Choosing a college major requires young people to balance their interests, academic ability, future job prospects, and expected financial return. Some majors pay off right away with solid employment outcomes and high earnings, while others take years to fully realize returns—if indeed they ever do. A recent descriptive study sheds light on one little-studied influence on the choice of a college major: family background.
Economists Margaret Leighton and Jamin Speer of the University of St. Andrews in the UK and the University of Memphis, respectively, use data from the American Community Survey (ACS) and Higher Ed Research Institute’s College Senior Survey to examine two proxies for family background—parental education and parental income. How do they influence a student’s choice of college major and how does each correlate to the earnings growth experienced by graduates with that major over time?
Leighton and Speer construct a dataset of college majors’ earnings profiles over the course of a career using a sample of about 140,000 students who were college seniors between 1994 to 2008. Data from ACS include detailed family characteristics. Unfortunately, while the higher ed survey data include hundreds of colleges and universities, they’re by no means representative of the U.S. college population and tend to oversample from private and selective universities. To attempt to correct for this, the researchers replicate their main analysis within two other, smaller datasets that show similar patterns to the larger analysis. They include lots of student-level controls in their model as well as control for differences across institutions. One limitation is they can’t follow the same individuals past their senior year of college, so they only know if students planned to go onto graduate school, not if they actually did. They look at career growth in five-year bands between ages 20 to 64. Their primary outcome is growth in earnings, which is the percentage change in average earnings from early in a career—roughly age 28—and later in a career, at around age 45.
First, the researchers identify the low-earnings-growth (a.k.a. “early return”) majors—such as nursing, education, and social work—and the high-earnings-growth (or “late return”) majors. The latter include medicine, chemistry, biology, and physics.
They find that parental education and parental income, despite being strongly correlated, have different relationships with the choice of major. Parental education level has a strong and consistent relationship with this choice: students whose parents have advanced degrees are more likely to choose majors that pay off later in life. Said another way, these young people appear willing to make less money immediately after college alongside a promise to make more later in life. Parental income level, however, is less related to the choice of major. In fact, while students from higher-income families tend to choose higher-growth majors, that link is insignificant once parents’ education is included as a control.
Importantly, the overall results appear to be driven by students with graduate-educated parents going on to jobs with high growth, and particularly by those who don’t go to graduate school right after college.
Leighton and Speer describe a role model effect even if they don’t call it that. They say that “the years between college and graduate school, in which these same students earn less than students with less-educated parents highlight that students with different backgrounds may have different time preferences.” That’s likely because they have seen their own parents make the same trade off and they have confidence that it will work out for them, too. The takeaway is straightforward: Family background may shape upward mobility not only by opening doors, but also by influencing which paths students believe are worth the wait.
SOURCE: Margaret Leighton and Jamin D. Speer, “Family Background and College Major Choice: Evidence on Major Earnings Growth,” Education Finance and Policy (January 2026).
