ever notice that some people have an easy time choosing a major, but others agonize about the choice for years? I’ve been talking with several friends in the second category. Whether they want to do something that doesn’t require them to specialize or whether they can’t decide what to specialize in, they don’t want to pick a major.

And I say they shouldn’t have to.

The only students who should have to choose majors are those who have an easy time doing so anyway: the students who know that what they want to do after college requires academic specialization.

Pre-med students can major in biology. Future math professors can major in math. But why should the rest of us have to specialize as undergrads?

A bachelor’s degree used to be the last degree many people earned, and employers looked for students who had majored in a subject relevant to the job. But now, with postgraduate degrees required for more and more jobs, it doesn’t make sense to specialize as an undergrad since it’s the subject you study in your final degree that counts. With interdisciplinary work becoming more popular, you don’t really need a bachelor’s degree in the subject you study in grad school. I have friends in the biology grad school who studied math and physics as undergrads, and my biology faculty advisor has a Ph.D. in physics.

The people who make decisions about academic requirements (i.e. the faculty and administrators) usually hold terminal degrees, which means they have specialized in a specific field. In my experience, faculty tend to want students to follow in their path. No wonder they want undergraduates to narrow their focus.

What would be better than having majors?

There is the individually-designed major option. However, an IDM still requires that you plan your courses ahead of time, fulfill the core requirements of one of your three mentors’ departments and show that your plan can’t be achieved by any combination of the scores of majors and minors available at Stanford. As a first step, I’d say Stanford should make IDMs easier to apply for (i.e. allow students to apply at any time of year, instead of just once a year) and give students more freedom in how they design an IDM.

What if students didn’t have to choose majors and just needed a certain number of upper division courses to graduate? If this were the case, every course you took would be like an elective — a class you enrolled in by choice, not because your major required it. And you could choose a career without feeling pushed into your department’s associated career paths. But most importantly, you could focus on getting an education instead of fulfilling degree requirements.

I wonder what sophomores would talk about then.

Andrea thinks that the study of overspecialization is not specialized enough. E-mail her at arunyan@stanford.edu.