The Relationship between College Major Prestige/Status and Post-baccalaureate Outcomes

Since Blau and Duncan’s seminal work on social mobility, researchers have used subjective measures of occupational prestige to understand either the change or stability in generational socioeconomic statuses. While subjective measures of occupational prestige have been developed, the creation of measures of educational status and prestige that might serve as parallels to these measures has received less attention. In this paper, we attempt to create such a measure and then use it to test the relationship between educational status (measured through the status of college majors) and three important post-baccalaureate outcomes: income, educational attainment, and occupational prestige. Our results, based on a survey of 718 undergraduate seniors, shows that majors differ in prestige just as occupations do. Then, using the National Survey of College Graduates, we confirm that those differences are meaningful in predicting early career incomes, the attainment of an advanced degree, and the prestige rating of college graduates’ occupations.