Is Choosing a Major Choosing a Career or Interesting Courses? An Investigation into College Students’ Orientations for College Majors and Their Stability

Students’ orientations towards choosing their college majors lead them to make different major choices with long-term stratification implications. In this paper, we investigate what orientations students use to choose their majors, how these orientations vary by student characteristics, how stable orientations are across the first year of college, and what mechanisms might explain how orientations change. We use mixed-methods data from an original longitudinal survey (N=1,117) and longitudinal in-depth interviews with 50 first-year students at UNC-Chapel Hill (N=146 interviews). We find that students rely on many different orientations, including learning interesting things and helping others, and that their most important orientations frequently change during the first year of college. These findings challenge the existing assumption that major orientations are stable and suggest the need to incorporate changing orientations into models of the major decision process if we hope to successfully intervene to disrupt inequality reproduction.

How The Choice of Academic Majors and Students' Future Achievements According to The Talent Path

This article described college majors' choices on future learning achievement according to students' talents. The researcher believes that selecting majors according to talent will determine students' success in the future. So, to prove this assumption, we proved it through a study of several related kinds of literature from several educational and higher education journal publications. The publications in question are, for example, ERIC, Google Book, Elsevier, Sagepub, and Taylor and France, which were published ten years ago. We designed this qualitative study with a phenomenological approach. We explored as much data as possible that addresses student choice significant variables and academic achievement when students enter the study period. The analysis model that we did is through data coding, evaluation, and in-depth interpretation to conclude to answer questions on the principle of validity. Based on the findings and discussion data, we could conclude that there is an influence between the choice of majors and college achievement because achievement will be obtained if the field of study follows students' interests and talents. Without interest and talent, it is challenging to achieve porosity following expectations.

College Majors, Occupations, and the Gender Wage Gap

The paper assesses gender differences in pre-labor market specialization among the college-educated and highlights how those differences have evolved over time. Women choose majors with lower potential earnings (based on male wages associated with those majors) and subsequently sort into occupations with lower potential earnings given their major choice. These differences have narrowed over time, but recent cohorts of women still choose majors and occupations with lower potential earnings. Differences in undergraduate major choice explain a substantive portion of gender wage gaps for the college-educated above and beyond simply controlling for occupation. Collectively, our results highlight the importance of understanding gender differences in the mapping between college major and occupational sorting when studying the evolution of gender differences in labor market outcomes over time.

“Physicists” and “lyricists”: Whom the Russian labor market values higher?

In this study, we raise a simple question: do STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education and employment provide a monetary return to professionals with this specialization and holding STEM jobs? If yes, what is the premium across ages and cohorts? We compare wages of professionals with the STEM education and without it, holding STEM jobs and those working in alternative positions, and with various combinations of education and jobs. We estimate premiums for the whole sample as well as for different age groups and cohorts. For this, we use various large data sets with variables for college majors and occupational positions. The main conclusion is that the STEM specialization brings no significant benefits compared to non-STEM majors and jobs. The premium does not emerge over experience or age; moreover, older groups engaged in STEM-related work tend to experience a wage penalty. As we move from younger to older age cohorts, the wage growth declines which means that wages for younger age cohorts catch up and take over the older ones, even if they were initially lower. These results are reproduced on all available datasets.

The Impact of the Peer-Tutoring Online Discussion (POD) Class Model during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The rapid spread of online classes in higher education during and after the COVID-19 pandemic has created a growing need for research that explores the issue of student disengagement in online courses. In this regard, the present study suggests a Peer-Tutoring Online Discussion (POD) class model to increase student engagement in online courses among undergraduate students with diverse sociocultural backgrounds and college majors. The study also examines the impact of the POD approach by exploring the experiences of undergraduate students who took online liberal arts courses that employed the POD model during the 2020 spring semester. Qualitative analysis of discussion data from students indicates that the POD class model includes characteristics that can be especially significant in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as opportunities for relationship-building, self-directed learning based on establishing a rapport, and discussion management that considers time limits.