Course-Skill Atlas: A national longitudinal dataset of skills taught in U.S. higher education curricula

TL;DR

Course-Skill Atlas is a comprehensive, longitudinal dataset that maps skills taught in U.S. higher education curricula to detailed workplace activities, enabling analysis of education's role in workforce preparation.

Contribution

This work introduces a novel dataset linking course syllabi to workplace skills using NLP, filling a gap in understanding higher education's contribution to skill development.

Findings

Dataset covers over 3 million courses from nearly 3,000 institutions.

Aligns course content with detailed workplace activities using NLP.

Provides insights into skills development trends in higher education.

Abstract

Higher education plays a critical role in driving an innovative economy by equipping students with knowledge and skills demanded by the workforce. While researchers and practitioners have developed data systems to track detailed occupational skills, such as those established by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), much less effort has been made to document which of these skills are being developed in higher education at a similar granularity. Here, we fill this gap by presenting Course-Skill Atlas -- a longitudinal dataset of skills inferred from over three million course syllabi taught at nearly three thousand U.S. higher education institutions. To construct Course-Skill Atlas, we apply natural language processing to quantify the alignment between course syllabi and detailed workplace activities (DWAs) used by the DOL to describe occupations. We then aggregate these alignment scores to create skill profiles for institutions and academic majors. Our dataset offers a large-scale representation of college education's role in preparing students for the labor market. Overall, Course-Skill Atlas can enable new research on the source of skills in the context of workforce development and provide actionable insights for shaping the future of higher education to meet evolving labor demands, especially in the face of new technologies.