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 …

lucrative careers. It further explains why such students also tend to exhibit higher dropout rates from college. …-economic groups that are further amplified upon students' adjustment of their educational choices in the course of studies. The best … assign, on average, lower grades and conjectured that female students exhibit stronger aversion to low grades, hence their …

college choice with uncertain graduation. Departing from much of the literature, we model in detail how students progress … persistent heterogeneity in students' credit accumulation rates that are strongly related to graduation outcomes. From this data …This paper studies the effect of graduating from college on lifetime earnings. We develop a quantitative model of …

succeed academically and drop out. (ii) At the college entry stage, their poor graduation prospects deter low ability students …This paper estimates the effect of graduating from college on lifetime earnings. Motivated by the fact that nearly half … of all college students fail to earn a bachelor's degree, we study a model of risky college completion. The central idea …

families? I present new evidence on this important question using data from two loan programs for college students in Chile …. Both programs offer loans to students who score above a threshold on the national college admission test, enabling a … regression discontinuity evaluation design. I find that students who score just above the cutoff have nearly 20 percentage points …