Majors Great and Small

Market pressures made them all

I discovered something cool this week. In a course where we were learning about how universities present their institutional data for public consumption, we reviewed the Data Support Initiative here at IU.

This is a series of adjustable data visualizations about finances, academic programs, and staffing on campus. The intention is to provide transparency so that internal stakeholders and the public who supports this public institution can understand the thing they’re supporting a little better.

Of course, the data is very hard to navigate. Even the name “Data Support Initiative” sounds more engineered for euphemism than for search engine optimization. It’s hard to say whether this is supposed to be hidden in plain sight or if that’s just an effect of its abundance of precise information.

Either way, I was excited to dig in, and I was drawn first to the “Student Majors” report.

Mammon and Music

What’s the first thing you do with a giant, unmanageable amount of data?

For me, I just want to see the extremes. What’s the biggest major? What’s the smallest?

After limiting my results to full-time undergraduates at the Bloomington campus, the largest major was not hard to distinguish. There are 5,266 students majoring in Finance at IU. It has over 3,000 more students than any other major on campus.

So what’s on the opposite end? This is harder to answer because there are quite a few major programs with just a single student. But at a glance, I noticed that many of those majors were in the Jacobs School of Music.

What was strange was that I’d see unexpected degree acronyms. Harp BSOF. Euphonium BME. Organ Composition BM. When someone says they major in music, what do they mean?

How many ways can you major in viola?

I want to focus on these programs because they often contrast in the public imagination. The discourse often asserts that it’s responsible for students to study business and irresponsible for them to study music. So when there is one student pursuing a Viola BSOF, is it a surprise?

But what does that number mean? Does it mean that one and only one student is studying viola at Indiana University?

Not exactly.

I learned that there’s several degree maps for music students. The Music BSOF allows students to focus primarily on performance while adding an outside field (OF) that is more substantial than a minor but less than a second major. For example, maybe you want to study accounting alongside viola to better support working as an independent musician. I don’t know, why not?

In some fields, the BSOF program actually outweighs the traditional “performance” major. For example, about two thirds of Ballet majors at IU are pursuing a BSOF instead of a BS.

Back to viola, however, the performance BM degree represents 85% of viola majors. Clearly, the incentives for pursuing the instrumental BM are different than those for pursuing the ballet BS degree. That’s something to learn more about some other time.

Viola students still have even more options. Instead of focusing on performance, they can focus on music composition, resulting in a Viola- Composition BM or they can add an outside field and earn a Viola- Composition BMOF.

And there’s still more! Viola specialists can become music teachers too. In that case, they’d pursue a music education degree, earning an Instrumental Strings- Viola BME.

And that’s just for viola! Every music field has some combination of these degree tracks, including some I haven’t mentioned yet like jazz (jazz piano, jazz guitar…) or a focus on early music (where my harpsichord heads at?).

Or, you know, you can just major in Finance.

Options and Obligations

This contrast is what threw me most. Why are there five ways to major in viola when there are 21 viola students but just one way to major in finance when there are over 5000 finance students?

I don’t actually know. But I do have ideas.

1) Many majors, few tracks

If you’re a composition major, you may specialize in viola, but most of your classmates will not. What you have in common is studying music composition. The same goes for music education. The “outside field” majors are just contractions of the performance and composition BM degrees.

So music students really have a few available tracks (performance, composition, education) and some options (instrument, relative jazziness, outside field). When you see a single student majoring in “viola composition,” perhaps it’s better to think that of the many students on the “composition track,” one of them plays the viola.

This flexibility looks, from the outside, like a lot of overhead for a vanishingly small population. But if music students effectively belong to one of a few “tracks,” instead of dozens of “majors,” perhaps that’s not the issue it first appears to be.

2) Fostering demand

There are five ways to major in viola because there aren’t many viola majors, not despite it. Having this many options for music majors is necessary to maximize the number of students who will study it.

Music programs may need to incentivize attendance in their niche programs by offering flexibility. Perhaps no one would study viola unless there were five ways to do it.

3) The simplicity of scale

Finance doesn’t need to adapt.

They have more students than they know what to do with. If you tried to get them all in the same room, you’d need to use Assembly Hall:

Every viola student at IU can fit in a single classroom. It’s easier to address their plans individually and offer them lots of options as their unique plans are easier to monitor and adjust.

Plenty of students studying finance would probably like to individualize their program. But the complexity inherent to getting 5,000 students through a single program makes any potential flexibility a huge administrative burden.

Plus, unlike the music program needing to foster demand by offering degree options, the business school is turning people away. More students want to study in the business school at IU than are allowed to. First-year students routinely see their dreams crushed as they’re told they will not be allowed to study business here.

Any business major will see the supply-demand situation. Because there’s a higher demand for finance degrees than there are seats for finance majors (yes, many more than 5,000 students want to study it), the business school doesn’t have to adjust to student preferences. Flexibility has an overhead cost that they can avoid bearing because students are still willing to pursue an inflexible degree path.

There’s one way to study finance because they have no incentive to care whether you like it that way. There’s hundreds more pre-business majors who would gladly take the program on as it is if you won’t.

4) Some people like to be told what to do

My last thought is that this is a reflection of the diverse personalities of college students. Is it possible that some programs need to have more options because they attract the kinds of students who thrive when they have options? And are some programs inflexible because some students prefer to just be told what to do?

This doesn’t apply strictly to music. Individual music degrees are probably more constraining than most, even if there are multiple (constraining) tracks available to choose from. But it’s a question I want to think about more broadly. Which majors are the most flexible and how much of that has to do with the kinds of people most likely to populate them? Something to think about further.

There’s lots more data to play with in this tool, so maybe I’ll revisit this. But those are my initial reflections on the extremes of the student major data here at IU.

-Matt