Aleksei Opacic (Harvard Sociology)

"Who Gets to Use Their College Skills? Skill-Job Alignment and Earnings Inequality Among College Graduates"

College graduates who follow common major-to-occupation pathways - for example, engineering majors who become engineers - receive substantial earnings premiums. Yet many bachelor's programs do not lead to a single profession, instead cultivating analytical, communicative, and quantitative capacities that can transfer across occupations. I argue that this transferability broadens the range of jobs in which graduates can realize the value of their human capital while opening a distinct margin of inequality in the college-to-work transition. Using linked course-catalog text, administrative transcripts, and employment records from a U.S. state, I develop a computational framework to construct graduates' coursework-derived skill profiles and measure their alignment with the tasks they perform at work. I find that this alignment varies substantially within both majors and occupations. Graduates whose skill profiles are more closely aligned with their work earn significantly more, even within the same occupation. However, access to skill-aligned work is sharply stratified by race and class background: disparities in access account for a quarter of the Black-White earnings gap, net of observed human capital differences and sorting into higher- and lower-paying occupations. Together, the results reveal an important relational dimension of occupational allocation: inequality arises not only from who reaches more advantaged positions in the occupational hierarchy, but also from who gains access to skill-aligned work within that hierarchy.