Forecasting Undergraduate Majors Using Academic Transcript Data

Abstract

Committing to a major is a fateful step in an undergraduate's education, yet the relationship between courses taken early in an academic career and ultimate major choice remains little studied at scale. We analyze transcript data capturing the academic careers of 26,892 undergraduates at a private university between 2000 and 2020. We forecast students' terminal major on the basis of course-choice sequences beginning at university entry. We represent course enrollment history using natural-language methods and vector embeddings. We find that a student's very first enrolled course predicts their terminal major thirty times better than random guessing and more than a third better than majority class voting.