What Is the Relationship Between First and Second Majors?
What Is the Relationship Between First and Second Majors?
In addition to the movement between majors, this study also examined the relationship between first and second majors among students and the role the humanities play among those second majors. As shown in Figure 6, only a small portion of college graduates finished with a second major. Among students who started their studies toward a bachelor’s degree in fall 2017 and graduated by the end of the 2023–24 academic year, only 9% finished with a second major.6Just over 16% of these second majors were in the humanities.
A comparatively large share of students who graduated with a primary major in the humanities—16.2%—also had a second major when they graduated. This was more than three percentage points higher than the next closest field—the behavioral and social sciences (12.6%).
Figure 6: “Second” Major at Graduation, by Primary/“First” Major (Fall 2017 Cohort, Status as of Summer 2024)
(Interactive version at )
Of the approximately 16% of humanities degree completers who graduated with a second degree, 61.7% had their second major in another humanities discipline. This tendency to earn first and second majors in the same field was common to all the major fields. More than half of the students earning a second degree in one of the major academic fields received both primary and secondary degrees in the same field. Business and management majors stood out in this respect, as 85% of their second degrees were in the same field as the first. In every other field, the percentage was greater than 55%.
Among humanities graduates who earned a second degree, only the social and behavioral sciences accounted for a nonnegligible share of degrees outside the field, with almost 3% of humanities graduates earning a second degree of this type. Second degrees in the behavioral/social sciences represented 18% of the second degrees earned by humanities graduates. The share of humanities graduates earning a second degree in each of the other major fields was less than 1%. Conversely, among students earning degrees in the other fields, only small shares earned a second degree in the humanities, ranging from just 0.3% of both business/management and engineering graduates to 1.8% of graduates from the social and behavioral sciences.