Katherine Welch's thesis explores the role of media coverage of science on the number of STEM majors. Dana Gullquist examines whether local government spending affects unemployment rates.
Seniors Katherine Welch and Dana Gullquist were recognized by the Department of Economics for writing the best theses this year.
For her thesis “From Cronkite to Williams: The Effect of News Coverage on the Number of Students Graduating with STEM Majors,” Welch gathered data on the number of science related news stories appearing on the nightly news on ABC, CBS and NBC from Vanderbilt’s Television News Archive. She related the number of individuals graduating with a STEM major in a given year to the number of stories that appeared when they were sophomores in high school. She finds a positive, statistically significant effect, and concludes that having more people, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, bring science into pop culture will directly affect the number of individuals who gravitate towards STEM majors.
Gullquist’s thesis, “The Effects of Local Government Spending on Unemployment”, exploits the fact that government spending is lower under a mayor-council form where the mayor and city council are elected separately than a council-manager form where the city council has more leeway in policy-making, to identify the effects of local government spending on local unemployment rates. Gullquist collected data on city government form by hand and found that local spending does not directly impact unemployment rates. She concludes that while most local spending goes towards education and there is less discretionary funding than at the state or federal level, local spending still may have an effect years later increased education spending leads to a more productive work force.