Decades of research on college students holds that student experiences and outcomes are more varied among students within institutions than between institutions. Thus, NSSE encourages institutions to examine internal variations in their students' experiences. The Major Field Report is a model of what these analyses could look like. The Major Field Report also informs department-level improvements in teaching and learning. Deans, department chairs, and faculty may not derive much diagnostic value from institution-wide results. But when information for their schools or departments is known and can be compared to other majors on campus, it may get more traction.

Participating institutions are able to download the Major Field Report in late fall shortly after the delivery of the NSSE Institutional Report. NSSE will contact institutions when their reports have been posted on the NSSE Institution Interface.

Institutions are encouraged to identify areas of small and large difference in major fields among their own students and against their comparison groups. This is a useful exercise for all engagement indicators, high-impact practices, and selected items of greatest interest/importance to an institution. Worksheets are available in the NSSE Facilitator's Guide to guide campus discussions about these results.

Institutions have the option to customize the major categories to match their profile of degrees offered. Institutions can regroup the 138 student-reported majors (or intended majors) into as many as ten new categories via an online form as part of report customization. Institutions choosing not to customize their major categories receive NSSE's ten related-major categories. NSSE also provides a crosswalk (MS Excel) and SPSS syntax to map NSSE’s list of majors to CIP codes (see below).

The Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) was developed by the National Center for Education Statistics to track enrollment and degree completion by field of study. To better understand how NSSE's major fields relate to CIP codes, or to add CIP codes into a NSSE data file, view the NSSE Majors, CIP Crosswalk, And Related Syntax section.

Only frequency distributions will be reported (without statistical comparisons) for Major Field Report categories containing fewer than 20 but at least 5 respondents. No results are reported for categories with fewer than 5 respondents. Although this is a minimum requirement, keep in mind that any statistical result requires a sufficient number of respondents per category to produce a reliable estimate. Due to the disaggregation of results by student-reported major, the Major Field Report results are unweighted.