Major Skills: How College Skill Offerings Respond to Changing Labor Market Demand

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 11
  In Roundtable Session: Student Success Perspectives (Table 11)

Abstract

As COVID-19 and new technologies change skill demand in the labor market, learners will look to higher education to re-skill for jobs of the future. However, the extent to which colleges respond to changing skill demand is an open question. This project studies how colleges and universities responded to recent labor market changes by analyzing changes in course content over time. For this project, I introduce a unique dataset of 5 million course descriptions scraped from a diverse sample of college and university course catalogs. I find evidence that courses, particularly at selective institutions, have increasingly emphasized cognitive and social skill development over the last decade, in parallel with the growing labor market importance of these skills.

Author

• Jacob Light, Stanford University