Learning your strengths vs. building them up: education and occupational mobility

Abstract

We propose a model of education which captures both the human capital formation and self-discovery aspects of years of schooling. We posit that broad education emphasises the later, while specialised studies favour the accumulation of job-relevant skills. To account for selection into broad studies by students who are unsure of their match with different fields, we endogenise the timing of specialisation in a bandit-style gradual learning framework. Under the assumption that broad education is informative, we obtain the counterintuitive prediction that students who specialise later enter the labour market with less accurate information about their type. In ongoing work, we are developing an empirical strategy to use longitudinal data from college graduates in the United States, where undergraduates have considerable freedom in course selection, to investigate the predictive power of education breadth on occupation choice and subsequent occupation changes