Students transitions to the labor market

Higher education institutions play an outsized role in facilitating skill development, yet employers regularly cite a gap between the skills they need and those new college graduates possess. One explanation for this disconnect is that technological change, industrial restructuring, and international trade are continuously evolving the demand for skills in the labor market, but that investment is slow to respond. This project uses several quasi-experimental techniques, and the universe of all online job ads paired with novel data on college course-taking over the past decade, to study how...

The central aim of this project is to estimate the causal effect of students’ college major choices  on their postsecondary and labor market outcomes. The combination of a research design that can identify causal effects of major choice with rich administrative data that allow us to track students from high school through college and into the labor market is novel in the higher education literature and will provide new and important evidence on how college major choices affect students during college and...

Building on the work of the Mellon Research Forum, University of Michigan's Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) has brought together seven 4-year postsecondary institutions (U-M, the City University of New York, Georgia College and State University, Indiana University, Truman State University, University of Houston and University of California, Irvine) to pilot measures of the liberal arts educational experience linked to various long-term outcomes for students. This collaboration is laying the foundation to scaling the work and develop the kind of large data...