Connecting higher education to workplace activities and earnings

Higher education is a source of skill acquisition for many middle- and high-skilled jobs. But what specific skills do universities impart on students to prepare them for desirable careers? In this study, we analyze a large novel corpora of over one million syllabi from over eight hundred bachelors’...

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Published inPloS one Vol. 18; no. 3; p. e0282323
Main Authors Chau, Hung, Bana, Sarah H., Bouvier, Baptiste, Frank, Morgan R.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States Public Library of Science 15.03.2023
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Subjects
Academic disciplines
Analysis
Career development
Careers
Cognition & reasoning
Colleges & universities
Computer science
Curricula
Design
Economic aspects
Economic growth
Education
Educational aspects
Evaluation
Forecasts and trends
Graduation rate
Higher education
Higher education institutions
Humans
Income
Information systems
Labor market
Motor skill learning
Occupational health
Occupations
People and Places
Profits
Skilled labor
Skills
Social Sciences
Students
Subject fields
Taxonomy
Trends
Workforce
Workplace
United States
United States > US
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Summary:Higher education is a source of skill acquisition for many middle- and high-skilled jobs. But what specific skills do universities impart on students to prepare them for desirable careers? In this study, we analyze a large novel corpora of over one million syllabi from over eight hundred bachelors’ granting US educational institutions to connect material taught in higher education to the detailed work activities in the US economy as reported by the US Department of Labor. First, we show how differences in taught skills both within and between college majors correspond to earnings differences of recent graduates. Further, we use the co-occurrence of taught skills across all of academia to predict the skills that will be taught in a major moving forward. Our unified information system connecting workplace skills to the skills taught during higher education can improve the workforce development of high-skilled workers, inform educational programs of future trends, and enable employers to quantify the skills of potential workers.
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Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0282323