system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How does a social science education shape students' political views? Do they become more/less conservative/liberal? Do different social sciences affect students' political ideology differently?

Is the average Political Science graduate more left-leaning than when she began studying? Does an Economics student become more right-leaning? And so on...

If yes, how do different fields affect the students differently (why does the econ graduate become more conservative the sociology graduate)?
gpt
I agree that this is going to be a tough question to answer.

Here are some elements you'd need to start with.

1. Take a university. Worry about external validity (across uni's) later
2. Poll all students for political beliefs before freshman year
3. Watch the ones that go into social science
4. Poll those kids after their social science courses
5. Figure out how to deal with majors switching later (from one social science to another, or dropping out, or "dropping in" after a few years of STEM)
6. You now have a pre-treatment dataset (from before the freshman year), a treatment (social science courses of varying stripes), and post-treatment evaluation. Of course you'd need a control group - those who didn't take social science courses? Seems problematic, but what else do you do? With just social science students, you can at least do a test of differences. Maybe put demographic stuff on the right-hand side at minimum.
7. Of course in this case, your population is "university students" and the specific subgroup you care about is "uni students who majored in social science of varying stripes." If you cared more broadly about "early 20s individuals," you'd need prior data on the political beliefs of 20-somethings more generally.

Somebody in  labor econ or the economics of education might know of studies along these lines?