A Major in Science? Initial Beliefs and Final Outcomes for College Major and Dropout

Ralph Stinebrickner and Todd Stinebrickner

The Review of Economic Studies, 2014, vol. 81, issue 1, 426-472

Abstract: Taking advantage of unique longitudinal data, we provide the first characterization of what college students believe at the time of entrance about their final major, relate these beliefs to actual major outcomes, and provide an understanding of why students hold the initial beliefs about majors that they do. The data collection and analysis are based directly on a conceptual model in which a student's final major is best viewed as the end result of a learning process. We find that students enter school quite optimistic about obtaining a science degree, but that relatively few students end up graduating with a science degree. The substantial overoptimism about completing a degree in science can be attributed largely to students beginning school with misperceptions about their ability to perform well academically in science. Copyright 2014, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (208)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/restud/rdt025 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: A Major in Science? Initial Beliefs and Final Outcomes for College Major and Dropout (2013)
Working Paper: A Major in Science? Initial Beliefs and Final Outcomes for College Major and Dropout (2013)
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:oup:restud:v:81:y:2014:i:1:p:426-472

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economic Studies is currently edited by Thomas Chaney, Xavier d’Haultfoeuille, Andrea Galeotti, Bård Harstad, Nir Jaimovich, Katrine Loken, Elias Papaioannou, Vincent Sterk and Noam Yuchtman

More articles in The Review of Economic Studies from Review of Economic Studies Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().