About

Kevin Stange is a Professor of Public Policy and the PhD Program Director at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. He is also a co-director of the Education Policy Initiative at the university. His teaching focuses on graduate courses in higher education policy, economics, and quantitative methods. Stange's research broadly lies in empirical labor and public economics, with a particular emphasis on education. He leads projects aimed at understanding how higher education influences students' labor market trajectories and mobility, how postsecondary investment responds to shifts in skill demand, and evaluates programs such as the Michigan Tuition Incentive Program. He is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a faculty affiliate at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education. Stange has contributed to the development of large datasets for research in postsecondary education, including the College and Beyond II (CBII) Data, which contains nearly 50 million course records for 1 million students across 19 universities since 2000. His prior research includes studies on college enrollment, persistence, community colleges, college choice, pricing structures, and the health care workforce. His work has been published in numerous academic journals and featured in outlets such as Time, the Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic Monthly. He has received research support from various foundations and government agencies. Stange holds undergraduate degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Economics from MIT and a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Research topics

• Economics
• Business
• Mathematics education
• Psychology
• Labour economics

Selected publications

• The Contribution of College Majors to Gender and Racial Earnings Differences

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The role of individual institutions in creating effective and efficient transfer pathways from community college to bachelor’s degree

  Economics of Education Review · 2026-02-01

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• College and Beyond II (CBII) Enrollment and Awards Data, [United States], 1958-2022

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-01-08

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  The College and Beyond II (CBII) Enrollment and Award Study contains student-level National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) data provided by postsecondary systems. The data are intended to cover the time periods before and after students' undergraduate attendance dates at the CBII institutions, making them ideal for examining such phenomena as transfer behavior and post-baccalaureate educational attainment. There are three files for each system that provided data: an enrollment file (all terms of enrollment across all institutions that report to the NSC), an awards file (all degrees and other awards earned across all institutions that report to the NSC), and a derived file. The derived file was created by the CBII team from the enrollment and award data as a convenience for users. It includes summary student-level measures such as 'highest credential earned' and indicators for whether students ever earned specific types of awards or had specific types of enrollment patterns. The Enrollment and Awards data can be linked to other student-level data in the CBII series using the ID_PERSON variable.

  PublisherDOI

• What the Migration of College Graduates Means for Earnings-Based Accountability

  Upjohn Research (W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research) · 2025-09-01

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

• Replication Data for: Attrition from Administrative Data: Problems and Solutions with an Application to Postsecondary Education

  Harvard Dataverse · 2025-12-18

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Review of Economics and Statistics: Forthcoming

  PublisherDOI

• How Higher Education Responds to Labor Market Demand

  Employment Research · 2024-04-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Skills, Majors, and Jobs: Does Higher Education Respond?

  2024-04-29 · 2 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  How does postsecondary human capital investment respond to changes in labor market skill demand? We quantify the magnitude and nature of this response in the U.S. 4-year sector. To do so, we develop a new measure of institution-major-specific labor demand, and corresponding shift-share instrument, that combines job ads with alumni locations. We find that postsecondary human capital investments meaningfully respond. We estimate elasticities for degrees and credits centered around 1.3, generally increasing with time horizon. We provide evidence that both student demand and institutional supply-side constraints matter. Our findings illuminate the nature of educational production in higher education.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Returns to College Major Choice: Average and Distributional Effects, Career Trajectories, and Earnings Variability

  The Review of Economics and Statistics · 2024-09-16 · 10 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract A growing literature examining labor market returns to college major is motivated by large returns to skill. Prior research focuses on mean effects rather than earnings growth and variability. Using administrative data from Texas, we find that mean differences mask important features of the returns to college majors. First, earnings growth varies across fields. Second, there is considerable effect heterogeneity across workers. Third, major choice affects earnings variability within workers over time. We use our results to simulate a lifecyle utility model and compare mid-career utility and mean earnings returns across fields while highlighting the important role of risk preferences.

  PublisherDOI

• College Majors and Skills: Evidence from the Universe of Online Job Ads

  2024-04-17

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  We use the near universe of U.S. online job ads to document four new facts about the skills employers demand from college majors. First, some skills––social and organizational––are demanded from all majors whereas others––financial and customer service––are demanded from only particular majors. Second, some majors have skill demand profiles that mirror overall demand for college graduates, such as Business and General Engineering, while other majors, such as Nursing and Education, have relatively rare skill profiles. Third, cross-major differences in skill profiles explain considerable wage variation. Fourth, although major-specific skill demand varies across place, this variation plays little role in explaining wage variation. College majors can thus be reasonably conceptualized as portable bundles of skills.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• New Data Show How Far Graduates Move from Their College, and Why It Matters

  Employment Research · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Isaac McFarlin

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  55 shared

• Paco Martorell

  University of California, Davis

  54 shared

• Steven W. Hemelt

  W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research

  43 shared

• Michael Lovenheim

  41 shared

• Rodney Andrews

  The University of Texas at Dallas

  41 shared

• Scott A. Imberman

  Michigan State University

  38 shared

• Andrew Simon

  University of Chicago

  28 shared

• Brad J. Hershbein

  27 shared

Labs

• Kevin StangePI

Education

• PhD, Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

Awards & honors

• Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research