Students’ Choice of Major: An Information Experiment
Abstract: This paper provides evidence that a lack of accurate information among undergraduate students contributes to the gender gap in student enrolment in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) programs. Specifically, undergraduates in STEM courses tend to underestimate their relative course ranking (which suggests that they are under-confident), and female students are more under-confident than male students. Through conducting a survey at a leading Canadian university, I find that 61 percent of the undergraduate students taking a first-year calculus course for STEM majors are under-confident about their relative ranking, with female undergraduates being 12.5 percentage points more likely to be under-confident. Additionally, I find that while the students are aware of the existence of a wage gap between graduates with STEM and non-STEM majors, both female and male students overestimate this gap. In a follow-up experiment, I provide participants with information about their relative course rankings and expected future incomes for STEM and non-STEM majors. I find that this information treatment helped 92 percent of students update their beliefs. Furthermore, the treated students became 8.5 percentage points more likely to choose a STEM major. These effects are largely driven by female students: treated female students are 17.3 percentage points more likely to choose a STEM major and the results are statistically significant at the 1% level, whereas treated male students are 2.6 percentage points less likely to choose a STEM major though this result is statistically insignificant. This study shows that, in general, undergraduate students do not correctly estimate their relative performance and that providing students with information on their relative ranking helps students re-evaluate their choice of major(s).
The Effects of Parental Leave Policies on Educational Attainment of Prospective Parents (with Aloysius Siow)
Abstract: In Canada, female students have comprised the majority of post-secondary students since the 1990s. One explanation for this gender gap in post-secondary education is that, since women tend to have children during the course of their careers, and since this will cause penalties in terms of career advancement, women may try to invest more in their educations upfront to compensate for the future anticipated career cost of children. If women take the future career cost of children into consideration when making their education decisions, changes in maternity leave policies should also affect their decisions in education since maternity leave, as a job benefit, reduces the career cost of having children. Canada introduced paid maternity leave benefits in the 1970s, and the provincial and federal governments increased the length of leave afterwards. This paper uses variation in maternity leave, in terms of both time of introduction and leave length, across Canada’s provinces to investigate whether maternity leave affects potential mothers’ decisions in education. Using multiple waves of census data from the Statistics Canada Research Data Centre, we find that family leave has a small but statistically significant negative effect on potential parents’ educational attainment. A 10-week increase in maternity leave policy during an individual’s high school years is estimated to reduce the probability of the individual completing college or above by 2 percentage points. In addition, the parental leave affects potential mothers more than prospective fathers, though the difference is small.
The Impact of Information Disclosure on Students Course Selection (with Robert McMillan and Hammad Shaikh)
Abstract: University students may enrol in less challenging courses despite being eligible for more rigorous courses that may be more beneficial for them. This mismatch of easy courses and high-quality students discourages departments from offering challenging courses, and also limits the human capital potential of post-secondary students. We conduct a randomized experiment to examine the impact of informing high-achieving first-year economics students about their future course options. We find that providing an information session significantly increases the probability of eligible first-year students enrolling in the most rigorous second-year economics courses. Our result sheds light on the determinants of students’ course selection and suggests course enrolment strategies for departments and universities.
How Financial Aid Affects Student Retention in the Canadian Post-secondary Education System
Abstract: In the Canadian context, many papers focus on the effect of financial aid on student access to higher education, but only a few quantitative papers focus on the effect of financial aid on student retention in higher education. This paper uses a unique survey to examine how first-year financial aid affects the second-year student re-enrolment rate. Employing a two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression analysis, this paper finds that financial aid, despite its potential to improve student re-enrolment, is found to have statistically insignificant effects. Student attitudes toward higher education, on the other hand, have statistically significant effects on re-enrolment rates: if students believe that skills developed in their first year will help them in the job market, the probability of student continuation of study increases by 3 percentage points. Student attitudes toward higher education, rather than financial aid, play a key role in determining student continuation of study.