How Some Colleges Are Helping Freshmen Find Their Academic Focus

College-major meandering: Boomers, Gen Xers, and older millennials surely witnessed it, and may have experienced it.

A classic example is Clancy Martin, a writer and professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. In the 1980s, he majored at Stetson University and then at Baylor University in physics, then chemistry, before double-majoring in chemistry and business, and finally focusing on philosophy.

But at many colleges, that wandering approach is going out of style. In a closely watched move starting this fall, as part of a multipronged student-success strategy, the entire University System of Georgia is asking incoming freshmen to declare, if not a major, then at least an “academic focus area” — more generically called a meta-major — before they even set foot on campus.

Flitting from subject to subject before alighting reluctantly on a major during junior year? That is discouraged. But the undecideds needn’t worry. The meta-major model is designed through intensive advising to help them find their academic interests, to enroll them in classes that will help them explore subjects they might like, and to develop study skills they’ll need regardless of their chosen field.

Still, the new system is designed to get them in a fairly well-defined academic track as soon as possible.

“We’re not saying pick a career today,” explains Tristan Denley, executive vice chancellor for academic affairs and chief academic officer of the Georgia system. Instead, the idea is for students to find momentum and get going in the areas they’re passionate about “before choice paralysis kicks in.” The meta-major model, he says, “provides them that initial identity, that initial direction.”

For example, students might have a general interest in the sciences even if they are unsure which appeals to them most. They might picture themselves in front of a classroom but not know what age group they’d like to teach. They might like the corporate world but be uncertain whether they prefer finance, marketing, or information analysis. STEM, education, and business would be the academic focus areas where they could explore and narrow down their interests.

The Georgia system last fall had 50,612 entering freshmen and 328,712 students overall, so the sheer scale of the meta-major experiment there is drawing attention from college leaders nationwide. Denley and his team are also highly respected data analysts, so experts are eagerly awaiting the Georgia results.

They are also watching an enterprise of comparable scale already underway in Texas: the Houston GPS (Guided Pathways to Success) network. Like the Georgia system’s reforms, Houston GPS includes meta-majors as part of a multistrategy student-success project. It was established five years ago with seven institutions and now includes 13, which enroll an estimated 263,997 students, 49,705 of them freshmen, says Teri Longacre, vice provost for undergraduate student success at the University of Houston. As with the Georgia system, pre-majors at Houston can enroll in programs like Exploratory Studies. In the fall of 2018, 1,132 students, or 23 percent of freshmen there, chose that path.

An Arsenal of Reforms

While colleges with meta-majors are still in the minority, the idea has gained momentum, says Ed Venit, managing director of the higher-education consulting company EAB, which has been active in both organizational and technological aspects of the Georgia and Houston reforms, among others. Most colleges have considered meta-majors, he says, and many are moving in that direction. “That wouldn’t have been true two years ago.”

Denley says educators took note of behavioral-economics studies like Richard H. Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s 2008 Nudge and Barry Schwartz’s 2004 The Paradox of Choice, which suggested that, faced with overwhelming options, people need help making wise choices, without being strong-armed into doing something they don’t want to. College leaders started talking about ways of helping undergraduates make the most out of college, intellectually and practically. The result has been a small arsenal of measures to improve retention and completion. The meta-major is one of them.

Other components of the Georgia and Houston reforms include interest-appropriate writing and numeracy skills, remediation in tandem with college-level coursework, encouraging and enabling a full course load, and cultivating an academic mind-set so that students discover how they learn best and how what they’re learning aligns with their goals.

In Houston, GPS is intended not only to improve retention and completion, says Longacre, but also to make transfers between participating colleges seamless. There are so many unenrolled and underenrolled students of college age in the Houston area, and so much “swirling” among institutions, she says, that the 13 GPS institutions understood that they would all benefit from cooperating.

“Meta-majors are about constructively narrowing choice, not eliminating it,” says Venit. And evidence suggests that students often need and welcome more-intensive guidance.

Complete College America, an organization trying to close achievement gaps and raise graduation rates, has advocated for meta-majors for a decade. Its recent report “College, On Purpose” highlights that 36 percent of college graduates, in retrospect, would pick a different major if they were choosing again, and that African-American and Hispanic graduates are underrepresented in the highest-paying and fastest-growing jobs in STEM, health, and business.

That might be in part because they weren’t guided in considering career options early on, educators speculate. Graduates also “are 63 percent more likely to value their education if they understand the relevance of their courses and degree to their career,” the report says.

The retention rate for first- and second-semester students enrolled in “Ethnography of Work” courses at New Hampshire’s community colleges had a 33-percent higher retention rate than their peers who didn’t take those courses. That resulted in an increase in overall retention from less than 66 percent to more than 75 percent. In the courses, students visit local employers, use an online career-consideration tool, and apply principles of ethnography to workplace visits and planning for their future occupations.

Georgia State University has reduced changes in majors by 30 percent since it began meta-majors seven years ago. Even students who did change majors there were more likely to have credits that would cross over to their new major.

All this comes as no surprise to some universities, like the University of Texas at Austin and Virginia Tech, which for decades have asked incoming freshmen to commit to majors. At Virginia Tech, roughly 12 percent begin as undecideds and enroll in University Studies, but for those who have clearer goals from the outset, says Rachel Holloway, vice provost for undergraduate academic affairs, “getting to start that work immediately is what gets students excited about college.”

Schools of engineering have traditionally required freshmen to focus early, out of necessity, because they won’t get through necessary preliminary coursework unless they hit the ground running. B.F.A. programs, too, have long understood how to harness students’ passion for their art and immerse them in concentrated skills training from Day 1. In a sense, then, liberal-arts and sciences administrators are catching up with their colleagues in these other programs.

Many community colleges, including Florida’s, have incorporated meta-majors in recent years, although last-minute enrollments sometimes make it tricky for them to guide students from the beginning of their college journey, says Christina Hubbard, EAB’s director of strategic research.

Students should have the time-honored opportunity to explore a variety of interests, Venit says, but colleges aren’t doing students any favors — especially if they are first-generation college students already trying to acclimate to an intimidating new situation — by just pointing them to a mammoth course catalog and hoping for the best.

EAB’s vice president for partnerships, Tom Sugar, co-founder and former president of Complete College America, says that letting students simply flounder, often with family’s occupational experiences and expectations as their only guides, is “a recipe for disaster.”

Since 2017, Pell and other federal grants are applicable only to courses in a student’s program of study. That, says Hubbard, is yet another reason to get students focused early on. Time is money, and “the shorter we make that path,”she says, “the more likely the students are to graduate.”

Sometimes early focus is for the institution as well as the student. In 2018, the University of Washington began asking incoming engineering students to commit to the College of Engineering as freshmen — not just as a student-success strategy but also to ensure capacity. The university needed a firm count of intended engineering majors to avoid having students plan to declare as juniors but to be short of resources to satisfy the demand, says Philip Ballinger, associate vice provost for enrollment and undergraduate admissions.

More than 10 percent of Washington’s freshman-class applicant pool of 45,000-plus indicated computer science as their primary, if not sole, interest. Nearly 12 percent of the enrolled class of approximately 7,000 indicated that area of interest. So the university is requiring the same commitment this fall for computer-science students. Similar commitments, in future, might be asked of students who want to major in the natural sciences, yet another area in high demand, and in nursing, where practicums limit the number of students who can enroll.

Asking students to declare a major from the start is meant to avoid disappointments down the road, Ballinger says, but “it’s a work in progress.”

Hard Conversations, New Plans

For the undecideds, success at finding their academic paths sometimes means setting aside, or at least readjusting, their dreams.

Caprice Kennedy, a rising sophomore at Montclair State University, in New Jersey, originally enrolled at Elon University, in North Carolina, hoping to be a dance major. Kennedy, from Newburgh, N.Y., didn’t get into the dance major there, so after one semester she transferred to Montclair State, but she didn’t get into the dance program there, either, even after two auditions, the second one all the way through the interview phase.

“It really crushed me,” she says of that second audition. “I was ready to be done with dance, but I knew I loved it.” Kennedy, who dances modern, contemporary, hip-hop, jazz, tap, and ballet, still trains in dance and is concentrating on her conditioning and her improvisation skills. But she needed a new academic direction.

She met with Jane Sanchez Swain, one of seven advisers in Montclair State’s University College, the program for pre-majors. “I was just expecting another counselor that wasn’t there for me that much,” says Kennedy. “But she from the beginning was right on point.”

“It’s very delicate to know where students are in their emotional journey toward those big dreams,” says Sanchez Swain. The adviser needs to explore other ways to incorporate those plans, she says, and she assured Kennedy that studying something other than dance didn’t mean abandoning it.

She suggested that Kennedy take a Focus 2 online assessment of work interests, personality, values, skills, and leisure activities. The assessment, which takes about 30 minutes, offers suggestions of careers that might be a good fit, an average salary range, and, for each field, the supporting major at Montclair State. Kennedy arrived at her next meeting with Sanchez Swain enthusiastic about cognitive science, a mixture of biology and psychology, which the adviser says Kennedy has the GPA and study skills to tackle.

To get undecided students like Kennedy on track, Montclair State invests in vigorous advising. The ratio of advisers to undecided students, which constitute about a third of Montclair State’s freshmen, is 1 to 275, says David Hood, associate provost for undergraduate education and dean of University College, while in other programs that ratio ranges from 1 to 600 to 1 to 1,000.

Montclair started the University College model in 2018, Hood says, because second-year retention rates are worse for students who haven’t found their academic focus. The undecideds are also invited to “Crash a Class” to see what prospective majors are like, and to take part in “Major Madness,” in which departments can advertise themselves in tandem with March Madness basketball.

Students might duck their advising appointments, says Hood, but they can’t hide, because they’ll see those advisers anyway, co-leading freshman seminars. Those include general skills for academic success, like how to have critical conversations, how to engage with your professor, how to navigate online learning-management software, and how to procure financial aid and other resources. That last aspect is crucial, Hood says, when students often work one, two, even three jobs and might have a plan to pay their first year’s tuition but not necessarily beyond that.

Kennedy’s dance dreams are far from over. Getting a callback for a Broadway production of West Side Story provided a huge confidence boost, she says, and this summer she’s teaching dance to boys at the Fresh Air Fund’s Camp Hayden-Marks, in Fishkill, N.Y.

But her horizons now are broader. “It turns out I’m glad I went in undecided,” she says, “because it gave me a chance to explore.”

Alexander C. Kafka is a Chronicle senior editor. Follow him on Twitter @AlexanderKafka, or email him at alexander.kafka@chronicle.com.