Financial Aid, Student Background, and the Choice of First-year College Major

Mark Stater ()
Additional contact information
Mark Stater: Department of Economics, Trinity College, 300 Summit Street, Hartford, CT 06106, USA.

Eastern Economic Journal, 2011, vol. 37, issue 3, 343 pages

Abstract: This paper examines the effects of tuition and financial aid on first-year college majors at three large public institutions. Higher net costs of college attendance (tuition minus aid) increase the probability of choosing professional majors and decrease the probability of choosing humanities and science majors. The effect of tuition on the probability of choosing a major is generally larger for students with more high school credits in similar subjects and smaller for those with more credits in dissimilar subjects. Thus, financial incentives and student backgrounds interact to affect major choices in a way consistent with academic comparative advantage.

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/eej/journal/v37/n3/pdf/eej200941a.pdf Link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/eej/journal/v37/n3/full/eej200941a.html Link to full text HTML (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:easeco:v:37:y:2011:i:3:p:321-343

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/41302

Access Statistics for this article

Eastern Economic Journal is currently edited by Allan Zebedee and Cynthia Bansak

More articles in Eastern Economic Journal from Palgrave Macmillan, Eastern Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().