Major Shifts
A Virginia Magazine analysis of a decade of academic data shows how, and where, STEM fields are outpacing the humanities.
As Tomi Igun (Col ’24) considered what she’d major and minor in during her time at UVA, she thought about her interest: global relations. But also top of mind were the ever-changing skills employers require, a complicated economy and worries about the future job market. She wanted to position herself for a variety of opportunities.
Igun landed on a global studies major, an interdisciplinary program that’s allowed her to dive into security and justice topics, along with a data science minor that’s given her highly sought-after skills for high-paying jobs. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics anticipates that the number of data science roles will grow by 35 percent between 2022 and 2032; the median pay for those roles is $103,500.
“Even when I was looking at different possible majors, I was looking at majors that had a high rate of getting a job after graduation,” Igun says. After graduation in May, she’ll launch her career as a technical analyst with a consulting firm, where her data science skills will be essential.
A decade ago, the list of top majors at UVA was filled with time-honored subjects such as commerce, biology, psychology, history and English. But now, up-and-comers like global studies, media studies and cognitive science have pushed into the top 10, and computer science dominates it. And while English and psychology remain popular, fewer undergraduates are choosing them.
The changes come as UVA is launching more interdisciplinary and technology-focused options. Computer science, for instance, offers both a bachelor of arts and a bachelor of science option and has grown fivefold over the past 10 years. Last year, 644 students graduated with a bachelor’s degree in the subject, up from 136 in 2013.
And this spring, the first group of first-years is applying for UVA’s newest major, data science, a multidisciplinary program in the School of Data Science. Already, the school’s 4-year-old minor is UVA’s most popular. About 700 students, including Igun, across 54 majors are currently signed up for it.
The shifts reflect national higher education trends prompted by emerging technologies and fields, such as data science and behavioral neuroscience, another new major at UVA. But they’re also driven by students’ expectations as they enter a volatile economy and job market that require increasingly sophisticated skills.
For Grace Deakyne (Com ’24), a double major in commerce and media studies, the job market was a consideration as she chose her course of study. A longtime fan of all kinds of media, she was intrigued by the media studies program. The commerce school, however, provided the career support and technical skills that she saw listed on job postings and LinkedIn. Together, she decided, the majors would make her a “better package.” She’ll move to New York City after graduation to start a job in United Talent Agency’s agent training program.
“I wish I could be like, ‘No, I was just following my passion,’” Deakyne says. The majors do “align with my passion, but I was thinking about marketable skills, and [commerce] is known to be a really high job placement. You’ll learn skills that will make you a marketable job candidate in the recruiting process, which was certainly appealing to me.”
Majors
Here are the total number of undergraduate and graduate majors at UVA between 2010 and 2023. Majors are sorted alphabetically by school. Click through to see a major’s performance over time, then click again to see a year’s cohort by gender and race. To start a new search any time, click on All Schools. Want to compare undergraduate majors against each other? Click here.
Source: Institutional Research and Analytics. Note: Any values of 3 or fewer are hidden in the charts.
Different names, similar subjects
UVA is hardly alone among universities seeing big shifts in majors. Research shows that the Great Recession triggered growing and sustained interest in science, technology, engineering and math; the nationwide proportion of undergraduate degrees in STEM fields grew from 22 percent of all degrees awarded in 2006 to 30 percent in 2015, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
At UVA, about 35 percent of undergraduate majors were in STEM fields a decade ago, jumping to 44 percent last year, due in large part to the increasing popularity of computer science, cognitive science and statistics.
Majors in STEM fields have grown nearly 50 percent in the past 10 years. Degrees in humanities, arts and social sciences decreased 8 percent, making them today less common than those in STEM.
Chart shows the number of UVA students who graduated in each major. (Note: Students with a double major are counted twice.)
STEM includes, among others: Computer science (BS and BA), systems engineering, biomedical engineering, biology, chemistry, interdisciplinary-cognitive science and interdisciplinary-statistics. Humanities, arts and social sciences include, among others: English, art, history, economics, Spanish, religious studies and philosophy.
At the same time, the number of degrees given in humanities such as philosophy, languages, English and history has sharply declined since their heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, according to a Northeastern University analysis of U.S. Department of Education reports. That decline particularly intensified around 2010 across all levels of institutions, including the most elite liberal arts colleges and research universities.
At UVA, that drop has been marked. The humanities, arts, languages and social sciences made up 49 percent of undergraduate degrees 10 years ago and 38 percent last year. English, Spanish, religious studies, foreign affairs and history all fell in popularity during that time.
But fewer students choosing to major in those subjects doesn’t mean students are skipping them altogether, says Brie Gertler, vice provost for academic affairs and professor of philosophy. They’re diving into them through general education requirements and in newer majors that UVA has launched in recent years.
For example, while enrollment in some social science majors has decreased, that’s partly attributable to the introduction of new majors such as global studies, Gertler says. And while there’s a decrease in the number of English majors—151 graduated last year, compared with 215 a decade ago—several English professors are now teaching courses in American studies, she says, a major that’s also seen growth.
Similarly, the media studies department includes professors who are jointly appointed to other departments, including African American studies, the Miller Center, American studies and sociology. Nearly 160 students graduated with a media studies degree in 2023, more than four times the number who did a decade ago.
“At UVA, we have not seen profound shifts in the kinds of disciplines that students are pursuing,” Gertler says. “We have seen shifts with the introduction of new majors.”
Liberal arts for the data age
And Gertler argues that a UVA education has long been interdisciplinary. General education requirements have exposed physics majors to English classes; in social science departments such as sociology, professors have focused their studies on either quantitative or qualitative aspects of the field; and a history student might have collaborated with an engineering professor on their fourth-year thesis.
But UVA’s newer majors are intentionally interdisciplinary, and the options have grown rapidly. Today, UVA offers about 70 official undergraduate majors, a nearly 20 percent jump over the past decade. New majors begin to form through collaborations with professors and interest from students, Gertler says.
Some of those new majors were introduced unofficially as interdisciplinary studies programs or pathways. Official majors must ultimately be approved by the State Council of Higher Education of Virginia through a review process that requires UVA to demonstrate “compelling evidence” of industry or employer demand. Several of the newer majors, including media studies and global studies, also require applications to manage enrollment as they ramp up.
“Given the speed of societal and technological change, the single most important skill for today’s graduates may be the ability to learn new things and adapt to new situations,” Gertler says. “All of our undergraduate programs foster this ability by providing both depth and breadth.”
Up-and-coming majors such as computer science, statistics, global studies, and media studies have boomed in popularity since 2013. Computer science saw the biggest growth, from 136 degrees conferred to 644 a decade later.
Chart shows the number of UVA students who graduated in each major. (Note: Students with a double major are counted twice.)
Many majors in the humanities have decreased in popularity, including religious studies, history, art, and Spanish, all shown here. History, previously a heavy-hitter, saw the sharpest decline, from 261 degrees conferred in 2013 to 113 a decade later.
Chart shows the number of UVA students who graduated in each major. (Note: Students with a double major are counted twice.)
Among those newer majors is the global studies program, where the number of graduates has more than tripled from 65 in 2015–16 to 220 in 2022–23. The major allows students to pick a concentration, such as global security and justice; public health; or commerce, culture and society.
The major’s flexibility appealed to Cole Anderson (Col ’25), whose internship last summer included working with the U.S. House of Representatives’ select committee on strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.
To fulfill the major requirements, he’s currently taking a course on the New Silk Road of China and fulfilling the program’s world language requirement by learning French. And he’s looking forward to completing a capstone project as a fourth-year, which he could eventually share with future employers. “I can essentially tailor the next two years of my studies to do something that I want to do,” says Anderson, who also is minoring in data science.
The new data science major, which will accept 75 students in its first class, will similarly draw from across different academic disciplines to provide students with a multidisciplinary education and flexibility in the topics they explore. Students will come out with experience in prediction modeling, data engineering and data systems, along with knowledge about policies, ethics, and the social impact of data and how it’s used, says Brian Wright, associate professor and director of undergraduate programs in the School of Data Science.
They’ll also be able to concentrate in a discipline, such as neuroscience and education, or double major in data science and another field, such as economics. “The catchphrase we’re using for the major is ‘A liberal arts degree for the data age,’” Wright says.
10 biggest majors
2013
- Commerce 344
- Foreign Affairs 323
- Economics 313
- Psychology 285
- Biology 283
- History 261
- English 215
- Computer Science (BS and BA) 136
- Government 126
- Chemistry 125
2023
- Computer Science (BS and BA) 644
- Economics 495
- Commerce 406
- Biology 301
- Psychology 242
- Global Studies
(Interdisciplinary) 220 - Cognitive Science (Interdisciplinary) 202
- Foreign Affairs 184
- Statistics
(incl. Interdisciplinary) 161 - Media Studies
(incl. Interdisciplinary) 157
Note: Computer Science (BS) is offered in the School of Engineering and Applied Science; Interdisciplinary-Computer Science is a BA program offered in the College.
Practical skills required
For today’s ’Hoos, that mix of liberal arts and technical skills is increasingly important. While a degree from UVA might have been enough for students to land a job a generation ago, the job market students are entering today is far different.
“Back in the day, majors were important. Majors were everything,” says Nicole Hall, UVA’s associate vice president for career and professional development. “Now you have this combination of majors plus skills. … Your skills come through your major. And, if they don’t, students do need to pay attention to what additional skills that they can develop.”
The career center helps students recognize the skills they’re gaining from their academic programs and guides them on developing others, including through micro-internships, self-guided projects, or online education programs that end with a verification of learning that they can share with employers.
A growing number of UVA students also appear to be landing on minors that provide them with practical skills they could list on their LinkedIn page. The percentage of UVA students with minors has doubled over the past decade. In 2023, 37 percent of students graduated with a minor, Gertler says. The most popular are data science, Spanish, social entrepreneurship and engineering business, which is designed for students in the engineering school.
The appeal of the data science minor is no surprise to Wright. Interest is booming across the country; the National Center for Education Statistics reports that the number of data science bachelor’s degrees awarded jumped from 84 in 2020 to 897 in 2022. At full capacity, Wright expects that the number of data science majors at UVA will grow to 450 students across the three-year program. In a decade, he sees data literacy as being an important foundational concept and even a key component of a general education at UVA.
“Students are pretty savvy buyers, and they do think about these things,” he says. “The demand for job skills moves so fast. And it’s easy to fall behind. It’s tricky now. You really do have to leverage the time that you have in college to make sure that you’re pursuing something that you really love but also that, when your time is done, that you’re competitive in what is a very knowledge-based economy.”
The minor is even helping science major Madison Dietl (Col ’24) land interviews. She entered UVA with plans to possibly earn a Ph.D. in biology. Adding a data science minor to her biology major opened her eyes to other fields, such as bioinformatics. It’s also helped with the job search process.
“Interviewers always bring up the data science and ask me about what my skills are, how I could use that in the role,” says Dietl, who has spent the past two summers interning at biotechnology companies and works in a UVA cancer immunology lab. “It has definitely gotten me some interviews where a simple biology major would not have sufficed. It makes my resume stand out.”
Newest undergraduate majors
- BA in Public Policy & Leadership (2012)
- BSED in Youth and Social Innovation (2014)
- BS in Material Science & Engineering (2020)
- BA in Applied Statistics (2021)
- BA in Media Studies (2021)
- BS in Statistics (2021)
- BSED in Special Education (2021)
- BSED in Elementary Education (2021)
- BSED in Early Childhood Education (2021)
- BA in Computer Science (2023)
- BS in Behavioral Neuroscience (2023)
- BS in Data Science (2023)
Compare Undergraduate Majors Over Time
2009–10 to 2022–23
Choose up to six majors to compare majors over time. We’ve chosen some popular ones to get you started. Don’t want to see all six? Click on the name of the major within the chart’s legend to toggle it on or off.
The future is interdisciplinary
Of course, even with the boom in programs such as data science, English remains a draw at UVA, appealing to students such as Jaden Bernard (Col ’25). Entering UVA, she intended to study foreign policy, but as a first-year she took a large English lecture class that focused on literature from the Middle Ages to the 18th century, and she fell in love with it.
“I find something about that kind of literature just really gripping because we have this conception that people from what we call ‘the olden days’ didn’t think the same way that we do or didn’t operate the same way we do,” Bernard says. “But all the literature that we read in that class demonstrates that human beings, across these generations and across these time gaps, have a lot in common. … I feel like that class taught me something about myself. And I’ve kind of felt that way with every single English class that I’ve taken.”
Bernard, who hopes to become an English professor and also is minoring in leadership and public policy, has heard what others think of her major—that it won’t give her practical job skills and that it’s not as rigorous as a more technical degree.
But in this new world of artificial intelligence and other technologies, Bernard considers what she’s learning in the English department essential. They include the graphic design and digital signage skills she’s acquiring as a media intern with the department, and they also come from studying medieval literature.
“A great part of studying English literature is the ability to communicate,” Bernard says. “And I think that’s lost on a lot of us because we just have been given a lot of shortcuts to effective communication.”
Ultimately, while STEM fields are booming and AI and other innovations emerge, the world doesn’t just need new technologists, Gertler says. It also needs people with a deep knowledge of English, psychology, studio art and other liberal arts to help gauge the positive and negative impacts of the latest tech tools. And that’s part of what’s guiding how UVA prepares students through its majors, minors and graduation requirements for what comes after Final Exercises.
“All of our graduates are going to face a world that’s rapidly changing,” she says. “The most important aspect of what we offer here is setting students up to be successful in a world that’s changing.
“We can’t predict the ways that it is going to change. But if you understand how to learn and are deeply familiar with different ways of thinking, then you’re going to be able to adapt.”