Higher education is arguably the most important source of skill development, which facilitates both economic and social mobility.
In the past few decades, empirical studies have consistently demonstrated that college-educated individuals earn higher wages, achieve more extensive professional networks, and collectively experience greater inter-generational upward mobility. Non-college educated workers now engage more in less skilled tasks than their counterparts compared to previous eras10 and tend towards low-wage occupations. On the other hand, the economic returns of higher education vary across fields of study due to differing skill sets imparted by college majors. They also vary because of institutional selectivity. Moreover, students from different demographic and socioeconomic backgrounds are sorted into different educational trajectories due to existing structural inequalities, which may hinder the social mobility that higher education is intended to foster.
In recent years, as elevated dropout rates and rising unemployment or underemployment rates of college graduates fuel concerns around the efficacy of higher education, it is important to better understand how higher education imparts skills and prepares students for the labor market.
Read more at Nature.
