Frontier Knowledge in Higher Education

Barbara Biasi and Song Ma

No 29853, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper studies the dissemination of frontier knowledge through higher education. Using natural language processing on 1.7 million university course syllabi and 20 million academic articles, we construct frontier knowledge proximity, a measure of how closely a syllabus is connected to recent research in its field. We document three facts. First, courses differ in frontier knowledge proximity, even within field, course level, and year. Second, instructors shape course content: proximity rises when instructors change and is higher for research-active instructors, especially when their research matches the course topic. Third, access is unequal: advantaged and faculty-intensive schools offer more frontier-oriented courses.

JEL-codes: I23 I24 I26 J24 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino, nep-lma and nep-ure
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