Inheritance of Fields of Study

Children of university graduates are twice as likely to earn a degree in their parent's field. I link Swedish university applicants from 1977-1992 to their children's later outcomes and exploit admission thresholds in a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. When a parent earns a degree in a broad field, the probability that the child later graduates from that field rises by 4.6 percentage points (46%). Parental STEM enrollment raises children's math scores by 0.18 standard deviations, but children who follow a parent earn about 30% lower returns to their field choice. Transmission is especially strong when parents choose gender-atypical fields.