The Importance Of College Major Choice

Register to read the introduction… While college acts as the prepping stone into the working world, a student’s college major is the pathway towards their specific career goals and future opportunities. Typically, Biology majors want to go into the medical field; Political Science majors aspire to be lawyers, while Business and Economics majors dream of becoming successful in the corporate world. Analyzing trends in college major choice is a key factor to understanding the foundation of inequality within the workforce. The study of inequality within gender and minorities throughout various careers has been an ongoing social research topic for many scholars, however, many overlook where the cause of the problem stems- college major choice. To begin to comprehend how inequality within professional fields occurs, we should note how and why individuals pursue such careers to begin with. While the workforce continues to be categorized as a social hierarchy usually with females and minorities stratified at the lower ends, we wish to understand how and why aspiring new college graduates choose to enter certain career positions and, thus, if their decisions continue the cycle of …show more content…
This influence is universally significant because the majority of people will at some point experience the effects of the major the chose in college on their career, which is why it is surprising that more research has not been conducted in the past. We measured college Major Choice in terms of the generalized options students have to choose from to study such as: History, sociology, biology, engineering, education, etc and categorized them depending on whether they are seen as majors that will feed directly into a high paying job (Engineering) or whether getting your BA in that subject is just a first step into the work force (sociology). Other researchers have measured College Major Choice differently such as Yingyi Ma (2009) who’s study of influences on patterned college major choice by gender, race/ethnicity, and nativity measures the dependent variable more broadly within four categories: Technical, Life/Health, Business, social, and