How and to what extent has COVID-19 affected undergraduate students' choices of majors, careers, as well as their sense of meaning and purpose with their chosen field of study and career? Secondly, does the impact of COVID-19 on major and professional selections vary across universities in the United States? What impact does it have on the society?

My project hopes to explore the impact of the global pandemic by starting with a cross-sectional, descriptive analysis within my university, Duke, and then a differences-in-differences evaluation across 35 private universities and liberal arts colleges across the United States. The cross-sectional analysis, drawing upon Duke University Senior Surveys in 2019 and 2023, aims to gain a preliminary understanding of how the choices of majors and jobs vary across the two cohorts of students – one that experienced no pandemic nor restriction, while the other spent over 3 years of their university under COVID-19. I will use descriptive statistics to compare the composition of majors and jobs and the degree of student satisfaction with their academic and professional choices across the two cohorts.

The differences-in-differences approach hopes to provide a more causal answer to the questions by following the 2019 and 2023 cohorts across time using university-level aggregate datapoints. I will first trace the changes in the composition of majors and intended careers from each cohort’s freshman years to senior years across universities, and then use this change as the dependent variable regressed against pandemic policy indices, student demographic distribution indices, and general academic and educational policy indices.

Through a two-folded analysis, I evaluate the relationship between pandemic and student choices through both cross-sectional and a time-series points of view, hopefully arriving at an answer that will help guide higher education institutions of the next decade to prepare against future pandemics.