Students, parents, and families look at niche majors for many reasons. Sometimes a student is interested in a specific/niche major. However, sometimes students and parents look at niche majors because the broader major might be a competitive major.
Students, parents, and families look at niche majors for many reasons. Sometimes a student is interested in a specific/niche major. However, sometimes students and parents look at niche majors because the broader major might be a competitive major.
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Every year, O’s List likes to analyze the UC admissions, simply because we are a California based startup and we totally love the UC’s, as the UC’s do truly provide a world class education. In 2018, we have anecdotally heard that UC admissions were very competitive for California high school students in 2018. Furthermore, reports by Inside Higher Ed seemed to confirm that it was a challenging admissions environment.
While STEM majors garner a lot of attention in the job market (that’s another post!), many of the most popular majors by graduation numbers are non STEM majors such as history, social sciences, economics, etc. What are the job prospects of graduates in these majors? What kind of jobs are specifically advertised for liberal arts majors? Sometimes it can be hard to get a sense of the employment opportunities of the majors until one is actively seeking a job.
Liberal arts majors have always been popular. They were popular fifty years ago, and they are still popular as evidenced by the number of graduates every year. But, are all liberal arts majors equally popular? Or there some trends that you should be aware of while figuring out a field of study?
Until a few years ago, most students either applied to their closest in-state public universities or private colleges for their college education. That paradigm has changed today with students applying to a wider combination of university types.
In 2018, it feels like almost every STEM major is popular and on an upward tick in popularity. Is that a fair assessment? It is quite instructive to take look at these disciplines through time. So, let’s hop on our time machine and go through number of graduates in biology, physical sciences, computer science, engineering and psychology.
Most students have a sense of the majors that are most popular amongst their peers in their high school. Many times this discussion has input from parents who draw on their career path or that of their colleagues. Neither of these viewpoints quite capture the majors which graduate the most number of students.
Engineering has become a very sought after college major driven partly by numerous articles in media about how STEM majors are on the rise and graduates find a job and also partly due to STEM graduates being able to land that first job, perhaps a tad faster, regardless of name brand of the college. Engineering has also received a huge push because of the emphasis on STEM education, coding camps, hackathons, STEM competitions, and some of these start from elementary school!
Many students and parents focus on the student to faculty ratio as an important metric while researching colleges. There is an impression that the student to faculty ratio is somehow an indication of the class size.
Some colleges offer students the option of applying early decision or early action in a second round of application deadlines. They are known as early decision 2 (ED2 or EDII) and early action 2 (EA2 or EAII) applications.