Double the Value of the 4-Year Degree

A better bachelor’s degree would give students more knowledge and skills in less time. Our treasured four-year model is losing its luster, as evidenced by the chorus of voices now questioning its worth and outcries from student loan borrowers. It is time for U.S. universities to meet the moment by creating a better value proposition for the four-year bachelor’s degree.

A decade ago, my institution, Our Lady of the Lake University, reimagined the bachelor’s degree to deliver more within the four-year model. Today, an increasing number of our undergraduates pursue double majors, completed within the traditional four-year or eight-semester time span. To make this happen, we reduced the number of general education courses, or core requirements, to release enough credit hours to permit the completion of a second major. Here, I describe our implementation of this doubly powerful bachelor’s degree for modern consumers who demand greater return on investment for their tuition dollars.

Advantages of the Double Major

In the U.S., double majoring is more common among students at elite universities and in circumstances where students already earned course credits during high school, for example through Advanced Placement courses. This is a shame for students at less selective institutions, as the double major undoubtedly delivers greater return on the investment of college tuition, among many other advantages.

First among these, double majors can stand out against other job applicants. They may be especially attractive to small and midsize companies, who look to hire employees who have more than one area of expertise (the dual specialist) or who can adapt to multiple roles within the organization.

Second, double-major graduates have more choices when entering the job market immediately after college. They are equally qualified to apply for jobs related to either of their two majors, double that of a traditional single-major graduate. As unanticipated social needs arise and technology continues to advance, interdisciplinary fields emerge, blending content expertise from two or more areas of study. The double-major graduate holds the inside track to secure these interdisciplinary jobs.

Third, the double major offers better job security over a lifetime. In a 2024 working paper, Andrew S. Hanks et al. reported that double majors are 56 percent less likely to suffer significant disruptions to their job earnings— think pay cuts, layoffs and periods of unemployment in general—than those with a single college major. Through their working years, double-major graduates experience greater career mobility and flexibility. If job opportunities decrease in one discipline, other job options may be available related to their second major or an interdisciplinary field. If they want or need to transition jobs, having studied two disciplines in college means they are less likely to need additional coursework or credentials. Fewer people have a single career over their entire professional lives, as today’s college-educated adults stay with a given employer for a median of 4.9 years.

Finally, double-major graduates position themselves to earn a higher salary, up to 3.2 percent more on average as compared to single-major graduates.

Employers also benefit because double-major employees draw upon both areas of content expertise to work through problems that require creativity and inductive reasoning. In a 2012 study, a majority of double majors reported that pursuing two courses of study increased their capacity to think creatively. This effect is most notable when their choice of majors represents a combination across the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. Employers want innovators and dynamic thinkers, and double majors draw upon their dual content expertise to bring multiple approaches to understanding and discovery.

Our Approach: Reducing GE Requirements

At Our Lady of the Lake University, our approach to encouraging double majors was to reduce our total number of required gen ed courses from 52 to 37 or 38 credit hours, resulting in a release of up to 15 hours within every student’s 120-hour bachelor’s degree plan. Combining those 15 hours with 18 normally allocated to a minor field of study plus commonly available elective hours (up to 10), many of our students can now complete that second major, plus their general education, within the traditional four-year time span.

Trading depth of the liberal arts for dual specialization, our faculty voted to remove course redundancy, eliminating one of two gen ed courses in natural science, foreign language and social science, along with one technology course. This reduction in hours allowed students to complete their gen ed courses in a shorter amount of time, while retaining a well-rounded liberal arts experience that included English composition (six credit hours), speech (three), multicultural or foreign language studies (three to four), natural science (four), mathematics (three), social science (three), literature (three), fine arts (three), history (three), philosophy (three) and theology (three). For something lost there is something gained, and faculty arguments against reducing the liberal arts exposure were resolved to encourage the dual specialties that we believe today’s students benefit from.

Since the inception of our Double Major in Four Years Degree Plans (DMFY), the percentage of our undergraduates who declared double majors has grown from 1.4 percent in 2018, prior to DMFY, to 14 percent in 2024 among eligible majors (approximately half of our total catalog of undergraduate majors can be part of a DMFY degree plan). Most students choose a second major that complements a specific career path related to their first major or adds a knowledge or skill set. Our most common double majors reflect our institution’s specialties in helping professions, including combinations of social work, psychology, criminal justice, Spanish language, child studies and speech pathology.

Our institution’s 120-credit-hour bachelor’s degree plans typically accommodate two majors that each require approximately 45 credit hours or less, completed alongside gen ed requirements of 37 credit hours. One downside is that majors that routinely require more credit hours to complete, such as accounting or teacher education, cannot typically become part of a double major in a four-year degree plan.

Student Advising Tips

While reducing the number of required gen ed credits helps reduce obstacles, other student-related and curricular factors contribute to students being able to complete a double major in four years. First-year students who earned college credit during high school have a head start on college and so can choose majors that require a higher number of credit hours and still complete the degree plan within four years. Certain gen ed courses, like Introduction to Psychology, can count double to fulfill the social science gen ed requirement and the popular psychology major.

Further, faculty agreements across departments allow students to double-count similar courses, so, for example, when each of the chosen majors require a statistics course, the double-majoring student needs to only complete one. Finally, we encourage students to test out of courses or prerequisites whenever possible using the College Level Examination Program to accelerate their academic progress. Double-majoring students at our institution take a full-time course load (at least five courses) each semester to remain on schedule to graduate within four years.

Provosts and academic administrators may notice the benefits of the adaptive curricula proposed in our DMFY degree plan. It pays to be nimble, as universities sustain an academic portfolio of majors that is responsive to changing market demands, growing interdisciplinary fields and unexpected social needs. With double-major degree plans, the university can instantly respond by marketing dual combinations of existing majors that best prepare prospective students for those new in-demand occupations, like the bilingual social worker (double major social work and Spanish).

We invite other four-year institutions to reimagine the college degree. Today’s chorus of voices questioning the value of the bachelor’s degree calls us to think differently. Our own slogan, double your degree, draws the college consumer who seeks a new value proposition in the traditional four-year bachelor’s degree.