Modeling College Major Choices Using Elicited Measures Of Expectations And Counterfactuals

The choice of a college major plays a critical role in determining the future earnings of college graduates. Students make their college major decisions in part due to the future earnings streams associated with the different majors. We survey students about what their expected earnings would be both in the major they have chosen and in counterfactual majors. We also elicit students' subjective assessments of their abilities in chosen and counterfactual majors. We estimate a model of college major choice that incorporates these subjective expectations and assessments. We show that both expected earnings and students' abilities in the different majors are important determinants of student's choice of a college major. We also show that students' forecast errors with respect to expected earnings in different majors is potentially important, with our estimates suggesting that 7.5% of students would switch majors if they made no forecast errors.

This dissertation is composed of three essays. Essay 1, "Does School Start Too Early For Student Learning?", considers the connection between school start time and student performance. Biological evidence indicates that adolescents' internal clocks are designed to make them fall asleep and wake up at later times than adults. This science has prompted widespread debate about delaying school start times in the U.S., a country which has some of the earliest start times worldwide. The debate suffers, however, from a glaring absence of evidence: the small number of prior studies has been too low powered statistically to test whether later start times improve achievement. I fill the gap by studying achievement across a large, nationally representative set of high schools that have varying start times. I identify the positive effect of later clock start times, as well as the independent effect of greater daylight at school start time. My primary empirical method is cross-sectional regression with rich controls for potentially confounding variables. The findings are confirmed by regression discontinuity analysis focused on schools close to time zone boundaries. I quantify the net gain in welfare from having an additional hour of sunlight before school starts by comparing the substantial lifetime earnings benefits for students against the likely the societal costs. Essay 2, "Student Success and Teaching Assistant Effectiveness In Large Classes", considers the impact teaching assistants (TAs) have on student performance. In universities, TAs play a crucial role by providing small group instruction in lecture courses with large enrollment. The multiplicity of TAs creates both positive opportunities and negative incentives. On the one hand, some TAs may excel at tasks--such as helping struggling students--at which other TAs fail. If so, all students may be able to learn better if they can match themselves to the TA that best suits their needs. On the other hand, the multiplicity of TAs means that students in the same class often receive instruction that varies in quality even though they are ultimately graded on the same standard. In this paper, we use data from a large lecture course in which students are conditionally randomly assigned to TAs. In addition to administrative data on scores and grades, we use survey data (which we generated) on students' initial preparation, their study habits, and their interactions with TAs. We identify the existence of variation among TAs in teaching effectiveness. We also identify how TAs vary in their effectiveness with certain subpopulations of students: the least and best prepared, students with different backgrounds, and so on. Using our parameter estimates, we simulate student achievement under scenarios such as random assignment to TAs, elimination/retraining of the least effective TAs, and matching of TAs to students based on initial information to show the potential gains in student welfare from more efficient matching. Essay 3, "A Study of Student Majors: A Historical Perspective", considers whether differing financial returns across degrees are a significant factor in a student's choice of a major. During the late 1990s, the U.S. experienced a technology boom that significantly increased the initial salary offers to engineering students, and computer science students in particular. These dramatic increases in returns provide an excellent opportunity to examine not only how students respond to salary levels, but also to salary trends. The existing literature has focused on the extent to which differing financial returns can affect a student's choice of undergraduate major. This paper extends the analysis to test if trends in salary levels also affect the share of students selecting into various majors using a comprehensive dataset of all post-secondary institutions. I find that students select into majors that offer higher salaries and have greater wage growth. Using a flexible empirical model that allows students to respond to both changes in salary levels and growth, I find that the results hold across majors and within engineering disciplines. These results help to explain why, for instance, the percentage of students choosing to major in computer science grew more rapidly than could be explained by salary level alone.

Handbook of Economic Expectations discusses the state-of-the-art in the collection, study and use of expectations data in economics, including the modelling of expectations formation and updating, as well as open questions and directions for future research. The book spans a broad range of fields, approaches and applications using data on subjective expectations that allows us to make progress on fundamental questions around the formation and updating of expectations by economic agents and their information sets. The information included will help us study heterogeneity and potential biases in expectations and analyze impacts on behavior and decision-making under uncertainty. Combines information about the creation of economic expectations and their theories, applications and likely futures Provides a comprehensive summary of economics expectations literature Explores empirical and theoretical dimensions of expectations and their relevance to a wide array of subfields in economics

Colleges sell themselves by the numbers—rankings, returns on investments, and top-ten lists—but these often mislead prospective students. What numbers should they really be paying attention to? High school and college students are inundated by indicators and rankings supposedly designed to help them decide where to go to college and what to study once they arrive. In Metrics That Matter, coauthors Zachary Bleemer, Mukul Kumar, Aashish Mehta, Chris Muellerleile, and Christopher Newfield take a critical look at these metrics and find that many of the most popular ones are confusing, misleading, and—most importantly—easily replaceable by more helpful alternatives. Metrics That Matter explores popular metrics used by future and current college students, with chapters focusing on colleges' return on investment, university rankings, average student debt, average wages by college major, and more. Written for students, their families, and the counselors who advise them, each chapter explains a common metric's fundamental flaws when used as a basis for making important educational decisions. The authors then draw on decades of scholarship from many academic fields to pair each metric with a concrete recommendation for alternative information, both qualitative and quantitative, that would be more useful and meaningful for students to consider. They emphasize that students should be thinking beyond solely using metrics when making college decisions—students should focus on their intellectual and academic education goals, not just vocational or monetary ones. Students' reliance on certain metrics has skewed universities away from providing high-quality education and distorted the perception of higher education's purpose, overemphasizing private financial returns over the broader economic and social benefits of universities. This book aims to facilitate important student decisions while reorienting public perceptions of higher education's values and how universities should measure their own success.

Engineering skills and knowledge are foundational to technological innovation and development that drive long-term economic growth and help solve societal challenges. Therefore, to ensure national competitiveness and quality of life it is important to understand and to continuously adapt and improve the educational and career pathways of engineers in the United States. To gather this understanding it is necessary to study the people with the engineering skills and knowledge as well as the evolving system of institutions, policies, markets, people, and other resources that together prepare, deploy, and replenish the nation's engineering workforce. This report explores the characteristics and career choices of engineering graduates, particularly those with a BS or MS degree, who constitute the vast majority of degreed engineers, as well as the characteristics of those with non-engineering degrees who are employed as engineers in the United States. It provides insight into their educational and career pathways and related decision making, the forces that influence their decisions, and the implications for major elements of engineering education-to-workforce pathways.

That mistakes are made is clear. What is meant by that is not. Measuring whatever might be meant and scientifically studying it is therefore even more challenging.These lectures introduce an interdisciplinary science of mistakes to cut the Gordian knot. The key building blocks are model constructs drawn from the economic tradition, methods of measurement drawn from the psychometric tradition, and analytic methods drawn from economic theory.

The economics of education is a burgeoning area of study, employing increasingly sophisticated analytical tools to answer questions with high societal impact. Thus, the aim of this handbook is to provide readers with an up-to-date overview of the current state of the field of the economics of education and its main areas of research. This comprehensive handbook provides an authoritative overview of key theoretical and policy areas, covering topics like econometric methods for education economics, returns to education, competition in education provision, education and economic growth, and education and inequality. It reviews the current state of research from early childhood through postgraduate education as well as adult education and life-long learning. Offering a truly international perspective, the handbook benefits from a global group of contributors and attention to both developed and developing country contexts. The Routledge Handbook of the Economics of Education will be a valuable resource for advanced students, researchers, and policymakers across economics, education, and public policy.

What is the value of an education? Volume 4 of the Handbooks in the Economics of Education combines recent data with new methodologies to examine this and related questions from diverse perspectives. School choice and school competition, educator incentives, the college premium, and other considerations help make sense of the investments and returns associated with education. Volume editors Eric A. Hanushek (Stanford), Stephen Machin (University College London) and Ludger Woessmann (Ifo Institute for Economic Research, Munich) draw clear lines between newly emerging research on the economics of education and prior work. In conjunction with Volume 3, they measure our current understanding of educational acquisition and its economic and social effects. Winner of a 2011 PROSE Award Honorable Mention in Economics from the Association of American Publishers Demonstrates how new methodologies are yielding fresh perspectives in education economics Presents topics and authors whose data and conclusions attest to the globalization of research Complements the policy and social outcomes themes of volume 3

Higher education is being reshaped, challenging institutions to strategically respond to the reconfiguration of their role and missions. This book addresses the interactions between policy drivers and institutional practices in major issues such as governance, funding, quality and management.

This edited book focuses on the organization and meaning of craft work in contemporary society. It considers the relationship between craft and place and how this enables the construction of a meaningful relationship with objects of production and consumption. The book explores the significance of raw materials, the relationship between the body, the crafted object and the mind, and the importance of skill, knowledge and learning in the making process. Through this, it raises important questions about the role of craft in facing future challenges by challenging the logic of globalized production and consumption. The Organization of Craft Work encompasses international analyses from the United States, France, Italy, Australia, Canada, the UK and Japan involving a diverse range of sectors, including brewing, food and wine production, clothing and shoe making, and perfumery. The book will be of interest to students and academic researchers in organization studies, marketing and consumer behaviour, business ethics, entrepreneurship, sociology of work, human resource management, cultural studies, geography, and fashion and design. In addition, the book will be of interest to practitioners and organizations with an interest in the development and promotion of craft work.