As high school students prepare for college, they start thinking about which majors they will take.
But the path for each student is different and as interests and wages change over the years in correlation to fields of study, so do program numbers.
Universities in Hampton Roads are seeing their students’ interests change over time and these changes reflect national trends.
Between 2005 and 2015, nationally the number of bachelor’s degrees increased by 32 percent, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
While that’s more than ever before, data also showed the fields of study varied significantly and showed substantial shifts during that time period. At the beginning of the decade, degrees in engineering fields decreased but by 2015 they had increased nearly 50 percent.
Those numbers are also reflected at local institutions such as Christopher Newport University, where Jim Hanchett, chief communications officer, said there is a greater interest in science, technology, engineering and math degrees.
But what happens to the other majors when students start flocking to one interest?
The dying arts
During the 2009-2010 and the 2014-2015 school years, programs in the humanities took the largest hit. Majors like literature, foreign languages and linguistics showed a 9-percent drop in interest nationally.
Those numbers are reflected on the local level as well.
“Generally, the issue of rising and falling popularity of degrees is seen more often at much larger universities,” Hanchett said. “Because Christopher Newport isn’t interested in increasing enrollment…rising numbers in one degree by necessity means falling numbers in another. Some of that is cyclical and just because there’s a short-term fall-off, you don’t eliminate a program.”
Those changing interests could be the result of a government push toward STEM careers in recent years. In 2014, President Obama made a statement questioning the value of degrees in liberal arts studies.
“Folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree,” he said, according to White House Archives.
At William & Mary, students are following a similar pattern and flocking to majors such as computer science, math, economics, kinesiology and health sciences, said Janice Zeman, dean of undergraduate studies.
While those are not the majors with the largest number of students, they are the majors that have grown the fastest in the past five years.
Compared to Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where many student from Hampton Roads attend school, their fastest-growing major is African-American Studies. The major has seen a 100 percent growth rate in the past five years, according to the school’s Office of Institutional Research and Decision Support.
But the school is still seeing 60-70 percent rate of change increases in degrees such as computer science and information technology.
Choosing a college major has changed within the past decade as new STEM incentives are placed in schools. But for the students who choose age-old majors like English and History, their fields of study could directly correlate to their future earnings.
In a study from Georgetown University, researchers broke down personal income of individuals with different college degrees.
Their study found that individuals in the STEM field have the highest earnings. In Virginia, individuals with degrees in engineering found entry level positions with starting salaries at $60,000 on average.
However, at William & Mary, the most popular major is Government and on average in Virginia those students earned only a little more than $40,000.
Similarly, students with degrees in History and English, starting salaries were often less than $40,000 in Virginia.
Overall, the study found the top-paying majors earn $3.4 million more than the lowest-paying majors over a lifetime. And in Hampton Roads, numbers of increased interest in higher paying fields show that students are recognizing earnings as a factor when choosing their major.
