47% of College Students Are Rethinking Their Majors Because of AI

Nearly half of enrolled U.S. college students — 47% — have seriously considered changing their major because of artificial intelligence's potential effect on jobs, according to Lumina Foundation-Gallup research released in April. Another 16% already have.

That figure anchors a Fortune commentary by Matt vandenBerg, president of Ohio Wesleyan University, a liberal arts college 30 miles north of Columbus, Ohio. His argument: American higher education forces 17-year-olds into one of the most expensive bets of their lives, then punishes them for doing the most predictable thing a teenager does — figuring out who they are.

"It's a ridiculous system, and I say that as someone who helps run it," vandenBerg wrote.

What does the research actually show?

A meta-analysis of 66 longitudinal studies tracking vocational interests from age 12 to age 40 found those interests stay stable through most of adolescence, then climb sharply between ages 18 and 22. In plain terms: the college years are precisely when people discover what they want to do — and we ask them to declare a direction just before they are equipped to know it.

The behavioral evidence follows. Federal data show about 30% of undergraduates switch majors within three years of enrolling. Broader institutional and academic estimates put the lifetime number closer to 80%. VandenBerg calls this group the "exploratory majority" — undecided, uncertain, and multi-decided — and argues that most of higher education, and nearly all of the enrollment marketing industry, treats them as a problem to fix.

He calls that a costly blind spot. The caveat writes itself: these figures come from an operator selling a repositioned product. But the numbers are sourced, and the trend they describe — student anxiety about AI — is independently measurable.

Why does AI change the calculus?

For a decade, the prevailing advice to colleges was to get specific: narrow the majors, build pipelines into defined jobs, shrink humanities departments. VandenBerg's verdict on that bet: "That bet is aging like a fax machine." His reasoning is that the highly specific domain expertise many programs sell is exactly what machines can now replicate at scale.

Employers, in his telling, are searching for people who can ask good questions, read a room, weigh shades of gray, apply context to hard decisions, and write persuasively without a large language model telling them what to say. He claims the arts, humanities, and social sciences are disproportionately good at building those skills — a claim he asserts rather than demonstrates.

Students appear to sense the shift. In a recent Inside Higher Ed Student Voice survey, students' second most common request of their colleges, right behind help using AI well, was preserving authentic learning.

"AI is the best thing ever to happen to liberal arts colleges smart enough to realize the moment we're in," vandenBerg wrote. Note what he is not saying: that the sector is, in fact, smart enough. He says most presidents he meets are in a defensive crouch — cutting, discounting tuition further, and waiting for demographics, Washington, or a clever sales pitch to rescue them.

The pressures are real. The number of high school graduates is projected to fall 13% by 2041, and 70% of Americans told Pew Research that higher education is headed in the wrong direction.

What is Ohio Wesleyan actually doing?

VandenBerg says his institution is building itself around the exploratory majority. Students cannot declare a major until sophomore year. General education requirements are organized around competencies — reasoning quantitatively, questioning scientifically, thinking aesthetically, listening across perspectives, writing and speaking effectively, acting responsibly — and those courses count toward the degree, so exploring is part of the path to graduation.

Every student must get out of the classroom through an internship, research, study away, service, or starting a business. The university is also building pathways designed so a student who changes direction does not lose time or money doing it — the pledge that matters most to families, and the one the piece describes only in outline.

The institution is also leaning into the arts and humanities while much of the sector retreats. The John F. Milligan Library, currently under construction, will become, per vandenBerg, the only fine arts-infused main campus library in American higher education. This month, Ohio Wesleyan is naming and elevating its arts and humanities division into the Mecum College of Arts and Humanities, anchored by a $40 million commitment to permanently raise faculty pay.

"A college can't credibly build itself around human judgment while underpaying the humans who teach it," he wrote.

Ohio Wesleyan is repositioning as "America's University for Ambitious Self-Discovery," betting that a shrinking market rewards the institution best built for students who change their minds. Whether a $40 million faculty-pay commitment and a sophomore declaration rule can carry that positioning through a 13% demographic decline is the question the piece answers with confidence — and the market will answer with enrollments.