Over at Inside Higher Ed, Matt “Dean Dad” Reed takes a look at the demographics of the students at his (two-year public) college who list their major as “Undecided”:
Prompted by a question from a colleague, I asked the IR folks for some basic demographics on the Undecideds.
In a college with a male/female student ratio of 47 to 53, male students make up 59 percent of the Undecideds.
Hmm.
I did not expect that.
The breakdown by race was striking, too. The overall student body here is 61 percent White, but White students are 72 percent of the Undecideds.
Hmm.
The Undecideds also skew young, though that didn’t surprise me; older students often come with a specific goal in mind. That one seems clearer.
This group is disproportionately young White men.
Reed’s interest in this stems from wanting to better understand the Undecideds so as to help them decide on actual majors through better targeted advising. On some level, though, I wonder if the best thing for them wouldn’t be to provide them with an entirely different option that didn’t involve college at all.
This is, I hasten to add, not intended as a knock on young white men— I have some affection for the group, having been one myself a long time ago— or two-year public colleges, which are an essential and underappreciated part of the higher education system. It’s more a knock on society generally, specifically the way we’ve set things up so that students feel pushed to attend college when they would be better served doing something else instead.
The issue, of course, is the well-documented wage premium for folks with college degrees, which leaves many people feeling that the only path to a comfortable middle-class life is to get a college degree. Reed alludes to this when he mentions students “enrolling because it’s next, or for lack of any better ideas.” Some of these students are not temperamentally suited to going to college at the “traditional” age, but the (potential) financial penalty for not doing so is so huge that they end up stumbling in and bumbling around as Undecideds.
We see a few of these even in my exceedingly expensive corner of elite higher education— students who aren’t particularly interested in college per se, but are just there because it’s expected of them. I vividly remember one guy in an intro physics class saying that it didn’t really matter if he didn’t make it as a Mechanical Engineering major, because his real plan was to be a race car driver. (He graduated with a degree in Economics. Make of that what you will.)
A lot of these students would be better off doing something else for a few years, and coming back to college later, with a clearer purpose. As Reed notes, these students often do very well— one of the best and most driven students I’ve had was a guy who spent a few years playing semi-pro hockey before enrolling— but we don’t see many of them. The problem is, we don’t have a lot of reasonable options for them any more— decades ago, they would’ve found work in the manufacturing sector, but those jobs don’t really exist any more, and especially not at reasonable wages.
Of course, these students don’t account for all of the Undecideds— some of them just haven’t found their thing yet. At some point, they’ll discover an interest in a particular subject— through a class, or community service, or a research experience— and a switch will flip for them and they’ll end up solid majors in a concrete discipline. They came stumbling in as Undecideds, and go striding out with a clear purpose. As faculty, there’s nothing better than being around when the lights come on for one of these students; it’s a big part of why we do what we do.
For others, though, that switch never quite gets flipped, and they bumble along as Undecideds right to the end. I mean, there’s a major listed on their diploma, but these are the ones cobbling together a bunch of miscellaneous credits (and bending a few requirements) to scrape together a degree they’re not really interested in so as to qualify for a job that doesn’t particularly need anything they might’ve learned along the way. I’m not sure this is actually a good use of anyone’s time, either the students’ or the faculty’s— everybody involved would probably be happier if there was some other way for those students to start their lives right out of high school.
I’m not really sure what that would look like in 2021, though. It’s hard to reverse decades of erosion in manufacturing and the slow creep of credentialism that makes a BA a de facto requirement for so many jobs. This might need to be something really sweeping, like a non-military national service option, or even a Universal Basic Income type scheme to reduce the importance of getting The Right Job as a path to a secure and comfortable existence.
This is very much a Hard Problem. It’s something that probably deserves some serious thought, though, both within the academy and in policy circles.
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