College Major Competitiveness and Attrition from the Sciences

Abstract

This paper examines how the competitiveness of distinct college majors at a student’s college affects her major choice and other college outcomes. To mitigate the selection problem, we control for very flexible application-admissions pattern fixed effects to account for student unobservables, as well as school-specific fixed effects to account for typically unobservable institutional characteristics that are plausibly correlated with peer quality and student outcomes. We find that students initially interested in pursuing a science major respond to the competitiveness of both the broad science and non-science major tracks. Weaker, non-minority students typically respond to greater competition in the sciences by shifting their major choice. Under-represented minorities tend to persist in the sciences regardless of competition, but suffer -- often substantially -- in terms of college grades and the likelihood of graduating.