US universities offer ‘integrated majors’ to boost enrolments

As the director of a first-year writing course at a midsize public university, Melanie Gagich doesn’t know a lot about computer science. But when her institution invited faculty to propose new programmes combining two existing majors, she and another writing instructor felt that English and computer science would be a perfect fit.

“A lot of students worry, I think, about being an English major, because they’re always like, ‘Well, can I get a job with that?’ That was sort of our inspiration,” she said.

Gagich’s proposal will become one of the inaugural integrated majors at Cleveland State University, which is launching 11 such programmes this spring. The university is part of a consortium of 10 universities exploring integrated majors under the guidance of the Center for Inclusive Computing, a research centre located at the birthplace of integrated majors, Northeastern University. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Northeastern was the first to launch what it called combined majors in 2001 with a series of programmes combining computer science with other majors (often referred to as “CS+X”). Nearly two and a half decades later, it offers a whopping 270 combined majors across a variety of disciplines, with 8,401 students – approximately half the student body – enrolled in them this past autumn.

Two core ideas catalysed the concept, according to Carla Brodley, director of the CIC. The first, she said, is that in today’s world, “every field is a tech field.” That is to say, in every discipline and industry, there are computer science roles and opportunities available.

“Every field needs people that can understand the discipline but also know how to create the software and the tools that are needed for the digital world that we live in,” she said.

The second idea has to do with demographics: Combined majors can encourage students who might not be otherwise interested in computer science – and especially those who are under-represented in the field, including women and black and Hispanic students, to consider studying it.

For some populations, the numbers seem to support the theory. A paper published by Brodley and a group of collaborators in 2022 showed that the percentage of traditional computer science majors at Northeastern who are women grew from 16 per cent to 21 per cent from 2014 to 2020. But within the combined computer science majors, the percentage of women grew from 18 per cent to 39 per cent over the same period. On the other hand, the rate of non-white students in the regular computer science programme was roughly the same as in the combined programmes, the report showed.

A handful of other institutions have launched their own CS+X programmes in the intervening years, such as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which offered its first CS+X majors in 2014 and now has 14 such programmes. Others have been less successful; a CS+X pilot programme at Stanford University was discontinued, with students reporting that the course load was too intensive.

Mats Heimdahl, who heads the University of Minnesota’s department of computer science and engineering, said boosting the number of female computer scientists is one of the key reasons his department is partaking in the new project.

“My background is in software engineering,” he said, “and it’s well known that diverse development teams and organisations, they just perform better than a homogeneous, sort of bro-culture type of development team.”

About 25 per cent of UMN’s computer science students are female, Heimdahl said, an increase of about 15 per cent over the past decade or so, thanks to efforts led by female faculty members to make computer science more accessible and less intimidating.

But he hopes the integrated programme, which looks likely to be formally proposed within the next year, will result in even higher numbers of women enrolling in computer science majors at UMN.

“We’ve been trying to make it attractive and reach out [to female students],” he said. “But it seems like a better model – rather than bring people to computing, bring computing to where people are.”

Brodley said that, as part of the project, the CIC and the institutions will be tracking their success attracting women and minority students over the coming years; the research will also study other elements of the implementation, such as how students learn about these programmes, and will ultimately inform best practices for other institutions looking to develop combined or integrated major programmes.

Combined curricula

Cleveland State is the only institution in the consortium that offers integrated majors beyond computer science, including a design and psychology major and a journalism and sociology major.

The university’s combined majors developed not only from faculty members’ proposals but in collaboration with local employers, who weighed in on which of the proposed programmes could meet the area’s workforce needs.

“As a regional public, as an institution that seeks to serve this community, we said, what do our employers need?” said Nigamanth Sridhar, the university’s provost, who is spearheading the initiative.

Once the programmes were chosen, faculty within the two departments worked to figure out what the curriculum for a given programme would look like. In the English and computer science programme, which is the only CS+X major that is being classified as a Bachelor’s of Arts, the curriculum will include all the classes required for a regular English major, plus a slate of computer science courses Gagich hopes won’t be too intimidating for humanities-minded students. Whereas a traditional computer science student must take calculus, for instance, English and computer science majors can substitute mathematics for business majors.

She is also developing a course in which students can combine their computer science technical know-how with principles of rhetoric and composition, culminating in creating a website as a final project.

“They’d be bringing in the skills of computer science that I don’t know, but I would be able to guide them on the whole literature side and the whole English side, which is thinking about audience, thinking about purpose, thinking about message,” she said.

Sathish Kumar, a computer science professor at Cleveland State, helped craft the curricula for its combined CS majors. He said that the courses in each integrated major were selected to complement the other major; the design and computer science major, for example, requires students to take a software engineering course, while English and computer science students must take courses on language processors and artificial intelligence.

But university officials said that the computer science curriculum is not dumbed down for students in these programmes, even if they don’t have to take as many CS classes.

“The computer science courses are deep enough that the graduate will have a fundamental knowledge of computer science,” said George Chatzimavroudis, interim chair of the computer science department and associate dean of undergraduate studies and faculty affairs. “It’s not a superficial knowledge … but they’re not going to have all of the core courses and not all of the technical electives.”

This is an edited version of a story that first appeared on Inside Higher Ed.