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RESEARCH IN ECONOMIC EDUCATION

The Discouraged-Business-Major Hypothesis Revisited: Could Economics be the Encouraged-Business-Major?

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Pages 19-32 | Published online: 18 Jan 2012
 

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.

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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.

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