Up in STEM, Down in Business: Changing College Major Decisions with the Great Recession

Shimeng Liu, Weizeng Sun and John Winters

No 117, GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO)

Abstract: We use the American Community Survey (ACS) to investigate the extent to which college major decisions were affected during and after the Great Recession with special attention to business and STEM fields, as well as the heterogeneity by gender, race/ethnicity and combinations of race/ethnicity and gender. Several conclusions are reached. First, we see an overall increase in the frequency of STEM majors but a decrease in the frequency of business majors during and after the Great Recession. Second, the increase for STEM fields is spread across several detailed STEM fields, while the decrease in business majors is especially concentrated among finance and management. Third, we find strong heterogeneous effects by gender and race/ethnicity. Males are pushed away from business majors, while both males and females are pushed toward STEM majors; certain racial groups, such as white and Asian, seem to be affected more than others.

Keywords: Great Recession; College Major; Business; Finance; STEM (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/168426/1/GLO-DP-0117.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: UP IN STEM, DOWN IN BUSINESS: CHANGING COLLEGE MAJOR DECISIONS WITH THE GREAT RECESSION (2019)
Working Paper: Up in STEM, Down in Business: Changing College Major Decisions with the Great Recession (2017)
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:zbw:glodps:117

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().