Non-College Occupations, Workplace Routinization, and the Gender Gap in College Enrollment

75 Pages Posted: 11 Oct 2021 Last revised: 6 Jul 2022

See all articles by Amanda Chuan

Amanda Chuan

Michigan State University - College of Social Science; University of Pennsylvania - The Wharton School

Weilong Zhang

University of Cambridge - Faculty of Economics

Date Written: February 11, 2022

Abstract

Women used to lag behind men in college enrollment but now exceed them. This paper focuses on the role of non-college job prospects in explaining these trends. We first document that routine-biased technical change disproportionately displaced non-college occupations held by women. We next instrument for routinization to show that declining non-college job prospects for women increased female enrollment. Two stage least squares results show that a one percentage point rise in routinization increases female college enrollment by 0.6 percentage points, while the effect for male enrollment is not systematically significant. We next embed this instrumental variation into a dynamic model that links education and occupation choices. The model finds that routinization decreased returns to non-college occupations for women, leading them to shift to cognitive work and increasing their college premium. In contrast, non-college occupations for men were less susceptible to routinization. Altogether, our model estimates that workplace routinization accounted for 63% of the growth in female enrollment and 23% of the change in male enrollment between 1980 to 2000.

Keywords: human capital, college enrollment, gender, automation

JEL Classification: I23, I24, I26, J16, J24, I26

Suggested Citation

Chuan, Amanda and Zhang, Weilong, Non-College Occupations, Workplace Routinization, and the Gender Gap in College Enrollment (February 11, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3939225 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3939225

Amanda Chuan (Contact Author)

Michigan State University - College of Social Science ( email )

East Lansing, MI 48824
United States

HOME PAGE: http://https://sites.google.com/view/amandachuan/home

University of Pennsylvania - The Wharton School ( email )

3641 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6365
United States

Weilong Zhang

University of Cambridge - Faculty of Economics ( email )

Sidgwick Avenue
Cambridge, CB3 9DD
United Kingdom

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