COMPASS · Understanding the Determinants of College and Major Choice: Preferences, Beliefs and Social Interactions

Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.

Project objective

Europe’s capacity to sustain growth and social cohesion rests on how effectively education choices promote upward mobility. COMPASS investigates the sources of disparities in choices of colleges and majors across socio-economic backgrounds to understand the key determinants of intergenerational persistence in life outcomes. Educational choices can be driven by (1) differences beliefs—for instance about socio-economic returns, risks and own ability—or (2) differences in preferences and constraints faced by different groups. Social interactions among peers can further shape beliefs and preferences to influence higher education choices. This research will improve our knowledge base by uncovering the main drivers of students’ choices and investigating differences by socio-economic background. Against the backdrop of stalled social mobility, Europe still lacks a clean diagnostic of which margin to target: do unequal outcomes reflect inaccurate beliefs or differences in preferences that information alone cannot—or should not—change? How do peer networks shape those beliefs? COMPASS answers these questions by embedding an information provision experiment in the context of the Norwegian centralised admissions system to identify how beliefs and preferences interact to shape individual choices. By linking surveyed individuals to administrative registers, I test whether providing information on the causal returns across colleges and majors—personalised based on each student’s observed skills and background—updates beliefs and durably improves choices to advance social mobility. I will carry out the project at the Department of Economics of the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH), under the supervision of Professor Kjell Salvanes and co-supervision of Professor Alexander Willen. NHH combines outstanding expertise in behavioural/experimental and labour economics, with one of the rare infrastructures for research with representative samples and register data.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

• NORGES HANDELSHOYSKOLE · BergenCoordinatorNorway

Links

• View on CORDIS
• DOI: 10.3030/101284453