Detecting Workplace Skills from University Syllabi
September 3, 2021
Which colleges give their students relevant skills for the future of work? Which majors or fields of study have limited effectiveness as workforce development? Data on skills and workplace activities are essential for describing labor trends in the workforce, but data on the skills taught during workforce development—in higher education in particular—remain absent. Although studies of job postings and US Department of Labor ONET data describe both the supply and demand side of a polarized job market, few studies describe the specific skills taught to college students, who then enter the workforce as “high-skill” workers. This project will fill this gap using a novel data set of 10 million university course syllabi to empirically study the skills (e.g., ONET workplace activities) taught in courses over the last decade according to the Open Syllabus Project. This project will compare the empirical skills taught in university/college classrooms with labor data from the US Department of Labor and a data set of millions of worker resumes to assess the role of higher education in job polarization, wealth inequality, and to identify the educational foundations for adaptable workers.
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