Do Peers Affect Undergraduates’ Decisions to Switch Majors?

Abstract

In this study, dormitory room and social group assignment data from a college are used to investigate peer effects on college students’ decisions to switch majors. Results reveal strong evidence of such peer effects at both the room and the social group level. Most notably, at the room level, the dense concentration of same-major roommates deters students from switching majors; having one or two same-major roommates has no significant effect on major switching, indicating strong nonlinearity of peer effects at the room level. Such nonlinearity is not observed among social group members. Results also reveal evidence that students’ choices of new majors are affected by peers’ majors. Peers are more likely to choose the same destination majors than nonpeers. In choosing their new majors, students do not necessarily follow their peers indiscriminately. Their decisions seem to be influenced more by short-term academic requirements than by long-term job prospects. Finally, peer effects on major switching and major choices are stronger at the dormitory room level than at the social group level in most cases.

Keywords

econometric analysis economics of education higher education peer interaction/friendship quasi-experimental analysis

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Abadie

Athey

Imbens

G. W.

Wooldridge

(2017). When should you adjust standard errors for clustering? (No. w24003). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w24003

Anelli

Peri

(2015). Peers’ composition effects in the short and in the long run: College major, college performance and income (IZA DP No. 9119). https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/9119/peers-composition-effects-in-the-short-and-in-the-long-run-college-major-college-performance-and-income

Arcidiacono

(2004). Ability sorting and the returns to college major. Journal of Econometrics, 121(1–2), 343–375. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeconom.2003.10.010

Astin

A. W.

Astin

H. S.

(1992). Undergraduate science education: The impact of different collect environments on the educational pipeline in the sciences. UCLA, Higher Education Research Institute.

Bayer

Ross

S. L.

Topa

(2008). Place of work and place of residence: Informal hiring networks and labor market outcomes. Journal of Political Economy, 116(6), 1150–1196. https://doi.org/10.1086/595975

Bettinger

E. P.

Long

B. T.

(2010). Does cheaper mean better? The impact of using adjunct instructors on student outcomes. Review of Economics and Statistics, 92(3), 598–613. https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_a_00014

Black

D. A.

Sanders

Taylor

(2003). The economic reward for studying economics. Economic Inquiry, 41(3), 365–377. https://doi.org/10.1093/ei/cbg014

Borsari

Carey

K. B.

(2001). Peer influences on college drinking: A review of the research. Journal of Substance Abuse, 13(4), 391–424. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0899-3289(01)00098-0

Bramoullé

Djebbari

Fortin

(2009). Identification of peer effects through social networks. Journal of Econometrics, 150(1), 41–55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeconom.2008.12.021

10.

Cabrera

Colbeck

Terenzini

(2001). Developing performance indicators for assessing classroom teaching practices and student learning: The case of engineering. Research in Higher Education, 42(3), 327–352. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1018874023323

11.

Cameron

A. C.

Miller

D. L.

(2015). A practitioner’s guide to cluster-robust inference. Journal of Human Resources, 50(2), 317–372. https://doi.org/10.3368/jhr.50.2.317

12.

Carrell

S. E.

Fullerton

R. L.

West

J. E.

(2009). Does your cohort matter? Measuring peer effects in college achievement. Journal of Labor Economics, 27(3), 439–464. https://doi.org/10.1086/600143

13.

Cohoon

J. M. G.

(2001). Toward improving female retention in the computer science major. Communications of the ACM, 44(5), 108–114. https://doi.org/10.1145/374308.374367

14.

Davies

Guppy

(1997). Fields of study, college selectivity, and student inequalities in higher education. Social Forces, 75(4), 1417–1438. https://doi.org/10.2307/2580677

15.

De Giorgi

Pellizzari

Redaelli

(2010). Identification of social interactions through partially overlapping peer groups. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2(2), 241–275. https://doi.org/10.1257/app.2.2.241

16.

Elliott

Strenta

Adair

(1996). The role of ethnicity in choosing and leaving science in highly selective institutions. Research in Higher Education, 37(6), 681–709. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01792952

17.

Espinosa

(2011). Pipelines and pathways: Women of color in undergraduate STEM majors and the college experiences that contribute to persistence. Harvard Educational Review, 81(2), 209–241. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.81.2.92315ww157656k3u

18.

Griffith

A. L.

(2010). Persistence of women and minorities in STEM field majors: Is it the school that matters? Economics of Education Review, 29(6), 911–922. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2010.06.010

19.

Han

(2009). The gender difference of peer influence in higher education. Economics of Education Review, 28(1), 129–134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2007.12.002

20.

Hanushek

E. A.

Kain

J. F.

Markman

J. M.

Rivkin

S. G.

(2003). Does peer ability affect student achievement? Journal of Applied Econometrics, 18(5), 527–544. https://doi.org/10.1002/jae.741

21.

Head

A. J.

Eisenberg

M. B.

(2010). Truth be told: How college students evaluate and use information in the digital age (Project Information Literacy Progress Report). https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2281485

22.

Jones

T. R.

Kofoed

M. S.

(2020). Do peers influence occupational preferences? Evidence from randomly-assigned peer groups at West Point. Journal of Public Economics, 184, 104–154. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2020.104154

23.

Lee

(2007). Identification and estimation of econometric models with group interactions, contextual factors and fixed effects. Journal of Econometrics, 140(2), 333–374. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeconom.2006.07.001

24.

Lyle

D. S.

(2007). Estimating and interpreting peer and role model effects from randomly assigned social groups at West Point. Review of Economics and Statistics, 89(2), 289–299. https://doi.org/10.1162/rest.89.2.289

25.

Savas

(2014). Which is more consequential: Fields of study or institutional selectivity? Review of Higher Education, 37(2), 221–247. https://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.2014.0001

26.

Manski

C. F.

(1993). Identification of endogenous social effects: The reflection problem. Review of Economic Studies, 60(3), 531–542. https://doi.org/10.2307/2298123

27.

Minton

H. L.

Schneider

F. W.

(1980). Differential psychology. Waveland Press.

28.

Pascarella

Terenzini

Feldman

(2005). How college affects students. Jossey-Bass.

29.

Patnaik

Wiswall

M. J.

Zafar

(2020) College majors (NBER working paper 27645). http://www.nber.org/papers/w27645

30.

Pimpa

(2003). The influence of peers and student recruitment agencies on Thai students’ choices of international education. Journal of Studies in International Education, 7(2), 178–192. https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315303007002005

31.

Rask

(2010). Attrition in STEM fields at a liberal arts college: The importance of grades and pre-collegiate preferences. Economics of Education Review, 29(6), 892–900. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2010.06.013

32.

Sacerdote

(2001). Peer effects with random assignment: Results for Dartmouth roommates. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 116(2), 681–704. https://doi.org/10.1162/00335530151144131

33.

Sacerdote

(2014). Experimental and quasi-experimental analysis of peer effects: Two steps forward? Annual Review of Economics, 6(1), 253–272. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics-071813-104217

34.

Thaler

R. H.

Sunstein

C. R.

(2008). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Yale University Press.

35.

Thomas

S. L.

Zhang

(2005). Post-baccalaureate wage growth within four years of graduation: The effects of college quality and college major. Research in Higher Education, 46(4), 437–459. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-005-2969-y

36.

Unger

J. B.

Yan

Shakib

Rohrbach

L. A.

Chen

Qian

Chou

C.-P.

Jianguo

Azen

Zheng

Johnson

C. A.

(2002). Peer influences and access to cigarettes as correlates of adolescent smoking: A cross-cultural comparison of Wuhan, China, and California. Preventive Medicine, 34(4), 476–484. https://doi.org/10.1006/pmed.2001.0996

37.

Urberg

K. A

Değirmencioğlu

S. M.

Pilgrim

(1997). Close friend and group influence on adolescent cigarette smoking and alcohol use. Developmental Psychology, 33(5), 834–844. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.33.5.834

38.

Witteveen

Attewell

(2020). The STEM grading penalty: An alternative to the “leaky pipeline” hypothesis. Science Education, 104(4), 714–735. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21580

39.

Zhang

(2017). It takes two shining lights to brighten the room: Peer effects with random roommate assignments. Education Economics, 25(1), 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/09645292.2016.1203867

40.

Zimmerman

D. J.

(2003). Peer effects in academic outcomes: Evidence from a natural experiment. Review of Economics and Statistics, 85(1), 9–23. https://doi.org/10.1162/003465303762687677

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.28 MB