How Does Choice of College Major Correlate With Parents' Household Income?

The explanation is fairly intuitive. “It’s … consistent with the claim that kids from higher-earning families can afford to choose less vocational or instrumental majors, because they have more of a buffer against the risk of un- or under-employment,” Weeden says. With average earnings for different types of degrees as well-publicized as they are—the difference in lifetime earnings among majors can be more than $3 million, one widely covered study found—it’s not hard to imagine a student deciding his or her academic path based on its expected payout. And it’s especially not hard to imagine poorer kids making this calculation out of necessity, while richer kids forgo that means-to-an-end thinking.

Another trend expressed in the data, Weeden notes, is that lower-income families and higher-income families tend to send their children to schools with different options for majors: Most of the priciest, top-tier schools don’t offer Law Enforcement as a major, for instance. There is also the possibility that children from higher-income families were more exposed to the sorts of art, music, and literature that colleges deem worthy of study, an exposure that might inspire them to pursue those subjects when they get to college.

The picture painted by Weeden’s numbers is further filled in by data provided to me by Greg Clark, a professor of economics at the University of California, Davis, and the author of The Son Also Rises. Clark looked at the majors chosen by students who attended Cambridge University in the past 15 or so years, and he zeroed in on students who had rare, elite surnames—which he used as an indicator of high social status. When he compared the majors of those students to students with typical English surnames, he saw that the elite students were much more likely to study classics, English, and history, and much less likely to study computer science and economics.

How Much More or Less Likely Are Cambridge Students With Rare, Elite Surnames to Choose Certain Majors?

Clark’s data, along with Weeden’s, provides a reason to reexamine the expected-earnings-by-major statistics that are so often scrutinized by indecisive college students. One recent finding out of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce is that majoring in the humanities gets you about $50,000 per year in median mid-career earnings, while a computer-science degree is good for about $75,000 per year.

Median Mid-Career Yearly Earnings, by College Major

It’s easy to look at that chart and conclude that computer scientists end up wealthier than English majors. But these numbers could be skewed, in that they don’t capture what Weeden’s and Clark’s data suggests: that students born with built-in financial safety nets are more likely to gravitate toward less-lucrative majors. It’s speculative, but richer students might be going on to take lower-paying jobs because they have the knowledge that their parents’ money will arrive eventually.