Higher education programs are essential for innovation and economic growth. This column introduces the education–innovation gap, a metric that captures the distance between education content and the knowledge frontier. Among US higher education institutions, the education–innovation gap is significantly lower for courses taught by instructors who are more active in producing research. The gap is higher in schools with students from lower socioeconomic status. On average, exposure to frontier knowledge is associated with better student outcomes.
Higher education programs play a central role in the dissemination of up-to-date knowledge, which is essential for innovation and economic growth (Jones 2005, Gold in and Katz 2010, Jones 2009). Through their curricula, higher education programs facilitate human capital accumulation and nurture future innovators, especially in a world where ideas are becoming harder to find (Bloom et al. 2017). Yet, these programs have been shown to differ greatly in student outcomes, including earnings (Hobby 2020, Mount joy and Hickman 2020) and rates of invention (Bell et al. 2019).
We argue that higher education programs have different abilities to equip students with up-to-date knowledge. These differences are shaped by traits at the school and instructor levels, and they can have important implications for labor market outcomes, education choices, and technological progress.
Novel data and methods to measure the content of higher education
In Bias and Ma (2022), we bring together new data and a novel methodology to measure the extent to which higher education courses across US institutions cover frontier – i.e. recently produced – knowledge. Applying modern text analysis techniques to a large sample of course syllabi (capturing the content of courses) and academic publications (capturing the frontier of knowledge), we build a novel metric – the education–innovation gap. The education–innovation gap is designed to capture the distance between education content and the knowledge frontier. Specifically, we define the gap as the ratio of similarities between a course’s content and knowledge from older vintages (covered by articles published decades ago) and between the course’s content and new, frontier knowledge (covered by the most recent articles).
Naturally, the gap is higher for syllabi that cover more knowledge that is older (rather than newer). For example, a computer science course that teaches Visual Basic (a relatively obsolete programming language) in 2020 would have a larger gap than a course that teaches Julia (a more recent programming language), because Visual Basic is mostly covered by old articles and Julia is mostly covered by recent articles.
Examining variations in the education–innovation gap across courses reveals stark differences in the coverage of educational content, both across and within schools. For example, to move a syllabus from the 25th to the 75th percentile of the gap distribution, approximately half of its content would have to be replaced with newer knowledge.
Instructors are crucial in shaping course content
Most of the observed variation in the education-innovation gap (about a quarter) occurs within schools, across courses taught by different instructors. The impact of instructors can also be seen from the fact that the gap of the typical course remains stable over time, but it declines significantly when the instructor of a course changes.
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