The signals we send: math placement and business major persistence among male and female college students

Marissa Eckrote-Nordland, Mary K. Hamman, Maggie McDermott, Natalie Solverson and Cody N. Vaughn

Applied Economics Letters, 2025, vol. 32, issue 10, 1448-1454

Abstract: We investigate large sex-based differences in persistence among business majors at a four-year institution. We follow students from admission through up to 10 semesters and examine the role of initial maths placement using a regression discontinuity design. For female students, we find placement in remedial maths coursework reduces the likelihood of graduating with a business degree by about 28% points. For males, we estimate the same placement either improves or has no effect on graduation rates. The mechanism for this difference appears to be differential selection by sex out of majors with higher maths requirements.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13504851.2024.2306181 (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:taf:apeclt:v:32:y:2025:i:10:p:1448-1454

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEL20

DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2024.2306181

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics Letters is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics Letters from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().