Students have a number of diverse interests. That, combined with the fact that it's not particularly difficult to do more than one major, probably is the correct answer. We do have a huge number of possible majors, but I think that we don't have quite enough, though that may be the bias of my own interests--I'm quite anticipating the emergence of the new Middle East and North African Studies program as a major.

I think that professional considerations come into play as well. Before I auditioned into the double degree program I intended to double-major in politics and english, both of which are great degrees for someone hoping for a career in journalism. A friend of mine is a politics and environmental science double-major, a fairly common combination here and one that also makes sense from a pre-professional standpoint. And so on.

And, at the risk of stating the obvious, the more majors you have the smarter you are. "Gotta catch 'em all."

Like Will, I see majors to serve as signals of skillsets that a person has. A Theater / Math major looks doubly hire-able. Or so we believe.

Within Oberlin, some departments almost require major status to attend high-level courses. The declared major means a commitment to courses. Except for Playwriting, non-Creative Writing majors can't really bust into upper level workshops. Space is limited.

Triple majors... I don't get that.

This is very helpful. I realize I should have included a fifth, much more pragmatic reason: keeping your future (employment) options open. I like the notion of the major as a particular skillset (rather than, say, a life's vocation)--but am wondering if most major programs are actually set up to allow students to acquire a particular set of (useful, applicable) skills.

To the extent that your choice of major is seen as a personal commitment (although obviously not an exclusive one), and an entry into a particular sub-community, do you feel that students identify strongly as a major in X or Y? And if so, do they identify with a department (i.e., group of professors), a field (interest, subject matter, outlook on the world), or with the other students in the major?

So, I had one major: physics. I took German for six semesters, but I started from scratch, at 101. I would have loved to have been able to have something "official" that nodded to my interest and commitment - because six semesters IS a commitment - but I didn't even qualify for a minor in German.

Having a few words on paper that display your focus(es) in college is a nice and easy way for employers and graduate schools to "assess" whether an individual is "qualified." But quite honestly, I feel less qualified for a job in my major field than I do for a job say, tutoring middle schoolers in poetry. I took two poetry courses and one poetry winter term, and I'm much more confident in my pronunciation of Middle English than I am running experiments in a physics lab.

So, I don't know. I know(?) my degree is far from worthless, but I feel like it doesn't accurately describe my skill set at all. I'm tired of being judged by my resumé.

Maybe the rest of the world is just too lazy to talk to their potential employees? Or maybe I'm bitter because I'm currently unemployed.

Some people in the administration are thinking of introducing an electronic portfolio for students--an online space where you can keep track of what you do during your four or five years here. You'd write regular posts on how your interests and ideas develop, but also upload papers, images, video, audio--a kind of academic Facebook. Once you leave, you could take the portfolio with you (virtually speaking) and use it as a presentation tool for potential employers. It would probably give a richer and less reductive picture of the actual content or value of your Oberlin degree.

Another idea is not to expand the number of majors or minors, but to come up with other formats that would also be "listable" on resumes and such: concentrations or certificates. Two years' worth of a particular language, for instance, could be awarded with a language certificate. Another advantage of the concentration or certificate is that it would allow us to identify meaningful or coherent clusters of courses that happen to be in different departments.

I know a school which does not offer any sort of major but implies a similar portfolio system. I think the portfolio is a great idea and it can be a strong motivation for students to do a better job. I hope that the administration inaugurate the plan before I graduate.

I am a double-degree student because I know better than to major in what I actually want to pursue- music theory. With a degree in composition, another in computer science, and a strong theory background that I pursue in "required" upper level courses of my choice, I've always been told I will do better. It's that diversity, the Spanish class here, the Discrete Math there, that lets you not only be a more well-rounded person, but also lets you approach future problems in a multitude of ways.

And, of course, if not at Oberlin then when? Yes, I want to be hireable, but I also don't want to wake up in twenty years saying "God, I wish I took Japanese."

And triple majors? I think most of us only do that if we can get away with another major for only one or two more classes. Double degrees overlap almost none, but the double majors I considered overlap nearly completely. You might as well get your piece of paper if you are doing the work anyway.

Courtesy of the Registrar, here are some hard numbers:

Of the 501 students that graduated last May in the College of A&S, 338 had only one major, 156 had a double major, and 7 a triple major. Twenty students graduated with a double degree (Con & College). Of the 104 Conservatory grads, only 6 had a double major.

I think I'm fairly unusual among Oberlin students in that I don't have a "well-rounded" double major like Creative Writing and ENVS, or something like that. However, I would like to suggest a new addition to your categories based on my experiences, and I'd be curious to know if anyone else has approached multiple majors this way. In my terms, I have a primary major (neuroscience) and a secondary major and minor (biochemistry and math). I need those additional areas of study to give me the background in both of those areas to do the neuro research that I want to; I think that I can't really understand neuroscience to the best of my ability without a deeper working knowledge of the way that individual neurons interact (hence the biochemistry) and the way that larger networks of neurons behave (hence the math).

I think one of the reasons so many students double major is that we don’t do a very good job explaining why majors matter and don’t matter. This is unfortunate, because it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that majoring in a field means become a specialist in it. Thus, I know of art history majors concerned at the end of their major that they may not be able to explain the Parthenon and Hiroshige and Gu Kaizhi and Michelangelo and Eva Hesse. The idea that a major makes you a specialist or gives you an expertise explains some of the allure of the double major: who wouldn’t want to be doubly expert? People outside Oberlin also tend to believe that specific majors lead necessarily to specific outcomes, a belief that leads to the understandable (but nonetheless annoying) question: “You’re majoring in X? What are you going to with that?”

But majors at liberal arts colleges like Oberlin are not designed to make you a specialist. Take art history, my field; our major requires 30 hours—which is just over 25% of the hours required to graduate—or one of your four years here. That proportion alone helps explain that an Oberlin education is a lot more than your major. It also indicates that majors are not obstacles to assembling a curriculum that allows you to explore all your interests. No matter what your major, you still have plenty of freedom to take all those classes you really want to take (though double-majoring may get in the way—making you narrower, not broader). In fact, I think that freedom also explains why some students double major; it can be a way of building structure into a curriculum of almost infinite choice; if we had a core curriculum (which I do not desire), the number of double majors would probably decline.

Returning to the art history major: convert the hours to classes. Thirty hours is ten classes, and of these one will be in studio, so you’ve got nine classes in art history; two of these will probably be at the introductory level, so you’ve got seven classes in intermediate or advanced art history—and these will be spread across many centuries and continents. That’s a great selection, and an excellent introduction to the field, but it’s not enough to make anyone a specialist. Specialization is what grad schools are for.

So, if majors don’t create specialists, what are they good for, and why do we require them? Oberlin, like most schools, requires a major because completing a major is the most predictable way to become self-conscious and uncomfortable with a body of knowledge. If you major in art history, you won’t learn all of art history, or a list of the top 100 most important artists. Instead, as you learn about some art and artists from some different times and places, you’ll learn how art historians think, the questions we ask and how we go about answering them. You should also become aware of our weaknesses and blind spots, the questions we don’t answer well or fail to ask in the first place. This has a salutary effect. It underlines that we have the ability to identify important questions and pursue them; it also teaches that the questions we deem important may be of recent invention, and may not seem important fifty years from now. It’s simultaneously exciting and humbling.

Once you’ve learned to do this in one field, it’s easier to do it more quickly in other fields; if you’ve got a good grasp on how art historians approach the world, you’ll recognize more quickly how anthropologists or physicists do as well. In short, you don’t double your self-consciousness by doubling your major.

Because I understand majors this way, I always give this advice to students thinking about double majors: take the classes you want to take and if, when the first semester of your senior year rolls around, you’re headed toward completing a second major, terrific. But if you’re a class or two shy, that’s no problem. Think about this: nine classes in art history and one in studio art makes you a major; nine classes in art history but no studio course and you’re not a major. I don’t think any one will be surprised if I say that we don’t save a bunch of secrets for the studio class that vaults you from the ranks of the ignorant to the ranks of the specialist. Instead, we needed a minimum to become a major, and we were satisfied that nine classes was insufficient, and ten classes including a course in the practice of art was sufficient. The number’s not arbitrary, but neither is it exact. So if you’re a classics major or an English major or a chemistry major and you excel in lots of art history classes without completing the major, don’t fret; you’re likely to make a very good candidate to use art history in your future if you like.

I should note in conclusion that my understanding of a major depends to a large degree on my field. Art History entered the academy in the late 19th century, the same period when our departmental and major culture was created (see Sebastiaan’s Fourth Hypothesis, above). But while the field of art history has changed a great deal since then, the discipline is still recognizable: the questions it asks and the skills it requires are usefully grouped and taught under the label art history. I do not feel constrained in my teaching or scholarship by the departmental structure I inherited; in fact, I feel supported by it. But while this is true for art history, I recognize that it may not be so for other fields; for scholars and students in such fields as Latin American Studies or Comparative American Studies, the traditional departmental structure may be unduly confining. But in a final defense of the utility of our majors, I’d note that my ability to recognize how my field’s departmental and major definition works for me but may not work for other disciplines demonstrates the self-consciousness a major is designed to teach.

Let me follow (more briefly) off of Erik's good points. Having just visited the Freud Museum and House last week, I could speculate that students double (and triple) major because of anxiety... it took a lot of piling up the accomplishments to get into Oberlin, and it's hard to turn off the habit once here. OK, that's out of the way.

As Erik suggests, one serious issue we need to confront is that we (faculty? students?) no longer know what a major is or what it is for. The major was the device to insure that a liberal arts student would get "depth" as well as the breadth which was implied by an undergraduate liberal arts education. Traditionally, majors allowed students to get that depth in a specific disciplinary approach (history, economics, sociology, etc.). The idea was that one would not just learn "about" history (e.g., the history of Japan), but "how" history was "done," the specific disciplinary approach used by historians as opposed to the approach used by those trained in other disciplines. That is still the impulse behind many majors but I think that even some of the oldest disciplines have moved away from that. In the past 20-30 years, however, the older disciplines were augmented by newer, mostly inter-disciplinary majors. Some of these (GSFS, for example) have their own set of theories and a variety of methodological approaches. Others (Latin American Studies, for example) is about a place and has no specific theory or methodology associated with its study. That means that while some majors can be there to introduce students to "depth" in terms of how to do the discipline, others are there to encourage students to study more about a topic.

I have my own ideas as to whether these approaches are good (useful) or not, but one thing that seems clear is that those of us who organize majors are not always certain what function a major has. This can happen when original rationales for majors become institutionalized in a list of what student need to take...and then time (and knowledge) marches on. Good points to think about more.

For the record, I agree with everything that Erik just wrote. (And for those of you not at Oberlin, it's Erik Inglis, the co-chair of the Art Department, since he didn't attach his last name.)

I'll go farther than Erik or Sebastiaan did and say that I believe far too many students double-major, largely because of the concern that Erik mentioned, that two majors can make your education narrower rather than broader. Completing, say, an English major and a history major just doesn't leave many electives for exploring the rest of the curriculum.

I had a student once who desperately wanted to study on the Oberlin-in-London Program with me, but couldn't because she needed to be on campus to complete the credits she needed for her East Asian Studies major (her second major in addition to Creative Writing). After wrestling with the issue, she finally decided not to complete the EAS major, and instead to come to London with me--which she says was one of the best decisions she ever made. She graduated with a major in Creative Writing, a strong background in EAS (though not quite a major), and the unforgettable experience of studying in London.

Students shouldn't feel obligated to complete a second major because they think it will give them more credentials in the world after college. I know of very few situations where that's the case.

I worry about double-majors. It seems to me that students sometimes take them because they believe that it leads to greater employability, and _in general_ I don't believe that to be true. That is, the fact that you have a double-major in Physics and English won't necessarily make you more attractive to the internet start-up that might hire you as a web designer. If you major in English and Physics because you love doing math problems about the frictionless universe, but you have the English major because you know that literary studies is where the big money is, that may be a different situation -- but the simple fact of a double-major is not, so far as I know, something that employers look for.

A wise friend of mine (whose name I'll reveal if she gives permission) once advised me that (paraphrasing here) "Every time you say yes to something, you're saying no to something else." It's a good idea to ask yourself what you're saying no to when you say yes to a double major; look at all the other electives that you lose so that you can have line on your transcript that says "Major: CAS/Hispanic Studies." In my opinion, the chance to branch out into other areas of knowledge -- admittedly, perhaps in a less structured way -- is rarely worth giving away for that second major.

I say this having decided, roughly 100 years ago, not to double-major (in English and Classics) myself; I ditched the second major (English) when I realized it would have required writing a second senior thesis. Instead of writing that second thesis, I spent more time on the first one, I played a fair amount of frisbee, and I got more sleep in my senior year. I've never regretted that decision.