If your childhood surname started with a letter toward the end of the alphabet, you might remember long wait times when teachers organized activities by alphabetical order — especially if you were in a large class. And waiting for your turn may have caused some frustration, as it did for agricultural and applied economics professor Guanming Shi.

“Many classroom activities were based on the number of Chinese character strokes in my last name, and I didn’t like that I was always called up late in elementary school,” says Shi, who grew up in China. “I became aware of this in middle school when I was suddenly fourth because the call order was now based on entrance exam scores. I was able to relax sooner and felt much happier.”

That experience was profound enough that Shi decided to help her own children avoid it. Several years after moving to the United States for graduate school, she used the Hong Kong spelling of her husband’s last name — Chang instead of Zhang — on her son’s and daughter’s birth certificates.

It took another 20 years until Shi put on her economist hat to test her long-standing hypothesis: Those with early initials experience greater classroom visibility and are more likely to develop an open personality. They tend to seek out activities that require teamwork and social interactions rather than tasks focused on individual effort. And these differences in personality development may affect choices made later in life.

Since an ideal dataset for testing that hypothesis was not readily available, Shi teamed up with American and Chinese colleagues to examine a modified question: Are those with last name initials earlier in the alphabet more likely to select a bachelor of arts college major?

“Choosing a major is the first big decision that many young adults make after their K-12 education,” says Shi. “Since personality plays a role in this decision, we used the chosen major as a proxy for personality to generate preliminary results for our main hypothesis.”

The researchers analyzed registrar data from one U.S. and one Chinese university. The U.S. dataset included 75,000 undergraduates enrolled at a large public research university between 2013 and 2022, of whom 67,000 had declared their major. The Chinese dataset was smaller, with 3,200 freshmen enrolled at one of China’s top 10 universities in 2024. But it included survey responses related to the “Big Five” personality traits — openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism/emotional stability — data she is hoping to obtain from a future U.S. dataset as well.

The analysis of the U.S. data showed that domestic students with a last name initial earlier in the alphabet were significantly more likely to choose a bachelor of arts than a bachelor of science major, supporting Shi’s hypothesis. In contrast, last name initial and college major were unrelated for international students from China and South Korea at the U.S. university and for students at the Chinese university.

The explanation, according to the researchers, is that there is no uniform last name ordering practice in the Chinese K-12 system. Urban schools use ordering systems based on both the Roman alphabet and stroke count, and most rural areas don’t employ an ordering method. Any ordering practices in South Korea are lost by converting Korean last names to the Roman alphabet.

The researchers also found that students who had higher scores for openness were more likely than those with lower scores to choose a bachelor of arts major at the Chinese university. This confirmed previous reports of high openness scores for U.S. and European students majoring in psychology, political science, or arts and humanities.

Shi’s research has traditionally focused on the economics of industrial organization in the U.S. and China. Her new interest in “alphabetical discrimination” was piqued not only by her personal experience but also other studies of last name effects. For example, research has found that adults with childhood surname initials toward the end of the alphabet make faster purchasing decisions for consumer goods; that high school students with late initials are less likely to attend college or receive academic recognition at graduation; and, in a recent analysis of 30 million records from a large U.S. public university, that later initials are associated with worse grades.

“Economists often study human decision-making and the efficient and equitable use of limited resources,” Shi says. “In this case, social equity means making sure all students receive similar levels of teacher attention and can participate in classroom activities based on their personal interests and aptitudes, regardless of their surname initials.”

This article was posted in Economic and Community Development, Fall 2024, Natural Selections and tagged agricultural and applied economics, college undergraduate majors, Guanming Shi, K-12 education, social equity.