Taking advantage of unique longitudinal data, we provide the first characterization of what college students believe at … of why students hold the initial beliefs about majors that they do. The data collection and analysis are based directly … that students enter school quite optimistic about obtaining a science degree, but that relatively few students end up …

We examine whether and how teachers' major fields of study affect students' achievement, exploiting within …-school students' data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and controlling student-teacher fixed effects, we … find that teachers with college majors in natural sciences improve students' achievement of subfields in natural sciences …