Kevin Stange

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…

Research topics

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

Selected publications

• Why Is Math Cheaper than English? Understanding Cost Differences in Higher Education

  Journal of Labor Economics · 2020-04-20 · 50 citations

  article

  This paper establishes five new facts about instructional costs in higher education using department-level data from a broad range of institutions. Costs vary widely across fields, ranging from electrical engineering (90% higher than English) to math (25% lower). This pattern is largely explained by differences in class size and faculty pay. Some STEM fields experienced steep declines in expenditures over the past 17 years, while others saw increases. Changes in class size and teaching loads alo…

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• The Pandemic’s effect on demand for public schools, homeschooling, and private schools

  Journal of Public Economics · 2022-07-08 · 49 citations

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

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2022-08-01 · 16 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  There is a growing body of research examining the labor market returns to college major, motivated by the large returns to skill in the labor market. Prior research has focused almost exclusively on mean effects and has paid little attention to the role of earnings growth and variability. Using linked administrative data from Texas on public K-12 students followed through college into the labor market, we find that the focus on mean differences mask four important features of the returns to coll…

  PublisherDOI

• Grads on the go: Measuring college‐specific labor markets for graduates

  Journal of Policy Analysis and Management · 2023-12-12 · 11 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract This paper introduces a new measure of the labor markets served by colleges and universities across the United States. About 50% of recent college graduates are living and working in the metro area nearest the institution they attended, with this figure climbing to 67% in‐state. The geographic dispersion of alumni is more than twice as great for highly selective 4‐year institutions as for 2‐year institutions. However, more than one quarter of 2‐year institutions disperse alumni more div…

  PublisherDOI

• 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 work…

  PublisherDOI

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

Similar researchers at University of Michigan

• Scott Atranh-83
• Jeremy Levineh-78
• Brian A. Jacobh-68