Details
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 599-627 |
| Number of pages | 29 |
| Journal | Journal of Geography in Higher Education |
| Volume | 46 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| Early online date | 23 Aug 2021 |
| Publication status | Published - 2022 |
Abstract
With growing numbers of university graduates, the choice of academic programs has gained in importance to enter the labor market successfully. Simultaneously, the link between the field of study and actual professional career is becoming increasingly blurry. This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of these relations and to position geography in this wide spectrum. We develop a conceptual framework to systematically categorize the relations between academic programs and their associated labor markets. We employ this framework in a most-different-case design to quantitatively analyze the influence of the field on the graduates’ career prospects, using student records of several German universities linked with administrative biographical data from social security records. We find evidence that the influence of the field of study on full-time employment and wage is substantial, controlling for various factors. Geographers do face difficulties on the labor market, but the demand for their core competencies–interdisciplinary, spatially specific and sustainability-related thinking–is rising through current societal developments. Moreover, we find some indication that those performance gaps are not an exceptional phenomenon of geographers but also apply to graduates of different fields of study with multidimensional and indirect links to the associated labor markets.
Keywords
- Employability, geography, graduates, higher education, labor market entry
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Social Sciences(all)
- Geography, Planning and Development
- Social Sciences(all)
- Education
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In: Journal of Geography in Higher Education, Vol. 46, No. 4, 2022, p. 599-627.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Research › peer review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - How wide is the gap?
T2 - Comparing geography graduates’ labor market success with that of peers from business and computer science
AU - Teichert, Christian
AU - Liefner, Ingo
AU - Otto, Anne
N1 - Funding Information: The authors would like to thank James F. Petersen for his helpful and constructive thoughts and suggestions on this paper. Furthermore, the authors would like to thank the editors, sub-editors, and three anonymous reviewers for remarkably supportive and helpful comments which have substantially improved the quality of the paper. The usual disclaimer applies.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - With growing numbers of university graduates, the choice of academic programs has gained in importance to enter the labor market successfully. Simultaneously, the link between the field of study and actual professional career is becoming increasingly blurry. This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of these relations and to position geography in this wide spectrum. We develop a conceptual framework to systematically categorize the relations between academic programs and their associated labor markets. We employ this framework in a most-different-case design to quantitatively analyze the influence of the field on the graduates’ career prospects, using student records of several German universities linked with administrative biographical data from social security records. We find evidence that the influence of the field of study on full-time employment and wage is substantial, controlling for various factors. Geographers do face difficulties on the labor market, but the demand for their core competencies–interdisciplinary, spatially specific and sustainability-related thinking–is rising through current societal developments. Moreover, we find some indication that those performance gaps are not an exceptional phenomenon of geographers but also apply to graduates of different fields of study with multidimensional and indirect links to the associated labor markets.
AB - With growing numbers of university graduates, the choice of academic programs has gained in importance to enter the labor market successfully. Simultaneously, the link between the field of study and actual professional career is becoming increasingly blurry. This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of these relations and to position geography in this wide spectrum. We develop a conceptual framework to systematically categorize the relations between academic programs and their associated labor markets. We employ this framework in a most-different-case design to quantitatively analyze the influence of the field on the graduates’ career prospects, using student records of several German universities linked with administrative biographical data from social security records. We find evidence that the influence of the field of study on full-time employment and wage is substantial, controlling for various factors. Geographers do face difficulties on the labor market, but the demand for their core competencies–interdisciplinary, spatially specific and sustainability-related thinking–is rising through current societal developments. Moreover, we find some indication that those performance gaps are not an exceptional phenomenon of geographers but also apply to graduates of different fields of study with multidimensional and indirect links to the associated labor markets.
KW - Employability
KW - geography
KW - graduates
KW - higher education
KW - labor market entry
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85113741413&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/03098265.2021.1960490
DO - 10.1080/03098265.2021.1960490
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85113741413
VL - 46
SP - 599
EP - 627
JO - Journal of Geography in Higher Education
JF - Journal of Geography in Higher Education
SN - 0309-8265
IS - 4
ER -