Publication: How universities can mind the skills gap : Higher Education and the future of work
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2021-04-08
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IE Center for the Governance of Change
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Universities are the main suppliers of higher order skills, where many young (and increasingly not so young) people go to expand their opportunities in the labor market. Historically, universities have been remarkably good at this; they have steadily guaranteed more and better paid employment. They have managed to do so even through the changes due to automation and the hollowing of traditional middle class jobs happening over the last twenty years. However, more recently the need for skills has changed dramatically. Digitization, automation and the rise of new forms of employment have meant that many new jobs have emerged and old jobs have disappeared or have now changed and demand different skills. Given the pivotal role of universities in educating the innovators and the workers of tomorrow, it is essential to understand how good universities are at adapting with the drastically changing demands of the economy. Before this report, this question had not been studied systematically at a resolution that enabled us to compare the skills provided by universities and those needed by the labor market. This was in part due to the lack of data about the content of university programs, and in part, on what exactly jobs demanded. We, for the first time, mobilize systematic data on 13 million job postings and over 500,000 syllabi from undergraduate degrees in three European countries for this analysis. In our research, we are able to use Natural Language Processing techniques to assess the level of alignment between the skills supplied by institutions and their national markets. We study the “skill intensity” of the universities in our sample, in other words, the average number of skills contained in a course offering. We also adjust the raw measure of skill intensity by the level of demand for each skill to develop a weighted skill intensity.
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Attribution 4.0 International
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IE Center for the Governance of Change
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Lastra-Anadon, C. X., Das, S., Raghavan, H., & Yu, R. (2021). How universities can mind the skills gap : Higher Education and the future of work. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4672341