What is a college major worth? Most answers reach first for a calculator: tuition paid, debt incurred, salary earned. Those figures matter. But they leave out another question: What does a field of study contribute to students’ lives as citizens? A new study published in Innovative Higher Education by Carlton Fong, Kristen Kremer, and Washington University in St. Louis Assistant Professor of Education Chris Rozek examines whether students in different majors also differ in how they serve their communities, participate in civic life, and think about contributing to society.
Using a national longitudinal dataset, the researchers studied 5,917 college-going students across six broad fields: engineering and computer science, the social sciences and humanities, business, education, the biological and physical sciences, and health care. They looked beyond voting alone. The outcomes included volunteering that was not required, completing a community-based project for a course, and viewing contributing to society as more important than salary, as well as voter registration. To avoid merely comparing unlike students who happened to choose different majors, the team used a propensity-score method to create more comparable groups based on factors such as sex, race and ethnicity, income, parental education, disability status, and native language. The analyses also accounted for students’ high school GPA and the type of college they attended.
The differences were not small. Thirty-seven percent of education majors had completed a community-based course project, compared with 16 percent of engineering and computer science majors. Nearly 64 percent of education majors said contributing to society mattered more than salary, compared with 28 percent of engineering and computer science majors and 22 percent of business majors. After the researchers made the groups more comparable, education majors still had 2.74 times the odds of completing a community project and 4.38 times the odds of prioritizing societal contribution, relative to engineering and computer science majors. Social science and humanities majors had about twice the odds on both outcomes. Education, health care, and biological and physical science majors also had higher odds of volunteering. Differences in voter registration, by contrast, did not remain statistically significant after adjustment.
The findings widen the question of what college is for and how its value should be measured. Because the study was observational, it cannot prove that choosing a particular major caused students to become more civically engaged, even after the careful statistical adjustments. Still, the broader pattern deserves attention: fields often described as offering lower economic returns, including education and the humanities and social sciences, showed stronger civic returns across several meaningful outcomes. That does not make economic mobility less important, or civic development the responsibility of only some majors. It does suggest that when colleges are judged only by what graduates earn, we may overlook what their education prepares them to give. Both belong in the equation when we ask what college is worth.
You can find the journal article freely accessible at the following link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10755-026-09941-1
