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...

Several recent published papers have asserted that a growing proportion of workers with college degrees are either unemployed or employed in jobs requiring only high school skills. Using data from the 1980 and 1990 Censuses of Population and Housing, we show that this assertion does not...

Cross-field citation probabilities appear to be symmetric for mutually citing fields. Scientific influence is asymmetric within fields, and occurs primarily from top institutions to those less highly ranked. Still, there is significant reverse influence on higher-ranked schools. We also find...

We link information on the current earnings of college graduates from many cohorts to their high-school records, their detailed college records and their demographics to infer the impact of college major on earnings. We develop an estimator to handle the potential for non-response bias and...

During the last two decades, there has been a significant growth in the share of faculty members at American colleges and universities that are employed in part-time or in full-time non tenure-track positions. Our study is the first to address whether the increased usage of such faculty...

Recent descriptive work suggests the type of college education (field or institution) is an important but neglected pathway through which individuals sort into homogeneous marriages. These descriptive studies raise the question of why college graduates are so likely to marry someone within their...

In the U.S. there are large differences across States in the extent to which college education is subsidized, and there are also large differences across States in the proportion of college graduates in the labor force. State subsidies are apparently motivated in part by the perceived benefits...

The low number of college graduates with science degrees -- particularly among under-represented minorities -- is of growing concern. We examine differences across universities in graduating students in different fields. Using student-level data on the University of California system during a...

Labor force participation rates of college-educated women ages 60 to 64 increased by 20 percent (10 percentage points) between 2000 and 2010. One potential explanation for this change stems from the fact that fewer college-educated women in the more recent cohorts were ever teachers. This...

This paper investigates which attributes of a Carnegie PhD-level institution predict the share of its undergraduate BA recipients that will earn a PhD. Four broad PhD fields are studied: humanities, physical sciences, natural sciences, and social sciences. We use restricted-access,...