At a February 27 lecture at UC Berkeley, Princeton economist Zachary Bleemer discussed his research on the impacts of policies at universities that restrict student enrollment in high-demand majors. After the lecture, he was joined in conversation by Benjamin Hermalin, Berkeley’s executive vice chancellor and provost.
Student interest in undergraduate majors such as computer science, data science, engineering and economics has increased in recent years. UC Berkeley and other public universities with competitive academic programs that can serve as a student pathway to high-paying careers have been challenged in responding to the demand; many have instituted policies in order to limit enrollment.
During the lecture, Bleemer highlighted research he said demonstrates that major-limiting policies disproportionately benefit students from high-income backgrounds and disadvantage underrepresented minority students.
Bleemer is an assistant professor of economics at Princeton University and a research associate at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the Goldman School of Public Policy. He completed his PhD at Berkeley and was advised by Berkeley professor and Nobel laureate David Card.
The lecture was hosted by Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS), in partnership with the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC), the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion, the College of Engineering’s Student Services, and the Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences.
The economic stratification of college students and the value of education
Opening with a brief history on the evolution of American higher education, Bleemer discussed the shift from public universities providing education to anyone who had graduated high school at the beginning of the 20th century to the implementation of increasingly selective admission policies from the 1960s to present day. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, the economic value of education for students from low- and high-income backgrounds was similar, Bleemer said: People who attended college earned about 20% more than people who graduated from high school but did not go to college.
The California master plan for higher education introduced in 1960 “aimed to allocate students based on academic preparation, giving preference to more capable students,” said Bleemer.
From the 1960s onward, selective admission led to a dramatic change in the value of higher education for different groups in the United States, he said. The value of a college education – as measured by wages in the labor market years after they were college students – had decreased for students with low-income parents relative to students with high-income parents.
“By the end of the 20th century, the average return of going to college for kids from the top parental income tersile is almost double the return for kids from the bottom parental income tersile,” said Bleemer, sharing graphs from a working paper with economist Sarah Quincy at Vanderbilt University.
“If lower income kids and high-income kids were to earn the same college degrees, overall inequality between rich and poor kids in the U.S. would be closed by about 15% among these college graduates,” he said.
The rise of computer science as a high-paying major
Bleemer discussed the decline of student interest in humanities majors and the growth of interest in computer science majors. His research showed that in the early 2000s computer science degrees across academic institutions were earned by students from the top and bottom parental income terciles roughly equally, but in more recent years students with higher income parents had become more likely to earn computer science degrees.
“It's no longer just the case that kids are competing for access to relatively more or less selective universities. Even once they're inside the university, there has been rising meritocracy for who has access to relatively higher and lower paying college majors,” Bleemer said, referencing a working paper with Aashish Mehta, an economist at UC Santa Barbara.
Bleemer and Mehta reviewed the increasing prevalence of major restrictions between 2003 and 2022 at top ranked public universities, including UC campuses, and found that GPA restrictions in particular disadvantaged underrepresented minority students.
In his role as director of the UC ClioMetric History Project, Bleemer and colleagues developed longitudinal dashboards in 2018 for comparing historical data across majors and UC campuses on a number of indicators, including alumni wages across their lifecycle.
“Even at Berkeley in 2010, the computer science major was unrestricted,” Bleemer said. “Anyone could earn the major quite recently. But demand has increased very substantially, and the university has not increased supply to the same degree… Computer science majors – initially and over the entire life cycle – are earning pretty substantially higher wages than students in these other fields.”
“There is a fragility to what we do”
At the end of the lecture, CDSS Dean Jennifer Chayes moderated a conversation between Bleemer and Hermalin.
In response to a question about resource allocation related to student demand at the Berkeley campus, Hermalin responded that resources are shifted to accommodate changing needs. “Some resources shift quickly, and some resources shift a little bit more tectonically,” he said.
“The University of California has many purposes in life,” he continued, “including developing research and knowledge in a wide variety of areas, providing access to a wide variety of areas for students who may want to take courses for reasons other than that they want to get as much money as possible when they graduate.”
Chayes and Hermalin mentioned increasing concerns about federal funding for research and education given rhetoric from the new U.S. administration and recent executive orders.
“An interesting feature of American higher ed over the last 100 years has been this dramatic growth of the research enterprise of universities,” said Bleemer. “Universities didn't have to do as much research as they're doing now, and very substantial federal funding since the 1950s has incentivized universities, and faculty in particular, to spend a growing amount of their time, effort and interest in the research endeavor.”
Hermalin closed the event with a story: “If you go to Humboldt University in Berlin, which used to be the University of Berlin, there’s this grand staircase. And as you walk up the staircase, they have pictures of all their Nobel laureates. And you could not reject the null hypothesis, but the University of Berlin was guaranteed Nobel laureates every year. At the beginning: 1901 they got two, then they got three. And then you hit 1933: Boom, it stops.
“There is a fragility to what we do, and we should never forget that,” he said.
