The provost wants to see the number of students in each major. Write a MySQL statement to display this.

Sure, here is a MySQL statement that could be used to display the number of students in each major, assuming you have a table named 'students' and the majors are stored in a column named 'major':

SELECT major, COUNT(*) as number_of_students
FROM students
GROUP BY major;

Here is a step by step breakdown of the statement:

1. SELECT major, COUNT(*) as number_of_students: This part of the statement is selecting the 'major' column and the count of rows for each major. The COUNT(*) function counts the number of rows. The as number_of_students part is just renaming the column for the count to 'number_of_students' for the output.

2. FROM students: This part of the statement is specifying the table to select from, which in this case is the 'students' table.

3. GROUP BY major;: This part of the statement is grouping the selected rows by the 'major' column. This means that for each unique value in the 'major' column, it will count the number of rows and display it in the 'number_of_students' column.