What Do You Want From College?

Let’s get started. It’s tempting to leap right into comparing college majors, but we need to first consider what college is even for. What we call “college” is actually a bunch of different concepts: a place you spend years of your life, a learning environment, the path to a degree, access to specialized jobs, etc. There’s a lot wrapped up in that one word, and you need to untangle which parts matter to you before you can make a well-informed choice of major.

So, let’s untangle it:

What are you most hoping to get from college?
When you imagine your college experience, what does success look like? What outcome(s) would you deem to be a failure?

Your answers will have a big impact on how you should choose your major, so it’s worth your time to try to answer them before proceeding. We’ll be discussing possible answers in depth in the coming pages, though, so don’t worry if you aren’t 100% sure of your answers right now.

Although I can’t know what your specific reasons are, we can look at the statistics on what other students have said. A 2016 survey conducted by researchers at UCLA asked freshmen to rate the importance of various reasons to their decision to attend college. Tallying how often the students rated each reason as being “Very Important” to their decision, they produced the following results:

Reason	Proportion of students indicating "Very Important"
To be able to get a better job	84.8%
To gain a general education and appreciation of ideas	75.4%
To make me a more cultured person	51.4%
To be able to make more money	72.6%
To learn more about things that interest me	83.8%
To get training for a specific career	77.9%
To prepare myself for graduate or professional school	61.2%
To please my family	34.7%

From The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2016 (PDF, page 43). According to the report, "The data reported here have been weighted to provide a normative picture of the American college first-year student population".

Although this list of reasons isn’t exhaustive and it may not capture your exact reason(s), it’s a good place for us to start. If we reorganize these reasons by similarity, we find most of them fit into two categories:

Category	Reason
Career Prep	To be able to get a better job
	To get training for a specific career
	To be able to make more money
Self-Improvement	To learn more about things that interest me
	To gain a general education and appreciation of ideas
	To make me a more cultured person
Other	To prepare myself for graduate or professional school
Other	To please my family

We’ll cover each of these categories in detail. Your job is to consider which reasons resonate most with what you want from your life, taking into account all the nuances we uncover in our examination.