Students’ choice of academic major can be influenced heavily by how information about their potential earnings is framed, suggests a new study scheduled to be discussed here at this week’s annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.
People told about pay variation in fields appear to look more favorably upon higher-risk majors with potentially big payoffs than do people who are provided only figures on average earnings, the study concluded.
What remains unclear, according to a paper summarizing the study’s findings, is whether people’s expectations of financial success are based on realistic assessments of ability or on their own tendencies toward optimism or pessimism.
Alex Ruder and Michelle Van Noy, researchers at the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, say in their paper that it is widely assumed college students consider projected-earnings data in choosing majors, but that little is known about how such data influence decisions.
To get at how people use projected-earnings data, the researchers created an online-survey experiment asking subjects to offer predictions and advice for a fictional college-bound student named Steve. By asking people to consider this other person, the researchers hoped to keep respondents’ attention focused on earnings data, and avoid having the respondents’ judgments clouded by personal considerations such as their own areas of interest.
The surveys said Steve is equally drawn to, and likely to be adept in, economics and mathematics. The surveys differed in how they described Steve’s overall academic ability, with some saying he “struggles somewhat academically” and others calling him “a high academic achiever.”
In discussing Steve’s potential earnings, some surveys offered just two numbers, described as the average annual incomes for 30-year-olds who had majored in economics or math. (It said math majors earned an average of $57,000, economics majors, $55,000.) The other set of surveys conveyed additional information about how much pay in the two fields varied, characterizing economics majors as having less-predictable earnings and standing a significant chance of earning either more or less than do people who major in math.
For each major, the survey asked respondents to estimate Steve’s likely earnings, his chances of earning more than $70,000, and his chances of earning less than $38,000. It then asked them to recommend a major for Steve based on earnings alone.
Regardless of which version of the survey they took, a majority of respondents recommended that Steve major in math. But those who had been given full information about variations in pay within each field were more likely to recommend that Steve major in economics and more likely to project that his earnings would be either below the $38,000 threshold or above the $70,000 one.
Interestingly, whether Steve was described as academically struggling or a high achiever did not have a statistically significant bearing on respondents’ answers. The researchers speculated that the survey might not have described differences between the academic performance of the two Steves starkly enough, or respondents might have simply believed there is not a strong linkage between academic performance and postgraduate earnings.
