Why I was wrong about triple majoring in Persian

Discovering the rule that closes the loophole I thought I'd discovered

In July, I wrote a post about studying Persian at Indiana University. You can review it here:

The basic premise was that Persian held the unique status of counting for major credit in three separate majors: Central Eurasian Studies, Middle Eastern Languages and Culture, and India Studies.

I supposed, therefore, that if you could count three years of Persian courses towards all three majors, you could complete the remaining requirements very quickly. Through a strategic selection of electives, I was able to minimize the second and third majors to just 12 and 9 credits of required coursework each. This meant that you could, theoretically, complete three majors in about two years’ worth of courses.

I found out recently that I was completely wrong. I’d like to show you why.

Combined credits minus three

I recently heard about this policy from the College of Arts and Sciences, the administrative unit which governs all the majors I identified. The policy is presented in two ways, which I’ll quote here:

A student may not count more than one (1) course (of up to three [3] credit hours) toward the credit hour requirement of more than one (1) major (including the major portion of B.S. and B.F.A. degrees), certificate, or minor.

[The student must complete all requirements for both objectives (major, minor, certificate)]

The total number of unique credit hours successfully completed by the student for both degree objectives must be equal to or greater than the total minimum number of credit hours required for both degree objectives (as defined by each degree objective) minus three (3) credits.

In search of specificity, I think it gets more confusing. The first paragraph seems pretty clear that only one course can count for credit in two programs. The final paragraph then tries to describe how you tabulate unique credits, adding the minimum credit requirements together and subtracting three to determine how many unique credits are necessary.

But it amounts to the same thing.

There is no reason you can’t do the triple major I described. But instead of requiring 12 additional credits, the Middle Eastern Languages and Culture major would require 29 additional credits. And instead of requiring 9, as I assumed, India Studies would require 27.

If you add these new requirements onto the existing general education requirements for the university, triple majoring in these areas would require 134 credits, which is 14 more than the 120 required for graduation.

This is doable, but it hardly feels like a slick way to circumvent the system.

So what did I do wrong initially?

Restrictions, stated and unstated

When I initially examined the majors in question, I did check to see if they’d imagined this possibility. For example, if you look at the bulletin for India Studies, you’ll see this “Restrictions” section:

This is just stopping the most obvious loophole. If you have a major in a certain subject, you cannot also earn a less-stringent credential in the same subject.

Since I didn’t see the other two majors as being “restricted” in their respective bulletins, I assumed I was in the clear.

You will not find the “unique coursework” policy listed anywhere on any academic bulletin. I heard about it during a meeting, but it was buried deep in the college policies. How would I have ever known to look for it?

This appears to be a policy that is backgrounded in our academic management system. Even when a student views their own record, they will not see a limitation on combining programs stated explicitly. But if they try to combine those programs, they will be prevented from doing so. This seems like a messy way of doing things because it basically necessitates students meeting with advisors to resolve something that could be listed up front.

It makes me wonder about when providing more information creates more problems.

If every bulletin had a section at the bottom that said “The total number of unique credit hours successfully completed by the student for both degree objectives must be equal to or greater than the total minimum number of credit hours required for both degree objectives (as defined by each degree objective) minus three (3) credits” would that make things more or less clear?

The reality is most students are not doing multiple programs which have multiple overlapping course requirements. In most cases, those issues are prevented via the explicit restrictions on the bulletin. There are so few students who will stumble into the kind of situation I described that it’s better to handle them on a case-by-case basis.

Drawing attention to this confusingly-worded policy would create angst for students who will probably not be affected by it. That likely outweighs the risk of a few students getting confused when their big brain loophole maneuver doesn’t pan out.

Labyrinth logic

I had to go pretty deep into the weeds to come up with my initial proposal. The conflicting policy is similarly deep in the weeds, undergirding systems without drawing any attention to itself.

This brings me back to where I ended that previous post: what’s the point of developing a complex degree program? I think the most satisfying element of my proposal was its possibility. Having a quadruple major or whatever sounds like a weighty accomplishment, so the thought that you could do this ostensibly-difficult thing with relative ease (as long as you like Persian) seemed like a reward for ingenuity.

The commodification of education means that we often do things we don’t care about in order to earn pieces of paper that give us lines on our CV. We don’t really know which lines will be important, so we just want more lines. The same logic that impels high school students to list ten extracurriculars, even if most of them were half-hearted, just because there’s space for ten on their college application drives us in this certification-seeking behavior too.

When education becomes compartmentalized into discrete objects, we will try to maximize our acquisition them. I am not immune to this! I recently reviewed my doctoral program plan, and realized that I was pursuing multiple supplementary certifications. I didn’t do this because I had any intention of using them but just because I could. I tried to maximize my academic program because it was possible, not because I was invested in it.

I ended up dropping a certification program and switching my minor in order to focus more properly on what I actually wanted to do. I had to deprioritize the academic baubles I wanted to collect. This is easier said than done when so many of the baubles seem so shiny and you don’t know which one of them will shine brightest for a hypothetical hiring committee.

What’s the alternative? I think so long as college degrees are distinguished from one another with students being able to construct their own combinations, this dynamic will stay in play. So, either you learn to live with it or you eliminate the major-minor system and replace it with an alternative. And in the disciplinarily siloed land of higher education, that’s a tough sell.

-Matt