Occupational Potential of College Majors: Measurement and Application

• In Event: 40217 - Education and Inequality

Abstract

As more people take the opportunity of higher education, the variability within tertiary education increases. An important factor that critically determines student’s experience in and returns to education is the college major. Whereas capturing this heterogeneity bores a great importance in the study of social stratification and mobility, the tools we use in the discipline are often confined to categorical representation of majors. In this paper, we propose a novel measurement framework that represents college major as a 120-dimensional human capital vector characterizing the prospective occupations. Denoting this as an ‘occupational potential’ of college major, we use the measure to revisit two core questions in the literature: differential representation in and labor market returns to college majors. We find the sex difference in math and science potentials in college major has decreased over the last 50 years, but the gap still stands. The sex gap in other dimensions of occupation potential has remained relatively stable across time. We also find that having high occupational potentials in math and science, language, and care work is associated with high occupational status attainment over the life course, whereas potentials in physical work and business/management had negative association. Lastly, having an occupation that is lower than one’s potential or is unrelated to the potential comes with an income penalty.

Authors

• Ha-Joon Chung, Princeton University

• Marco Dongil Jang, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities