The #2 College Myth, Busted: A Trial-and-Error Search for a Major Is Never Your Child's Best Plan

Somehow the idea has gotten around that once your child starts college, the best she can hope for is a trial-and-error approach to choosing a major and thereby stumbling into a career.

Of all the prevailing college myths, this one is the most likely to make me froth at the mouth. I guess I take it personally because it ignores the work of vocational psychologists. To my mind, our misplaced faith in trial-and-error is like prescribing bed rest and blood-letting for someone with strep throat, ignoring the proven benefits of penicillin.

Of course, trying random classes once she's in college might help her decide on a major. Or perhaps she'll simply join the throng taking six or more years to finish what was originally set up as a four-year degree. Certainly a willy-nilly search after your student enrolls is in the interests of the educational institution, only too happy to collect tuition checks for the rest of your lifetime.

Colleges offer from fifty to 120 majors; universities, from 100 to 200. A few institutions list as many as 300 possible majors. This abundance is surely a blessing, as it provides college students with boundless latitude to explore their options and find their passion.

But all those options can just as easily lead to confusion and dead ends.

As psychologist Rollo May wrote in The Courage to Create, unlimited possibilities are often more terrifying than energizing. “It is like putting someone into a canoe and pushing him out into the Atlantic toward England with the cheery comment, ‘The sky’s the limit.’ The canoer is only too aware of the fact that an inescapable real limit is also the bottom of the ocean.”

Your student faces a double peril: She must paddle through a tight pass between modern-day versions of the mythical sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis, avoiding the rocks of a prematurely-chosen major on one side and the whirlpool of indecision on the other, one that keeps her swirling through random classes on the off chance that one of them will push her out of the vortex.

A better approach begins with understanding your student's strengths, particularly her abilities and interests, before she even applies to college. You don't want to start too narrow, not when she's still a teenager. So start wide—but do what you can to make sure that even though your child will be at sea, she is headed toward her personal best part of the deep. From that smaller and more navigable body of water, she can then steer herself with growing assurance.

Here's a hypothetical example of this technique. Let's say that your student is interested in the broad realm of ideas and her strongest abilities are with numbers and creativity. College majors that would allow those talents to be put into play include economics, computer science, math, marketing, and statistics. She tries introductory courses in all five subjects. One by one, over her freshman and sophomore year, she rejects computer science, economics, and marketing. She discovers that she likes statistics best, with mathematics as a first alternate.

By the age of 20, when her interests have begun to stabilize, she has attained a positive sense of direction. At the end of her sophomore year, she's ready to declare a major in statistics. And she's put herself in a good position to specialize, having the requisite background to head toward careers as an actuary, astronomer, biostatistician, math teacher, or operations research analyst, all of which would require and reward her talents with numbers and creativity.

To recap: You can help your college-bound student develop a short list of possible majors. I'll show you how. Over the first two years, she can take courses from a carefully-selected but small number of subjects, intending to rule most of them out. That way, by the end of her sophomore year, she is more likely to have settled on a major that develops her talents and also leads to gainful employment.

With stronger up-front planning, you can save her time, your money, and everyone's stress, with an added advantage: Once she completes her coursework, she won't be camping on your couch!