New research counters a common claim that colleges don’t prepare students for what employers say they need. Upjohn Institute Senior Economist Brad Hershbein and coauthors find that colleges respond to increased demand for skills in a particular field with more course hours and degrees in that field.
Despite the expectation that jobs increasingly will require bachelor’s degrees, there has been little research on how the colleges and universities that grant these degrees respond to employer demand. Hershbein and his coauthors tackled the problem with mountains of data: the near-universe of online job postings, the locations of alumni from a professional networking app, industry-specific job growth, and credentials awarded and courses taken by major and specific college.
Those data let them examine changes in demand for graduates of nearly every college and for around 70 majors. If job ads in a certain market start asking for more communications degrees, for instance, the researchers can see whether the colleges that send most of their graduates to that market teach more students in communications classes and turn out more communications majors.
They do: every 1 percent greater demand for jobs in a specific major – across the metro areas where graduates of a given college tend to go – leads to 1.3 percent greater course-taking and degrees from that college and field.
Not all colleges respond the same way, however, and some fields respond more than others. Highly selective colleges show less response than do less-selective ones, perhaps because of the selective institutions’ large endowments and focus on research.
Less-selective or broader-access colleges tend to keep graduates closer and depend more on public funding, the authors write, which exposes them to greater public pressure to keep up with trends. Colleges that do scale up tend to use more nontenure-track faculty to do so.
The most expensive fields of study are also less responsive, with the cost of expanding these programs, such as adding science labs, potentially dampening the response. Among groups of majors, the authors found that communications, health, and social sciences respond the most, while humanities, physical sciences and education respond the least.
More on the research is in the policy brief “How Higher Education Responds to Labor Market Demand” by Johnathan Conzelmann, Steven Hemelt, Brad Hershbein, Shawn Martin, Andrew Simon and Kevin Stange.
The research is part of a series exploring the relationships between higher education and labor markets.