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Top1. Introduction
Selecting a college major represents a strategic decision that may have an impact on the future career of a student. This decision was identified as the decision with the most life regret for students (Roese and Summerville 2005). If not appropriately approached, it is likely that many students will change their major before the completion of their education. Selecting a major is a complex, behavioral phenomenon that has received extensive consideration over the last few years (Looney and Akbulut 2007; Zhang 2007; Heinze and Hu 2009; Croasdell et al., 2011; Downey et al., 2011; Cohen and Parsotam 2012; Benamati and Rajkumar 2013; Govender et al. 2014; Burns et al., 2014).
Despite the promising outlook of the MIS field in terms of future employment growth and salary increases (Computerworld 2006; Bureau of Labor Statistics 2010), this field suffers from a decline in student enrollment in many business schools; and many studies have attempted to investigate this phenomenon in developed countries (Granger et al., 2007; Looney and Akbulut 2007; Zhang 2007; Panko 2008; Walstrom et al., 2008; Ferratt et al. 2010; Saunders and Lockridge 2011; Downey et al., 2011; Benamati and Rajkumar 2013; Govender et al. 2014; Burns et al., 2014); but few studies have been conducted in developing countries (Rouibah 2012; Govender et al. 2014). This trend continues and remains a real concern for managers and MIS departments (Saunders and Lockridge 2011) because some universities have completely dismantled their MIS programs (Aken and Michalisin 2007). The Association for Information Systems and other researchers have called the problem a crisis (Zhang 2007; Looney and Akbulut 2007; Panko 2008), which has led two researchers to publish a paper entitled “Declining MIS enrollment: The death of the MIS degree” (Saunders and Lockridge 2011). Additionally, non-scholarly papers have been recently published that discuss students choosing irrelevant majors, including MIS (Chasalow 2014). The decline in MIS enrollment has led many researchers to call for additional studies to understand the factors that have either contributed to or mitigated the continued decline in enrollment in the field (Walstrom et al., 2008; Heinze and Hu 2009; Benamati and Rajkumar 2013). Therefore, “it is imperative that the IS community as a whole addresses this problem from several different perspectives” (Topi et al., 2010).