Education Policy Speaker Series

Dr. Kevin M. Stange
Associate Professor – University of Michigan

Kevin Stange is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Professor Stange’s research investigates topics in empirical labor and public economics, with a focus on education. He is currently leading projects to better understand how higher education alters students’ labor market trajectories and mobility.

In this talk, Dr. Stange will discuss his working paper, “Skills, Majors, and Jobs: Does Higher Education Respond?” How do college students and postsecondary institutions react to changes in skill demand in the U.S. labor market? Dr. Stange and coauthors quantify the magnitude and nature of response in the 4-year sector using a new measure of labor demand at the institution-major level that combines online job ads with geographic locations of alumni from a professional networking platform. Their findings illuminate the nature of educational production in higher education and suggest that policy efforts that aim to align human capital investment with labor demand may struggle to achieve such goals if they target only one side of the market.