Research

Abstract: The choice of college major shapes academic success, earnings, and broader patterns of inequality and productivity. Despite its importance, little work investigates the supply of majors and how this facet of institutional 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 measured by their concentration across majors has diversified significantly over time. I document this pattern in multiple data sources and determine that within-college expansion of program options is a key driver of the trend. Isomorphic tendencies and colleges' acute attention to their close peer institutions provide the most consistent explanation for the way colleges have accommodated increasing demand for a bachelor's degree over time. Marked changes in the demographic composition of students obtaining degrees cannot account for major diversification, nor can other factors like declines in state support for higher education, spillovers from graduate education within colleges, or changes in the business cycle and employer demand for skill. I furthermore show that major diversification led to an increase in average instructional costs per student. This increase stemmed from spillovers within institutions as students shifted enrollment away from some pre-existing majors and into new and related programs. However, I also find major diversification increased 6-year graduation rates, suggesting students may sort more efficiently across majors when more options are available. This highlights an important trade-off 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.