College Student Elasticity: The Impact of Job Openings on College Major Decisions
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Over time, there has been a shift in the demand for different college majors and skills, particularly engineering and science majors. Understanding how college students decide their major is important for future employment outcomes. This paper studies the effect of shifts in job opening availability on college major choice. I use a novel job openings dataset and a record of degrees conferred in the United States from 2007 to 2019. I use lags and fixed effects to estimate exposure to change in job openings by region and identify the effect on college major choice. I find that a 25 percentage point increase in job openings for a given industry leads to a 1 percentage point increase in the fraction of degrees in that industry. The results are similar for public colleges and community colleges. Students who attend small colleges and majority undergraduate colleges are more responsive to changes in job openings. In addition, students in the fields of business and humanities are more responsive to changes in job openings than other industries.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 3, 2022 |
| Date modified | December 5, 2022 |
| Publication date | May 26, 2022 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Bhattacharya, Jodie | |
|---|---|---|
| Thesis advisor | Pistaferri, Luigi | |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Department of Economics |
Subjects
| Subject | human capital investments |
|---|---|
| Subject | higher education |
| Subject | field of study |
| Subject | labor market information |
| Subject | vacancy data |
| Subject | expected demand |
| Subject | postsecondary school |
| Subject | mismatch employment |
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Bhattacharya, Jodie. (2022). College Student Elasticity: The Impact of Job Openings on College Major Decisions. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/qc596vt4859
Collection
Stanford University, Department of Economics, Honors Theses
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- Contact
- jodieab@alumni.stanford.edu
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