What our undergraduates are studying

Kinesiology 359 seniors (l-r) Alyx Doughty, Alissa Hoover and Bree Beyer work together on performance testing in a Forker Hall laboratory Wednesday. Kinesiology and health remains a popular degree program among Iowa State undergraduates. Photo by Christopher Gannon.

Mechanical engineering (1,660 students) and kinesiology and health (934 students) continue to be Iowa State's most sought undergraduate degrees, as they have been for at least the last decade. Just over one in 10 undergraduates this spring is working toward a degree in one of those two programs.

On their heels and breaking into the top five for the first time are the finance and marketing degree programs. As of fall 2023, the Ivy College of Business eliminated its "pre-business" placeholder for lower-level students, who now may declare a major as incoming freshmen. The change provides a more accurate picture of student enrollment across the Business college. Like the other undergraduate colleges, Business also has an undeclared option. Finance is the second most frequent major among all Iowa State male-identifying undergraduates and marketing cracked the top five for all female-identifying students. 

Among female-identifying undergraduates, the number of psychology majors leapfrogged over elementary education and kinesiology majors -- consistently in the second and third spots the last few years -- to grab the second spot. Animal science remains the favorite undergraduate major among this group of students.

Male-identifying students are more densely concentrated in their top 10 majors than female-identifying students are in theirs. Among male students this spring, 47% landed in one of the 10 degree programs, including 11% of all undergraduate males in mechanical engineering. Female-identifying students are distributed more widely, with 37% studying in the top 10 degree programs.

Among this spring's 23,416 undergraduate students, 55% (12,928) identify as male and 45% (10,488) identify as female.

 Spring 2024: Top 10 undergraduate majors*

*Students' first major