Major Stereotypes

Lots of students come to college looking for what I sometimes call a “golden ticket” major–that is, choosing a major that will assure future prosperity and status. Lots of first-year students show up declaring that their career path is to become a doctor, but a certain percentage of them make other plans after getting their butt kicked in their first real college-level intro chemistry or intro biology course. The huge increase in computer science majors in the last decade or so was at least in part driven by a belief that such a major would assure a well-paid career–a belief that has not aged well with the arrival of AI tools. But more broadly, undergraduate students often have an unrealistic set of beliefs about how certain majors will with high probability lead to certain jobs, which then leads to disappointment. John J. Conlon and Dev Patel explore the issue in their research paper “What Jobs Come to Mind? Stereotypes About Fields of Study” (recently published online in Quarterly…