The opinions of economics majors before and after learning economics

Abstract

Using longitudinal data on undergraduates from 463 American colleges and universities from 1994–99, the authors examine how majoring in economics affects student opinions on 13 social, political, and economic issues. Economics majors were found to begin and end their college tenure with differing opinions on several issues when compared to other majors, and studying economics was found to be related to changes in several opinions. On the whole, studying economics appeared to increase beliefs in favor of personal freedom and decrease support for government intervention in markets. However, the authors find little evidence that economics majors leave college more united on their opinions when compared to the general student population.

Keywords:

• Economics education
• economics major
• social values
• student opinions
• student views

JEL codes:

• A12
• A13
• A22

Notes

1. Students cannot report a double major in the HERI surveys; they are forced to state a “primary academic major.”

2. Approximately 76 percent of economics majors in our sample began college as another major. We found that estimates from models where treatment is restricted to students who both began and finished college as economics majors are highly similar to those where treatment was those who began as something else, which in turn are highly similar to models where both groups fit treatment. For brevity, these additional estimates are not presented but are available from the authors.

3. For a more detailed discussion of this technique, we direct the reader to an article by Eff (2010). In the context of education studies, it has been previously used by Bougnol and Dula (2006), among others. We note that models where the five component variables are entered individually result in highly similar estimates for economics majors and work equally as well in terms of goodness of fit. We ultimately chose the index over this method for the benefit of easy engagement comparison across economics major status.

4. Studying economics is found not to influence the Change Society, Handgun, Women, Death Penalty, and Criminal Rights opinions. All are areas in which economics does not have a relatively great deal to say or may not have been a focus of classroom discussion.