Underrepresented minority (URM) college students have been steadily earning degrees in relatively less lucrative fields of study since the mid-1990s. A decomposition reveals that this widening gap is principally explained by rising stratification at public research universities, many of which...

Going to college has consistently conferred a large wage premium. We show that the relative premium received by lower-income Americans has halved since 1960. We decompose this steady rise in 'collegiate regressivity' using dozens of survey and administrative datasets documenting 1900-2020 wage...

This article studies the determinants of college major choice using an experimentally generated panel of beliefs, obtained by providing students with information on the true population distribution of various major-specific characteristics. Students logically revise their beliefs in response to...