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Crises influence individuals’ career development. The COVID-19 crisis has global impacts in financial, health and social aspects and service industries are at the forefront of the pervasive impacts. This study investigated how college students’ perceptions of COVID-19 interplayed with self-efficacy on their academic plans and further identified major differences between students in service-oriented and nonservice-oriented majors.

A self-administered online survey was conducted with 299 undergraduates at a large Midwestern university during COVID-19. Regression analyses, including conditional analyses, examined the study hypotheses using SPSS.

The results showed that, in general, students’ self-efficacy reduced their intentions to change their academic majors. The joint effects of self-efficacy and perception of COVID-19 diverged among students in nonservice-oriented majors but converged among students in service-oriented majors (e.g. hospitality and tourism). These students in the service fields showed more commitment to their current majors even as their concerns about the social implications of COVID-19 increased.

This study suggests that academic institutions should try to improve students’ self-efficacy to maintain their career commitments during crisis times. Furthermore, service organizations should highlight the importance of social aspects as recovery from COVID-19 begins as a tool to recruit college graduates.

The literature on career decisions of students in service industries is quite limited. This study enriches the body of career decisions research in the context of service management by highlighting how service sectors are influenced by COVID-19.

This study aims to analyze the wage differentials of the majors in college education in Turkey, which is a country implementing an ongoing expansion in college education in recent years.

The study implements Mincreian wage regression using ordinary least squares, Heckman two-step estimation and quantile regression with sample selection correction by using household labor force surveys of TurkStat from the years 2014–2017.

The findings indicate one of the highest heterogeneity, close to 0.50 log points, between majors in the literature. The within-heterogeneity created by majors is highest among the graduates of social-behavioral sciences, law, biology, physics, mathematics, statistics, computer, engineering and manufacturing, as shown by a 90–10 difference, which is almost 700% for some of these majors. This study shows that the natural science and technical majors that are expected to be more productive and to be paid more fall behind in the wage distribution.

Estimation results show that natural science majors, except for subjects allied to medicine and engineering, are paid lower than law and service-sector-related majors. This indicates that the predictions of the skill-biased technical change hypothesis are not valid in the wage profiles in Turkey and that some majors supply more than the sectoral needs. This casts doubts on the effectiveness of the ongoing higher education expansion process of the country.

This study contributes to the literature on wage differentials of college majors, an area with limited studies. This is the first study analyzing wage differentials of the field of studies by correcting sample selection bias for the Turkish case.

This paper aims to extend the scope of previous studies on education-occupation mismatch to explicitly focus on the role high school track choices have on the risk of being mismatched in the labor market.

The paper uses the most exhaustive available database regarding the early-career paths of university graduates in Romania. Using a novel matching technique, entropy balancing (EB), our study relies on multinomial logit models and logit regressions to estimate the effect of the completed high school track on the likelihood of being mismatched in the labor market. The empirical analysis focuses on two types of education-occupation mismatches: horizontal and vertical mismatches.

We show that studying a different field in college compared to the completed high school track increases the risk of being skill mismatched in the first job after graduation. Five years after college graduation, the influence of the high school track fades, while being skill mismatched in the first employment plays a more important role. In contrast, we find no evidence that pursuing a college major unrelated to the completed high school track increases the probability of being overeducated. However, being overeducated in the first job increases the risk of being overeducated five years later.

The study brings new reliable evidence on the extent to which high school track choices may contribute to the risk of being mismatched in the labor market.

Managers in higher education require cost effective ways to attract the optimal number of students. The purpose of this paper is to address that general problem at the college level, and in doing so, it points toward strategies that could also be relevant at university and at national level. Two crucial issues are whether potential students are more influenced by parents or by peers when it comes to choosing a college; and whether spending money on advertising is more efficacious than spending money on making direct contact with potential students. The findings provide essential market intelligence for strategically managing the scarce resources available for attracting students.

Data were gathered through a survey instrument and the partial least squares (PLS) technique was subsequently applied to 314 responses.

Secondary school guidance counselors, followed by current and previous college students were the highlights in order of magnitude for non-marketing information sources for college choice. Social life received the highest loadings among college attributes and phone calls from the admissions office received the highest loading among marketer controlled variables. The results reflect the nature of Chinese culture, which is regarded as being highly collectivist.

The model proposed in this study is applicable to students of sub-degree courses, but may need to be adapted to degree and postgraduate courses students.

This study helps educational managers to identify which factors most strongly influence choice of higher education provider, and as a consequence enable managers to make more strategic use of scarce resources.

This is one of very few studies which employ PLS analysis to discover the key factors that influence student selection of a higher education provider, and one of few studies that focusses on Hong Kong.

Social cognitive career theory (“SCCT”) suggests that positive feedback can influence educational choices. Introductory courses often provide students with their first opportunity to obtain feedback in a given discipline. As a result, SCCT hypothesizes that introductory courses grades will impact a student's decision to major in a given discipline. The purpose of this paper is to explore this hypothesis in the accounting domain.

Longitudinal data were collected from four cohorts of students registered at a Canadian university. The main hypothesis is tested by estimating a logistic regression.

A significant positive relationship is found between a student's introductory financial accounting (“IFA”) course grade and their decision to major in accounting. This decision to major in the discipline is not found to be affected by various student (e.g. biological sex or age) or instructor (e.g. whether the instructor holds a CPA designation or not) characteristics.

This study supports seminal and enduring research that emphasizes the IFA course as a gateway into the accounting major. As a result, educators should consider these findings when designing their IFA courses and the related student supports embedded within the IFA course.

Prior literature offers conflicting results on the relationship between IFA grades and student's choice to major in accounting. This study relies upon a theoretical framework, SCCT, to settle the debate. This study further extends the prior literature by exploring the impact of various student and instructor characteristics on the relationship between IFA grades and student's choice to major in accounting.

This chapter uses a college-by-graduate degree fixed effects estimator to evaluate the returns to 19 different graduate degrees for men and women. We find substantial variation across degrees, and evidence that OLS overestimates the returns to degrees with the highest average earnings and underestimates the returns to degrees with the lowest average earnings. Second, we decompose the impacts on earnings into effects on wage rates and effects on hours. For most degrees, the earnings gains come from increased wage rates, though hours play an important role in some degrees, such as medicine, especially for women. Third, we estimate the net present value and internal rate of return for each degree, which account for the time and monetary costs of degrees. Finally, we provide descriptive evidence that satisfaction gains are large for some degrees with smaller economic returns, such as education and humanities degrees, especially for men.

A bivariate probit model is used to predict the choice of an economics major in a sample of first‐year, undergraduate business students. The paper examines the statistical significance of a number of student‐related characteristics on the likelihood of choosing an economics major, along with the role of student personality and perceptions of the profession. Factors analysed include secondary studies in economics, accounting and business, grade point average and attendance pattern, along with perceptions of the economics profession arrayed along dimensions of interest, independence, structure and precision. It would appear that the primary influences on the selection of a major in economics comprise student personality and level of interest in the profession.

This study investigates the determinants of students’ intention to major in accounting (IMA) in pre-recessionary, recessionary, and post-recessionary time periods. By examining four factors (perceived professional ethics (PE), job market consideration (JMC), social influence (SI), and self-efficacy (SE)) in accordance with the theory of planned behavior (TPB), we address two primary research questions. The first question concerns whether the four factors are related to students’ IMA before, during, and after the recession. The second deals with whether there is a shift in the relative importance of the factors between the pre-recessionary, recessionary, and post-recessionary periods. We use structural equation modeling and multigroup analysis of structural invariance to analyze these issues. The results show that all four factors have significant structural weights in each period, with the exception of perceived PE in the pre-recessionary period. In terms of students’ IMA over the three periods, perceived PE, JMC, and SI become factors of greater importance during the recessionary and post-recessionary periods, while SE decreases in relative importance.

With many countries having reached universal primary and secondary education, parents are increasingly investing in private tutoring as a means of ensuring that their children attend the best schools and universities. However, unlike the returns to years of schooling and effects of school quality on student achievement, the effects of spending on private tutoring have received limited attention. This chapter studies the impact of tutoring on higher educational outcomes using exogenous variation in tutoring expenditure caused by the imposition of a curfew on the operating hours of tutoring institutes in Korea. The estimated effects of the curfew highlight the severity of the college entrance rat race, with a 10 p.m. curfew constraining tutoring expenditure and increasing sleeping hours. I find diminishing marginal effects of tutoring on college entrance and positive effects on degree completion while the impact on college major followed varies across disciplines.

Employers regularly complain of a shortage of qualified scientists and advocate that to remain competitive more scientists need to be trained. However, using a survey of graduates from British universities, I report that 3 years after graduation less than 50% of graduates from science subjects are working in a scientific occupation.

Accounting for selection into major and occupation type, I estimate the wages of graduates and report that the wage premium of science graduates only occurs when these graduates are matched to a scientific occupation – and not because science skills are in demand in all occupations. I also provide additional evidence to assess whether science graduates are pushed or pulled into non-scientific occupations. Altogether, the evidence does not support the claim that science graduates are pulled by better conditions, financial or otherwise, into non-scientific jobs.