Double majoring enhances students’ expertise and empowers them to overcome biased professors.
Why Double Majoring is the Key to Success in College
Undergraduate degrees in Gender Studies and Creative Writing have always been dubious ventures. They tend to be prime examples of a higher education system that has lost its way and, in the process, infected the rest of America with an anything-goes approach to morality and language.
But going to college is still worthwhile because there is no substitute for the benefits of a rigorous education. The differentiator in getting a “useless degree” versus one that sets graduates up for success is how students choose to structure their academic paths, and I have advice for today’s college students: The best thing you can do for yourself is to double major.
Minimizing the number of elective courses — optional classes students take out of interest that do not contribute to fulfilling a major — in order to complete a second major is the best corrective action students can take to help themselves. Double majoring endows students with the independent reasoning and critical thinking skills they need to graduate and establish a career. And, it is one of the few choices they have complete agency over in America’s failing education sector.
Double majoring exposes students to new ways of thinking where individual professors and departments fail. When students pursue an interdisciplinary education by double majoring, they acquire knowledge about two independent fields of research with distinct methods and approaches for understanding the world. Through that interdisciplinary process, double majoring reveals to students that methods, theories, and debates in any field are constructed and must always be interrogated. Interrogative habits augment students’ abilities to synthesize, question, and investigate their experiences.
In other words, the process of studying two different fields trains students to think critically — a powerful antidote to repulse indoctrination and spot gaslighting. In today’s highly politicized classes, students may think what they are being told is the only true way to understand the world. However, double majoring enables students to pull back the curtain on academia and “recognize bias.” That skill empowers students to bear witness to their professors’ biases and limitations including restrictively niche expertise.
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For the last 30 years, international research has demonstrated that interdisciplinary learning augments individuals’ cognitive abilities to navigate through complex information or situations in both school and work undeterred by bias or contradicting ideas.
Incoming students are part of Generation Z, whose test scores in math and reading are plummeting to levels not seen in decades. Public high school education has failed to prepare them for higher education and ideology-driven college curriculum preoccupied with equity is not going to close the gap. Double majoring will not fix everything wrong with higher education’s leftward drift from intellectual inquiry to activism, but it is part of the solution to make young Americans more fit to persevere through academic biases and thrive in their careers.
For example, take two departments that seem nearly identical: Anthropology and Sociology. Most people could not explain the difference between them, so the benefits of that double major combination can appear negligible. Now, imagine an anthropology professor who went abroad to study a tribal village with more than two categories of gender. Imagine that the professor is now back in the classroom telling students to forget everything they know about the differences between men and women because this one example proves biological reality wrong. A student in that class who opposes gender ideology, but is also studying sociology, will know that other methods for studying people exist including statistical and historical research. This tribal village is probably not the answer to the gender/sex debate.
Gender ideology and other leftist theories lose their power on campus when students have the vocabulary and capacity to look beyond them.
These skills cultivated by double majoring make students more employable as well. One study published in Columbia Economic Review finds that double major graduates earn more than employees who only had one major. Even students majoring in two arts or humanities departments (think Gender Studies and Creative Writing) make more than single arts or humanities majors. That’s not surprising because two majors double the areas in which students can demonstrate expertise on a resume and it gives them the cognitive processing skills to handle more complex jobs.
Surveys show that employers are desperate to find workers who can adapt or problem-solve through competing ideas and interconnected information because higher education is not teaching students to be independent critical thinkers. That’s what double majors prepare students to accomplish.
These benefits make double majors more valuable than excessive amounts of frivolous electives like Disney & Pop Culture Politics, Angry White Male Studies, and FILM-300O: Porn. Students are better off taking as few electives as possible to make room for a second major. Yes, electives expose students to new interests or passions, but collectively they do not marshal expertise the way a major does through the succession of increasingly complex course sequences. The simultaneous cultivation of expertise in two fields of knowledge unlocks new critical thinking skills and intellectual interests for students they may not otherwise acquire.
College degrees are still valuable when students know how to make the most of them. My advice: Double major!
Zachary Marschall is editor-in-chief of the Leadership Institute’s Campus Reform and an adjunct, assistant professor at the University of Kentucky.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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