The Invisible College Barrier | Washington Monthly
Gonzalez s experience is, sadly, a common one. New research from UC Santa Barbara and Yale University indicates that major enrollment requirements like these have been systematically excluding minority and low-income students for decades. Across the country, students who grew up with fewer resources to prepare for college earn lower grades during their freshman year, which means they disproportionately run afoul of restrictions that limit popular majors by GPA. The popularity is the problem: Since college attendance began to rise nationally in the 1970s, universities most often large, public ones have protected their limited resources by gating off sought-after majors like economics, engineering, and computer science. The unintended consequence has been that underprivileged students are shunted to less lucrative majors in terms of post-college income, according to a December 2021 study by Aashish Mehta, a professor of global studies at UC Santa Barbara, and Zach Bleemer, an assistant professor of economics at Yale.