Moving beyond the STEM/non-STEM dichotomy: wage benefits to increasing the STEM-intensities of college coursework and occupational requirements

Audrey Light () and Apoorva Rama

Education Economics, 2019, vol. 27, issue 4, 358-382

Abstract: Using a sample of college graduates from the NLSY97, we introduce a new approach to assessing wage benefits of STEM training, STEM jobs, and the match between the two: rather than classify individuals dichotomously as STEM or non-STEM, we measure the STEM-intensities of both their college coursework and their occupational requirements. While the orthodox approach simply predicts that ‘STEM pays,’ we find that workers at the top of both gender-specific STEM-intensity distributions are predicted to out-earn their counterparts at the bottom by a substantial margin – even when we condition on their dichotomous STEM classification – but that predicted log-wages do not increase monotonically with STEM-intensity throughout the entire joint distribution.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09645292.2019.1616078 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:edecon:v:27:y:2019:i:4:p:358-382

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CEDE20

DOI: 10.1080/09645292.2019.1616078

Access Statistics for this article

Education Economics is currently edited by Caren Wareing and Steve Bradley

More articles in Education Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().