Do completed college majors respond to changes in wages?

Long, Mark C.; Goldhaber, Dan; Huntington-Klein, Nick

doi:10.1016/j.econedurev.2015.07.007

Cited by 67 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…We suggest that the likely channel 4 through which lower black STEM degree completion operates is negative expectations about future employment prospects in STEM fields as a result of increased inflows of skilled foreign-born workers. This result is consistent with research studying how students form expectations about employment outcomes for various majors and choose their own majors (Zafar, 2011;Clark, 2015;Long, Goldhaber, and Huntington-Klein, 2015;Wiswall and Zafar, 2015). Additionally, we argue that white STEM graduates were also adversely affected by the policy by being less able to find work in related occupations (or at all), which reduces earnings (Kinsler and Pavan, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Do Foreigners Crowd Natives out of STEM Degrees and Occupations? Evidence from the US Immigration Act of 1990

Ransom¹,

Winters

2020

ILR Review

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. ABSTRACT Do Foreigners Crowd Natives out of STEM Degrees and Occupations? Evidence from the U.S. Immigration Act of 1990This paper examines effects of the U.S. Immigration Act of 1990 on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) degree completion and labor market outcomes for native-born Americans. The Act increased the in-flow and stock of foreign STEM workers in the U.S., both by increasing green card allotments and by expanding temporary work visas via the H-1B visa program. These policy changes potentially altered the relative desirability of various college majors and occupations for natives. We examine effects of the policy on STEM degree completion, STEM occupational choice, and employment rates separately for black and white males and females. We identify the effects using variation in natives' exposure to foreign STEM workers and the geographic dispersion in foreign-born STEM workers in 1980, which precedes the Act and predicts future foreign STEM flows. We find that the Immigration Act changed natives' skill investment and utilization in three ways: (1) it pushed black males out of STEM majors; (2) it pushed white male STEM graduates out of STEM occupations; and (3) it pushed white female STEM graduates out of the workforce. JEL Classification:J24, J61

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Do Foreigners Crowd Natives out of STEM Degrees and Occupations? Evidence from the US Immigration Act of 1990

Ransom¹,

Winters

2020

ILR Review

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“…By doing so, we add to a growing set of papers using subjective expectations data to distinguish between the role played by monetary returns versus nonpecuniary preferences in individual decisions. While several papers have recently addressed this question in the related context of college major and university choices (see, e.g., Zafar, 2011Zafar, , 2013Arcidiacono et al, 2012;Delavande and Zafar, 2014;Long et al, 2014;Stinebrickner andStinebrickner, 2014 andZafar, 2014), our paper is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to do so in the context of occupational choices.…”

mentioning

confidence: 91%

“…These occupation-specific elasticities range from 0.70 (for Business) to 0.86 (for Education), resulting in a mean elasticity across all occupations equal to 0.79. It is worth noting that these elasticities are sizable, especially in comparison with the very low earnings elasticities which have been found in the literature on college major choices (see, e.g., Beffy et al, 2012, Long et al, 2014, and Wiswall and Zafar, 2014. This further stresses the importance of considering the choice of college major and the choice of occupation as two separate, albeit related, decisions.…”

mentioning

confidence: 92%

Recovering Ex Ante Returns and Preferences for Occupations Using Subjective Expectations Data

et al. 2014

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We show that data on subjective expectations, especially on outcomes from counterfactual choices and choice probabilities, are a powerful tool in recovering ex ante treatment effects as well as preferences for different treatments. In this paper we focus on the choice of occupation, and use elicited beliefs from a sample of male undergraduates at Duke University. By asking individuals about potential earnings associated with counterfactual choices of college majors and occupations, we can recover the distribution of the ex ante monetary returns to particular occupations, and how these returns vary across majors. We then propose a model of occupational choice which allows us to link subjective data on earnings and choice probabilities with the non-pecuniary preferences for each occupation. We find large differences in expected earnings across occupations, and substantial heterogeneity across individuals in the corresponding ex ante returns. However, while sorting across occupations is partly driven by the ex ante monetary returns, non-monetary factors play a key role in this decision. Finally, our results point to the existence of sizable complementarities between college major and occupations, both in terms of earnings and non-monetary benefits.

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“…Research has shown that the choice of college major is responsive to the relative pay of graduates with those majors, as in Arcidiacono (2004), or Montmarquette, Canning and Majseredjian (2002), or the relative pay of occupations related to those majors, as in Long, Goldhaber and Huntington-Klein (2014). Similarly, Freeman and Hirsch (2008) show that the number of students that graduate with a particular college major is responsive to the knowledge content of occupations and the market payoff to that knowledge content.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Changing Occupational Distribution by College Major

Ransom¹,

Phipps²

2017

Research in Labor Economics

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. In this paper we examine the occupational distribution of individuals who hold bachelor degrees in particular fields in the United States using data from the various waves of the National Survey of College Graduates. We propose and calculate indexes that describe two related aspects of the occupational distribution by major field of study: distinctiveness (how dissimilar are the occupations of a particular major when compared with all other majors) and variety (how varied are the occupations among those who hold that particular major). We discuss theoretical properties of these indices and statistical properties of their estimates. We show that the occupational variety has increased since 1993 for most major fields of study, particularly between the 1993 and 2003 waves of the survey. We explore reasons for this broadening of the occupation distribution. We find that this has not led to an increase in reported mismatch between degree and occupation.JEL Classification: I23, J24

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Do completed college majors respond to changes in wages?

Cited by 67 publications

References 37 publications

Do Foreigners Crowd Natives out of STEM Degrees and Occupations? Evidence from the US Immigration Act of 1990

Do Foreigners Crowd Natives out of STEM Degrees and Occupations? Evidence from the US Immigration Act of 1990

Recovering Ex Ante Returns and Preferences for Occupations Using Subjective Expectations Data

The Changing Occupational Distribution by College Major

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