Consider the degree to which most industries have dramatically changed in the last thirty years. Or in the last ten, for that matter.
Consider the likelihood that you will work in one industry or occupation, without significantly changing how you do your job, over the 30-40 years of your working life.
Then decide which makes more sense: narrowly focused technical training in a particular field (training that is probably obsolete at the time you receive it), or a broad-based classic liberal arts education, where you learn to process information quickly, connect it with other information, synthesize new ideas, and effectively communicate the results to others. Which is likely to make you more attractive to a potential employer outside whatever field you initially work in?
That’s not to say that I don’t recognize the importance of training in technical fields – I don’t want to go to a doctor who’s not thoroughly grounded in physiology, chemistry, etc. or who hasn’t kept up to date in current clinical issues. But I’m also leery of those who’ve focused on learning only what they had to learn to get through college and medical school to the exclusion of everything else (there are a couple of those in my neighborhood, and they scare me both as people and as doctors).
Your major scarcely matters once you’re out of school; what matters is that you learn how to learn, think, and communicate. That’s what college is (or at least ought to be) about. I was an English major, and did a couple of years of grad school in a Ph.D. program in English lit. For the last dozen years, I’ve been working at the intersection of the graphic arts and computer industries, including managing staffs of Computer Science majors, serving as Vice President and General Manager of a software/hardware company, etc. I consider my undergraduate education to have been invaluable in my success, not because the specifics of medieval English lyric poetry come up frequently in my day-to-day affairs, but because it trained me to think and communicate. I can also say that the most valuable employees I’ve had, even in highly technical positions, have either been liberal arts majors or had a solid liberal arts component to their undergraduate studies, and I always consider it a strong point in a resume when I’m hiring.
The only regrets I’ve had about my undergraduate education have been that even my education was a little too specialized – I took so many English and foreign language courses that I neglected other areas, particularly math and the sciences. Most of my non-fiction reading over the last decade has been science-related, as I’ve come to realize how intertwined all areas of knowledge are.
My advice, then, would be to declare a major that’s as general as you can get away with, and take as wide a range of lower-level courses as you can manage for the first couple of years. You may find the faculty in one department or another particularly congenial, or you may get really energized by one subject or another, and find that you’re really interested in pursuing that in more depth. In any case, don’t make the mistake of assuming that your choice of major locks you into a particular course of life. That may be true in some societies, but not in ours.
There’s also something to be said for not going to college at all unless the prospect of learning really excites you. The world is full of people who managed to drift through college with no real committment to it. If that’s the case with you, work for a little while first. My only warnings there would be that it’s a lot easier to focus on college before you have a lot of other things going on in your life – before you’re married or in a long-term committed relationship, before you have kids, before you have a job that you enjoy and that occupies much of your physical and mental energy. You’ll never have more energy and attention to devote to college, or fewer things to distract you from it, than you do now. But you still have to be willing to invest yourself in it to get much from it.
