Changing Minds: The Impacts of College Majors on Political Attitudes

This study examines how college majors affect American students' political attitudes. It uses a comprehensive survey dataset of students from hundreds of colleges, tracked from entry to graduation. We find that college majors have substantial effects by comparing post-college attitudes of students with different majors and controlling for their pre-college attitudes, major preferences, and other factors. The effect of studying left-leaning majors (e.g., humanities) versus right-leaning majors (e.g., business) is about 0.2-0.4 standard deviations. These results indicate that college majors are among the most important life experiences shaping political attitudes. An instrumental variable approach, using supply-induced changes in major availability within colleges, supports our causal interpretation. Additionally, the results indicate that college majors influence students' views beyond simple self-identification on the liberal-conservative scale, affecting opinions on issues from taxes to abortion. We find no evidence of peer effects in our setting, suggesting that faculty and academic content may play a larger role. Furthermore, examining students' major decisions based on pre-college political attitudes and their impact on post-college attitudes, we show that college major choices may increase political polarization among American college graduates.

Joint with Matan Kolerman.