Past event
Applied Microeconomics Seminar with Professor Kevin Stange, University of Michigan Skills, Majors, and Jobs: Does Higher Education Respond?
Kevin is an Associate Professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan. Kevin's expertise is at the intersection of education economics and quantitative methods. He has published extensively in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Public Policy, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, among other general interest and top field journals.
Abstract: How do college students and postsecondary institutions react to changes in skill demand in the U.S. labour market? We quantify the magnitude and nature of the response in the 4-year sector using a new measure of labour demand at the institution-major level that combines online job ads with geographic locations of alumni from a professional networking platform. Within a shift-share setup, we find that the 4-year sector responds. We estimate elasticities for undergraduate degrees and credits centred around 1.3, generally increasing with time horizon. Changes in non-tenure track faculty allocations and the credits they teach partially mediate this overall response. We provide further evidence that the magnitude of the overall response depends on both student demand and institutional supply-side constraints. Our findings illuminate the nature of educational production in higher education and suggest that policy efforts that aim to align human capital investment with labour demand may struggle to achieve such goals if they target only one side of the market.