The discouraged-business-major hypothesis revisited: Could economics be the encouraged-business-major?

Abstract

The term "Discouraged-Business-Major"(DBM) describes students who become discouraged with the rigorous standards of colleges of business and migrate to colleges of arts and sciences to complete a degree in economics under relaxed requirements (Salemi and Eubanks 1996). Following Salemi and Eubanks, the present authors examine a decade of demographic characteristics and ability measures for every economics and business graduate at a large Midwestern university. They find DBMs, but also note that major selection dynamics are much more complex than originally expected. Finally, they employ a multinomial logit model to estimate the marginal effects of student characteristics on major choice. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.