Currently, nearly one quarter of UW-Madison students are pursuing double, triple and even quadruple majors to satisfy their academic appetites, but students' rising ambitions might not be to their advantage or the university's.
Between 1986 and 2003, the number of students who received a bachelor's degree and had two or more majors rose from 14.3 percent to 22.6 percent, according to the UW-Madison Academic Planning & Analysis office.
According to undergraduate advisor and art history Professor Barbara Buenger, students seem to think they will attract better job opportunities if they graduate with more than one degree.
But students may be undercutting their education by narrowing their studies down to just the fields they are majoring in instead of using their elective credits to explore many fields, she said.
\I think people look good with a UW degree in any case. And they should be using their education to get a fuller education in other areas and not to stop everything and take five courses in art history,"" Buenger said. ""It just doesn't make sense to me intellectually, spiritually or financially.""
Students pursuing multiple majors may be squeezing diversity out of the student body as well as their academic careers, according to Clif Conrad, UW-Madison professor of higher education.
Of the students pursuing more than one major, it is likely that a disproportionate number come from the upper-classes because few poor students can afford to stay the extra semester or year it may take to finish additional majors, he said.
This could become a problem, according to Conrad, because well-to-do students who continue in undergraduate school for more than four years are occupying spaces that could otherwise be opened up to other students.
""In effect, it could be an upper-class or mid-class indulgence that is at the expense of underrepresented groups ... including poor students,"" he said.
Conrad said he supports students who move on to graduate school to specialize their studies, but limits need to be set to reduce the number of ""journey people"" who linger as undergraduates for more than five years.
However, UW-Madison alum Keith Schiller, who spent more than 11 years in undergraduate school and earned four majors, offered a more romantic view of educational indulgence.
""How can people not be curious about many different subjects?"" Schiller said. ""Most universities, when they were first created, were created for education's sake. For some reason there seems to be developing this stigma that learning for learning's sake is a waste of time as opposed to learning to get a job and being productive.\
