Event Details

Max Schroeder - Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), external speaker

Abstract: University graduates have highly differentiated skills, both compared to the general population and other graduates. In recent years graduates’ skills have become central to debates about the value of higher education. While existing research has focused on returns to fields of study, limited work examines the multidimensional nature of skills, their qualitative content and how they relate to the labour market outcomes of university graduates. In this paper, I develop an economic model to estimate the heterogeneous distribution of analytical and interpersonal skills among recent UK graduates across different disciplines between 2001 and 2019. I structurally estimate the model using UK Labour Force Survey data from 2001-2019, to recover the time-varying parameters of the graduate skill distribution. I find rising analytical but stagnant interpersonal skills across most subject areas, diminishing boundaries between fields, and corresponding implications for wages and employment. Rising analytical skills across the distribution weaken the comparative advantage of technical subjects like STEM and Business/Economics and increase the relative scarcity of interpersonal skills. This implies that soft skills are likely to become more relevant for graduate’s success in the near future.