Search EdWorkingPapers

Search EdWorkingPapers by author, title, or keywords.

Fulya Y Ersoy

Fulya Y Ersoy, Jamin D. Speer.

We study the importance of job-related and non-job-related factors in students’ college major choices. Using a staggered intervention that allows us to provide students information about many different aspects of majors and to compare the magnitudes of the effects of each piece of information, we show that major choices depend on a wide set of factors. While students do not change their choices when given information about earnings, they do update their choices when told about other aspects of majors. The non-job-related factors, such as a major’s course difficulty and gender composition, are important to students but not well-known to them. We also find that male and female students value different major characteristics in different ways. Lower-ability females flee from majors that they learn are more difficult than they had believed, while other students do not. On the other hand, male students are averse to being taught by female faculty, while female students are not. Overall, our results show that a variety of factors are important for students’ major choices and that different factors matter for male and female students.

More →


Fulya Y Ersoy.

How does the perceived relationship between effort and achievement affect effort? To answer this question, I conduct a field experiment with a popular online learning platform. I exogenously manipulate students’ beliefs about returns to effort by assigning them to different information treatments, each of which provides factual information. Students update their beliefs towards the information provided and change their study effort in the same direction with the shifts in their beliefs. This result shows that students’ beliefs about the returns to effort is an important component of their human capital accumulation and low-cost information interventions can influence these beliefs.

More →