Research

Abstract: College major choices shape academic success, earnings, and broader patterns of inequality and productivity. Despite their importance, little work investigates the supply of majors and how this facet of college behavior influences student outcomes and costs in higher education. In this paper, I identify a decades-long trend in 4-year postsecondary education in the United States—the production of bachelor’s degrees has diversified significantly by field of study over time. I document this pattern in multiple data sources and show that within-college expansion of program options drives this trend. Peer institution effects, or colleges’ tendency to identify with and aspire to other colleges, offers the most consistent explanation for the market’s collective accommodation of increased demand for a bachelor’s degree since 1990. Consequently, I show major diversification led to increases in average instructional costs per student. However, major diversification also coincides with increases in 6-year graduation rates. This highlights an important tradeoff for colleges: increased costs for a more diverse set of major options can attract and retain more potential graduates.

Abstract: This paper introduces a new measure of the labor markets served by colleges and universities across the United States. About 50 percent of recent college graduates are living and working in the metro area nearest the institution they attended, with this figure climbing to 67 percent in-state. The geographic dispersion of alumni is more than twice as great for highly selective 4-year institutions as for 2-year institutions. However, more than one-quarter of 2-year institutions disperse alumni more diversely than the average public 4-year institution. In one application of these data, we find that the average strength of the labor market to which a college sends its graduates predicts college-specific intergenerational economic mobility. In a second application, we quantify the extent of “brain drain” across areas and illustrate the importance of considering migration patterns of college graduates when estimating the social return on public investment in higher education.

Abstract: How do college students and postsecondary institutions react to changes in skill demand in the U.S. labor market? We quantify the magnitude and nature of response in the 4-year sector using a new measure of labor 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 centered 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 labor demand may struggle to achieve such goals if they target only one side of the market.