Dr. Yoav Goldstein was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his project, “Major Choices: Priorities Behind American College Students’ Decisions Across Generations.” The project studies how meaning-related motives and prosocial preferences shape educational choices. It moves beyond the traditional focus in economics on expected earnings. Using comprehensive survey data on millions of American college students from the 1960s to the present, Yoav will examine how students’ pecuniary and non-pecuniary goals have evolved over time, how these goals differ across cohorts and groups, and how they shape college major choices. The project will also examine the broader implications of these patterns for occupational sorting and economic inequality.

Yoav received his bachelor’s degree in PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) and his master’s degree in economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He completed his PhD in economics at Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Professor Analia Schlosser. His dissertation studies field specialization in higher education, focusing on how students choose their fields of study and how these choices shape economic and civic outcomes. In a secondary research agenda in health economics, Yoav examines physician decision-making in preventive care and its implications for healthcare quality. His work combines large-scale administrative and survey data with causal inference methods.