Lots of students come to college looking for what I sometimes call a “golden ticket” major–that is, choosing a major that will assure future prosperity and status. Lots of first-year students show up declaring that their career path is to become a doctor, but a certain percentage of them make other plans after getting their butt kicked in their first real college-level intro chemistry or intro biology course. The huge increase in computer science majors in the last decade or so was at least in part driven by a belief that such a major would assure a well-paid career–a belief that has not aged well with the arrival of AI tools.
But more broadly, undergraduate students often have an unrealistic set of beliefs about how certain majors will with high probability lead to certain jobs, which then leads to disappointment. John J. Conlon and Dev Patel explore the issue in their research paper “What Jobs Come to Mind? Stereotypes About Fields of Study” (recently published online in Quarterly Journal of Economics, June 22, 2026). They write:
Almost half of employed U.S. college graduates report that their job is not closely related to their degree, and mismatch between major and occupation strongly predicts job dissatisfaction, lower salaries, and the rate at which graduates say they regret their choice of what to study. What explains these patterns? One possibility is that they primarily reflect uncertainty—for instance, about undergraduates’ future job preferences—resolving into ex post regret. But a second possibility is that they in part reflect systematic ex ante mistakes, for example, due to student misperceptions about the consequences of major choice. Identifying the nature and magnitude of any such mistakes would point toward policy interventions to improve student outcomes. …
We test this prediction first through surveys run in partnership with an academic program at the Ohio State University (OSU). Our respondents are first-year undergraduates who are undecided about their major. The main survey questions simply ask students their beliefs about the share of U.S. graduates with different majors who are working in various careers. We find large and systematic stereotyping: students overestimate the preva-lence of almost every major’s representative career. For example, the average student believes that 53% of art majors work as artists (17% do), that 47% of journalism majors work as journalists (4% do), that 38% of political science majors work as lawyers (16% do), and that 43% of psychology majors work as counselors (21% do). Very similar patterns appear in students’ beliefs about majors they are versus are not likely to pursue and in their beliefs about the careers they themselves are likely to have …
To provide evidence on the breadth and persistence of such stereotyping, we analyze a large-scale, nationally representative sample of U.S. college first-year students including more than 9 million respondents over 40 years. We find that dramatically more first-years expect to attain their major’s representative career than actually end up working in that job: 63% of biology majors expect to be doctors (versus 23% in reality), 62% of psychology majors expect to be counselors (versus 21%), 65% of art majors expect to be artists (versus 17%), 42% of communications/journalism majors expect to be writers or journalists (versus 4%), and so on. Pooling across majors, these facts combine to produce large gaps between the expected and actual careers that college graduates pursue. For professions that are primarily the rare-but-representative outcome of particular majors—doctor, counselor, journalist—two to four times more college first-years expect to work in these jobs than actually do. In contrast, many fewer expect to be teachers, work in business, or be nonemployed than ultimately are, be- cause these are the common alternatives to the representative career of many majors. These overall gaps—amounting to 40,000 to 200,000 students a year—appear largely unchanged since at least the 1970s.
The authors carried out an experiment at Ohio State University, a “light touch intervention,” where some students were given actual information on the share of student in a given major that ended up in certain high-profile jobs. The student who got the information were likely to remain undecided longer about declaring a major, and also to end up in a different major than the one toward which they had originally been leaning.
My own sense, based on not much (if you need a fancy name, call it “casual empiricism”), is that the faculty who are teaching undergraduates are often not well-informed about the actual job market outcomes of their students. But faculty want to be encouraging, so if someone says that they want to be an artist, journalist, lawyer, or doctor, they are counselled that a certain major is a good way to get to that goal. It’s a rare faculty member who would have data available on what those who majored in their subject actually end up doing, and who would tell students that for almost half of them, their eventual job will not be closel related to their major.
