Versatility Is More than a College Major

It’s a tough labor market out there, especially for new entrants. This is often the case for recent grads, but certainly this seems to be more so now than it has been for a long time. “Hiring of college grads is down across the board,” as a recent Forbes article notes in its headline (https://www.forbes.com/sites/courtney-connley-hampton/2026/06/25/the-college-majors-most-likely-to-get-you-hired/). That’s why the article leads with: “Choosing a college major has always felt like a big decision.” That decision is not just about what a student wants to study deeply, but also about what we expect the job market to look like at the other end of the degree. Do what you love, sure, but most students could love a lot of things, at least enough to make a meaningful career out of it. It’s the perennial question of certainty versus security.

I really appreciate the focus on degree versatility. It’s another version of “keeping your options open.” When comparing hireability (in the intended industry) versus versatility (finding work outside the industry of the program), Forbes found via LinkedIn data that “versatility may be one of the biggest competitive advantages for new graduates.” That should prompt us to think differently about how we prepare students, regardless of the major they choose.

Our society clearly needs those specialized skills. Economically we can’t afford for students to abandon these degrees let alone higher education altogether, nor do we want them just to choose a versatile degree. Rather, we want students to think intentionally about building versatility throughout their college experience.

There are formal ways to do this obviously, like a double major. Even a minor, sometimes maligned as not being substantive enough to merit mentioning, can play a valuable role; because the point isn’t the additional credential, rather it’s the way it changes how one thinks—the point is the learning! This is certainly one of the safest ways to hedge against uncertainty without abandoning specialization.

But the informal ways are just as important: Students build versatility by repeatedly applying what they’re learning in new contexts. We need to encourage students to think intentionally about how they will build versatility throughout their college experience.

We should encourage students to solve real problems long before graduation, to find opportunities for application and specialization DURING THE PROGRAM. It’s not enough anymore to just check the boxes and get the degree. Even beyond something official like internships or research projects or a capstone, students should be engaging in personal projects, applying their learning in real-time to help family and friends. In this way, students should already be acting like consultants. By the time students are graduating, they should already be thinking more directionally.

Students should be building a portfolio, of course, but the portfolio itself is not the point. The point is the clarity of articulation. Assembling a portfolio forces students to define their work, helps them to see connections between different projects and threads that bridge them, and enables them to translate their experience for others.

Then there’s the simple human element. We should help our students resist narrowing their focus too quickly. The students who become versatile professionals are often the ones who stay genuinely interested in a lot of things. People are drawn to colleagues who are interested in ideas, problems, and other people. Those habits also make it easier to recognize opportunities and connect knowledge across contexts. That’s incredibly “hireable.”

The best-case scenario for our students at graduation would be security AND certainty. We want our students to enter the post-college labor market with both deep expertise in something that matters and the versatility to apply that depth as the world inevitably changes.