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Marriage-related preferences are a likely factor when students choose a major in college, according to an economist’s findings.
While expected earnings, employment opportunities, and ability are clearly some of the biggest factors, “students also make decisions in a broader social and personal context,” economist Hayri Alper Arslan told The College Fix in an interview this month.
“Their choices may reflect expectations about lifestyle, family formation, work-life balance, and the kind of future they imagine for themselves,” he said via email.
Arslan, assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, co-authored a paper titled “Testing the effects of an unobservable factor: Do marriage prospects affect college major choice?”
In March, UT San Antonio Today shared more about the study, noting it “revealed that women with higher expectations of marrying within five years were more likely to choose education and less likely to pursue business as a major.”
“While expected earnings remained the strongest predictor of major choice overall, the influence of marriage prospects was more pronounced among women, highlighting key gender differences in how students weigh personal and professional priorities.”
Arslan told The College Fix the idea for the study began during his Ph.D., when he and his peers noticed major differences between men and women across college majors.
“At the same time, we also observed that marriage rates varied substantially across students graduating from different fields,” he said.
Those patterns led researchers to ask broader questions about what influences students’ college major decisions.
“Why do we observe such differences in the data?” Arslan said. “Are they driven only by academic ability, expected earnings, labor-market opportunities, or institutional factors? Or do students’ unobserved preferences — such as preferences over future family formation, work-life balance, or social environment — also play a role?”
The results of the study somewhat surprised researchers, he said.
They expected that marriage prospects may be related to college major, but what they found was that “the data provide fairly strong empirical evidence that students’ unobserved preferences related to marriage and their college major choices are connected.”
Arslan cautioned against overinterpreting the results of the study, emphasizing that “an important point in the paper is that marriage prospects are far from the primary reason behind major choice.”
“Students choose majors for many reasons: interests, academic strengths, expected earnings, career opportunities, family background, and information about the labor market,” he said. “Our results suggest that marriage-related preferences may be one additional factor operating in the background, not the dominant factor.”
He said it would be too strong an interpretation to conclude that students pick a major specifically to improve marriage prospects. In reality, the relationship is mostly indirect; they reflect a deeper difference in the students’ preferences and expectations about their future.
The findings suggest future family expectations may still play a role alongside considerations such as work-life balance, career flexibility, geographic mobility, and the social environment tied to different fields.
Arslan told The Fix that this study has many implications.
“Major choice affects how talent is distributed across fields, which matters for labor markets, innovation, and economic growth,” he said.
“If students sort into majors partly because of work-life preferences or expectations about future family life, then policies aimed at improving talent allocation need to consider more than wages or academic preparation,” he said.
He also said the findings suggest academic advising should take a more holistic approach when helping students navigate career paths.
“Students may benefit from better information not only about salaries and employment rates, but also about career flexibility, workplace culture, and long-term life outcomes associated with different fields,” the professor said.
“Our study contributes to this conversation by showing that educational choices are connected not only to labor-market outcomes, but also to broader social and personal dimensions of students’ lives.”
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