Fields of study, college selectivity, and student inequalities in higher education

Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth we examine processes by which students enter lucrative fields of study, selective colleges, and lucrative fields within selective colleges. We code fields by their graduates ' average monthly income and use average incoming student's SAT scores to measure selectivity. We find that: (1) males are much more likely to enter fields of study with higher economic returns than are females; (2) socioeconomic factors do not affect chances of entry into lucrative fields net of other background factors, but SES predicts entry into selective colleges and lucrative fields within selective colleges; (3) measured academic ability is an important predictor for all dependent variables. The volume and diversity of opportunity now available in higher education is unprecedented in U.S. history. Students confront a myriad of possibilities when transferring from high school to college. Not only must they choose between elite versus mass institutions, public versus private universities, or two-year versus four-year colleges, but within any institution they must choose a field of study (e.g., engineering, liberal arts) and degree type (e.g., associate, bachelor). Higher education is like a complicated mosaic, a richly differentiated tapestry, revealing a hierarchically arrayed system of institutions and programs. This stratification is rooted, in part, in the sheer size of an increasingly differentiated system, with more than 3,600 institutions enrolling over 15 million students (U.S. Department of Education 1993). Striking diversity exists both among and within these institutions. * We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The original draft of this article was written when the first author was a post doctoral fellow funded b