Lower Grades, Sharper Gaps: Majority Status Shapes Who Finishes a College Major

Women earn roughly one in four undergraduate engineering degrees in the United States and fewer than one in five computer science degrees, while men remain a small minority among nursing and education graduates. These imbalances have persisted for decades despite sustained efforts to broaden participation, and they have typically been explained through a familiar set of suspects: differences in prior academic preparation, differences in expressed interest, and stereotypes about who belongs in which field. A new study published in Nature Human Behaviour complicates that picture in an important way. Drawing on two large, nationally representative datasets collected by the US Department of Education, researchers at New York University and their collaborators found that representation gaps across college majors are not uniform. Instead, they are concentrated among students with lower pre-college grades and test scores, and they shrink considerably—though they do not necessarily vanish—among the highest-achieving students.

The central finding is deceptively simple but consequential for how educators and policymakers think about diversity in higher education. In male-majority fields 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 with straight cisgender women who had similar levels of academic performance. Among students at the top of the achievement distribution, that gap narrowed dramatically. In other words, the familiar underrepresentation of women in quantitative and technical fields is driven disproportionately by what happens to students with weaker academic credentials, not by a uniform filtering process that operates equally at every level of preparation.

Lead author Joseph Cimpian, professor of economics and education policy at NYU Steinhardt and NYU Wagner, emphasized that this heterogeneity is easy to miss if researchers only examine overall representation rates. Across both datasets, he and his colleagues found that when a representation gap varied across the achievement distribution, that gap tended to favor the major’s historically dominant demographic group most strongly among students with lower pre-college grades and test scores, and least so at other points in the distribution. Those gaps narrowed considerably among students with the strongest pre-college performance. Cimpian argued that looking closely at how gaps differ by achievement level, rather than relying on aggregate statistics, is essential for understanding who is actually entering these different fields—and who is being screened out or discouraged before they ever arrive.

The methodological foundation of the study is one of its distinguishing strengths. The researchers analyzed the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, which followed 6,340 students from their first year of high school in 2009-2010 through their junior year of college, capturing demographic information including sex and LGBTQ+ identity alongside measures of academic preparation, interests, and outcomes. They complemented this with the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study of 2016, which provided academic and demographic data for 12,950 students who earned a bachelor’s degree in 2016. Using two independent, nationally representative datasets allowed the team to test whether the same patterns emerged in different cohorts and at different stages of the college pipeline, from initial major selection through persistence to degree completion.

Crucially, 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 the STEM disciplines that have dominated conversations about demographic disparities. The results showed that LGBTQ+ students, regardless of sex, were underrepresented in male-majority fields such as engineering, computer science, and business. LGBTQ+ men were also underrepresented in nursing and other health fields—a finding that mirrors, in reverse, the pattern of straight cisgender women being underrepresented in male-dominated technical majors. The consistency of these across-group patterns suggests that the dynamics shaping who enters and stays in a major operate along multiple demographic dimensions simultaneously, not solely along the lines of gender.

In female-majority fields, the evidence for a parallel pattern of overrepresentation among straight cisgender women was mixed, and the authors are careful not to overstate symmetry between the two directions of the analysis. However, some statistical models revealed a striking result: LGBTQ+ women tended to be overrepresented in female-majority fields among students with the highest pre-college achievement. The researchers interpret this cautiously, but it raises the possibility that LGBTQ+ women may need stronger academic credentials to gain a foothold even in fields that might superficially appear welcoming to them. If confirmed by future work, this would suggest that the barriers facing sexual and gender minority students are not confined to traditionally hostile environments but extend into disciplines where their demographic group holds numerical dominance.

What might explain why representation gaps are sharpest among students with weaker academic credentials? The researchers point toward social norms and institutional environments that subtly favor a field’s historically dominant demographic group. Students with lower grades and test scores may have less margin for error when navigating environments where they are demographically outnumbered: they may receive less encouragement, face harsher judgment when they struggle, or perceive fewer role models and fewer signals that people like them succeed in the field. High-achieving students, by contrast, may possess a kind of buffer—strong credentials, confidence, and external validation—that allows them to persist even in environments that are less than fully welcoming. The study is correlational, and the authors explicitly note that it cannot establish that these norms directly cause the observed gaps; it demonstrates only that individual academic and demographic factors on their own do not fully account for the patterns in the data.

That caveat matters, but it does not diminish the study’s practical implications. If prior performance alone cannot explain who stays in a major and who leaves, then interventions focused exclusively on academic preparation—tutoring, prerequisite pipelines, admissions criteria—are unlikely to close representation gaps on their own. The findings point instead toward the climate of departments and classrooms, particularly for students who arrive with less academic capital and therefore less resilience against discouragement. They also suggest that aggregate diversity statistics may mask the true geography of exclusion. A department that appears moderately diverse overall may, in fact, be nearly homogeneous among its less-prepared students, with demographic diversity concentrated only among those strong enough to overcome environmental headwinds.

Cimpian framed the results as a story of missed opportunity rather than simple loss. 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 their interest in those fields, that is a loss both for the students themselves and for the disciplines they might have enriched. The phrase ‘unrelated to their preparation or even interest’ is the study’s sharpest edge: it implies that the conventional explanations for demographic sorting, which center on ability and preference, are incomplete. Something in the environment surrounding a major appears to interact with a student’s demographic identity and achievement level to shape whether that student completes a degree in the field.

The research, co-authored by Zachary T. McDermott at Abt Global, Jo R. King at Boston University, Nathaniel Woznicki at the NYU Department of Psychology, and Taek H. Kim at the Korean Educational Development Institute, was supported by grants from the Institute of Education Sciences at the US Department of Education. Its publication in Nature Human Behaviour reflects growing scientific interest in moving beyond binary questions of whether demographic gaps exist toward more granular questions of where, for whom, and under what conditions those gaps emerge. For universities seeking to diversify engineering, computer science, nursing, education, and every field in between, the message is that the students most at risk of exclusion are not the strongest performers but those with the least academic cushion—and that the environments those students encounter, not just the students themselves, may be the most promising target for change.

Subject of Research: Demographic representation and persistence across college majors by achievement level

Article Title: Students with lower grades and test scores earn degrees more often when they belong to an academic major’s majority group

Article References: Students with lower grades and test scores earn degrees more often when they belong to an academic major’s majority group. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: higher education, college majors, gender representation, LGBTQ+ students, STEM diversity, academic achievement, degree completion, Nature Human Behaviour, longitudinal study, education policy, student persistence, NYU