Students with Lower Grades and Test Scores Earn Degrees More Often When They Belong to an Academic Major’s Majority Group

Led by Joseph Cimpian, professor of economics and education policy at NYU Steinhardt, a team of researchers found that academic preparation and interest in a major do not fully explain representation and retention gaps.

Despite efforts to encourage broader participation, women earn about 25 percent of undergraduate engineering degrees and 18 percent of undergraduate computer science degrees—and men remain a small minority among nursing and education degree earners. Shedding new light on these discrepancies, a study—published in Nature Human Behaviour and examining two US Department of Education datasets—finds that these long-standing patterns tend to be most pronounced among students with lower pre-college grades and test scores, although prior academic performance alone does not explain who stays in a major and who leaves.

The researchers found that in male-majority majors such as physics, engineering, computer science, business, and economics, straight cisgender men with lower-than-average high-school grades and test scores were substantially overrepresented compared to straight cisgender women with similar levels of academic performance. That gap narrowed considerably among the highest-achieving students. LGBTQ+ men were also underrepresented in these fields.

In female-majority fields, evidence for a parallel pattern of overrepresentation for straight cisgender women was mixed. However, some models showed that LGBTQ+ women tend to be overrepresented in female-majority fields among students with the highest pre-college achievement—suggesting that LGBTQ+ women may need stronger academic credentials to gain a foothold even in seemingly welcoming fields.

For the study, the researchers used two large and nationally representative datasets collected by the US Department of Education to analyze patterns of high school performance and college major selection and persistence for straight cisgender men and women, and LGBTQ+ men and women. The High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 provided demographic information including sex and LGBTQ+ identity as well as academic preparation, interests, and outcomes for 6,340 students from their first year of high school in 2009-2010 through their junior year of college. The Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study of 2016 provided academic and demographic data for 12,950 students who obtained a bachelor’s degree in 2016.

“Across both datasets, we found evidence that when there was a representation gap that varied across the achievement distribution, that gap tended to be more in favor of the major’s historically dominant demographic group among the students with lower pre-college grades and test scores—and less so at other points in the distribution,” says lead author Joseph Cimpian, professor of economics and education policy at Steinhardt and NYU Wagner. “Those gaps tend to narrow considerably among the students with the strongest pre-college performance, highlighting the importance of looking more closely at how these gaps differ by achievement level rather than just overall representation to better understand who is entering these different fields.”

The researchers suggest these more pronounced gaps among students with lower pre-college grades and test scores may be due to social norms and institutional environments that subtly favor a field’s historically dominant demographic group. Because the study is correlational, the authors are careful to note that it cannot establish that these norms directly cause these gaps—only that individual academic and demographic factors on their own do not fully account for the observed patterns.

The study is among the first to use nationally representative data to examine how LGBTQ+ students sort across the full range of college majors, not just STEM. LGBTQ+ students—regardless of sex—were underrepresented in male-majority fields like engineering, computer science, and business. LGBTQ+ males were also underrepresented in nursing and other health fields.

“These patterns suggest a kind of missed opportunity,” Cimpian notes. “If talented students are leaving—or never entering—majors where they would do well and contribute, partly based on factors unrelated to their preparation or even interest in these fields, that’s a loss for the students and for the fields themselves.”

This study is co-authored by Zachary T. McDermott at Abt Global, Jo R. King at Boston University, Nathaniel Woznicki at NYU Arts and Science, and Taek H. Kim at the Korean Educational Development Institute.

This research was supported by grants from the Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education (R305B140037 and R305B200010).

Jade McClain
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