Department of Informatics and Networked Systems, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 15216, USA.
Argyros College of Business and Economics, Chapman University, Orange, CA, USA.
Sci Data. 2024 Oct 4;11(1):1086. doi: 10.1038/s41597-024-03931-8.
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.
高等教育通过为学生提供劳动力所需的知识和技能，在推动创新型经济方面发挥着至关重要的作用。虽然研究人员和从业者已经开发了数据系统来跟踪详细的职业技能，例如美国劳工部（DOL）建立的系统，但在以类似的粒度记录高等教育中正在培养哪些技能方面，所做的努力要少得多。在这里，我们通过展示课程技能图谱来填补这一空白，这是一个从近三千所美国高等教育机构教授的超过三百万份课程教学大纲中推断出的技能的纵向数据集。为了构建课程技能图谱，我们应用自然语言处理来量化课程教学大纲与 DOL 用来描述职业的详细工作活动（DWA）之间的一致性。然后，我们将这些一致性得分汇总起来，为机构和学术专业创建技能档案。我们的数据集提供了大学教育在为学生做好劳动力市场准备方面的作用的大规模代表性。总的来说，课程技能图谱可以使有关劳动力发展背景下技能来源的新研究成为可能，并为塑造高等教育的未来以满足不断变化的劳动力需求提供可行的见解，特别是在面对新技术时。
