Random Academic Generator

What the random academic subject generator does

You want a random field of study. For a prompt, a game, a what-should-I-take daydream, a character who needed a major.

This pulls one out. Press the button.

And then read on, because these are not a loose pile of subjects somebody typed up. They come out of an actual government taxonomy, with code numbers, and which number your subject has can genuinely change a person's life.

How to use it

Click Generate for a subject, or a batch to read through, and Copy takes them with you.

There is an official government list of every college major

Here is something almost nobody knows. In the United States, there is an official, government-maintained list of every academic subject a person can major in. It has a name, and a code system, and a committee that revises it.

It is called the Classification of Instructional Programs, the CIP, and it is run by the National Center for Education Statistics, inside the US Department of Education. It was first published in 1980, and it has been revised every ten years or so since, in 1985, 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2020.

It is enormous. The current edition contains over two thousand eight hundred distinct programs of study. Accounting. Anatomy. Agronomy and Crop Science. African American Studies. Analytical Chemistry, listed separately from plain Chemistry. Every one of them is in the list, and every one has a number.

Read a few entries off this generator and you are not reading somebody's idea of what subjects exist. You are reading the federal register of fields of study. The reason Adult and Continuing Teacher Education is worded exactly that way, and sits apart from Administration of Special Education, is that a government taxonomy drew the lines there and gave each one a code.

Think about how strange that is for a second. Somewhere there is a document, maintained by civil servants, that is trying to be a complete and non-overlapping list of everything a human being can formally study. And it mostly succeeds, and it gets updated when the world invents new things to learn, and almost no student who spends four years earning one of these has any idea the document exists.

Which box your major is in decides whether you can stay in the country

Now the part that turns this from a piece of trivia into something with teeth.

That code is not just for counting. It is used to make decisions about real people, and the biggest one is about who gets to stay.

When an international student studies in the United States, their major is recorded on their official immigration paperwork, the form called the I-20, as a CIP code. The system that tracks foreign students, run by the Department of Homeland Security, uses the CIP list to do it. The school picks the code, and it goes on the student's record.

And here is where it bites. The US government designates certain CIP codes as STEM, science, technology, engineering and mathematics. A graduate whose major has a STEM code can apply to stay and work in the country for a substantially longer period after finishing than a graduate whose major does not.

So the code attached to your subject is, for an international student, one of the most consequential numbers in their life. Two students can study things that feel almost identical. One ends up with a code on the STEM list and one does not. The first can stay and work for years longer than the second. Same campus, same effort, different box on a federal taxonomy, completely different future.

This has real consequences that ripple outward. Universities have been known to look hard at how a program is classified, because the code affects how attractive that program is to international applicants. A subject that can be legitimately placed under a STEM code becomes easier to recruit for. The filing decision, made by administrators consulting a government list, quietly shapes what gets taught and to whom.

So the next time this generator hands you a subject, remember there is a number behind it, and for a large number of people on student visas, that number is the difference between staying and going home.

How the whole of human knowledge got sorted into a filing system

The clever part of the CIP is not the list. It is the shape.

You cannot just write down two thousand eight hundred subjects in a heap. It would be useless. So the whole thing is a tree, built out of a six-digit code, and the code tells you exactly where a subject sits.

It works in three levels.

The first two digits are the broad family. There are around fifty of these top-level groupings, and they are the big continents of knowledge. One number for the whole of engineering. One for the health professions. One for the visual and performing arts.

The middle two digits narrow it to a related group of programs inside that family.

The last two digits pin down the exact individual subject.

So a code like 43.0406 reads from left to right as a set of nested boxes. The 43 says this is in the protective services family. The 04 narrows it to the security science group. The final 06 lands on the specific program. Forensic Science lives inside Security Science lives inside Protective Services, and the number carries all three facts at once.

This is exactly how biologists classify living things, a kingdom containing phyla containing species, and it is not a coincidence that both are called a taxonomy. It is the same idea applied to subjects instead of animals. Every field has an address, and the address tells you its whole ancestry.

Which is why Analytical Chemistry and plain Chemistry can be separate entries that still obviously belong together. They share the first four digits and split on the last two. They are siblings in the tree, and the code says so, without anybody having to explain it.

So this pile of subjects is not a pile at all. It is a map of everything people study, drawn so that related things sit near each other and every field knows exactly where it lives.

Taking a subject apart

Read down a batch from this list and you can watch the tree working, even without the numbers in front of you.

Notice how many of the subjects come in families. There is not just Chemistry, there is Analytical Chemistry, and elsewhere in the full taxonomy Organic, Inorganic and Physical Chemistry, each its own entry, all sharing a parent. There is not just Studies, there is African Studies, African American Studies, Native American Studies, American Studies, a whole cluster of area studies sitting together.

That clustering is the four-digit level showing through. When you see several subjects that clearly belong to one bigger subject, you are looking at a branch of the tree, and the specific ones are the leaves.

Then notice the oddities, because they are the interesting part. Administration of Special Education is a mouthful, and it is worded that precisely because a code has to be unambiguous. A taxonomy cannot have two boxes that might mean the same thing, so the names get long and exact in a way ordinary speech never would. Nobody says I am studying Administration of Special Education at a party. They say special ed. The formal name exists so the filing system has somewhere clean to put it.

And notice how the list quietly records history. New programs get added every revision to reflect fields that did not exist before. So the presence or absence of a subject, and the exact way it is phrased, is a small snapshot of what counted as a field of study at the moment the taxonomy was last revised. The list is a photograph of the academic world, and it is retaken every ten years.

So even without the codes, the shape is visible. Families of related subjects, oddly precise names, and a slow drift as the world adds new things to learn. That is a taxonomy seen from the outside.

How these subjects were drawn

Nothing clever here, deliberately. The subjects were drawn from the real taxonomy of academic fields and checked by hand, one at a time. Press Generate and it picks at random, never repeating inside the same batch.

The whole thing runs in your browser, and nothing you type leaves your device.

Questions people ask

Is there really an official list of college majors?

Yes. It is called the Classification of Instructional Programs, maintained by the National Center for Education Statistics in the US Department of Education. It holds over two thousand eight hundred fields of study, each with a six-digit code, and it has been revised roughly every decade since 1980.

How does a major get classified as STEM?

The government designates specific CIP codes as STEM. Since a student's major is recorded as a CIP code on their immigration paperwork, whether that code is on the STEM list decides whether an international graduate can stay and work in the country for a longer period. It is a genuinely high-stakes classification.

What do the numbers in a CIP code mean?

They are a three-level address. The first two digits are the broad family, the middle two narrow it to a group, and the last two pin down the exact subject. So the code carries a field's whole ancestry, the same way biological classification does.

Why are some of the subject names so oddly specific?

Because a taxonomy cannot have overlapping boxes. Each entry has to be unambiguous, so the names get long and exact in a way normal speech never bothers with. Administration of Special Education is precise because the filing system needs it to be.

Does the list change?

Yes, every revision. New fields get added as they emerge and old ones get merged or retired. Because of that, the list is a kind of snapshot of what counted as a field of study at the time it was last updated, which was 2020.

References

1. Classification of Instructional Programs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_Instructional_Programs
2. Introduction to the Classification of Instructional Programs, 2020. National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cipcode/Files/2020_CIP_Introduction.pdf
3. Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP). Study in the States, US Department of Homeland Security. https://studyinthestates.dhs.gov/sevis-help-hub/student-records/classification-of-instructional-programs-cip
4. Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP). Learn & Work Ecosystem Library. https://learnworkecosystemlibrary.com/topics/classification-of-instructional-programs-cip/