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Inequality reproduction, higher education, and the double major choice in college

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Abstract

Inequality scholarship has long highlighted the role of education, including higher education, in both mobility processes and the reproduction of disadvantage. This article, drawing on a unique sample of nearly 22,000 undergraduate students in Israel, builds on and extends this body of work by analyzing the extent to which double majoring in college, types of double major combinations, and their potential labor market returns are stratified by social class. Two competing theories are proposed for explaining variations by subgroup: social reproduction theory and rational choice theory. My analyses and findings in these regards are strikingly clear: there are significant social class background advantages in the choice to double major, and with especially unique combinations of lucrative and non-lucrative fields among the more advantaged students. While students from disadvantaged backgrounds were less likely to double major, they were more likely to choose double lucrative majors. These results and the accompanying discussion, beyond highlighting the role of double majoring as a higher ordered and seldom discussed mechanism of inequality, point to the ways in which students across the social class hierarchy negotiate not only college but also their perceptions of how employers will eventually assess educational credentials.

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Notes

  1. Reasons for double majoring suggested by the literature include, but are not limited to, weighing different motivations or constraints, such as one field for labor market and one for personal fulfilment (Zafar 2012); to expand horizons; to balance between breadth and depth of knowledge (Klein 1990; Lattuca and Stark 2011); and to develop different ways for thinking, writing, and practicing (Pitt and Tepper 2012).

  2. Basic tuition for one year of a bachelor’s degree program, in 2021, was 10,198 NIS (about 3,090 USD).

  3. The primary sampling unit of the 1995 Census of Population and Housing is the household. Every household was sampled, and asked to complete a short questionnaire on its demographic composition; every fifth household (20%) was given a long questionnaire, which sought information across a range of socioeconomic fields. All members of the household were asked to fill the questionnaire. According to the official report of the ICBS (2000), the distribution of Israelis born between 1978 and 1984 in the 20% sample and population with regard to various demographic characteristics is balanced and representative.

  4. As at the time of the study, double major programs were offered almost exclusively by the universities. This is very similar to the USA, where double major programs are found in elite and multidisciplinary institutions (Pitt and Tepper 2012).

  5. Preliminary analysis showed no differences between students from families with two Ashkenazi parents and students from families with one Ashkenazi and one Mizrachi parent, so these two groups were combined.

  6. The formula for calculating the ability score is as follows: Ability score = ((weighted matriculation score * 10.446–403.235) + (psychometric score)) * 0.516—47.710.

  7. Multinomial logit is an appropriate model to use if the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) assumption holds. Results of the Small-Hsiao tests (Long & Freeze 2001:188) on each of the ten separate files were not statistically significant, which suggests that IIA assumption was not violated.

  8. While the multinomial regression includes j-1 sets of coefficients, there are j sets of marginal effects.

  9. Multiple imputation is a statistical technique for handling missing data that accounts for uncertainty in single imputation and replaces the missing values with plausible values based on observed association in the data (Allison 2001). Specifically, I used Stata’s multiple imputation with chained equations command to impute 10 complete datasets.

  10. Controlling for parental occupation (not shown here) did not improve the model fit or alter the results of Table 2. These analyses are available upon request.

  11. Moving the threshold between lucrative and non-lucrative fields from the 50th to the 75th percentile of the income distribution reduced the number of double majors with at least one lucrative field from 15.9 to 4.9%.

  12. On a standardized scale running from 200 to 800, the average ability score of continuing-generation students is 604.2 (SD = 77.6) and the average for first-generation students is 543.3 (SD = 93.0); the difference is significant at p < .001.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Hanna Ayalon, Dafna Gelbgiser, and Vincent Roscigno for their comments on earlier versions of this paper, as well as the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their insights and suggestions.

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  1. Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA

    Oded Mcdossi

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Appendix

Appendix

Tables 5, 6, 7, 8

Table 5 List of lucrative and non-lucrative fields of study
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Table 6 List of main fields of study by type of double major combination
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Table 7 Logistic regression estimates for double major
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Table 8 Multinomial logistic regression for type of double major combination
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Mcdossi, O. Inequality reproduction, higher education, and the double major choice in college. High Educ 85, 157–186 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00827-7

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