Sociocultural background and choice of STEM majors at university

摘要

This article proposes a generalized Roy model to examine the role of students’sociocultural background for choosing a STEM major at university. We combine surveydata on Swiss university graduates with rich municipality level information. Weuse a principal component analysis to construct an indicator capturing progressiveattitudes in a student’s home environment. Our structural approach allows directlycomparing the importance of sociocultural background with that of pecuniaryreturns and costs in the choice of college major. Identification exploits individual differencesin the relative cost of studying STEM that are unrelated to the local economicenvironment. Male students from conservative backgrounds are more likelyto study STEM, whereas women are unaffected by sociocultural background besidesmajority language. The effect of the progressivism indicator for males is abouthalf of the effect of the earnings return to STEM and twice as large as the effect ofthe relative monetary cost.