As a high schooler in the Bay Area of California, Sophia Duran took eight Advanced Placement courses and three dual-enrollment courses at the local community college, hoping the advanced coursework would help her stick out to college admissions officers. When she later enrolled at Syracuse University, though, she realized her college-level studies had had an unintended side effect—she already had more than a year’s worth of college credits.

“My adviser said that I could graduate a semester early or triple major,” she said. “I figured I’d want to be in college all four years, kind of the classic, standard route. So I figured I might as well push as much into that time frame as I could.”

She was already a double major—which she says are common at Syracuse—in finance and business analytics, so she added another major in entrepreneurship and emerging enterprises. Entering her junior year, though, she once again found herself struggling to fill up her schedule. She decided to add a fourth major, economics, making her a rare quadruple major.

Duran is one of an extremely small but mighty cohort of students pursuing more than three undergraduate majors, with some students attempting as many as seven. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, about 10 percent of students from 2009 to 2019 earned double majors, and research indicates that double majors are better able to withstand financial downturns and job losses. There is little data, however, about how many students pursue three, four or even more majors and no research into whether multi-majoring can have the same positive impact as double majoring.

Now, as students and parents alike are increasingly concerned about the return on investment of a college degree and students’ job prospects after graduation, some students, including Duran, are hoping a high number of majors may help their résumés stand out.

Duran told Inside Higher Ed that appealing to employers is “probably the biggest reason” she decided to quadruple major.

“I think everyone probably just wants to seem … more well-rounded, and if you can add more majors, that really does show that,” she said.

But are employers actually interested in hiring employees with four or more majors? Not specifically, according to Shawn VanDerziel, president and CEO of the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

“Most employers are looking for something very specific in terms of knowledge and skills, so it’s really up to the student to be able to demonstrate that in some way. Having multiple majors could [be] a signal; however, it wouldn’t be the strongest signal that they have more skills than someone else,” he said, noting that specialized professions like science writing that combine the skills of two distinct majors may be an exception.

Rahul Palle, a student at Arizona State University studying five different majors, echoed VanDerziel’s argument. Although Palle hopes to found a start-up one day, he said that in his experience hunting for internships, employers aren’t necessarily impressed with his many majors. Most are looking for a specific set of skills and work experience, so someone hiring for a finance position wouldn’t be impressed by his also having majors in supply chain management, accounting, economics and business administration.

Multi-majors aren’t unheard-of at ASU—a total of eight students are seeking four majors, according to Jerry Gonzalez, assistant director for media relations and strategic communications at ASU. But that represents just one-hundredth of 1 percent of the university’s more than 65,000 undergraduates who are studying in person.

Like Duran, Palle originally started adding on majors because he came to ASU with a huge number of college credits, more than two years’ worth, already completed. But despite the rarity of multi-majors, Palle said, after his freshman year, he found fewer and fewer people were impressed. Now, he sees the wealth of knowledge he’s gaining as the central benefit of pursuing so many degrees.

“It’s a real learning opportunity. As a full-time student, I don’t pay anything extra to take more majors, but I do believe that I’m gaining a lot more in terms of learning,” he said. “You get to network a lot more, you get to meet professors out of renowned universities and just learn [so] much in such a short amount of time.”

Scheduling Nightmare?

For some students, taking on an extra major doesn’t inherently mean their schedules are outrageously busy. Coming into Syracuse, Duran said, she expected she would front-load her studies, taking heavier course loads in her freshman and sophomore years and easing up as an upperclassman; that hasn’t come to pass, but she’s never had to take an absurd number of credits in a single semester. Some courses overlap between Duran’s programs, as well, which makes pursuing four majors easier.

Palle, on the other hand, takes about 27 credits per semester, which is significantly higher than ASU’s maximum of 18 and requires special permission. On the average day, he wakes up at about 6:30 a.m., goes to the gym and has breakfast, before jumping into around nine straight hours of classes at 9 a.m. When he’s not in class, he’s almost always studying or working. (Duran, too, balances four majors with a part-time job.) But he said he still finds time for friends and family, mostly on the weekends.

“I think it’s crucial to have that balance in your life. I think what working extremely hard has taught me [is] if you just work all day, you’re going to get burned out pretty quick,” he said.

Another multi-major—Hojae Kirkpatrick, who is currently pursuing a whopping seven majors at the University of Oklahoma—said he has taken up to 50 credits every semester for the past several years, a record he is hoping to get recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records, in addition to summer courses.

Despite his packed schedule, however, he claims he doesn’t manage his time very rigidly.

“A lot of people consider me an anomaly in that I don’t have a calendar … I’m partially a procrastinator in that I find it fun to see overwhelming pressures that build up with the deadlines and just be able to elude my way into creating a masterpiece within the pressure,” he said—though he noted that his sleep schedule is far from ideal. During finals, he’ll study for an hour and a half, then sleep for the same period of time, throughout the night.

Because so few students take so many credits, there is little, if any, research about the academic outcomes of students who take well above a normal number of courses per semester. A study found that there was no relationship between the number of credit hours a student takes and their academic performance, but that study only went up to full course load of 15 credits.

“We did not find any big differences between the high-performing students who were already doing really well and the students who weren’t in terms of the effect of a full course load on them,” said one of the paper’s authors, Nick Huntington-Klein, an associate professor of economics at Seattle University. “But I imagine, once you really get up there, as speculation, you would expect only certain students are going to be organized enough to make that happen. Even if those students can handle it, that doesn’t mean the typical student would be able to do a similar thing.”

Not every institution allows students to take more than two majors; faculty at Amherst College, for one, recently banned students from triple and quadruple majoring. They cited concerns that students were focusing too much on delving deep into their subject areas and not enough on getting a well-rounded education; they also did not want students to earn three or more majors solely to look good to graduate schools and employers.

In an email to Inside Higher Ed, Gonzalez said that, at ASU, there is no overarching policy dictating how many majors students can earn.

“We aim to be student-centric in our decision-making. This means that we do not have a blanket policy or recommendation for students with regards to the number of majors they pursue. Instead, we tailor our advice to the individual student. Broadly speaking, we aim to empower students to make decisions that help them achieve their specific goals,” he wrote. “If their goal is to earn multiple credentials, we’ll work with them to make it happen.”