If Students Are Smart, They'll Major in What They Love

"If students are smart, they'll major in what they love," writes Dartmouth History professor and Dean of Faculty for Premajor Advising Cecilia Gaposchkin in the May 21, 2015, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. "Company representatives who recruit at [Dartmouth] consistently say they don't really care about someone's major. What they want are basic but difficult-to-acquire skills. When they ask students about their majors, it's usually not because they want to assess the applicants' mastery of the content, but rather because they want to know if the students can talk about what they learned. They care about a potential employee's abilities: writing, researching, quantitative, and analytical skills" and that "by allowing [students] to study what they are sincerely interested in, we allow them to become smarter, more creative, and more able. This is what potential employers value...."