Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The literature often characterizes the value of major choice by associating labor market returns because we perceive this to be a reasonable measure of a student's benefit from choosing a particular major. By the same token, we could also characterize the value of a particular major by considering the set of opportunities it affords its students upon graduation. For example, a student with a Bachelor's Degree in English would likely not be able to pursue a Master's Degree in a technical field, say engineering. In contrast, a student with a Bachelor's Degree in Engineering could likely pursue a Master's Degree in a technical field, Engineering, or a potentially less technical field, say Business. In this paper, I examine this transition between undergraduate major and graduate major and the extent to which these transitions are borne out in the Texas Higher Education data. I find that the majority of students transition by aligning their undergraduate major and graduate major. I also find that Undergraduate Majors transition to equally-technical or less-technical Graduate Majors. The second most common transition is to graduate majors in business and education. The results suggest that many students specialize in their field during their undergraduate career and that graduate programs in business and education provide a broadly useful skill set that attracts students from a variety of undergraduate majors.