Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Return To College Education Revisited: Is Relevance Relevant?, Olga Yakusheva

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

This study examines whether the size of the college earnings premium varies depending on the quality of the match between an individual’s degree field and his/her occupation. The study uses the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) to obtain a new measure of the quality of occupational match for a sample of 2268 young adults with post-secondary degrees from the restricted use High School and Beyond (1980/92) data. The study finds that people whose occupations better match their degree fields earn significantly higher returns to post-secondary schooling. This result is robust to controlling for an extensive set of pre-existing differences among individuals, …