This is a fascinating question, that Freeman and Hirsch examine in a new IZA paper: "College Majors and the Knowledge Content of Jobs".
According to the authors, college students select their majors for a variety of reasons, including expected returns in the labor market. "Students’ choices of major and fields of study have varied considerably over time. Much of the prior work by economists on college majors has attempted to identify the returns on alternative choices. Such work is typically based on micro data sets containing both an individual’s current earnings and previous college major". This aspect of career decision-making will interest several researchers in the Higher Education Centre at the Geary Institute.
The authors use novel empirical methods that links a census of U.S. degrees and fields of study with measures of the knowledge content of jobs. The study combines individual wage and employment data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) with ratings on 27 knowledge content areas from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET), thus providing measures of the economy-wide knowledge content of jobs.
The Occupational Information Network (O*NET) is a relatively new government database providing hundreds of job descriptors on highly detailed occupations. A subset of O*NET descriptors (27 are used in the authors' analysis) include content areas
for which knowledge is required on the job, everything from philosophy and religion to physics to economics, finance, and accounting.
Fields of study and the corresponding BA degree data from the Digest of Education Statistics for 1976-77 through 2001-02 are linked to these 27 content areas. The authors find that "the choice of college major is responsive to changes in the knowledge composition of jobs and, more problematically, the wage returns to types of knowledge".
Further development of this area could help us to how understand how much efficiency exists in the markets for labour and education. If choice of college major is responsive to changes in the knowledge composition of jobs and the expected returns to education, then individuals must be choosing to invest in education based on the job that they want and the level of wages that they desire.
Of course, this is a massive generalisation, as some people pursue higher education for "consumption" reasons, while others do not make any firm decisions about occupational choice until they reach a point of absolute necessity to do so i.e upon leaving higher education. One potential inisght is that there may be sub-optimality in any procrastination related to occupational choice. If a decision about career trajectory will be forced upon entry to the labour market, surely it is better for those who might procrastinate to consider this decision fully upon entry to the market for higher education?
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