Education Policy Speaker Series – “Skills, Majors, and Jobs: Does Higher Education Respond?”

In this talk, Dr. Kevin M. Stange will discuss his working paper, “Skills, Majors, and Jobs: Does Higher Education Respond?” How do college students and postsecondary institutions react to changes in skill demand in the U.S. labor market? Dr. Stange and coauthors 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. Their 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.

Kevin Stange is an associate professor of public policy at the University of Michigan where he teaches graduate courses in higher education policy, economics, and quantitative methods. He is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and faculty affiliate of the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education and the Education Policy Initiative, both at University of Michigan. Professor Stange’s research lies broadly in empirical labor and public economics, with a focus on education and health care. Learn more about Stange here.