Choosing Career and Family: The Multidimensional Returns to College Majors

This paper studies how college major choices shape earnings and family formation using administrative data that link students’ preferences, admissions, graduation, earnings, and births. Beyond documenting heterogeneity in effects across fields, we characterize the structure of effect heterogeneity in these returns. Earning payoffs exhibit substantial preference-based heterogeneity but limited gender heterogeneity, while fertility effects exhibit limited idiosyncratic heterogeneity with more substantial gender heterogeneity. This contrast points to interpreting college majors as gender-specific career-family bundles, an interpretation supported by associations between fertility effects and measures of career-family compatibility that we document. We then show how these multidimensional returns relate to major choice and subsequent implications. Men’s choices are more strongly associated with earnings effects, whereas women’s choices are more strongly associated with family-formation effects; demand counterfactuals show that gender differences in payoff weights shape sorting and the earnings gap. Finally, we use our causal estimates to evaluate counterfactual assignment rules that target representation gaps in centralized assignment systems, illustrating how gender quotas could reduce assignment and earnings gaps with minimal aggregate earnings costs and small effects on aggregate fertility.