Students majoring in the social sciences and humanities tend to become less religious, while those majoring in education and business become more religious, according to a paper published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The paper, “Empirics on the Origins of Preferences: The Case of College Major and Religiosity,” examines how students’ religious behavior affects their choice of major, and vice versa. It focuses on students who change their major, a variable that the authors thought would be less influenced by factors like parents’ religion than the selection of an initial major would.
The paper uses data from the Monitoring the Future Study, a longtime project by researchers at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who have gathered information from students in high school through college. The data set includes two measures of religious belief: attendance at worship services and a self-assessment of how important religion is to the respondent.
Attending religious services and placing personal importance on religion are predictors of switching into education. Placing importance on religion also has a significant effect on switching to the humanities and biological sciences.
Majoring in the humanities or social sciences had a statistically significant negative effect on both religious-service attendance and students’ assessment of the importance of religion in their lives, the paper reported. Students who switched to humanities majors were more religious, on average, but also more likely to be less religious when they completed their studies than when they began.
Majoring in biological or physical sciences did not affect students’ religious attendance, but physical-science majors put less importance on religion later. Majoring in education appeared to increase religiosity, especially service attendance.
The researchers took the difference in outcomes between students who chose humanities majors and those who chose science as evidence that “postmodernism, rather than science, is the bête noir—the strongest antagonist—of religiosity.”
