College Majors and Skills: Evidence from the Universe of Online Job Ads

Steven W. Hemelt, Brad Hershbein, Shawn M. Martin and Kevin Stange

No 29605, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We document the skill content of college majors as perceived by employers and expressed in the near universe of U.S. online job ads. Social and organizational skills are general in that they are sought by employers of almost all college majors, whereas other skills are more specialized. In turn, general majors––Business and General Engineering––have skill profiles similar to all majors; Nursing and Education are specialized. These cross-major differences in skill profiles explain considerable wage variation, with little role for within-major differences in skills across areas. College majors can thus be reasonably conceptualized as portable bundles of skills.

JEL-codes: I23 I26 J23 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm and nep-lma
Note: ED LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published as Steven W. Hemelt & Brad Hershbein & Shawn Martin & Kevin M. Stange, 2023. "College Majors and Skills: Evidence from the Universe of Online Job Ads," Labour Economics, .

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29605.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: College Majors and Skills: Evidence from the Universe of Online Job Ads (2024)
Journal Article: College majors and skills: Evidence from the universe of online job ads (2023)
Working Paper: College Majors and Skills: Evidence from the Universe of Online Job Ads (2021)
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:nbr:nberwo:29605

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29605

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().