The Education-Innovation Gap

Arbeitspapier

This paper documents differences across higher-education courses in the coverage of frontier knowledge. Comparing the text of 1.7M syllabi and 20M academic articles, we construct the “education-innovation gap,” a syllabus’s relative proximity to old and new knowledge. We show that courses differ greatly in the extent to which they cover frontier knowledge. More selective and better funded schools, and those enrolling socio-economically advantaged students, teach more frontier knowledge. Instructors play a big role in shaping course content; research-active instructors teach more frontier knowledge. Students from schools teaching more frontier knowledge are more likely to complete a PhD, produce more patents, and earn more after graduation.

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• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: CESifo Working Paper ; No. 9653

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Higher Education; Research Institutions ; Education and Inequality ; Returns to Education ; Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity ; Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
• Subject: education ; innovation ; syllabi ; instructors ; text analysis ; inequality

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Biasi, Barbara ; Ma, Song
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo)
• (where): Munich
• (when): 2022

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/260783