Abstract
The term “Discouraged-Business-Major” (DBM) describes students who become discouraged with the rigorous standards of colleges of business and migrate to colleges of arts and sciences to complete a degree in economics under relaxed requirements (Salemi and Eubanks Citation1996). Following Salemi and Eubanks, the present authors examine a decade of demographic characteristics and ability measures for every economics and business graduate at a large Midwestern university. They find DBMs, but also note that major selection dynamics are much more complex than originally expected. Finally, they employ a multinomial logit model to estimate the marginal effects of student characteristics on major choice.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank conference participants and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions. This article is based on a paper that was presented at the National Conference on Teaching Economics at Stanford University on June 1–3, 2011.