College Quality and Returns to Occupational Match
Abstract: How does college quality matter? Existing literature emphasizes student and institutional characteristics, but has paid little attention to the transition into the labor market. This paper introduces a new perspective to understand college quality through how it affects the relatedness between job and college education. Using panel survey data and a novel knowledge-based measure of relatedness, I find that students from the lowest-quality colleges work in less related occupations and see no wage gains from the relatedness on average. An exception is science majors at these colleges, who experience substantial returns of 14%, though such majors are relatively rare. In contrast, students attending middle- and high-quality colleges earn 4%-5% more in more related jobs. Further analysis indicates that in addition to major courses, non-major courses in similar fields also contribute to the wage gains, especially at top-tier colleges. These findings suggest that college quality shapes the wage returns to job-education relatedness, potentially through differences in course composition.
Trade-offs Between College and Major PreferencesÂ
This project studies how students trade off college selectivity and major preference when applying to college-major programs in centralized admissions systems. Using rich application and enrollment data from Chile, where students submit rank-ordered lists (ROLs) under a deferred-acceptance mechanism, I examine which students prioritize selectivity over major preferences, how admission probabilities shape these choices, and how these trade-offs relate to later outcomes such as major switching and on-time graduation. By quantifying how much additional selectivity students require to forgo their preferred major, the project contributes to the growing evidence on preference revelation in ROL data, providing new insights into how students value college selectivity relative to their major preferences.