Tastes, ability or expected wages? The intended choice of college majors by students in Italy

Giorgio Brunello, Francesco Campo, Elisabetta Lodigiani, Martina Miotto and Lorenzo Rocco

No 26055, RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin)

Abstract: We investigate the factors influencing the intended college major choices of high school students in Italy, ranking the relative importance of expected earnings, perceived ability, and major-specific tastes, that we measure directly using a Coller and Williams game. We find that major-specific tastes and self-assessed ability are significantly more influential in shaping academic intentions than mean expected earnings at age 30. We estimate that a one standard deviation change in the taste for (resp. perceived ability in) a given major increases the odds of choosing that major (relative to Humanities, our benchmark scenario) by 136.4% (resp. 114.1%), far outweighing the 39.3% increase associated with a one standard deviation change in mean expected earnings.

Keywords: College major choices; student expectations; nonmonetary rewards (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-02
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