When Dean of the College Nancy Weiss Malkiel went looking for the biggest problem facing undergraduate education, she came up with the so-called major majors.
Forty-five percent of juniors and seniors major in only five departments, overburdening the five and leaving the stellar faculty of the smaller ones underused.Malkiel's goal to encourage students to join a wider variety of departments seems appropriate. Her plans to help smaller departments design and fund better introductory courses and to develop a recruiting system to attract students interested in specific disciplines are admirable initiatives.
Shifting the distribution of concentrators among departments is a challenge. Students choose departments based on a wide variety of factors including personal interest, convenience, prerequisites, supposed ease of courses or grading, requirements (particularly languages), parental pressure and professional aspirations. Can a slightly improved ANT 201 course or personalized letters from the Slavic languages and literatures outweigh those influences?
Perhaps Malkiel and the rest of the administration should reconsider which academic issue to tackle as their number one priority. Given the uncertainty of results in an initiative such as this one, the administration's resources would be better allotted to issues that students themselves deem to be in need of attention.
Academic advising, long recognized as one of Princeton's weaknesses, should be improved. Though students and administrators alike frequently discuss ways to improve the system, little effective action has been taken. Both faculty and peer advising systems are in dire need of improvement : Delegating to the residential colleges simply hasn't produced good results.
The dean's office should oversee a systematic reworking of academic advising in which networking among faculty members is strengthened to better inform advisors and enable communication among advisors in different fields. With the implementation of such changes in advising, students will be more informed and better guided in their choice of major, thus less apt to base their decisions on arbitrary factors and more likely to end up in departments where they'll be happy.
While redistributing majors is an admirable goal, if the University wants to tackle the biggest problem with undergraduate education, it should take on the advising system.
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